The lead option to get around this requirement is to use facial recognition through a web camera at provemyage.com, which will do some facial keypoint mapping to determine with high accuracy if the user is 25+ without the need for ID and will dispose of the the photography data from memory as soon as it is checked. Most techies are going to stick with VPNs, but joe public looking for easy access will have this route without giving up ID or going to a shop for a 'license'.

Direct work from the laptop/desktop is backed up on an infrequent basis (about once a week) so that I can manually trim the fat from the home directory before backing up each time. Once backups are taken from the laptop/desktop they go into a RAID 5 array on a stable, local server (yes, yes, redundancy is not a backup). A second server with a RAID 5 array then performs rdiff-backup snapshots of the data each night, allowing rollbacks to day one. Personal data which would be difficult or impossible to reproduce (code, photos, etc) is periodically backed up on external hard drives, memory sticks or devices and is stored separately to reduce risks from fire or natural disasters.

pff just a rip off of Jules Verne's Mysterious Island

IIRC, XMBC is only doing a dedicated, purpose built front end for PVRs. You'll still need mythtv on the backend.

At the simplest level yes, but cassandra (for example) is more like a multi-dimensional hashmap. Eg; Key-Value where Value points to another Key-Value and so on, so you can reference values such as: SomeApp.Users[UserID][username]=bob The advantage of this is being able to sort by time, alpha, etc, and therefore handle sorted pagination from the key/value listings. The main advantage though is that you can literally just plug in more systems and have it scale horizontally without any extra work, unlike databases which need sharding, bigger machines, redevelopment, etc. once you hit the limits of basic clustering.

Poor artists, then they only have more people enjoying their works, allowing them to have bigger concerts, sell more merchandise, get paid more for tv and corporate appearances, income from product endorsements, etc. Real demotivating.

121 keys on some logitech gamer keyboard. Hurrah! Also, I have two keyboards plugged in to the laptop (USB and laptop built in), so wonder if that counts as 200 or so...

Agreed, mini itx is one of the best ways to do this. Fanless has a long, stable lifespan and using a portable hard drive will keep operating power usage down close to a dedicated router so it does not work out that much more expensive. You can run a transparent proxy, secure remote access, transparent tunneling/VPNs, gather statistics, etc.

And the natural history museum is just up the road from the science museum - perhaps the most impressive museum building in the world, built to be a cathedral to science and full of dinosaurs, rocks (including meteorites), a cool earthquake simulator, large mammals, and more dead things in jars than you will ever see anywhere else in your life.

The Victoria and Albert museum is over the road from that too, and has a gigantic old persian rug (and I mean gigantic), and the very impressive cast courts that preserve many european statues and facades which were destroyed in the various conflicts since the victorian era.

You can buy them easily from the airport too (especially coming into the UK). Changing wifi settings is not needed - it is still 2.4ghz, the standard only changes the power levels. If it works in the US it will work in the UK. For more geeky things, the welcome trust (featuring victorian medical curiosities like darwin's walking cane, a mummified south american, mad king george's hair, 19th century japanese sex toys, etc) and the british library treasures room (featuring the magna carta, gutenburg bible, domesday book, early maps, da vinci notes, shakespeare, beatles, etc) are great and are practically next door to each other. Most locals dont even know about them but they are definitely worth half a day or so between them.

This is at peak time, is a consistent speed and more often that not is limited by the server rather than the network from what I gather. Since any bulky transfers (offsite backup, log processing, etc) is all done early in the morning, that frequently hits 45Mbits. Still not squeezed out those last 5 though!

NTL were always bad. Blueyonder/telewest were good. Virgin got really, really bad about 2 years ago, but now things are improving to the point just after they took over blueyonder.

I've seen a SSD fail because the same sector - the superblock - was constantly overwritten to the point where it failed. Think how many times the superblock (if the relevant FS is using one) gets touched, then figure that in to reliability calculations too!

I currently have the 50mbit connection and finally, they have returned to their previous level of quality. I've managed to get 45Mbits out of it off peak, and consistently get 3.5MBytes/sec at peak times. I'm very happy right now, I have not even noticed the bandwidth constricting cap come in to play (which was a big problem on the 20Mbit/sec DOCSIS1)