On the WD20EADS: I've had nine of those running in a mostly perfect environment (active cooling, probably never hitting 40 deg C) for about half a year now. Three of them have since died in rapid succession with little warning, one is in the process of following suit. Skip the old ones, go straight for the WD20EARS.
As for the rest of the hardware: I've gotten myself a Synology DS1010+ with a DX510. Ten bays for less than $1500, running at acceptable noise levels. As far as cons go, you're limited to ext3 and it's maximum partition size of 16 TiB. Because you can only use whole disks to build an array, the effective limit is around 14.5 TiB using ten 2 TB disks in RAID-6, 5+Hotspare or nine disks in RAID-5. On the pro side you have easy set-up, well-built hardware and acceptable performance. Alternatives might include Thecus' N7700 (7 bays around $1k) or something from QNAP. Some of them offer stacking (i.e. 7 disks with one appliance, 14 with two, 21 with three), xfs, a built-in battery backup and so on.

Talking about the capacities of single memory/storage chips, using losercase b (bit) figures has been the standard for years. Since only techies who care about the capacity of the actual chips read this, it's not that much of an issue.
As soon as you're talking about an assembled product (be it a RAM module, SSD or even a smartphone), it'll be B (for bytes) again.

Without your knowledge, they'd track down the Borders' IP address to the store, drive up to it, have a cup of coffee with a laptop hooked up to the store wifi, wait for the torrenting to continue, gather your internal IP address, it's corresponding MAC address and, with some additional equipment might even track down the direction your signal originates from.
Then, they'd take a stroll in that direction, check neighboring apartments for cantennas strapped in front of windows and similar constructions. Upon finding one, a couple of CIA (Copyright Inquisition Agency) agents would fly by in a couple of black hawks and, guns blazing, join you for tea, crumbs and torrenting.

For subscribers, that's true. Not for communications providers, though. Yesterday's /. story has some additional discussion.

There might be some honeybuckets in the tracker's list

The big name trackers have, for some time now, been sending random IP addresses out in every response. It's usually one to three in 50, which isn't a lot, but enough for some plausible deniability. With multiple trackers confirming a peer's address, that plausibility shrinks to very close to zero. Still, receiving a peer's address from a tracker hasn't been any evidence in quite a bit.

[They] denied the dog access since they confused it for a gay dog.

From what I can gather from TFS, they deny access to any dog - regardless of its sexual preferences. They make an exeption for guide dogs, because many blind people rely on these to, well, guide them. Mistaking guide for gay, the denier probably didn't realize he might be dealing with a guide dog, straight or not. The dog's skimpy leathery outfit might've played some part in the confusion as well. You might expect a gay dog to wear such a thing, or a guide dog, but both? At the same time? Who'd think of such a thing?

The effect seems to be positive nonetheless. According to their page, communications providers don't really need to bother looking at infringement reports. Classify yourself as one and AAISP won't care about your infringement reports directed to them. You, equally, don't have to care about your infringement reports directed to yourself; after all you're a communications provider, not a subscriber.
If whomever is sending out the reports is serious, they can still go the legal route. They could do that before (sue John Doe to get your information from the ISP, then sue you) and still can (sue you directly). In any case, the whole infringement report business is rendered useless.

why would any company want a market that small?

Google's MO usually doesn't include selling a gadget to a customer in exchange for some money; there's too much labor per-piece, handling of physical objects and dealing with lots of small customers involved.
What they're trying to do, is push the Android platform. Every now and then, they'll throw out a very shiny and rather expensive toy to enthusiasts, developers and the like; to set a bit of a bar and demonstrate their vision of where other manufacturers are to go. A couple of thousand units are sold, HTC quickly whips up their version (with Sense, sans some Google exclusivity) and sells many more at a more attractive price, with more marketing and actually aimed at the general public.

The G1 and N1 owners push sales of the Heroes, Desires (high-end and) and Legends (lower-end N1 alternatives) just by having a shiny exclusive toy. Thanks to a geek-friendly buying process and very limited support, Google doesn't have to deal with Joe Sixpack's questions to tech support, grabs a couple of megabucks towards development of the next model and, most importantly, pushes android. Us geeks get to play with a shiny gadget without the uncoolness of everybody's grandma and their dog getting one (iP*). HTC and relatives sell the bulk of the devices and, having some experiences with Joe & co, can deal with their customers' problems. Everybody wins.

GSM sign-on requires your phone to provide it's (unique) IMEI, containing it's Type Allocation Code, which again is specific to a phone model or revision of a phone model.
As far as I know, the relevant bits you'd need to tamper with in order to avoid detection are quite far below in the phone's baseband, either in true ROM or, at the very least, only delivered in binary form. Faking IMEIs, one could wreak quite a bit of havoc :)

GSM phones transmit their IMEI (jumps directly to the interesting bits) to the network provider during sign-on. This number contains a TAC allowing the provider to identify what model, in some cases what revision of said model you're using.

Whether or not AT&T uses this information, I can't tell you. All I know is several providers do. Call second-level support and ask if they can tell you what kind of handset you're on. If they can (and you didn't buy it in their store), they check. If they can't, they may still check but not expose this info to CSRs.

Luckily we haven't devised a way of FTL (or CloseToL) travel yet, so keeping in touch constantly wouldn't be that much of an issue.
It'd be of some necessity anyways, a person or two spending 600 years without any contact to outsiders would be quite likely to go bonkers, so those links would need to be kept open.

Even with 1200 years of disconnect, the culture shock shouldn't be that bad. Much of the rapid change we experience right now is closely related to the short turnover between generations. If the life expectancy is 10'000 instead of (somewhat less than) 100 years, cultural change will simply slow down by about two orders of magnitude. Technological change may be faster, but after returning from 1'200 years, there'd be relate-able people of the same age, with the same past around.

Convict is, as far as I know, short for "dumb criminal". The smart ones don't get caught, the really smart ones may let themselves get caught but won't get convicted.
Why would you want to send dumb criminals to space?
Meeting aliens? They'll really look forward to meeting the rest of us after their first encounter with a bunch of murderers, rapists and lawy^Wcon men.
Exploration? I'm sure, your selection of convicts will be skillful and motivated enough to handle the probably complex and surely expensive equipment they've been handed.
Colonisation? I'm not that sure I'd like a couple of space pirates with an uncontrollable base on the moon hijacking satellites for ransom. Handing a couple of assault rifles to tanker crews operating around Somali waters would be quite simple compared to hiring Goons for every sat up there.

There's one upside, though. A couple of decades after the end of that program, we'd reconnect with them again, and by then, they'd have the most awesome accent of English ever devised by man. Look at what Australia did, then increase the distance (quite directly proportional to awesomeness, methinks) by a couple orders of magnitude. That's Profit! right there.

In that case, we're looking forward to quite a sleek future. Check out (screenshots of) Opera 10.5x, if you haven't yet :)

Your typical shipping crate is fashioned from two kinds of woods - a hard, dense kind (beech, oak, etc) for the edges and a softer, ligher, cheaper kind (fir, spruce) for the rest of the panels. FMJ rounds may cause some (little) splintering in the former, but should pierce right through the latter, leaving very small holes (5-6 mm for a typical 5.56 mm round).
A silencer can take care of a lot of the noise, with the usual goal of moving the emission spectrum into a zone that's more difficult to pin down aurally.
Muzzle flashes like you know 'em from the movies and typical ego shooters are way exaggerated. In anything but darkness you won't typically see a flash even looking right at the weapon being fired. In the darkness, throw in a silencer; they work to suppress the little remaining flash, too.

Word of advice, though: Don't use incendiary (including tracers) or hollow point ammunition to shoot through crates containing potentially flammable stuff. A tracer may be enough to set off the wood shavings inside a crate. Keep a couple of inches between the muzzle and the crate to give the bullet some little time to stabilize in it's flight before it pierces through the first obstacle (this also helps against burn marks on the crate). And a hollow point may start to deform on the first impact, which would then leave quite a hole in your cover.

Finally about the "cover" aspects of non-bulletproof materials: they still work. A mobile target with, say, 0.5 sq m of vulnerable surface behind 4 sq m of target can increase your chances of not getting hit five- to eightfold. Throw in a vest and helmet, kneel down and a crate or two will increase your chance of survival by an order of magnitude.

Now that's caring more than one should. :p

You don't talk to French people much, do you?