This comment is "Score 5: Insightful"? Really? I'm with you about discrimination being a wider issue, but then you bring up the Democrats without making a real point. You are welcome to your political beliefs, but you'll need to craft a better argument then "those Dem's think its okay to discriminate." If you want to just shout your ideology without backing it up, go for it, but you scuttled a potentially interesting conversation by getting all "mouth-breathery."

Net magazine is an excellent magazine about web development, which ironically has an almost unusable website.

Do you really need to back-up that much data?

I'm just speaking generally here, there are certainly cases where someone would need to back up this much data, but for your home media library? If we're talking movies, 20 TB is roughly 20,000 movies (for sake of argument, I'm not considering music). At what point is this just digital hoarding? I used to keep a large collection of movies, mostly pirated, and eventually realized that:

a) I was spending more time and money managing the collection then I wanted to. b) That I rarely watched many of the items in my library. c) That I was placing myself in legal jeopardy by storing so many illegal copies. d) Anything I did want to re-watch I could get from Netflix, the public library, or download.

Music would be slightly different, as I could see where music is in some kind of constant rotation, but again, how much of it are you actively using? I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but I think this kind of collecting/hoarding is a byproduct of pre-internet scarcity.

Be direct, specific, and non-punishing.

Is anyone else a little hesitant to run Chinese software? I don't want to be xenophobic, but I'm a bit leery of either Russian or Chinese software.

This kind of thing happens to creatives all the time. Designer are asked to submit logos, ad agencies are asked to come up with campaigns, and developers are asked to build software, usually by companies trying to get more then they are willing to pay for. Most professional designers, developers, marketers will recognize this kind of "opportunity" for what is it: a shallow attempt to exploit them. Which is why most professionals, especially successful ones, would laugh at such a project. The people who are really being exploited by this are people who haven't earned much a reputation yet.

Great, then CL is ready for disruption. I'm not saying that CL is awesome, I'm saying this is why you don't take your company public. You can do whatever you want. And if the CL audience is as sick of CL as you and others claim, then it's time for someone to start typing.

I'm always amused when I see people, mostly web professionals, bitch about CraigsList.

The VC and bizdev types hate CL because "CL is just leaving money on the table. They need to understand how to make a profit."

Webdevs hate them because CL doesn't adopt whatever new design trend comes along, therefore CL "doesn't get UX", or webdevs hate them because of situations like this, where some webdev can't build his business off of someone else's platform.

This, compadres, is why you don't take your business public. CL has a staff of less then 20 people, they make plenty of bank while at the same time staying true to their own ethos, whether you agree or not. And the consumers seem to be coming back over and over. And yes, I have heard many people say that this is because CL has been around so long, that they are the 500 lb Gorilla that will never be moved. Uhh, are we on the same Internet? Tell that to Yahoo, MySpace, etc etc.

Here's a Wired article from 2009 that covers the exact topic of CL and site scraping. Maybe PadMapper should have read it first.

Wired Interview with Craig Newmark

He only published a few books, but "Bridge of Birds" (and its follow ups) is a wonderful mixture of Chinese folklore, Indiana Jones, and Sherlock Holmes.

"I don't think it took a genius to know that this was coming, "

No, but it took huge balls at the time to say "we're not supporting this anymore. " Apple did the same thing with the 3.5" floppy disk and adopting the USB port on iMacs back in the day and got roundly mocked for it, until the PC makers started following suit a few years later. Whatever Jobs was, he was certainly a visionary. Apple was never afraid of break convention when they felt it was the right thing to do. What other companies can we say that about (seriously, what other PC manufacturers have down this? I'm genuinely curious.)

I didn't subscribe to Netflix because I wanted the latest content. I wanted something decent to watch, when I wanted to watch something, and I wanted it cheap. The $18 a month I pay for Netflix is still way cheaper then the $60 I was paying to Comcast for shows I didn't want to see and that were loaded down with commercials I didn't want to watch. When I did the math and realized I was paying $720 a year for that privilege, it was time for a change. It's not that I can't afford it, it's just not worth that amount of money to me.

As a guy who ran email servers for a small organization, let me say enjoy it while you can, because email admin is a never-ending pain in the butt. The spam management, the 24x7x365 server monitoring for security issues, the blacklisting and DNS issues, and that people get really bitchy when their email service is disturbed in any way.

That being said, I hear nice things about Zimbra.

"Chalk up!"

Extra cool points for knowing the first pinball machine with flippers -- Humpty Dumpty

"Is it a requirement for a tech reporter to be completely clueless? Is not doing basic research part of the job requirement?"

There is a strong sentiment in the US that a person doesn't necessarily have to understand an industry to work in it. Reporters frequently report on issues that they barely understand and so they end up missing important details and nuances. Executives frequently get high paying jobs in other industries because "business is business." And yet these same executives are destroying their industries (looking at you banking and automotive industries). As we speak, Carly Fiorina is running for Governor of California based on the idea that because she was the head of HP (a job she was forced to resign from), she's qualified to run a state. These skill sets are not always transferable, but the status quo will be maintained by this layer of executive management because if the rationale behind this logic ever truly got scrutinized, I think we'd all be more outraged at how little value we've been getting for our dollar.