I thought Doctors didn't die, they just regenerated? Unless of course they were killed while regenerating.

Having a 1 1/2 yr old son, I went thru the same questions you have. This is the working solution that I currently have in place.

1) Running a DLINK DNS323 SAN, in raid mode. This is the main repository.
2) Purchases 2 external 2TB USB drives. I keep one here at home. Every 2-3 months I copy pictures/videos to one, bring it to my parents place and bring back the other one. Rinse and repeat every couple of months. This also protects me from losing pictures if the house was robbed, caught fire, etc..
3) Every 6 months or so I also get selected pictures professionally printed. Usually anywhere between 50-100 pictures. They are then stored in nice photobooks.

Last Xmas I also surprised my wife with a professionally done photobook, with pictures celebrating our first dates up to the first 6 months of my son's life. She really treasures that gift.It can get pretty expensive (100-200$), but oh so worth it.

For the first 10 or so years of Costco's existence in Canada (mostly known under the name Price Club), you could only get a membership if you worked for the government (federal of provincial) or were a business owner. The primary account holder could also add 2-3 people to their 'membership. So what's happening in the UK isn't something new.

Missing option:

-Not American. Don't really care/have a voice/have an opinion

When there's US centric polls, there's sadle never an option for those of us not in the US. Slashdot is read by people outside of the confines of the United States ;)

Having recently had a hand in buying new Sun/Oracle hardware, I can attest that prices did not directly go up, BUT the discounts offered to corporations have gone down. For example (using fake numbers) we used to get a 20% discount on hardware purchases, but now only get 10%.

It'll take some getting used to, but I don't mind the new design. Change != bad

Testing with a meter, my desktop was drawing 350w idle. Much much higher than the 25-30w used by a laptop.

A UPS isn't a choice where I live. Its a must, as we often get brownouts. So its not being affected by spikes and sags. As far as my next upgrade, since our wonderful government has gone to time of use for electricty, and the rates are skyrocketing, I'll be going with a laptop instead of a desktop. 25-30w of power vs 750-800w is a no brainer. I no longer game much on the PC so upgrading isn't a requirement.

Wow, power supplies blow all the time. I've had to replace 4 for family members in the last 18 months or so. I'll be looking for a replacement machine soon for myself as my motherboard is dying (Asus P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP, not a cheap mobo). The board is about 4 years old. Onboard sound is dead. 2 of the SATA controllers are crapping out. BIOS settings aren't saving on reboot (and I've tried changing the battery 3 times). I haven't upgraded from XP for only one reason, really. There's no direct XP to Win 7 upgrade path. I have dozens upon dozens of apps that I use on a regular basis. I can't be bothered spending a week + reinstalling the apps until I absolutely need to.

I second this. I just bought my 2nd DNS 323 after the first one got full. (its cheaper to buy 2 DNS 323 which are 2 bays, compared to getting the 4 bay version). I shoot a lot of pics, and at 20-25 meg per RAW file, it adds up quickly. The first is stacked with 2x1.5 TB drives, the 2nd with 2x2TB drives. I've got them running in RAID 1 for hardware redundancy. Great little devices and cheap (150$ Canadian). With the latest firmware you can even run NFS, and a native bittorrent client.

The only diskless OS booting I'm interested in and waiting for is booting from EEPROM. Near instant boot times. Why has this never really taken off?

The ruling is that Bell can now also charge ISPs that lease the copper from them. The usage based billing that Bell has had in place for its customers for the last 1.5-2 years was never 'illegal'.

Or for 5$ a month you can get 100 gigs instead of 60. http://www.bell.ca/shopping/Usage-Insurance-Plan/VasIntInsurance.details so well short of the extra 22.50$. If you continually bust 60 gigs but stay under 100 this is a much better deal.

Not only use something like DenyHost or Fail2Ban, but firewall off all IP classes from Asia, South America and any other region that you know you'll never SSH from. I can easily get the /8s and such that are in use by each region (just look up Apnic, RIPE, etc...).