I hear google is starting a new service where you get your electricity for free, but they get to keep all the usage data and do whatever they want with it. As a first test of the utility of this they are modeling when people are home and when they are not, then door-to-door sales organizations get to participate in an auction to buy time segments of people at home. Rumor has it that the Girl Scouts and the Jehovah's Witnesses were having a bidding war for your house at 6:45-7:15 PM next tuesday. Next they will target your computer with ads for porn when you are using the laptop after 11PM and the wife has set her alarm earlier than 7AM and turned off the upstairs lights. Other applications to follow.

Ok, ok, i just made that up.

We blew a big opportunity with the body disposal. Here's what they should have done with the body: Cremate him, grind the ashes up extra-fine, then add them to a batch of 50,000 or so of those cakes that go in urinals. Optionally print a picture of his face on the cake. Distribute evenly across the US. Good times ensue. Some measure of karmic justice is achieved. Being eaten by fish just doesn't have the same impact.

I'm acutally surprised how that the price tag for something like this is so low. Also, I wonder where it has been. TFA says they buyer will be returning it to Russia, and hopes to put it in a museum. So where has it been and how did it fall into private hands? TFA doesn't say anythign about that. But I bet the answer is a dirty, dirty story.

Bingo. There are *lots* of studies. The author of this article is speaking from ignorance. A quick look through the publications from Virginia Tech's HCI group, viz group and gigapixel project shows an abundance of work on this. And that is just one university. I'm sure there are *many* other examples.

So it's in California, Superior Court of San Diego County. And he was nabbed "less than two weeks after his annual review on a prior offense of shooting a person with a pellet gun."

Excellent point. For more support on that point check out this video ( part_1, part_2 ) in which Professor James Duane of the Regent University School of Law tell us why even supposedly law-abiding innocent people should never talk to the police. One of his points is that there because of the complexity of our laws there really is no way to know whether you have broken any laws. As an example of this, we have treaties that incoporate the laws of foreign countries into our own by reference. This was a big eye-opener for me.

I got an Infrant ReadyNAS NV , before the company was bought up by NetGear. It's pretty awesome, though not perfect. Real hot-swappable RAID, dynamic reconfiguration, and lots of other good management tools. Looks pretty sweet, fairly quiet. Using it as a print server has always been problematic, tho.

Also, they seem to have gone up in price *quite* a bit. This site says the no-disk one is $1049. I think mine was around $600. I got one with no disks, and found a good deal on two 500GB disks (which were on their approved h/w list) and still ended up under $1200, and that was two or three years ago. But mine didn't have gigabit ethernet. I guess that explains some of the cost increase.

I set mine up with 500GB of storage, mirrored, and two open bays. I started offloading pix and video and backing up everything else, and a couple years later have not yet had to fill the other bays. But I like knowing I can expand to 1.5TB in RAID5 when I need the space.