Your comparison seems to assume that just because you've bought a commercially licensed image that you don't have to track it the same way you would a CC-licensed one. You actually probably have to track it more stringently for the commercial one than for the CC-licensed one, because you KNOW that someone's expecting to get paid for the commercial one.

"Hey, you know that background image we've been using for 5 years for the X site? Where'd we get that? iStockphoto? Can you track down the purchase info along with proof that the $3 was for *that* photo? I think that was a few years before Getty bought them, and I think we were still Y Corporation at the time. Man, I sure hope Jimmy didn't just do that on his own account for convenience. Any idea where he is these days?"

Heck, I was at someone's office today where they couldn't find the paperwork for an out-of-warranty laptop repair from March, much less something years old.

The concept is nothing new, and in fact there are active and semi - active attempts at building some or at least exploring some elements of them. Notable (per Wikipedia) are Masdar City near Abu Dhabi, many Las Vegas hotels, and Arcosanti in Arizona.

ThinkPad T440, $859 starting price, upgrade to 1600x900 for an extra $50. Going to 1920x1080 takes it up another $200 beyond that.

Also a couple of less business-oriented systems from Lenovo (based on their on-site search looking at 1600x900 and higher on screens of 13 or 14 inches): Their Flex2 14, this week's "deal" at $699 with a 4th-generation i7 and 1920x1080, which makes me go "wow". I'm going to include the link because that's pretty impressive: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/flex-series/flex-2-14/?sb=:000001C9:00011EDA:

They also have one of their Yoga 2 systems, 13" also 1920x1080 with 4th-gen i5 for $900.

And of course you can get higher resolution even cheaper if you're looking at giant 17" screens.

If you don't happen to have any NFC tags around, Shell gas stations with their Circle K convenience stores are using them as their new "loyalty" tags. You won't be able to write to them, but you can certainly read the ID out of one.

I have a client that we're going to be getting some software for - not a major purchase, none of the alternatives being considered are even over $300. Of the two leading options, one is produced by a Russian firm, and that alone is making me less likely to choose it.

Admittedly in this case there aren't any major differences in functionality, and we may end up with the Russian one after all if testing shows its interface is easier to use/train on, but it's the first time I recall actually looking into and considering where the software is being created.

I think I'd like one of these with Debian, Java and Crashplan. Slap it on a 4TB SATA drive, put it in a box, seed a backup onto it and ship it to a family member with broadband. Handy offsite backup.

The assorted troubles of the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-Op as discussed in Planet Money episode 525 (March 19, 2014) are directly relevant to this.

Basically, it's easy for people to hoard, and there's likely going to be a need for quite a bit of back-end management.

There are two decent approaches: backup or mirror your setup offsite OR archive the previous generation intact and do incrementals starting from that point. I'm assuming that a home user isn't going to be picking up a $2000+ LTO-6 tape drive and swapping in 8+ $65 tapes for each full backup.

The first is to have your own offsite storage that you back up to, where the backup is (at least) as large as the original. Multiple people have recommended Crashplan, and that's certainly a viable option. There are undoubtedly other options that could do similar things depending on how down into the weeds you want to get - rsync, the various rsync-based versioning backup solutions, git-annex as mentioned by someone else though that one's new to me. I'll note that from experience with Crashplan's Enterprise product on some older 32-bit servers, the client software can chew some fairly significant memory when you have a lot of files or data.

The other and probably simpler option is that when you start to near capacity on the storage system, don't upgrade it - shut it down and store it, preferably not in the same (not-yet-burning) building after building the new system and copying the data over to it. After you shut the old one down, keep backups of anything you've changed since that "checkpoint" system; hopefully your data isn't changing that rapidly - 20 TB seems to me almost guaranteed to be mostly static.

I'd also expect within the next year or two (or less, considering how cheap they are) that police will be documenting crime scenes with "gigapixel" panoramas. Gigapan sells a robotic mount for DSLRs for under $1000, and I'm sure they're not the only ones.

Try the Lite version of the app - if you only need two connections then it may actually do what you need and is free.

If you do need the paid version, Tacit Dynamics (tacit.dk) apparently has it available through Amazon.com and through AndroidPit.com as well if either of those will work for you. The drawback of either is that I believe (as with most competing app markets) you have to keep that app market installed on your device.

I hit Submit too soon on the previous one. Isn't DLNA designed for that kind of in-home streaming of media between devices? If you're rolling your own for the sake of tinkering have at it, but if it's just to stream things around I'd look hard at the existing options first.

There's at least one app that may do what you want (rsync backup by Michal Kowalczuk), but I've never used it.

If that doesn't do the trick, I find that my tablet running Cyanogenmod 10.1.3 has rsync 3.0.7, but I've also installed extra bits and pieces ("Android Terminal Emulator" by Jack Palevich, "Terminal IDE" by Spartacus Rex, "Busybox Pro" by Stephen (stericson)) so I'm not 100% sure that it was originally available. You may be able to script and schedule something of your own based on scripts you use elsewhere, though with a few changes (e.g. "jping" instead of "ping", see Issue 29 on Terminal IDE's code.google.com page though that indicates that it may be fixed).

Yes, the one by Tacit Dynamics

I'd look at the FolderSync app, ~$3. It supports a huge number of backend connection types including FTP/SFTP, SMB/CIFS and WebDAV to cover most of your local server needs. It also covers most of the major and many minor cloud storage providers. You can set it up to sync only on specified wifi networks, to sync on schedules or when files change, etc.

There's also a "lite" version, which only allows 2 accounts, no Tasker support and no sync filters (which I've never fiddled with anyway, so may not be that important).

As Charlie Stross put it in his announcement, ""Halting State" wasn't intended to be predictive when I started writing it in 2006."

/. readers may be more familiar with the second book, or at least with the reference in its title: "Rule 34." The main character in that uses a descendant of Google Glass-like technology.