And ObamaCare is NOT "Single Payer". I might have a LITTLE respect for it if it were, but it's the same old crap system with more overhead. There's change I can believe in right there.... sigh....

Offline, I would suggest a pair of HDD docks/hot-swap bays. SATA, with normal HDDs. Put them in a ZFS mirror and keep track of which ones go together. ZFS detects bit-rot, the mirror allows you to correct for it. Add in another backup layer as desired, for that size range, you're probably into LTO tape or multi-layer BD... Just make sure to store a checksum so you know if your data is good when you try to read it later. MD5 would probably work fine.

If you're talking ONLINE storage, I would still use HDDs and ZFS, but include a cron job that runs "zpool scrub" on the array to keep it checked for bit-rot. Check the logs and "zpool status" for errors, replace bad drives as they show up. Make sure to use mirrors or RAIDZ. For large HDDs (>1TB?) I'd go with RAIDZ2 or 3-way mirrors. The reconstruction time can fail a second disk...

ZFS is excellent, but I'm not sure it's a good choice for average home users. They don't understand why they need drives the same size, or build non-redundant arrays and get pissed when one drive takes out the whole array. If you can get them to understand to install new drives in mirror pairs and keep an eye on them so you can replace one when it fails, you might be on to something. A custom distro could be set up to handle this without too much hassle. While I don't like MS tech much, their drive extender thing was ok for home users. WHEN you lose a drive, you can still read the data on the other drives. So it's non-redundant, but it also doesn't lose ALL your data when one drive dies. ZFS and most other raid systems don't either, but try getting most home users to do it right... They will stripe them and think they are so smart for not "wasting" the space.... then scream when their non-backed-up "RAID" dies.

I explain my raidz2 setup to people and the first question when they get the basic stuff is "so you throw away 2 drives?"... sigh... They don't want to spend the $, buy the cheapest USB HDD they can find, then complain to me when that drive crashes and they lose all their data. We can't talk home users into using backups, RAID seems to be completely beyond them. People on /. understand this stuff, but your average home user thinks the computer case is the "hard drive" or "cpu".....

I was already done with Sony. They don't even make high quality stuff anymore, it's all disposable junk they charge a premium to put their name on. The last straw was a BluRay movie, a $10 one, refusing to play on my PS3 without a firmware upgrade. WTF?!?!?! It's a PAID FOR MOVIE. Fuck you. Not only that, I think I'm going to start pirating all my media. I don't have to deal with this shit on pirated movies/games.

Wouldn't that be #1?

That was my thought on the whole thing as well. If you are stupid enough to broadcast your private data over public airwaves without encryption, you deserve what you get.

It sounds like they really wanted just the MACs for the APs anyway, so they probably ignored everything else, but you need a packet to get the MAC.

It didn't seem unreasonable to me to log a bunch of data, then just go through it later to grab the MAC and line it up with GPS data.

So get off your ass and share the data faster. There's no good reason this stuff should be more than a few seconds delayed. Each transaction is what, 100 bytes or so? No, I don't care that you're running the network on a 1970's era mainframe written in Cobol using punchcards, for what you're charging us, you can afford to upgrade.

Curious. Why would someone's parents reading to them help them understand how to spell the various screwed up words and when to use which version? Hell, I read all the time and I still have trouble with some of them. That's like saying that listening to an audiobook would help you know which version of "there" you should be using.

Just about anyone can read a PDF. If you send a MS Word doc, you have to wonder what version of Word the other person has. And these days, Macs are popular enough that they might not have Word at all! PDF works, and works for everyone. It would be far simpler to print to PDF, but not everyone has a print driver that can do that. ODF is supposed to fix that, but it probably won't.

The new and improved TalibanMonkey Javascript engine! It flies code into large webpages and DDOSes any script that mentions Muhamad. :)