Coraid has sata over ethernet gizmos..... that's not really new. I think they are relatively cheap as well - that's their market niche.

As to having it available to all your computers - while technically true - this is potentially dangerous - your common filesystems (ntfs, ext3, fat,e tc, HFS+, ZFS, etc) are not cluster filesystems - they are designed for a single machine to mount at a time. What's worse is some won't recognize if you DO manage to mount the same filesystem to two machines, and you'll end up corrupting data before you realize what's happened.

If you want access to the same data from multiple computers - you want something that exports a network filesystem - NFS, CIFS, AFS, or whatever (or all of the above I guess....).

I'll second that - while I don't use a drobo - it's on the purchase list.

I'm highly technically competent - I use an opensolaris fileserver with ZFS and some terabyte drives - and sure, I can expand it and do all kinds of cool things - but in the end, I could get the same features I get there (the ones I actually use) out of a drobo, with less hassle.

With my fileserver I have to know a bunch of stuff about how to manipulate it to expand it... with a Drobo, you have to watch some blinkenlights and just pop in bigger drives when you need to grow. It locks dives when you shouldn't remove them, and is dead simple to use. From all my research, it's unparalleled in the ease of use department for joe average.

Yes - exactly. The "Return unopened goods at any time" is a marketing tool (and a good one for the consumer) - but not something they are required to do by law. That policy has aboslutely nothing to do with the "fit for purposes sold" legal end of things - and the two are often mixed up at big box stores when people return broken things.

The store would be free to say "all sales are final" and not accept returns (other than broken items) - they do that in many stores here where I live - but they also unpack and test most electronic stuff before you leave the store to avoid dealing with broken returns, which could be fraudulent (and really saves everyone time and money in the long run)

Indeed complicated... but if I buy a box with software in it in the store, and you, the sales guy, tell me it will do X, and it really WONT do X, no EULA should protect you - the software vendor is probably fine - but if the store selling the box of software LIED about it's capabilities to make the sale - that's fraudulent, and illegal in most places. In Canada, for instance, you'd have to accept a return and give a FULL refund if the product was not fit for the purposes sold.

It's free... no money exchanged hands.. no purchase, no right to any damages.

There might be a convoluted case in there somewhere - but it's nothing like the parent article - which is basically standard fit-for-purposes-sold law being applied. Selling something that dosn't do what you say it does is fraud.

If you didn't sell it you have no problems - this is just the same old, very good piece of consumer law that says you can't fraudulently sell goods. You can't LIE about what the thing does. You can't sell me an old plasma TV and tell me it's HD if it's not HD. .. that's fraud. You can't sell me a toaster that doesn't toast bread - that's fraudulent. Things need to be fit for the purposes sold. THis is to keep salesmen honest - because the flip-side of hte coin is that all sales are generallly final (in-store policies generally accept returns these days everywhere, but that's not because they were required by law, that's marketing strategy).

I have the right to sell you a toaster and I didn't lie to you about it's capabilities before the sale, and as long as it actually works when you unbox it, our business is generally done. I can count my sale as profit and don't have to accept any kind of return from you.

When google wants them to stop, they'll be hearing from lawyers........ not just finding that google changed their page layout.

Right - which is perfectly acceptable.

Before they can have their way with it, yes - but they can use it internally - just as I can make derived works from GPL code and use them however I want, myself or in my company. What I can't do is distribute it, sell it, etc... but if I base my employers in-house time-tracking system on some GPL code - the company is under no usage restriction whatsoever, and is under no obligation to share those changes with anyone else.

If they do want to distribute the stuff outside their organisation, they'll have to do so under the terms of the GPL - other than that scenario, they can do whatever they want internally.

Work, don't talk. Deliver quality code.
Cooperate. Share.
Don't act like a know-it-all or "try to impress" just be yourself, track your deliverables and always over-deliver without making a big scene about it. If you have time, help others if they need it.

"LCD screens are thinner - not much thinner, and most people spend their time looking at the front, not the side. "

I don't know about that.... some of the new ones I'm seeing seem pretty damn thin....

I find that for watching sports on TV, that motion prediction stuff on those 120hz Sony models does seem to make things look better.

In any other situation, for me it just makes things look weird and creepy - I don't see artifacts as you describe, but things look too hyper-real and it throws me off. It makes Hellboy look like an actor in a costume working on a sounstage under artifical light rather than, you know, reality....

Actually most of the world was behind the US when it came to going into Afghanistan and going after the Taliban & Osama after 9/11. People had no objections there, going after the people that attacked you and helped the attackers.

Iraq was a completely different, unrelated matter that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.

Just to head off one answer - which I'm sure is something along the lines of "if joe average can't take advantage of the same opportunity, then the market isn't fair".
The thing is, joe average can - he can put up the money and build the systems he needs to take advantage of the market more efficiently if he wants to. He's not prevented from doing so.