Rob's humor and contributions to linux advocacy will be missed. His early presence on Slashdot made it my go-to news site for many years.

My condolences to his family. Thanks for sharing him with us for all these years.

Really? You must have been paying a very low price for Crashplan Home if their Business plan is 5x for you.

I was paying $5 a month, and under the new plan, would be paying $10. That's still a lot better than with Mozy and its high per-gig pricing, and pretty close to Carbonite (which has inferior features, esp. with its lack of Linux support). For my backup needs, Amazon S3 storage would also cost about $10 a month (with bring-your-own backup software), and Backblaze B2 would be about $2.50 a month. For either of those, I would need something like Arq or Duplicati to do the backups, and wouldn't have much in the way of customer service.

I am still weighing my options, but I may well sign up for Crashplan Business, if it looks like the company is doing OK financially.

Nope, Fiber To The Node (DSL or cable head-end), as opposed to Fiber To The Home. FTTN gives almost all the increased bandwidth benefits of FTTH at a fraction of the trenching costs.

Since most homeowners (in the US anyway) still think the max bandwidth of about 20 - 50 Mbps (theoretical) on DSL over twisted-pair copper would be fantastic, ISPs have little incentive to deploy more expensive infrastructure.

Nice set of practices.

You're right, @alphatel, we would never offer Exxon 2 million dollars to reduce domestic oil prices. Clearly that's thinking too small. How about over $3 billion a year in Oil Exploration tax exemptions for Exxon and other oil companies? Nevermind the fact that oil prices have been so high the last decade, the oil companies have been falling over themselves to do oil well exploration and proofing, and would continue to do so, with or without the subsidies.

But yeah, I'm sure *this* $2 million is a waste, even if it serves to reduce the perceived need for that $3 billion annual subsidy to big oil giants.

You're describing the key ideas of Tahoe LAFS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahoe_Least-Authority_Filesystem

As long as a quorum of your family/friends are available, you can access the files. Think of a distributed RAID using something like PAR to create enough excess parity to handle the loss of a number of blocks of each file. It is encrypted in such a way that none of the other nodes can reconstruct your files, or you theirs.

> AGW is probably the most extraordinary claim in the history of extraordinary
> claims and the proposed solution (seizing most of the world's wealth,
> eliminating most of the current industrial base, etc.) is so far beyond
> extraordinary

While I feel way too underqualified to judge the science of AGW, I don't understand these oft-repeated hyperbolic claims that carbon reduction strategies will "eliminate most of the current industrial base."

On the contrary, even in the absence of evidence of AGW, most of our strategies are just common economic sense and good health policy -- reduce dependence on oil (which will continue to rise in price as demand outstrips supply); decrease destructive mountaintop coal mining (which imperils the health of countless rural residents); improve public transportation availability and usage; improve our electrical grid and accommodate supply elasticity; etc

Where carbon reduction or carbon taxes would add costs to some manufacturing industries, it will also create economic opportunities in new technology, alternative energy production, new batteries, nuclear energy, etc.