The iPod got its touch wheel in 2002. Prior art. End of discussion.

OpenSolaris and 8 drive RAIDZ-2. PHYSICALLY disconnect that fileserver (and turn it off) and sync up to it once a month.

Use GlusterFS or RSync to sync that up to your main computer. If you can figure it out, make incrimental backups to DVD once a week (or day, if it's that important). Take those DVDs off-site into a vacuum sealed (not expensive, you can make one that uses a hand pump and a box). If everything goes to hell, restoring from DVDs takes forever but you have that option, and that's what's important.

Just as long as those PSA's don't air right before my (store-purchased) game's title screen loads. Seriously, that shit is how violence happens.

But you guys also have the biggest allotment of cheap natural gas(to the point where some folks use it in their cars), meaning any process which converts electricity to heat is inherently financially inefficient over there. ;)

The moment I find these in stores I am IMMEDIATELY buying a few and replacing every bulb attached to a dimmer switch in my house. Ask anyone with a light dimmer who switched to CFL's, and this'll immediately be their biggest caveat with the tech.

Okay, there's no need to generalize. Let's look at what really happens in ZFS.

1. Data in ZFS is held in blocks. The verification for those blocks is held in their parent blocks. Meaning, a corrupted block whose corruption manages to return a viable checksum in most filesystems would not do so in ZFS. If it's broken, the parent will tell you, and if the parent is broken, the grandparent will tell you. This works all the way to the highest parent (known as the superblock), which has multiple redundant copies of itself. Basically, it's HARD for shit to break in ZFS.
2. RAID and mirroring can tell you if a disk is bad, and if you're rebuilding, if a sector is bad. But the latter doesn't work unless you're scrubbing. ZFS catches errors like that while reading, and then it fixes them while it's sending you the good data.
3. Let's say you have 8 1TB drives in a RAID6 configuration. Let's say you have about two terabytes of data across the whole thing. Let's say a drive fails. You replace it. The entire drive now has to be rebuilt. ZFS only needs to fill the 160 megabytes that drive actually contains.
4. Data in ZFS is held as a tree. This can make some things slower (possibly why ZFS tends to aggressively cache) but it also means that stuff like snapshotting is built into the filesystem and cheap as hell to do. You want to snapshot your OS's root folder before a risky patch? Go ahead! If anything breaks, you can roll back instantly.
4.a. Feel free to correct me on this, as I've never tested it, but as far as I've read, ZFS is probably the only filesystem that could survive an rm -rf / and a (single) accidental dd at the same time, the latter under a RAID-Z2 config.
5. Cloning is just as easy as snapshotting. Lets say you have a developer account or VPN account template? The files that you start out with only need to be held once on your hard drive. Only edits to those files result in new data being stored.

Basically, ZFS works best with the fact that both hard drives and RAM are getting cheaper. You could put together a system with 8 gigs of RAM (more if the motherboard supports it) and 8 terabyte drives (plus a spare) for under a grand. That's 6 terabytes of lightning fast (about 120 megs a second I'd imagine), absurdly reliable (it's statistically nearly impossible for the same block to be broken across two drives, and unlike RAID, ZFS won't stop rebuilding if that happens. It'll just report which files were affected)

It's essentially a filesystem designed for 2009 (or whatever year this happens to be for at least the next 10), and people who need a ridiculously good filesystem on a budget.

Did I forget to mention that adding space is only limited by your hardware? (e.g. available sata slots, or available PCI slots for new sata cards) Or that if a drive gets disconnected (say, you have them all on a USB connection) and you reconnect it, ZFS only adds the missing data since it was disconnected rather than rebuilding the whole drive? (What RAID does, mostly because it doesn't know anything about the underlying filesystem)

Could be one of those "mini" hard drive vaults. How uncommon were 4 320GB drives be back then? (enough to do nearly a terabyte with one drive dedicated to parity, a near-requirement for NAS's like that)

The problem, both legally and morally, is that you probably used Bittorrent to get this game, meaning you also distributed it as well. To this day, pretty much all of the trouble people are getting and giving over P2P is because of distribution. I really doubt your ISP would have given you a warning if you'd used a download service (say, Usenet, or even the Rapidshare/Megaupload/Depositfiles/etc. bunch), partially because it's impossible to scan without outright wiretapping (which is still pretty goddamn illegal for a non-government entity, and especially so for a non-criminal matter), and partially because the hundreds of thousands in damages they warn you about center around distributing (equating you with someone who copies games/movies/music and sells them) material.

Even the Rapidshare (Germany) people whose info was revealed were uploading. Lesson: Don't distribute. It's not yours to give away.

You have a really funny idea of the term "profitable". If you don't have a passion to play a real guitar, its worthwhileness as an investment is nil.

Take the amount of time it would take to make it job-worthy (e.g. capable of playing gigs either solo or in a band), take into account how much you'd reasonably expect to make (how common are people who play at bars vs. people with record contracts vs. people with record contracts that actually succeed?), and then compare that to training in any serious field (say, learning how to access a variety of database servers via Java, C++, ASP.net, PHP, VB, etc., or how to manage and administrate a server). Yes, music can make you millions, but so can selling a software company or film scripts.

I think I'll stick to my plastic guitar, and spend the other dozens of hours learning useful shit.

Note the (read:not much) section. I'm not saying it's legal, I'm saying it's not as bad, as say, selling bootleg copies, or, as mentioned, ripping sprites. However, as it's still C&D-able, how "legit" it is is probably a moot point.

Actually, being a ROM hack lends them MORE legitimacy, tho how much more is a subject of debate. (read: likely not much). If it was a windows executable, it would be filled with graphical assets from the game. As it stands, this essentially amounts of a fanfic with a bit of extra work, given that it would be released as a patch and that its copyright infringement would come down to *names* of the characters in the text. If the romhack uses the existing pointers for the character names, it doesn't even have that.

All things considered, there was probably a solid chance that they could've legally released this, save for a C&D which would scare anyone without a stable of lawyers.

Terabit, at the moment, is entirely for enterprise, where the amount of hard drives connected to the bigger machines lies in the triple to quadruple digits. However, 10G is at least useful for higher-end consumers.

8 hard drives in a RAID6 array managing full speed (approx. 20mbytes/sec. per drive?) hits 120 megabytes/sec., already reaching gigabit's limits. Add two more arrays and 10G becomes useful. While I personally can't see much of a use for that beyond, say, murdering load times in modern games (and maybe the scratch disk needed while editing a poster-sized image at 600dpi with several layers), I'm sure plenty of people can find plenty of good uses for such a setup, which is becoming cheaper daily.

It isn't about using up a terabit, it's about getting bottlenecked at the level below it and needing the breathing room.

That depends. If most of your duties revolve around desktop support, and there's more than one of you there, it's incredibly stupid. If you're the only one and you have other important work to do, no, it's not stupid.

On the latter, dumb users make your job more difficult and tedious. On the former, they're your bread 'n butter.

And mind you, this has been the case for ages. Starcraft's installer executable, for instance, is a 600 meg file, due to them packing everything into it.