I think the original article showed why you'd want ECC in a desktop machine -- random bit errors do happen in real life. I don't see how a warranty makes this less of an issue -- if my machine silently corrupts data due to a bit error, getting a $50 replacement DIMM isn't really going to satisfy me. Does ECC really cost 5X over non-ECC?
If he was processing data or editing a spreadsheet, then that bit error could have corrupted his data. If he was compiling a program for distribution (perhaps to thousands of machines), that bit error could have corrupted his executable, causing errors on all of the machines it was deployed to.
After reading this article, the question that comes to mind is why am I *not* running ECC on my desktop?
And during those 6 months, what do they tell the banker? If there's money to be made in the gulf, then they need to get started. If there isn't, they move that rig to another location and try again. Waiting 6 months isn't even a question. Those things will go to whatever company wherever they can be used in the world ASAP.
That's my point -- when the moratorium is over, they'll be back to the Gulf, it's not like they are going to take their rigs to South America and leave them there. If there's money to be made in the Gulf, drillers will be back. A 6 month or 12 month or 18 month delay is not going to change America's dependence on foreign oil.
If the moratorium continues, the drilling rigs will move where they can be utilized, and they'll stay there while there is work. Most won't just sit around and wait the moratorium out and hope it isn't extended. There are limited numbers of deep water drilling rigs, they take time to build, and nobody wants to build replacement rigs to meet a spot shortage because they've all moved to other areas due to this. So there could be a longer term impact even if the moratorium does end in 6 months.
So they are saying "if you don't let me play I'm going to take my toys and go home"?
Either there's oil (money) to be found in the gulf or there's not. If there is, then there will be companies ready to drill when the moratorium is lifted. Maybe it will take them 6 months to relocate equipment there, but they'll definitely be back.
Delaying a few dozen exploratory wells for a year while they investigate this accident and have a better idea of the cause *and* have time to enact new rules to prevent the same scenario from recurring doesn't seem like a bad course of action.
I thought the line was if you are intentionally broadcasting plaintext traffic that can be picked up by any legal receiver, then you have no expectation of privacy. None of the other examples you gave would reasonably be expected to be picked up by someone outside your hours, but if you read the owners manual for your Wifi access point, you know that unencrypted means anyone can pick it up.
You have nothing to fear from Google catching a few packets of traffic when they are driving by, but from a real hacker who is searching your streams for passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.
There can still be a privacy violation without violating any laws. Look at Facebook -- they are under fire for a number of privacy violations even though they did not (or at least haven't been proven to) violate any laws.
I'm sure that many people would be quite surprised (and would think that it's invading their privacy) if you told them that every time they visit a website by clicking on a link at a search engine, than that site knows exactly what search terms they used to get there. Those same people will probably also be surprised to learn that search engines can track every time you click on a link. And through ad networks and analytics links, they can track you throughout the web.
So please don't dismiss privacy concerns just because they don't violate some outdated "principle of wireless".
Continuing the offtopicness...if you worked at my employer, you wouldn't be able to get on the network with your own laptop -- you'd plug into the network and end up on a guest vlan that gives you access to some printers and an intranet site. You'll end up on a captive portal if you try to get to the internet. Without a password to get to the internet, you won't be searching for anything.
The best way to ensure private searching at work is to have your own 3G data card. Private from your employer that is, not private from whoever supplies you the data card.
While technically true, they need *some* computing device connected to their TV, it doesn't necessarily need to be a computer. In my case, it's a "Roku" streaming device where I can get Netflix. This alone has been enough to prevent me from ordering cable service. Many new blu ray players are also coming with Netflix and other streaming services including Youtube. In 6 months, it may be a "GoogleTV" device.
Like most people on Slashdot, I have the technical know-how to connect a computer to my TV, it's just not worth the hassle to me so I went with the dedicated streaming device (as will most people).
If Hulu gets onto streaming boxes, then cable is *really* in for some competition.
Without SSL, no one needs to do a man-in-the-middle attack to see what you're searching on, they just need to sit at your ISP (or some upstream ISP between you and Google) and watch your traffic go by. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that some large ISP (and I mean you, Comcast) is doing just that and reselling the data, but not telling anyone.
But really, I doubt that's happening much, the real benefit of SSL is that the website you're visiting no longer gets the referer data so they can't see what search teams led you there. While I'm sure that JoesPharmacy.com finds it very valuable to know that I searched on "herpes+cure" to reach their site, I really don't think it's any of their business. Worse, if I search for "I+think+i+have+breast+cancer" and end up at an insurance company's website, they can use that as a flag to refuse to sell a policy to me.
I don't feel that it's any of Google's business either, but it's their service and letting them see my searches is part of my "payment" to them. And, I can clear my cookies and they won't have any idea who I am, while if I make a purchase at JoesPharmacy.com, they'll know exactly who I am and what search terms I used to get there.
Since most people don't know about the referer header, I don't think your analogy is correct. It would be more like if I taped a note on your back that says "I have a spoon fetish". The note is easy for you to find and remove (or alter) if you really want to.. but most people wouldn't even think to look there.
TV may be able to do many things locally that a newspaper can't, but I don't think they are competing against newspapers, newspapers are already dead -- subscription rates have plummeted and will continue to do so as the new generation gets their news online. I'm not even in the new generation but I haven't subscribed to a newspaper in over 10 years.
TV can't do anything that the internet can't do, and it's more limited. Even when I'm sitting in front of the TV, I don't watch TV news (though maybe because they've stopped showing real news). I prefer to get my news on the web where I can browse several competing news sites and drill deeper into stories I'm interested in. In less time than the 30 minute news, I can read much more news on my own.
Oh, and thanks to Netflix movies on demand and hulu, I don't even watch cable TV, I can watch the shows I want when I want and don't see the need to pay the cable company to deliver 100 crap channels I don't care about just to see the 8 channels that I do care about.
They already are collecting up the oil, but the spill is over such a huge area that they are barely making a dent. Oil-water separation is the easy part, collecting oil over hundreds of square miles of open ocean is hard.
Furthermore, the oil is spewing from a breach 5000 feet below the surface, so it's not coming up in one place, it's spread over a huge area, making it impossible to put a boom around the rising oil to contain it.
They are still working on the "plug up the well ASAP" part of your plan -- they didn't do it initially because there's a risk of making the spill worse -- when they try to inject the mud or junk, they run the risk of causing a larger leak in the riser... or maybe even a new leak in or around in the BOP. Anything they inject has to be done at a high pressure (to overcome the pressure of the oil), so there's gonna be a big pressure spike in the BOP and riser when they do the injection.
Ok you said anywhere in the world, here's $100M ($1B? How much money does it to violate the rules of physics and logistics?). I want a semi-submersible drill rig 10 miles off the coast of Oahu. Oh, and it has to be able to drill to depths of 5000 feet. And I need it there tomorrow. The clock starts now!
But even within the gulf, how are you going to relocate a 50,000 ton drill rig overnight? Especially if there's not a suitable idle rig waiting around, then you've got to safely shut down current drilling operations, pack everything up, *then* relocate it.
That does not even address the legal and contractual issues -- no one is going to give you a $500M drill rig on a handshake, and even if you had $500M in the bank, you're not likely to negotiate terms of sale overnight. Not even if you tell the lawyers that you're losing $10M/day.
Presumably you'd only use the auto-wipe setting if you had something to hide on your phone, so you wouldn't likely leave it on your desk while you go take a dump.
But even so, if the phone auto-wipes itself because you left it unattended for too long, then that should be better than the alternative of having someone get to your secret data when they steal (or confiscate) your phone. You do have backups of your data (encrypted, of course), right?
There must be a point where a dimmed LCD screen sends less light to your eyes than the whole-room lighting needed for the Kindle. I wish my Android phone would let the screen to be dimmed much more.
Maybe that's because ABC could not afford to keep years worth of (uncompressed?) video spinning on disk - they probably had hundreds of hours of programming each month (week? day?) -- and they have digital librarians to take care of storing and retrieving tapes. They'd pay at least an order of magnitude (probably 2 orders of magnitude) more for disks than the original poster -- EMC, Netapp, Hitachi, etc are not cheap and a major news organization is not going to build their own Linux box to store video.
A home user has different needs (I haven't watched the Little Mermaid in 2 years and I want to watch it NOW DAMMIT!), much less video to deal with both in number of hours and in raw size since most of his stuff already came from a compressed format), and the economics are different for home gear -- a home built Linux fileserver is a fraction of the cost of enterprise storage from a major vendor.
Plus he's only talking around 10TB of disk space, that's not much for a home hobbyist to build.
Does any enterprise really test Virus updates before they are pushed out? I work in a relatively small shop (less than 1000 desktops), and we have about a dozen "mission critical" desktop applications that would impact business if any went down. Things like AP, HR, and other applications related to business.
Not to mention that even though we've tried to standardize our hardware platform, we have almost a half dozen hardware configs that we support -- all would need to be tested to make sure a bad AV update doesn't kill some hardware dependent driver.
While we do serious QA across all applications before rolling out most software patches, I just can't believe that management would agree to let us triple the size of our QA team so we can thoroughly test daily anti-virus updates.
Also, cows don't typically sweat like a horse, so even if a cow can produce 2KW peak it's not likely that it can sustain that level of output for 8 hours due to cooling issues.
There were around 400,000 books published in the 70's alone reference. Most of these books are not rare, nor would they be fragile enough to be significantly damaged by a high speed scanner. And I'd be willing to bet that most of them do not have electronic publishing files.
Some high speed scanners (like Google's) are designed to cause no more harm to a book than a person reading it.
There are many (most?) books published before computer aided writing and typesetting became the norm. Even for many books that were published electronically, the electronic files used to create the books may not exist or may be unreadable due to poor archiving, publisher is out of business, hard to parse proprietary file formats, archaic hardware (cobbling together a punched tape reader from the 70's might be harder and more trouble-prone than just scanning the book), etc.
And then there are the non-technical issues like when publishers don't really want to cooperate (i.e. Google Books).
Technology like this will cause the publishing industry to go the way of the music and movie industries.
Right now the publishing industry is where the music industry was 7 years ago. Multiple incompatible book formats, DRM that lets rights holders yank your paid content away from you, DRM/formats that leave you tied to specific vendor readers, etc.
The barrier of scanning a book has made the publishing industry think that they don't need to provide books in a format that users want and feel that they can keep books locked down by DRM.
Even if DRM succeeds in keeping e-books from being redistributed, scanning technology keeps moving forward. All it's going to take is some enterprising company to buy one of these scanners and become the "AllofMP3" of the book world -- selling e-books in open, non-DRM formats for $1/each and the publisher's business model will fail miserably and they'll try doing the same catch-up that the music industry is involved in in trying to give users a reasonably priced legal product that can compete with the cheap illegal copies.
it won't even take new scanning technology for this to happen -- a scanning "peer-to-peer" service can be formed where thousands of subscribers are asked to scan and proofread a single page from new releases, which are them compiled into a central database to form a complete scanned book archive.
Whether they like it or not, the book industry is going to be forced into open, interoperable standards for books, and lower prices that consumers have come to expect from industries where nearly all of the manufacturing and distribution costs have been eliminated by electronic distribution.
I agree with everyone that recommended tape. an LTO4 tape is rated at 15 - 30 years archival life. Make 2 copies, keep on one-site, and send one off to Iron Mountain for long term storage.
While the tapes are rated to last 15 years, if you want to be able to access the data for that long, make a plan to copy them to new media every 5 years or so so you can be sure to have access to a tape drive that can still read the media. New LTO generations come out every around every 2 years, and LTO drives can typically read 2 generations behind. So in 5 years you'll be able to buy an LTO-6 drive that will still be able to read today's LTO-4 tapes (and will store around 4x more data per tape). If you can wait until LTO-5 is available (later this year?), you'll be able to store 1.5TB per tape.
I'd never trust a powered off hard drive to store data for any length of time - if it's not spinning, scrubbed, and monitored in a RAID array, you don't know if the data is readable -- there are many things that can go wrong with a hard drive that don't apply to tapes.
I posted the link to their website where you can find the plan information, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to reject your cry of foul. The plan I was talking about is Kaiser's 40/3000 NM plan, but they have a bunch of others. I'm assuming that they have the same pre-existing condition exclusions that other plans do, so that could account for at least some of the difference between your employer's plan and these plans.
Since I don't know what your employer sponsored plan's coverage is, I can't tell you what the difference is between this plan and your plan, but by all means, go check it out and maybe you can save yourself some money.
There's no mention of excluded illnesses in the plan summary and I assume that Kaiser has only one formulary for prescription coverage that is the same across all of their plans, whether employee sponsored or individual, but as you say, it's all in the fine print.
By all means, go check it out, and see if it's a better deal than your employer's plan. Give them a call and ask for the full benefits booklet if you want to check out the fine print.
Except that insurance is there to cover catastrophic health care costs. Better to buy a plan with the highest deductable you can find (that still offers reasonable lifetime maximums) and then just plan on paying expenses out of pocket, never reaching the deductable. But the insurance is still there to protect you for major illnesses.
Otherwise, a major medical event can bankrupt you and your family. If you have a "simple" heart attack and need open heart surgery, figure $250K for the emergency room visit, ICU, dianostics, surgery, and followups.
Even if you're healthy, if you're walking down the street and get run over by a hit-and-run driver, you can easily rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs. Each day in the ICU alone can cost $3000 -- so each week in ICU can cost you over $20,000.
If you don't have any real assets anyway, then perhaps it's easier to go without insurance, but I don't want my family to lose our house and other assets if I go into the hospitcal just because I wanted to save a few thousand dollars a year.
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I think the original article showed why you'd want ECC in a desktop machine -- random bit errors do happen in real life. I don't see how a warranty makes this less of an issue -- if my machine silently corrupts data due to a bit error, getting a $50 replacement DIMM isn't really going to satisfy me. Does ECC really cost 5X over non-ECC?
If he was processing data or editing a spreadsheet, then that bit error could have corrupted his data. If he was compiling a program for distribution (perhaps to thousands of machines), that bit error could have corrupted his executable, causing errors on all of the machines it was deployed to.
After reading this article, the question that comes to mind is why am I *not* running ECC on my desktop?
And during those 6 months, what do they tell the banker? If there's money to be made in the gulf, then they need to get started. If there isn't, they move that rig to another location and try again. Waiting 6 months isn't even a question. Those things will go to whatever company wherever they can be used in the world ASAP.
That's my point -- when the moratorium is over, they'll be back to the Gulf, it's not like they are going to take their rigs to South America and leave them there. If there's money to be made in the Gulf, drillers will be back. A 6 month or 12 month or 18 month delay is not going to change America's dependence on foreign oil.
If the moratorium continues, the drilling rigs will move where they can be utilized, and they'll stay there while there is work. Most won't just sit around and wait the moratorium out and hope it isn't extended. There are limited numbers of deep water drilling rigs, they take time to build, and nobody wants to build replacement rigs to meet a spot shortage because they've all moved to other areas due to this. So there could be a longer term impact even if the moratorium does end in 6 months.
So they are saying "if you don't let me play I'm going to take my toys and go home"?
Either there's oil (money) to be found in the gulf or there's not. If there is, then there will be companies ready to drill when the moratorium is lifted. Maybe it will take them 6 months to relocate equipment there, but they'll definitely be back.
Delaying a few dozen exploratory wells for a year while they investigate this accident and have a better idea of the cause *and* have time to enact new rules to prevent the same scenario from recurring doesn't seem like a bad course of action.
I thought the line was if you are intentionally broadcasting plaintext traffic that can be picked up by any legal receiver, then you have no expectation of privacy. None of the other examples you gave would reasonably be expected to be picked up by someone outside your hours, but if you read the owners manual for your Wifi access point, you know that unencrypted means anyone can pick it up.
You have nothing to fear from Google catching a few packets of traffic when they are driving by, but from a real hacker who is searching your streams for passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.
What's to keep me from holding up a picture of my coworker in front of the camera when I want to log in to her computer?
This sounds easier to fool than the fingerprint sensors that can be spoofed with silly putty.
Tapes are very cheap, LTO4 tapes hold 800GB (native, not compressed) and cost around $30.
It's the drives that are expensive for home user -- no home user wants to pay $2000 for a tape drive.
There can still be a privacy violation without violating any laws. Look at Facebook -- they are under fire for a number of privacy violations even though they did not (or at least haven't been proven to) violate any laws.
I'm sure that many people would be quite surprised (and would think that it's invading their privacy) if you told them that every time they visit a website by clicking on a link at a search engine, than that site knows exactly what search terms they used to get there. Those same people will probably also be surprised to learn that search engines can track every time you click on a link. And through ad networks and analytics links, they can track you throughout the web.
So please don't dismiss privacy concerns just because they don't violate some outdated "principle of wireless".
Continuing the offtopicness...if you worked at my employer, you wouldn't be able to get on the network with your own laptop -- you'd plug into the network and end up on a guest vlan that gives you access to some printers and an intranet site. You'll end up on a captive portal if you try to get to the internet. Without a password to get to the internet, you won't be searching for anything.
The best way to ensure private searching at work is to have your own 3G data card. Private from your employer that is, not private from whoever supplies you the data card.
While technically true, they need *some* computing device connected to their TV, it doesn't necessarily need to be a computer. In my case, it's a "Roku" streaming device where I can get Netflix. This alone has been enough to prevent me from ordering cable service. Many new blu ray players are also coming with Netflix and other streaming services including Youtube. In 6 months, it may be a "GoogleTV" device.
Like most people on Slashdot, I have the technical know-how to connect a computer to my TV, it's just not worth the hassle to me so I went with the dedicated streaming device (as will most people).
If Hulu gets onto streaming boxes, then cable is *really* in for some competition.
Without SSL, no one needs to do a man-in-the-middle attack to see what you're searching on, they just need to sit at your ISP (or some upstream ISP between you and Google) and watch your traffic go by. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that some large ISP (and I mean you, Comcast) is doing just that and reselling the data, but not telling anyone.
But really, I doubt that's happening much, the real benefit of SSL is that the website you're visiting no longer gets the referer data so they can't see what search teams led you there. While I'm sure that JoesPharmacy.com finds it very valuable to know that I searched on "herpes+cure" to reach their site, I really don't think it's any of their business. Worse, if I search for "I+think+i+have+breast+cancer" and end up at an insurance company's website, they can use that as a flag to refuse to sell a policy to me.
I don't feel that it's any of Google's business either, but it's their service and letting them see my searches is part of my "payment" to them. And, I can clear my cookies and they won't have any idea who I am, while if I make a purchase at JoesPharmacy.com, they'll know exactly who I am and what search terms I used to get there.
Since most people don't know about the referer header, I don't think your analogy is correct. It would be more like if I taped a note on your back that says "I have a spoon fetish". The note is easy for you to find and remove (or alter) if you really want to.. but most people wouldn't even think to look there.
TV may be able to do many things locally that a newspaper can't, but I don't think they are competing against newspapers, newspapers are already dead -- subscription rates have plummeted and will continue to do so as the new generation gets their news online. I'm not even in the new generation but I haven't subscribed to a newspaper in over 10 years.
TV can't do anything that the internet can't do, and it's more limited. Even when I'm sitting in front of the TV, I don't watch TV news (though maybe because they've stopped showing real news). I prefer to get my news on the web where I can browse several competing news sites and drill deeper into stories I'm interested in. In less time than the 30 minute news, I can read much more news on my own.
Oh, and thanks to Netflix movies on demand and hulu, I don't even watch cable TV, I can watch the shows I want when I want and don't see the need to pay the cable company to deliver 100 crap channels I don't care about just to see the 8 channels that I do care about.
They already are collecting up the oil, but the spill is over such a huge area that they are barely making a dent. Oil-water separation is the easy part, collecting oil over hundreds of square miles of open ocean is hard.
Furthermore, the oil is spewing from a breach 5000 feet below the surface, so it's not coming up in one place, it's spread over a huge area, making it impossible to put a boom around the rising oil to contain it.
They are still working on the "plug up the well ASAP" part of your plan -- they didn't do it initially because there's a risk of making the spill worse -- when they try to inject the mud or junk, they run the risk of causing a larger leak in the riser... or maybe even a new leak in or around in the BOP. Anything they inject has to be done at a high pressure (to overcome the pressure of the oil), so there's gonna be a big pressure spike in the BOP and riser when they do the injection.
Ok you said anywhere in the world, here's $100M ($1B? How much money does it to violate the rules of physics and logistics?). I want a semi-submersible drill rig 10 miles off the coast of Oahu. Oh, and it has to be able to drill to depths of 5000 feet. And I need it there tomorrow. The clock starts now!
But even within the gulf, how are you going to relocate a 50,000 ton drill rig overnight? Especially if there's not a suitable idle rig waiting around, then you've got to safely shut down current drilling operations, pack everything up, *then* relocate it.
That does not even address the legal and contractual issues -- no one is going to give you a $500M drill rig on a handshake, and even if you had $500M in the bank, you're not likely to negotiate terms of sale overnight. Not even if you tell the lawyers that you're losing $10M/day.
Presumably you'd only use the auto-wipe setting if you had something to hide on your phone, so you wouldn't likely leave it on your desk while you go take a dump.
But even so, if the phone auto-wipes itself because you left it unattended for too long, then that should be better than the alternative of having someone get to your secret data when they steal (or confiscate) your phone. You do have backups of your data (encrypted, of course), right?
There must be a point where a dimmed LCD screen sends less light to your eyes than the whole-room lighting needed for the Kindle. I wish my Android phone would let the screen to be dimmed much more.
Maybe that's because ABC could not afford to keep years worth of (uncompressed?) video spinning on disk - they probably had hundreds of hours of programming each month (week? day?) -- and they have digital librarians to take care of storing and retrieving tapes. They'd pay at least an order of magnitude (probably 2 orders of magnitude) more for disks than the original poster -- EMC, Netapp, Hitachi, etc are not cheap and a major news organization is not going to build their own Linux box to store video. A home user has different needs (I haven't watched the Little Mermaid in 2 years and I want to watch it NOW DAMMIT!), much less video to deal with both in number of hours and in raw size since most of his stuff already came from a compressed format), and the economics are different for home gear -- a home built Linux fileserver is a fraction of the cost of enterprise storage from a major vendor. Plus he's only talking around 10TB of disk space, that's not much for a home hobbyist to build.
Does any enterprise really test Virus updates before they are pushed out? I work in a relatively small shop (less than 1000 desktops), and we have about a dozen "mission critical" desktop applications that would impact business if any went down. Things like AP, HR, and other applications related to business.
Not to mention that even though we've tried to standardize our hardware platform, we have almost a half dozen hardware configs that we support -- all would need to be tested to make sure a bad AV update doesn't kill some hardware dependent driver.
While we do serious QA across all applications before rolling out most software patches, I just can't believe that management would agree to let us triple the size of our QA team so we can thoroughly test daily anti-virus updates.
Do any companies do this?
Also, cows don't typically sweat like a horse, so even if a cow can produce 2KW peak it's not likely that it can sustain that level of output for 8 hours due to cooling issues.
There were around 400,000 books published in the 70's alone reference. Most of these books are not rare, nor would they be fragile enough to be significantly damaged by a high speed scanner. And I'd be willing to bet that most of them do not have electronic publishing files.
Some high speed scanners (like Google's) are designed to cause no more harm to a book than a person reading it.
There are many (most?) books published before computer aided writing and typesetting became the norm. Even for many books that were published electronically, the electronic files used to create the books may not exist or may be unreadable due to poor archiving, publisher is out of business, hard to parse proprietary file formats, archaic hardware (cobbling together a punched tape reader from the 70's might be harder and more trouble-prone than just scanning the book), etc.
And then there are the non-technical issues like when publishers don't really want to cooperate (i.e. Google Books).
Technology like this will cause the publishing industry to go the way of the music and movie industries.
Right now the publishing industry is where the music industry was 7 years ago. Multiple incompatible book formats, DRM that lets rights holders yank your paid content away from you, DRM/formats that leave you tied to specific vendor readers, etc.
The barrier of scanning a book has made the publishing industry think that they don't need to provide books in a format that users want and feel that they can keep books locked down by DRM.
Even if DRM succeeds in keeping e-books from being redistributed, scanning technology keeps moving forward. All it's going to take is some enterprising company to buy one of these scanners and become the "AllofMP3" of the book world -- selling e-books in open, non-DRM formats for $1/each and the publisher's business model will fail miserably and they'll try doing the same catch-up that the music industry is involved in in trying to give users a reasonably priced legal product that can compete with the cheap illegal copies.
it won't even take new scanning technology for this to happen -- a scanning "peer-to-peer" service can be formed where thousands of subscribers are asked to scan and proofread a single page from new releases, which are them compiled into a central database to form a complete scanned book archive.
Whether they like it or not, the book industry is going to be forced into open, interoperable standards for books, and lower prices that consumers have come to expect from industries where nearly all of the manufacturing and distribution costs have been eliminated by electronic distribution.
I agree with everyone that recommended tape. an LTO4 tape is rated at 15 - 30 years archival life. Make 2 copies, keep on one-site, and send one off to Iron Mountain for long term storage.
While the tapes are rated to last 15 years, if you want to be able to access the data for that long, make a plan to copy them to new media every 5 years or so so you can be sure to have access to a tape drive that can still read the media. New LTO generations come out every around every 2 years, and LTO drives can typically read 2 generations behind. So in 5 years you'll be able to buy an LTO-6 drive that will still be able to read today's LTO-4 tapes (and will store around 4x more data per tape). If you can wait until LTO-5 is available (later this year?), you'll be able to store 1.5TB per tape.
I'd never trust a powered off hard drive to store data for any length of time - if it's not spinning, scrubbed, and monitored in a RAID array, you don't know if the data is readable -- there are many things that can go wrong with a hard drive that don't apply to tapes.
I posted the link to their website where you can find the plan information, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to reject your cry of foul. The plan I was talking about is Kaiser's 40/3000 NM plan, but they have a bunch of others. I'm assuming that they have the same pre-existing condition exclusions that other plans do, so that could account for at least some of the difference between your employer's plan and these plans.
Since I don't know what your employer sponsored plan's coverage is, I can't tell you what the difference is between this plan and your plan, but by all means, go check it out and maybe you can save yourself some money.
There's no mention of excluded illnesses in the plan summary and I assume that Kaiser has only one formulary for prescription coverage that is the same across all of their plans, whether employee sponsored or individual, but as you say, it's all in the fine print.
By all means, go check it out, and see if it's a better deal than your employer's plan. Give them a call and ask for the full benefits booklet if you want to check out the fine print.
Except that insurance is there to cover catastrophic health care costs. Better to buy a plan with the highest deductable you can find (that still offers reasonable lifetime maximums) and then just plan on paying expenses out of pocket, never reaching the deductable. But the insurance is still there to protect you for major illnesses.
Otherwise, a major medical event can bankrupt you and your family. If you have a "simple" heart attack and need open heart surgery, figure $250K for the emergency room visit, ICU, dianostics, surgery, and followups.
Even if you're healthy, if you're walking down the street and get run over by a hit-and-run driver, you can easily rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs. Each day in the ICU alone can cost $3000 -- so each week in ICU can cost you over $20,000.
If you don't have any real assets anyway, then perhaps it's easier to go without insurance, but I don't want my family to lose our house and other assets if I go into the hospitcal just because I wanted to save a few thousand dollars a year.