Yawn.. please try to keep a disk with a bad motor. You might get it to spin up, you'll get your data - but the disk is still broken.

Looking at one of the shelves here in my home office, I spot 3x1tb, 4x500gb and 2x3tb disks that I can pop in if something breaks. The 3tb disks are spares for my FS.

I'm using the 1tb disks for backups(3x3x1tb) and haven't thrown out the 500gb ones as I don't think they're quite old enough for the trash just yet.

Yeah I looked at the data from google when they published it and it makes sense. I don't really worry about it though.

At home I take backups of the stuff I care about (sourcecode, pictures, video). I've had quite a few disks breaking on me through the years, but haven't lost any data I care about due to a disk that breaks down.

At work we have redundant backups both of data and vms. Backups are on disk inhouse, on disk in a second location and on tape in a second location.

nah, not running _that_ many at home anymore. Still I don't think I need more of them

2 laptops, two desktops, a mediabox and a fileserver. Only the Fileserver has more than a couple of tb of disks.

Fileserver uses raid 5, just in case. Desktops are striped SSD's, laptops uses single SSDs and my mediabox boots from an SD card.

I've got neither the time or interrest in testing my disks besides replacing them if they break.

I didn't really think I had to mention that I kept backups of my important stuff. Thought that was pretty much what everyone on slashdot did. As a hobby photographer I have monthly backups in 2+1 locations, one of my backups is even in another country :)

I'm ok with loosing my porn and pirated movie collection, though

I havn't even considered testing my personal harddrives. If they break I try to retrieve whatever is on them, but I just buy new drives instead of spending any amount of time fixing them, never returned a disk - I just buy a couple of new ones whenever I need more space.

At work we're using properly configured SANs with 24x7 support, so I couldn't be arsed to test disks there either. We don't have multiple racks of disks, so I don't see any good reason to test everything.

If you're testing new diskdrives you must be really bored or very broke.

The payment is split between the company you work for and the public benefits we have here. I think my employer pays for the first week and after that it is split up depending on how long you've been sick. I think it works in much the same way as with the maternity/paternity leave.

I pay about 28% direct tax which I don't think is too bad considering what I get in return for it. My health insurance is ofcourse included in the taxes.

Although some people (not too many) abuse the system, it is widely considered to be a good thing.

Also forgot to mention the fact that my employer would be pretty pissed off if I showed up at work while sick, risking the health of everybody else.

Here in Norway it is required by law that every employee has the possibility to call in sick for 4x3 days per 12 months (not by calendar year). This is with 100% pay, no questions asked. If you're reall sick, and has to get sickleave, this will not count in on the 12 days as long as you get medical confirmation. Sickleave is also with 100% pay btw.

In addition every parent has the right to stay home when their kid/babysitter is sick, I believe that is upto 20 days a year. This is also with 100% pay.

A fun thing is also that if you get sick on your vacation days, you'll get replacement vacation days. This is only for the 5 weeks of required vacation, not the national holidays though.

Weird, I thought that the count wasn't final yet.

But from my point of view 55.9m votes (Obama) is a bit more than 54.4m votes(Romney), so you must be using some funny fuzzy maths

My N900 is almost 3 years old, and it is starting to show it's age. I really hope the combination mer/sailfish will turn out ok, as i haven't found anything able to replace my current N900 yet.

I'm going to miss Nokia if they go down for good :(

redhat -> mandrake -> debian -> kubuntu -> sabayon -> arch

Mandrake was the first distro I used as a full-time desktop OS. Have been using debian on my servers "for ever"

Still trying out new distros in vm's fairly regulary, but I'm getting to old to dedicate hours every day just to play with it.

:%s/96/06/gc

I recall reading about this here on slashdot several years ago (guessing '96), and thought that it was disproved not lang after. I might be wrong though

European elephants did go extinct fairly recently. And as The Question is quite old, I don't think we should completely rule them out.