< ie. plain-old HTML special entities :)

Here in Finland HDD prices have always been high for some reason, but before the floods I could get a 1TB drive for 50 euro (~$63) whereas now a similar one costs 82 euro (~$102). That is quite a high difference in price, 164% the price it was back then.

Earth's orbit will become more and more elliptical over time and will eventually either slingshot Earth out of the orbit and directly into the Sun.

I'm not a rocket-scientist or anything, but as far as I can see if Earth was getting slingshot out of orbit Jupiter would in no way have enough mass to catch it.

Ahaha :D

It actually says in the TFA that there is a gigabit ethernet.

Raspberry Pi is first and foremost meant for hardware hacking which is quite obvious from the generous amounts of GPIO, I2C et. al. connectors on it. This thing lacks all that and is apparently aimed more at half-assed HTPC-tasks.

Even on the hardware-side this one is quite lacking. Yes, 4 USB2.0 - ports and a Gigabit ethernet are good features to have, but then they're paired with a measly 720p video output? What do you need all that bandwidth for if you can't even do full 1080p? In theory it could be used for data-processing or such, but then again, the thing would need more RAM and faster CPU for that. Well, it will make for a quite useable small box for running emulators and watching low-quality media, like e.g. YouTube videos.

Not over my dead body!

I personally quite enjoy Google+. I write there about once or twice a week on average and I write about things that I feel are worth saying and I always write in English so as for my thoughts to be internationally readable. The site is clean and useable, though I still think the layout needs some more work. Facebook on the other hand.... well, I write there only like once or twice every two-three months and even then only as a response to something; Facebook is cluttered, annoying, and I have relegated it for only the irrelevant, meaningless flutter that my so-called 'friends' like to share. I tend to use Google+ more like an interactive blog than a chatting- or trend-watching-platform, so perhaps that explains why I like it so much better. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Google+ suits me better than anything else I've found so far.

That said, I also have to agree with the sentiment that Google+ feels like a rather empty place. I still haven't found anything worth following, for example, and many of the entities I might actually care to follow aren't there. I can understand why, though: Facebook attracts people with short attention-spans, people who like to follow trends and what others do and say, and people who can be rather easily swayed, whereas Google+ seems to attract people with more pronounced individual traits. In other words, Facebook attracts exactly the kind of people companies love. This should obviously not be seen as a failure on Google+'s part -- something so many seem to imply -- but instead as a success in attracting entirely different kind of people; how can it be a failure when you are successfully attracting people who aren't attracted to other offerings?

That was kind of my point: removing magnets from the drive does not make the data there unreadable, it only makes it a tad bit more difficult. Ie. if he is removing magnets as a means of trying to make the data inaccessible he should rather do a Secure Erase first. Of course, if he doesn't care about that and just wants the magnets to toy with then I got no complaints :)

With DBAN one must make certain to use the ATA-6 wipe method to also clear out remapped sectors, something it doesn't do by default. And DBAN apparently does not support wiping out HPA at all. How important it is to wipe out remapped sectors and HPA is certainly an entirely different matter and for most regular users is irrelevant because of how difficult it is to access those, but with today's drives having multiple gigabytes -- even tens of gigabytes -- of sectors reserved for remapping it is entirely possible for passwords and other important bits to end up there and thus it would likely make sense to be properly prepared and clear those out, too.

Your tinfoil hat might be a tad bit too tight there, mate.