Siah

I am a US resident and it seems that I cannot use my US accounts to legally pay for Intrade. I am wondering, considering the rise of prediction markets, is it possible for US residents to participate in these markets legally?

Is it possible to find a non-paid UX internship for somebody with no background in HCI?

A friend of mine lives in the valley and has done some very basic UI work here and there. She is looking for a non-paid internship to refine her skills and gain more experience. I am wondering if it is even possible to find such internship positions?

I am a writer and I am often too distracted by things like formatting my text, pagination or things that have nothing to do with my writing like gmail notifications on my chrome. I am wondering if the HN community knows about a text editor that let's me write without much distraction. Something that has a spellchecker and a nice font and not much else. If it can shut off my internet while I am writing that would be a plus :) I used to use emacs but its font it too ugly.

I have been looking at scalable web hosting solutions and I am interested in starting a web server on Amazon's EC2. It is simply because I can run many of my processes in the background and reduce the amount of online processing.

I have no experience in setting up and checking for security holes in my Apache server. I am wondering what is the best practice for setting up a secure webserver on Amazon machines?

Is there any AMI that is already configured to serve as a secure web host?

Thanks

Siah

I am planning to get a hosting service for a client. we are not using any kind of server side programming and the server will just serve a couple of static html, pdf and flash files. What is the most affordable (while reliable) hosting that we can get?