Meanwhile I was thinking Nike.

Laziness and lack of education breeds the folk that allow cheque to be spelled check and deem it acceptable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheque#Spelling

I wouldn't call it "active" if it's sitting in a cabinet. That's about as passive as you can get.

Just saying. The options listed were not at all what I expected from reading the question, thinking about what I do from Dec 26 to 31...

I think the poll responses are less humorously creative than a few years back. I remember the good old days when I was as entertained by reading the poll choices as I was reading the comments. Now it's mostly mneh, whatever.

Although I voted hamster because I'm too lazy to actually check, my bill lists the amount used this billing cycle, last billing cycle, and a graph of the last 12 months with very coarse granularity.

By looking at this info periodically, power usage, gasoline, even your tv/internet/phone bills you can find out if you're being overbilled or if you can save a few dollars by changing your habits.

One of my co-workers who has cable internet and POTS phone started being billed for ADSL despite not having the service. Since he paid it for an entire year before realizing what was going on he wasn't able to get a refund - the EULA states that by paying the bill you agree to the service.

You should really start looking at that shit.

No no no. We do make >$75K and still live in a dark dingy concrete basement with wood plank furniture, but god damn you'd be jealous of my 3 monitor display made of 60" oLED TV, 4 iPads, 2 kindles, 2 racks full of servers, 4 FiOS lines trunked with OpenBGP and ordering pizza 3 times per day adds up too.

After fulfilling all my needs there's no $$ left to get my own place.

Not because it's against any policy but as good internet citizens, if they cut my connection I'm going to ask why, I find out it's because I'm infected, I just have to clean the infection and I'm back online. Whose rights, freedoms, expressions are being affected in any way from this?

Most internet users (don't just think /. crowd) would appreciate this type of action. One ISP where I live had this policy in place 4-5 years ago and I helped my cousin get rid of virii that he didn't know he had until this happened. Some advanced uses might be upset, just like pirateers are upset when TPB goes down, but those people will find ways around and still be able to do what they want to do.

I got the point a few posts back, but this comment actually made me laugh. Thank you.

Most of the open access points I come across are proxied to some pay per MB or pay per minute credit card log in page. Not so open but still connected to the internet.

You don't have backup needs, you have recovery needs. Backup enables you to fulfill those needs.
As has been mentioned many times above, there's no one fit answer - but I don't think you're even asking the right questions.
Under what circumstances will you be recovering data? There are two main types of recovery:
day to day recoveries where users want older versions of files or to replace a corrupt or deleted file; and
disaster recovery in case of hardware, system or site failure.

Will you support both recovery needs? If so then for day-to-day recoveries you need backups every day kept for any length of time deemed appropriate. Proper tape based backup is still the industry standard here just based on the volume. 12TB at 75% used, running full backups every week kept for 4 weeks, and daily cumulative incremental backups with 5% changes every day kept for 10 days means 51.3TB of data. Plus, you don't want all your copies on a single media, imagine if that thing failed?

For disaster recovery you need to know your RPO and RTO? Your Recovery Point Objective is basically how much data can you stand to loose while your Recovery Time Objective is how long after the disaster you can take to get back up and running. Answering these will tell you how often you need to run a backup and what storage technologies and methods are appropriate, or at least which ones are inappropriate. How are you going to protect your data from the disaster - how far away is far enough? I wouldn't consider the same campus as far enough away.

There are a number of products out there. I personally work with NetBackup from Symantec and it's pretty much an industry standard, but that's my employer's choice. I've looked at amanda (http://www.zmanda.com/) a few times, but haven't done any real testing with it. There's data protector, BackupExec and many listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backup_software

The third frame of that comic should read ~on't Pani~

The briefness of the article and lack of actual functional analysis make me think this should have been a comment on the original /. article rather than a whole new article of its own.

Slow news day?