@glamajamma In a video on the BBC news website, a librarian answers that question. In a nutshell: too many books, too little time.

So do I get to keep my username?

You're thinking of a "washing machine"

cmd-P is always print in Mac OS applications.
Ctrl-P is always print under Windows applications.
F8 to my best recollection, and according to my recent Google search never printed under MS-DOS.
What is your point?

Buy two external hard drives, with at least the capacity of the drive(s) in the computer you wish to backup. Connect one of them, and use a backup application (Windows Backup or Apple's Time Machine are included with two popular OSes) to make a backup of your computer. Take that drive offsite, e.g. I keep a backup of my home computer in my desk drawer at work).

Make another backup to the second external hard drive, and keep that near your computer. Make regular backups, and occasionally swap the drives' locations.

Try not to have the computer and both backup drives in the same place ant any one time. You're covered against theft (from one location), drive failure, fire, accidental file deletion. Sometimes (rarely) you can suffer a failure of the drive you're trying to backup, while you're actually trying to make a backup. With two rotating drives, you always have one intact backup, i.e. you're never half-way through overwriting you're only backup.

Something to remember with backups: they're only useful if you can restore from them, so occasionally, you should check you're able to restore your data ok.

If you're paranoid about having multiple copies of your data, you should consider encrypting your backup drive and the drive in your computer.

My thoughts on backups to the cloud: Don't rely on them. Maybe have one copy of data in a cloud backup, but don't let that be your only copy. The company who stores your data could go out of business, and in the event of a catastrophic failure requiring a large restore of your data, it takes aaaages to copy all your data from the cloud back to your computer.

I invite your thoughts on any of this?

You're right; the D3s has a vertical grip, huge battery, three times more frames per second, and better noise characteristics at the higher ISOs. You can pay less for the Canon body if you don't require those features.

Your choice will already be made for you, I doubt this will be the first SLR for its purchasers. The Canon vs Nikon decision is made by the menagerie of lenses that a photographer already owns. No Canon photog with a bag full of Ls will buy a Nikon body, and the same goes in reverse.

USA's 55mph speed limit was introduced in 1973 by Nixon. Not for reasons of safety, but for reasons of fuel economy during an oil crisis.

I care. You know, over 6.4 billion of the population of this planet lives outside of USA?

At least in my country, Coca-Cola contains phosphoric acid. I've heard some people actually drink that stuff.

Most things you would call a virus are a worm or a trojan [horse].

My question is, given that a well written "virus" will do a good job of keeping its head down while it starts to wreak havoc, how would you know you don't have an infected computer, unless you run anti-virus software to check that?

You know all those spam emails that your spam filter is detecting? They're -- almost without exception -- sent from zombies, i.e. PCs with no antivirus that have fallen victim to some internet nasty. Wouldn't the people who own those computers say the same, "I don't run anti-virus and my computer is fine" ?