The assignee of this patent is "The Invention Science Fund I, LLC." Sounds like a zany R&D lab, right?

Wrong.

They appear to be a law firm specializing in patent law. I smell an up-and-coming patent troll.

I'm confused. Was Costco selling these drives at a loss or something, just to get people in the door?

I can't think of many good reasons that they would look at customers coming in and buying assloads of their merchandise and say "NO! Get out of here and don't buy stuff from us ever again!"

But 'are' you 'qualified' to 'use' so many 'scare quotes?'

You forgot to mention the overabundance of full suspensions, too. Those things are ridiculous for city riding.

I've seen the clientele of Walmart, I promise you that statistically speaking NONE of them are hardcore downhill mountain bikers.

They're just [fat/dumb]asses who buy full suspensions because they look cool, then think bikes suck because that suspension eats up so much of their power bouncing around.

Why does tethering make it worth more? Stop drinking the Kool-Aid and get it through your thick skull that a bit is a bit, no matter its source.

That said, I appreciate how T-Mobile does it now. You get a finite amount of that sweet, sweet 4G, and then are throttled down (usually to 3G speeds, which are plenty fast for most things IMHO). Once I'm sure they're doing it that way (and not throttling too badly over the 4G limit) I may switch to one of their smaller month-to-month plans, which could potentially save me $5-15/mo

I voted $11-20 because I'm still grandfathered into $20/mo unlimited data on T-Mobile. I was early to the Android party, and locked in that price before all the carriers took up mercilessly gouging us all.

Sure, IE may update less often. It's orders of magnitude more likely to break things when it does, though.

I've been doing web design almost non-stop since 1998, and I don't think I've ever had an update to Firefox or Chrome break the rendering on anything. I've had new versions of IE break countless designs, though. The same goes for their Javascript implementations (with the odd exception of one pet project I made the ill-advised choice of making rely on Gears in Chrome).

Sounds pretty secure, bro. Except that on Android there's a little checkbox in the settings, labelled "allow mock locations."

No. The specific people he listed probably have not added him back and sent him private posts.

That doesn't mean it isn't a thing people do. Personally I've got a few small groups of people that I communicate back and forth with on G+ via private posts. Hell, I've even used it to send private posts to a single person before.

It tailors the recommended section to each person. Maybe you should try harder not to be a person Google thinks will like just a bunch of Lifehacker posts.

I get all manner of interesting things in mine.

Maybe the RIAA should have its assets seized and business halted for a year. See how they like it.

Awesome. I'm sure government security contractors, the paragons of efficiency and inexpensive solutions that they are, will step right up and make everything cheap.

&_&

I don't know that it *is* more likely to catastrophically fail. Just make the landing zone on one of the more reliable drives, or better yet mirror the landing zone with RAID or ZFS. That way your landing zone is redundant, and the only way you could realistically catastrophically lose a fresh file is by having exactly the wrong two drives fail within at most a few minutes of each other.

I've been personally working on switching my own file server over to greyhole (from ZFS) this week. I'm doing it because instead of defining redundancy on a per-device basis, it lets me set redundancy on a per-directory basis. In the end that will let me make a more thorough use of my set of drives and their mismatched sizes. I have a relatively small amount of files that are actually very important and would be genuine problems if lost.

With greyhole I can mirror those truly important files across multiple drives for redundancy (and even send them off site for super safety), while all the MP3s don't need the same kind of redundancy. If I lose them I can just download them from Google/Amazon again, or rip them from CDs again.

I think the main draw of greyhole is that flexibility in how the redundancy is handled. It lets you make the most efficient use of your drive space, as long as you have a similar situation, with files that have drastically different redundancy needs.

Another thing I enjoy about greyhole is that its failures won't be as catastrophic as RAID or ZFS. Since it's dealing well above the file system all your files are still just files. Even with zero redundancy if a drive fails the entire pool doesn't drop dead, you only lose whatever files happened to wind up in that particular spot, and all the others are still safe.