1) Espionage is anything but cost-effective. But cost isn't the primary (or even secondary) concern there for those who want to do the spying. (It's (technical) feasibility)
2) Running cable above ground is _always_ more cost-effective then running cable underground. So if you:
- don't give a shit about your customers
- don't have a lot of competition because you can gain a monopoly by buying senators
- and if you do a bare minimum of maintenance because you want more money (more so if you _do_ run cables underground)
then even in a city, local power stability is going to be shit.
If you think 250TB of backup is a lot, then you don't need tape.
I currently backup about 1PB and data storage is growing exponentially here (gene sequencing data). Tape is the only cost effective solution for us.
I do agree though that tapedrives are ridiculously expensive but it's a sellers market. Tapedrives don't sell in massive quantities so the price stays up, mainly because there just aren't that many suppliers.
On the other hand. I called a shop a while ago to see what they'd give for our 5x LTO4 tapedrives since we upgraded to LTO6 and they only offered us 30 euros per drive. So if you don't need the latest drive out there, you can save a lot of money by buying second-hand.
It's true that renewable power levels like wind-power rise and fall, but once you look at a larger area then it pretty much evens out.
Of course you can back it up with other types of renewable that have a more stable output like hydro-electric of geothermal.
For one, the US is big.. really big.. So it's not cost-effective to run power cables and alike underground. So that makes them more vulnerable.
Also, the US enjoys a form of super-capitalism, where the almighty dollar stands above things like quality of service and stability. So companies do the bare minimum of maintenance, also worsening outages.
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What pisses me off as a consumer is that Microsoft patches never come with any kind of useful information.
"There are X patches available", and when you click a specific patch you get "This is a stability patch for Windows 8" or something generic like that.
How can a consumer make an informed decision to go ahead and install patches or not without hours of looking up KB numbers?
I'd like more info, so that unless a patch specifically fixes a security bug, I'd rather leave the rest of the patches uninstalled as long as my system runs ok.
You will have many recoverable tape errors.