You can use their service for $10 a month, which is no money. The experts are really experts, although there is no guarentee. I joined because at that time at work the system administrator left and I had to fill in the blanks. Whenever I had a problem I couldn't handle, and googled for it, EE appeared on top. And the service has helped me many times.

The fact that they earn money with this service doesn't bother me. If you want to use EE for free, you have to answer about two to four questions a month. This means that the asker should reward you points. The competition to earn points can have a good effect on your skills. You can learn a lot here, both by asking and answering questions. But you have to be open for it. After a while you enjoy it, and the points come in without effort.

Btw, many serious dating sites let women pay as well!

One "forum" does this quite well. You've probably seen Experts Exchange appear sometime when you were searching the web looking for solutions to a problem. With EE you award points to users who have helped you, and other people can value answers as well. Because EE is not free, unless you help other people, the community is of great value. I use it quite a lot, and many times it has helped me finding the right answer.

I would recommend Amazon S3 Jungledisk. It is the same kind of service as Mozy. I've used Mozy, and it works okay. You can generate your own key if you want, or you can use a key generated by Mozy. That means that they can decrypt your data, but I suppose that if you take the professional account, that they promise to protect your data. You can of course contact them by mail. Normally they reply in a day.

I've changed to Jungledisk because it's faster and you can use multiple computers with the same account. For one computer, Mozy is cheaper, although this may depend on the amount of data as well. But $5 or $10 per month is probably not an issue for a lawyer. With Amazon you can use your own key as well.

Extra care should be taken of the backup of the key. You should put it on several usb sticks in different places, probably in a vault. You can print it as well, making sure that you can see the difference between a 1 and l, and 0 and O, etc.

Jungledisk and Mozy are great, but what if you loose everything and you need to download 200GB? That's why I use external usb disks as well for local backup. 2.5" disks are the best because they are small and light, more durable because made for notebooks, and don't require a power adapter. Use Time Machine or another backup program. Create a truecrypt volume on the disk (probably using the same key), and copy the backup to that volume. Better use two external disks, and always keep one offsite.

Another thing that is forgotten... When a process can be optimized, it normally results in price-cuts which result in heavier use of the process. In the end more resources are used than before the optimization, opposite to the original intent.

Recently I had to create a static website, which was only needed as a kind of prototype for a new web application. They couldn't get the functionality working, but they wanted to be able to click through pages.

So I've set up a website with many static pages, and then DW is the best tool out there. You can move stuff around (links keep working), create templates, library items (reusable pieces of code). And the HTML is clean.

I think spitter is a better name for this event.

It's my home network. It's WiFi, but I suppose they don't scan home wifi routers?! And you're probably talking about the US, while I'm not living in the US.

I know Tor, and have used it on occasion. But many times I get errors when visiting websites that the IP-address I come from is banned. Does this mean my ip-address will be banned when I start using Tor frequently?

In Leeuwarden they don't speak English that well. When they were reading the backup manual, they translated "back up" into "pick up". Anyway, it's not such a stupid thought, as this collection was so big, it fitted in a shoe box. So I think this was an old-school collection, you know, printed on paper and stuff.

When I open Google Maps on my iPod Touch, it has a little button in the left bottom corner. When I push that button, it can locate where I am. At home, it turns out it "knows" my location with a precision of about 10-20 meters. (I'm living in a street with many houses close to eachother, so you can't tell the exact house.) I suppose they do this based on my IP-address an nothing more.

So if Google can do this somehow, where is my privacy anyway???

Certainly a good observation. About you being naive I mean. Looking back at the past 10 years, how many years have you used MS software? The same applies to them. And don't tell me that five or ten years ago Linux was not a real alternative. It wasn't, but excuses like that don't count.

I know the basics of VIM, and can use it when nothing else is available. But for some reason I can't get really used to it. My preferred editor is jEdit.

jEdit

Behold the zPhone! Or - as the Germans say it - "ze" Phone!