It can do these kinds of transfer rates, however SAS enclosures (with built-in RAID controllers) tend to be more expensive and then you also need a SAS interface card, whereas Thunderbolt is now being built into motherboards.

This is starting to get to the upper limits of what SAS can do. Only Fibre Channel and Thunderbolt will do these kinds of rates with room to grow.

Ummm. No.
That enclosure doesn't do RAID, it's a JBOD enclosure. The peak transfer rate for the mini-SAS interface is 3Gbs (3 Gigabits, not bytes, per second) this is an absolute maximum of 375 MB/sec. The real-world performance of the unit will then depend on the RAID card you're using and will typically be somewhere lower than the peak theoretical performance of the interface. I don't know what drives you're putting in there that can each do 500MB/sec (SSD?) and I don't know what RAID card you propose to use that'll let all eight SSDs run at their peak rate.

The unit I was talking about (http://www.areca.com.tw/products/thunderbolt.htm) on the other hand, with 8 drives in it has a measured real-world performance of 650MB/sec read or write via a single Thunderbolt cable, using RAID 5 that's done in hardware in the enclosure itself.

This 650MB/sec is the actual performance that the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test gave me on a MacBook Pro 13" laptop connected to the RAID with 8x 1TB Western Digital hard drives in it.

Thunderbolt is faster than SAS, SATA and SATA II. Thunderbolt is faster than 2, 4 and 8 Gb/sec Fibre Channel - Thunderbolt is a 10Gbs full-duplex interface, so can transfer 20Gb/sec at it's peak. That's 2.5 Gigabytes per second (1.25 in each direction).

There's some really good storage available with Thunderbolt now. I can get an 8-bay RAID enclosure with Thunderbolt for around a grand (bare enclosure with no drives) put 8 drive mechanisms in it and get a multi-terabyte array that delivers around 650MB/sec (megabytes, not megabits) per second read and write on my MacBook Pro.
Prior to this you needed really expensive FibreChannel equipment to deliver the same kind of performance.

If you have it set, the device PIN unlocks the AES key that decrypts the phone's filesystem.
If you allow unlimited guesses at the PIN, you can unlock the AES key and decrypt the filesystem.

If you erase the phone (reset all content and settings) the phone securely wipes it's AES key - the filesystem is from that point forwards nothing more than random data. If you have an attack against AES256 then you stand a chance at recovering something, but you don't...

There's no use in guessing the PIN as the encryption key that the PIN unlocks has been erased.

Yes, this 1000 times. I'd happily rather have a 256kbs AAC that's mastered properly than have a 24/96 lossless track that's mastered badly with all the dials turned up to 11.

Yes, but no-one is arguing you should record and mix at 44.1/16 - on the contrary, there are well established and accepted reasons for recording and mixing at, say, 96/24 and only mixing down to 44.1/16 at the very end of the process.

If you compare the raw bitrate, and you're mixing at something like 192/24 and the final mixdown gives you 44.1/16 then the size of the output will be on the order of 15% - and that's a good thing, as it means that CDs aren't the size of LPs and MP3 players can store more than three songs.

Where he's wrong (Neil Young) is assuming that he can hear every fine nuance of the high-res audio (he can't, no argument there, he simply can't) and that as the redbook CD audio is 15% of the size, then somewhere along the way you're throwing away 85% of the sound. Now, that's simply crazy talk (and, let's face it, Neil Young has done more than his fair share of substances that may induce a hint of crazy)

In a word, yes.

You'd be crazy to record, mix and master all at 44.1/16 as you need the headroom to work with, to adjust the volume, to mix things together.
The final result that people end up listening to though is just fine as redbook CD audio.

There are also good and not so good ways to do sample rate conversions. High-quality sample rate conversions take quite literally one or two orders of magnitude more processing power to do than a quick one, and the effects of a poor quality SRC can have a dramatic outcome on the sound.
Refer to some of the graphs on the SRC Comparisons page for some good converters (eg, Apple's afconvert in bats mode, iZotope's converters) versus some really bad ones (FL Studio 10 6-point, ffmpeg 1.1.1 swr etc)

You might be onto something here - and this is why Apple have their Mastered for iTunes program - where instead of getting your masters, decimating them and dithering them down to 44.1/16, you can either supply Apple with high-res masters (and they will re-convert them for you if their mastering process changes, or if they up the quality again on the iTMS) or you can use the same tools that Apple uses to directly convert your high-res audio to AAC 256.
When you use the tools Apple provides, they take the high res audio and convert it to 32-bit floating point, apply a "mastering quality" sample rate conversion (and, yes, it is a very high quality SRC - refer to the afconvert examples at the SRC Comparisons page) and then make the AAC from this. They also have a plugin for the workflow where you can get a preview of how the audio sounds when converted to AAC, so you can preview the tracks and adjust it to get the best out of the AAC after it's converted.

Yes, this is it in a nutshell. What goes into mixing and mastering an album has far more effect on the final result than whether it's played back as a 96 kHz 24 bit file, or compressed down to a 256 kbs AAC (or, around 4 Mbs compared with 0.25 Mbs).

Whilst the data rate is sixteen times as much for the high resolution audio, there is nowhere near 15/16ths of the sound lost - and even on good quality hifi equipment, I'd challenge anyone to successfully pick the difference in a proper blind test.

What's more, there are now things like Mastered for iTunes which gives a lossy AAC the potential to sound better than redbook CD audio as the AAC files are created directly from the high res masters with, among other things, better floating point conversions and a very high quality sample rate conversion (and, yes, I have verified the quality of apple's "bats" sample rate converter in afconvert)

Music lovers love to listen to music. Audiophiles on the other hand would rather listen to their equipment.

Having weighed in with that bombshell, I've got a fairly decent sound system (Rotel preamp/processor, Rotel power amp, VAF speakers) and I can't hear the difference between MP3 V0 (VBR at around 220kbs) 256kbs AAC (my preferred format, simply because it's what I get from iTunes) and redbook CD audio.

There's a Mac App Store: http://www.apple.com/au/osx/apps/app-store.html
There's the iOS App Store - available from iTunes and on iOS devices
There's the Windows Store: http://windows.microsoft.com/is-is/windows-8/apps
There's Google Play: http://www.android.com/apps/

They all handle DRM for you in a relatively unobtrusive way, plus they handle payment processing and distribution. The end user doesn't need to worry about you going out of business, your authentication servers going down, your serial numbers not working etc or dealing with another payment processor.

The advantage of something like the Mac App Store is that if I buy apps on here, Apple keep my purchase history. When I get a new machine, I sign in to the App Store and download all my apps from one place, and don't need to keep track of serial numbers or activation keys or anything like that.

This leaves you to handle doing the coding and the promotion of the app. Yes, you give up a cut of 30% or so, but if that's a big problem for you, put your price up slightly to take this into account. Or, give up the 30% cut knowing you don't need to handle any payment processing, hosting downloads, going over your bandwidth cap on your hosting plan because your app became popular, DRM, activation, providing lost serial numbers to users etc...

[citation required]

Microsoft says Outlook.com IMAP support "coming", promises better Mac support
http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/microsoft-says-outlookcom-imap-support-coming-promises-better-mac-support-253444

Access Your Account Using IMAP or POP E-Mail Programs
http://help.outlook.com/en-ca/140/cc875899.aspx
"Applies to: Office 365 for professionals and small businesses, Office 365 for enterprises, Microsoft Exchange, Live@edu."

Webmail war: Gmail vs. Outlook.com vs. Yahoo Mail
http://pcworld.co.nz/pcworld/pcw.nsf/feature/webmail-war-gmail-vs-outlookcom-vs-yahoo-mail
"Outlook.com does not support IMAP"

Bigpond to use Outlook.com as email handler and still, in the year 2013, you can't use IMAP for your email.
It's bad enough that up until now they've been providing nothing but a POP account (except with the switch to Windows Live Mail last year) but to move to another provider that doesn't support IMAP is just crazy.
Sure, you can use EAS on your mobile device, but what about on your desktop. Oh, you mean there are other email clients than Outlook?

Hard drives haven't parked the heads on the disks for many years now. All hard drives move the heads off the disk surface completely before the platters come to rest, and wait until the platters have spun up before moving the heads back out again.

Granted, we're talking about hard drives from the 90's and possibly earlier (I don't know when they started doing this off-platter parking, but it's been happening for as long as I can remember taking apart hard drives).

I've also heard that the grease that lubricates the central spindle can seize up when the platters haven't been spinning for some time, but since around the year 2000 or so, HDDs moved to fluid dynamic bearings that have no grease in them to seize up...