The things is your typical "PLC" these days is pretty much a ruggedized PC running Windows, and a likely buggy stack of control software packages on top of that; which do not get along with the security patches for Windows, so Windows does not get patched. This is pretty serious problem when these machines are not properly isolated.
Well there is a little more than to running a modern prison then just sequestering and feeding the inmates. We have decided that we care about their health and safety as well.
In the event its necessary to evacuate the prison, say because there is a fire or something, central control of the locks would be very valuable. Much easier for the guards to grab the shotguns and rifles and say "Alright we are evacuating to the yard, the doors are going to unlock all of you then step out hands in the air were we can see them and form a line." than it would be for them to go through the cell block unlocking each cell or row of cells at time.
At the very least that would be a dangerous situation for the guards, already somewhat chaotic they don't want to have their backs turned to other prisoners while they focus on operating a lock mechanism rather than their surroundings. I should expect the folks we keep locked in high security detention facilities are likely to be the sort that would try to take advantage of an unusual situation which may arise, and being able to lock and unlock all doors at the same time is one of the many ways prions try and mitigate that risk.
Um what makes you think you can do VPN in clear text? I guess the "Private" part of VPN would not really apply but you could bridge networks just fine over the Internet using GRE for instance.
the typical American has more debt than they do fungible assets
I don't know where you came up with that whopper! The vast vast majority of Americans have a positive net worth. Yes there are many who don't; especially with the housing bubble busting but inflation is NOT beneficial to most American's portfolios.
That being said we all know some inflation is needed to keep the economy moving, so in a sense it can be good for you public on a macro level, provided its a sustainable rate, and he can grow the value of his other assets at a similar or better rate; which btw from the late 90's through the mid 2000s there were pretty few vehicles the average American could do that with, besides real estate. We know how that worked out. Had you plowed you assets into stocks, or gold in say late 2008 you'd have done okay as well, but its too late now. There is in fact no vehicle Joe public with 30-100K in fairly liquid assets, and another 200-500K in real-estate and long term investments tied up in IRA, US Savings Bonds etc, can protect himself; to my knowledge at the moment.
If the Administration tries this, it will be a pretty hard blow to the middle class. Inflation (real inflation, not the way the Treasury dept measures) is probably running 4pct or so which is about 2pct to high all ready, and with no hedges and stagnate wages its going to start pull pretty heavily on the quality of life. Keep in mid this money is not being stuffed in the mattress its going to be dumped into the economy pretty rapidly by the government paying its obligations. Meanwhile bonds won't be sold to offset it, which means no other money is being sequestered. The M3 would start to rise sharply, there would be lots of dollars floating about that nobody would know what to do with.
No we can't balance the budget period, because the liberal social justice crowd insists that base line budgeting is they way we have to do things. Not increasing the year over year budget for a program is not a cut, well ok there is some inflation to consider. Still the assumption is 10pct per year while inflation is more like 2pct per year.
Second these people need to get it through their very thick skulls that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was never supposed to mean to that government guarantees you get those things but that it would not stand in the way of those things. Health care is not a right, and if your health stops you from doing those things its not your fellow citizens problem unless they freely chose to make it their problem. You have no moral claim on them, and you should have no legal claim on them.
Now that the rest of the world has options and is no longer the war torn mess it was in 1945, we need to accept that or society is simply not productive enough to do all these wonderful things FOR people. We would all be better off if government stopped doing things TO people. There is no reason the Federal government needs a department of education, a DEA, an ATF, a TSA, a DOT, an SEC, an FCC, EPA, AID, I could go on and on and on. Let me have a crack at balancing the budget.
Use the gray matter between peoples ears. I had an 89 Doge Omin, I always kept track of my mileage. I generally could over the course of 10gal of fuel average around 31mpg. It had a 2.2liter engine and developed something like 92HP, and 120 ft/lbs torque.
It also had a five speed, with 4th being 1:1 and 5th was I think 2:1. I can't recall what the rear end was, I want to say 3.1:1 but I could be wrong. That little car was quick! I could wind her up in 1st, and 2nd, which would let it pretty well jump off the line faster than most other sedans could comfortably in city situations, and I could wind it out in 3rd to get onto an interstate. Then you put in 4th or 5th as appropriate when you are at speed, need to accelerate again? learn to double clutch on your down shifts.
I am sure running the thing up to 4.5K RPM it was SUCKING FUEL, but you only did that briefly, then you put into high gear to cruise, and used very very little. It averaged out and you still had good performance as a driver.
The key is you had to know how to drive, and know what do when. The automatic is the reason engines have to be so big in American cars. Its not because they don't xfer power efficiently, its because they don't know anything about the situation other than vacuum and throttle angle. Kinda hard to make decisions about what gear to be in when you can't plan ahead. Solve that problem and Americans will be perfectly happy with 1.2ltre turbo charged engines.
The flaw there was proping them up. We should have let the automakers go bankrupt. If we had all that tooling, equipment, and realestate could have been snapped up by people with the intent to actually build something new and different, possibly even something consumers want.
At the same time they'd be free of the burden of all those obligations the big 3 STILL have. Which would give them lots more flexibility on how much margin they have to get, so they actually could try some new things. The Volt is a joke and everyone knows it; it exists to game the CAFE standard system, not because they are going to sell more than few tens of thousands of them them same crowd that still drinks $5 coffees every morning.
Ford is doing what they have also done, selling F150's which are good trucks, for the folks that need them, and an OK car for the people who don't actually need a pickup.
Chrysler is pushing re-badged FIATs after Obama STOLE (yes STOLE) 20% of the company from the bond holders and gave it to a foreign automaker, because he needed a distraction for a few weeks.
Don't worry Detroit will be in as big a fix as ever within a few years all over again. Nothing has changed, and the reason is BECAUSE WE DON'T LET MR.MARKET OPERATE.
This has NOTHING to do with emca/java script, they are not in anyway related to Java other than the really really unfortunate sharing of a brand and a little syntax also common to many other languages.
'I might point out that the same auto industry that ran attack ads about how 56.2 would destroy their businesses and force everyone to drive electric cars has embraced 54.5 as an achievable target,' writes Grunwald. 'It almost makes you wonder if the automakers may have exaggerated the costs of compliance, the way they always do.'"
Or it indicates that they had little leverage at the negotiating table, and this was the best they were going to get so they try and save a little face. I for simply don't understand why we are raising standards at all, in the current economic environment.
If you like FF3.x so much USE SEAMONKEY. Its a great browser. You don't even have to install composer if you don't want it. The built-in mail application is pretty much at parity with Thunderbird so you can use that do, or don't. Firefox post 2.x is every bit as resource intensive as the old suite was, and post 4.x clearly more intensive.
You can install new versions of SeaMonkey that give you the latest geko and java script engines. SeaMonkey these days is everything that is good coming out of the Mozilla foundation without all the crap. Its really worth try, if you are a frustrated Firefox user. It hands down better than Firefox 4/5 IMHO.
This is complete BS. My sister is a teacher ( a young one a that, just finished her fourth year) she gets paid a salary that might seem a little low at first blush but if you adjust it for the fact that she only works 9/12s of year is pretty much right in line what I earned at her age in private industry. She also gets benefits which are frankly much better than I have ever been offered in IT. She has taken jobs either tutoring or working at camps the past couple summers and when you add her wages in from that she earns more than I did when I was only a few years out of school, and does better than almost all her peers in industry.
Teachers being deeply underpaid is a myth and she would be the first to tell you that. The time teachers are really underpaid is their first year where they have to put in tons of extra time developing lessons and filling out reports and stuff to the staff assigned to watch them as part of their probation. After that its a pretty good living.
I would think as an adult you would have come to appreciate the value of the things you learned in school and can see how they apply to your personal pursuits.
Now maybe your kid is the type who is smart enough to obtain and internalize information on his own or at a much faster rate than it is fed at most public schools. That might be true. Maybe you ought to sell it to the kid like this, and if he is so gosh darn gifted perhaps he will even understand.
Look you have to be there, you might as well learn what they have to teach you while you are there, and you never know some of it might prove useful to you in your projects. I know you're time might be better used another way, if you were free to do so but your not; play the hand your dealt, nobody will take you seriously until you are 18 anyway.
-- OR --
You could home school the kid and you'd both have lots more freedom to control the particulars of his primary and secondary education. So yea, I kinda think YOU are the problem.
It will be an amazing stroke of luck if that is the take away. Qaddafi is not seen as an enemy of Islam thought most of the Muslim world. Libya is a pretty secular place as far as the middle east goes. The Rebels may be less secular than the pro-Qaddafi Libyians but I really don't think this fight is being seen as jihad.
I'd be quite surprised if this buys us much good will outside Libya, at all.
Tell that to Qaddafi! He got the message from the Iraq war. Don't support terrorism against the USA or its allies, and control your people and territories well enough they are not used for terrorism against the USA or its allies, or else you might get regime changed and that won't be fun. Qaddafi's government was stable and friendly towards us.
Know what we attacked him ANYWAY! Why I have no idea, especially because we don't know who the rebels are or if they will be a better partner in the future. Qaddafi has been playing ball, our actions in Libya make our foreign policy look completely schizophrenic. The sadly "we" can't be trusted. Oh I won't entertain the argument we are there for humanitarian reasons, if that were the case we'd have been in Darfur, the DRC, and Tibet for years before Libya happened. The kind of person who says we are in Libya for humanitarian reasons is either ignorant and deeply stupid, or the sort of person whose ideas are to blame for most of the suffering in the world.
The only way to be "safe" from our horrible foreign policy is to be major supplier of oil to us, or a major supplier of cheap consumer goods. You don't even have to be friendly.
Murdoch's media follows it does not lead. They seem to have lots of influence because their readership thinks the same things their papers print but really its the other way around, as you point out he switches sides from time to time.
The editors at News Corp and its subsidiaries pretty much have a moist finger in the air on most issues. They figure out what the reader/viewer ship wants to hear and just repeat it. They don't have the political ambition most people seem to think they do. Their ambition is to sell papers, ad time, and TV ad time; and to make piles of money doing it.
I am not saying Murdoch an his son did nothing wrong or that they are not criminals, or that they should not be punished. I do think the focus on them is wrong.
First the phone hacking. News organizations gather information its what they do. Celebrities and public figures know they are targets and should take additional security precautions, nobody should be surprised by this in 2011. As to the little girls phone, the real story there is bad police work. If the police though the voice mail being checked indicated the missing girl was still alive, that should have RAISED the priority of the case not lowered it. If you think the victim is already dead no more harm can come to them after all. Second that should have given them an avenue to peruse the case, GET THE PHONE records, even though that would have leas to News of the World.
Second the bribery allegations. Look taking a bribe is much more serious then offering one. When you offer a bribe you do so for personal gain, pure and simple. When you take a bribe not only do you do so for your own gain you also are doing something the violates your responsibility to office or party you serve. Its far less ethical to take bribes than to offer them. Again the story should be about corrupt police and politicians more than it is about News Corp.
Because you want to charge your customer for some crapy hunk of klugeware you build out of code snip-its you had laying around from other projects, instead of building something appropriate for their needs.
employs a large amount of people in a country rife with joblessness
Yes it employes large amounts of law enforcement personnel, politicians, thugs of various kinds, and attorneys. None of whom produce anything of use, but consume vast resources. Perhaps we are so rife with joblessness BECAUSE OF IP>
Probably but I am sure what this comes down to is if their contract covers damages from this loss or not.
My guess is they have some clause that says the insured party is supposed to take reasonable steps to prevent losses as result of security compromises. Your home owners policy has something similar. If you leave your doors unlocked for instance you might have a serious problem with a claim for loss by theft.
The issue here is going to probably be what constitutes reasonable, and given the problem was essentially they failed to patch servers, Sony will most likely lose. Its going to be really hard for Sony to locate IT security experts who will testify that having a patch management plan the covers all assets and following it is not a basic measure everyone should employ.
I am pretty careful about keeping my original media, and retaining the tag files from my installation and such on my home machines. So I really only need to backup my home directory. Within that I am pretty organized as well. There is lots of stuff I keep because I can that I don't need and would not cry over if something happened to it. The stuff I do want to keep either because it would take lots time re-rip and prepare form the original media or because its my own content (software I wrote, my financial records, e-mail, everything I wrote for College, etc) weighs in at about 30GB tar'ed and bziped and feed through ccrypt now.
I used to do backups to zip disks, moved on to jaz disks, did dvd+Rs for a while, currently rotate on a pair of 32gig flash drives now. I like to keep the older generation at the office; so multiple media backs would be a pain. I am about to out grow my flash drives, probably within a few months. I will have to by some 64 GB or 128 GB models to replace them. I have no real use for the 32s after that.
Optical disks of enough capacity would eliminate this waste for a good long while have multiple uses (the drive anyway) and let me affordably keep more than two generations.
Slashdot Mirror
The things is your typical "PLC" these days is pretty much a ruggedized PC running Windows, and a likely buggy stack of control software packages on top of that; which do not get along with the security patches for Windows, so Windows does not get patched. This is pretty serious problem when these machines are not properly isolated.
Well there is a little more than to running a modern prison then just sequestering and feeding the inmates. We have decided that we care about their health and safety as well.
In the event its necessary to evacuate the prison, say because there is a fire or something, central control of the locks would be very valuable. Much easier for the guards to grab the shotguns and rifles and say "Alright we are evacuating to the yard, the doors are going to unlock all of you then step out hands in the air were we can see them and form a line." than it would be for them to go through the cell block unlocking each cell or row of cells at time.
At the very least that would be a dangerous situation for the guards, already somewhat chaotic they don't want to have their backs turned to other prisoners while they focus on operating a lock mechanism rather than their surroundings. I should expect the folks we keep locked in high security detention facilities are likely to be the sort that would try to take advantage of an unusual situation which may arise, and being able to lock and unlock all doors at the same time is one of the many ways prions try and mitigate that risk.
These are probably the same people who thought skipjack was a good idea.
Um what makes you think you can do VPN in clear text? I guess the "Private" part of VPN would not really apply but you could bridge networks just fine over the Internet using GRE for instance.
the typical American has more debt than they do fungible assets
I don't know where you came up with that whopper! The vast vast majority of Americans have a positive net worth. Yes there are many who don't; especially with the housing bubble busting but inflation is NOT beneficial to most American's portfolios.
That being said we all know some inflation is needed to keep the economy moving, so in a sense it can be good for you public on a macro level, provided its a sustainable rate, and he can grow the value of his other assets at a similar or better rate; which btw from the late 90's through the mid 2000s there were pretty few vehicles the average American could do that with, besides real estate. We know how that worked out. Had you plowed you assets into stocks, or gold in say late 2008 you'd have done okay as well, but its too late now. There is in fact no vehicle Joe public with 30-100K in fairly liquid assets, and another 200-500K in real-estate and long term investments tied up in IRA, US Savings Bonds etc, can protect himself; to my knowledge at the moment.
If the Administration tries this, it will be a pretty hard blow to the middle class. Inflation (real inflation, not the way the Treasury dept measures) is probably running 4pct or so which is about 2pct to high all ready, and with no hedges and stagnate wages its going to start pull pretty heavily on the quality of life. Keep in mid this money is not being stuffed in the mattress its going to be dumped into the economy pretty rapidly by the government paying its obligations. Meanwhile bonds won't be sold to offset it, which means no other money is being sequestered. The M3 would start to rise sharply, there would be lots of dollars floating about that nobody would know what to do with.
No we can't balance the budget period, because the liberal social justice crowd insists that base line budgeting is they way we have to do things. Not increasing the year over year budget for a program is not a cut, well ok there is some inflation to consider. Still the assumption is 10pct per year while inflation is more like 2pct per year.
Second these people need to get it through their very thick skulls that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was never supposed to mean to that government guarantees you get those things but that it would not stand in the way of those things. Health care is not a right, and if your health stops you from doing those things its not your fellow citizens problem unless they freely chose to make it their problem. You have no moral claim on them, and you should have no legal claim on them.
Now that the rest of the world has options and is no longer the war torn mess it was in 1945, we need to accept that or society is simply not productive enough to do all these wonderful things FOR people. We would all be better off if government stopped doing things TO people. There is no reason the Federal government needs a department of education, a DEA, an ATF, a TSA, a DOT, an SEC, an FCC, EPA, AID, I could go on and on and on. Let me have a crack at balancing the budget.
Use the gray matter between peoples ears. I had an 89 Doge Omin, I always kept track of my mileage. I generally could over the course of 10gal of fuel average around 31mpg. It had a 2.2liter engine and developed something like 92HP, and 120 ft/lbs torque.
It also had a five speed, with 4th being 1:1 and 5th was I think 2:1. I can't recall what the rear end was, I want to say 3.1:1 but I could be wrong. That little car was quick! I could wind her up in 1st, and 2nd, which would let it pretty well jump off the line faster than most other sedans could comfortably in city situations, and I could wind it out in 3rd to get onto an interstate. Then you put in 4th or 5th as appropriate when you are at speed, need to accelerate again? learn to double clutch on your down shifts.
I am sure running the thing up to 4.5K RPM it was SUCKING FUEL, but you only did that briefly, then you put into high gear to cruise, and used very very little. It averaged out and you still had good performance as a driver.
The key is you had to know how to drive, and know what do when. The automatic is the reason engines have to be so big in American cars. Its not because they don't xfer power efficiently, its because they don't know anything about the situation other than vacuum and throttle angle. Kinda hard to make decisions about what gear to be in when you can't plan ahead. Solve that problem and Americans will be perfectly happy with 1.2ltre turbo charged engines.
Because a major portion of pickup buyers want the ability to pull a large load, they need to be able to develop torque a relative low RPM.
The flaw there was proping them up. We should have let the automakers go bankrupt. If we had all that tooling, equipment, and realestate could have been snapped up by people with the intent to actually build something new and different, possibly even something consumers want.
At the same time they'd be free of the burden of all those obligations the big 3 STILL have. Which would give them lots more flexibility on how much margin they have to get, so they actually could try some new things. The Volt is a joke and everyone knows it; it exists to game the CAFE standard system, not because they are going to sell more than few tens of thousands of them them same crowd that still drinks $5 coffees every morning.
Ford is doing what they have also done, selling F150's which are good trucks, for the folks that need them, and an OK car for the people who don't actually need a pickup.
Chrysler is pushing re-badged FIATs after Obama STOLE (yes STOLE) 20% of the company from the bond holders and gave it to a foreign automaker, because he needed a distraction for a few weeks.
Don't worry Detroit will be in as big a fix as ever within a few years all over again. Nothing has changed, and the reason is BECAUSE WE DON'T LET MR.MARKET OPERATE.
This has NOTHING to do with emca/java script, they are not in anyway related to Java other than the really really unfortunate sharing of a brand and a little syntax also common to many other languages.
'I might point out that the same auto industry that ran attack ads about how 56.2 would destroy their businesses and force everyone to drive electric cars has embraced 54.5 as an achievable target,' writes Grunwald. 'It almost makes you wonder if the automakers may have exaggerated the costs of compliance, the way they always do.'"
Or it indicates that they had little leverage at the negotiating table, and this was the best they were going to get so they try and save a little face. I for simply don't understand why we are raising standards at all, in the current economic environment.
Nah, it explains our current political environment pretty well. You get instability where the majority opinion switches from side to side.
If you like FF3.x so much USE SEAMONKEY. Its a great browser. You don't even have to install composer if you don't want it. The built-in mail application is pretty much at parity with Thunderbird so you can use that do, or don't. Firefox post 2.x is every bit as resource intensive as the old suite was, and post 4.x clearly more intensive.
You can install new versions of SeaMonkey that give you the latest geko and java script engines. SeaMonkey these days is everything that is good coming out of the Mozilla foundation without all the crap. Its really worth try, if you are a frustrated Firefox user. It hands down better than Firefox 4/5 IMHO.
This is complete BS. My sister is a teacher ( a young one a that, just finished her fourth year) she gets paid a salary that might seem a little low at first blush but if you adjust it for the fact that she only works 9/12s of year is pretty much right in line what I earned at her age in private industry. She also gets benefits which are frankly much better than I have ever been offered in IT. She has taken jobs either tutoring or working at camps the past couple summers and when you add her wages in from that she earns more than I did when I was only a few years out of school, and does better than almost all her peers in industry.
Teachers being deeply underpaid is a myth and she would be the first to tell you that. The time teachers are really underpaid is their first year where they have to put in tons of extra time developing lessons and filling out reports and stuff to the staff assigned to watch them as part of their probation. After that its a pretty good living.
I would think as an adult you would have come to appreciate the value of the things you learned in school and can see how they apply to your personal pursuits.
Now maybe your kid is the type who is smart enough to obtain and internalize information on his own or at a much faster rate than it is fed at most public schools. That might be true. Maybe you ought to sell it to the kid like this, and if he is so gosh darn gifted perhaps he will even understand.
Look you have to be there, you might as well learn what they have to teach you while you are there, and you never know some of it might prove useful to you in your projects. I know you're time might be better used another way, if you were free to do so but your not; play the hand your dealt, nobody will take you seriously until you are 18 anyway.
-- OR --
You could home school the kid and you'd both have lots more freedom to control the particulars of his primary and secondary education. So yea, I kinda think YOU are the problem.
"Didn't they just help millions of Muslims?"
It will be an amazing stroke of luck if that is the take away. Qaddafi is not seen as an enemy of Islam thought most of the Muslim world. Libya is a pretty secular place as far as the middle east goes. The Rebels may be less secular than the pro-Qaddafi Libyians but I really don't think this fight is being seen as jihad.
I'd be quite surprised if this buys us much good will outside Libya, at all.
Straw purchasers, eh? You mean Obama administration ATF and DEA agents?
Tell that to Qaddafi! He got the message from the Iraq war. Don't support terrorism against the USA or its allies, and control your people and territories well enough they are not used for terrorism against the USA or its allies, or else you might get regime changed and that won't be fun. Qaddafi's government was stable and friendly towards us.
Know what we attacked him ANYWAY! Why I have no idea, especially because we don't know who the rebels are or if they will be a better partner in the future. Qaddafi has been playing ball, our actions in Libya make our foreign policy look completely schizophrenic. The sadly "we" can't be trusted. Oh I won't entertain the argument we are there for humanitarian reasons, if that were the case we'd have been in Darfur, the DRC, and Tibet for years before Libya happened. The kind of person who says we are in Libya for humanitarian reasons is either ignorant and deeply stupid, or the sort of person whose ideas are to blame for most of the suffering in the world.
The only way to be "safe" from our horrible foreign policy is to be major supplier of oil to us, or a major supplier of cheap consumer goods. You don't even have to be friendly.
Murdoch's media follows it does not lead. They seem to have lots of influence because their readership thinks the same things their papers print but really its the other way around, as you point out he switches sides from time to time.
The editors at News Corp and its subsidiaries pretty much have a moist finger in the air on most issues. They figure out what the reader/viewer ship wants to hear and just repeat it. They don't have the political ambition most people seem to think they do. Their ambition is to sell papers, ad time, and TV ad time; and to make piles of money doing it.
I am not saying Murdoch an his son did nothing wrong or that they are not criminals, or that they should not be punished. I do think the focus on them is wrong.
First the phone hacking. News organizations gather information its what they do. Celebrities and public figures know they are targets and should take additional security precautions, nobody should be surprised by this in 2011. As to the little girls phone, the real story there is bad police work. If the police though the voice mail being checked indicated the missing girl was still alive, that should have RAISED the priority of the case not lowered it. If you think the victim is already dead no more harm can come to them after all. Second that should have given them an avenue to peruse the case, GET THE PHONE records, even though that would have leas to News of the World.
Second the bribery allegations. Look taking a bribe is much more serious then offering one. When you offer a bribe you do so for personal gain, pure and simple. When you take a bribe not only do you do so for your own gain you also are doing something the violates your responsibility to office or party you serve. Its far less ethical to take bribes than to offer them. Again the story should be about corrupt police and politicians more than it is about News Corp.
Because you want to charge your customer for some crapy hunk of klugeware you build out of code snip-its you had laying around from other projects, instead of building something appropriate for their needs.
Geez, sounds like someone was circumcised a little to tight.
employs a large amount of people in a country rife with joblessness
Yes it employes large amounts of law enforcement personnel, politicians, thugs of various kinds, and attorneys. None of whom produce anything of use, but consume vast resources. Perhaps we are so rife with joblessness BECAUSE OF IP>
Probably but I am sure what this comes down to is if their contract covers damages from this loss or not.
My guess is they have some clause that says the insured party is supposed to take reasonable steps to prevent losses as result of security compromises. Your home owners policy has something similar. If you leave your doors unlocked for instance you might have a serious problem with a claim for loss by theft.
The issue here is going to probably be what constitutes reasonable, and given the problem was essentially they failed to patch servers, Sony will most likely lose. Its going to be really hard for Sony to locate IT security experts who will testify that having a patch management plan the covers all assets and following it is not a basic measure everyone should employ.
Here here!
I am pretty careful about keeping my original media, and retaining the tag files from my installation and such on my home machines. So I really only need to backup my home directory. Within that I am pretty organized as well. There is lots of stuff I keep because I can that I don't need and would not cry over if something happened to it. The stuff I do want to keep either because it would take lots time re-rip and prepare form the original media or because its my own content (software I wrote, my financial records, e-mail, everything I wrote for College, etc) weighs in at about 30GB tar'ed and bziped and feed through ccrypt now.
I used to do backups to zip disks, moved on to jaz disks, did dvd+Rs for a while, currently rotate on a pair of 32gig flash drives now. I like to keep the older generation at the office; so multiple media backs would be a pain. I am about to out grow my flash drives, probably within a few months. I will have to by some 64 GB or 128 GB models to replace them. I have no real use for the 32s after that.
Optical disks of enough capacity would eliminate this waste for a good long while have multiple uses (the drive anyway) and let me affordably keep more than two generations.