No. The specific people he listed probably have not added him back and sent him private posts.

That doesn't mean it isn't a thing people do. Personally I've got a few small groups of people that I communicate back and forth with on G+ via private posts. Hell, I've even used it to send private posts to a single person before.

It tailors the recommended section to each person. Maybe you should try harder not to be a person Google thinks will like just a bunch of Lifehacker posts.

I get all manner of interesting things in mine.

Maybe the RIAA should have its assets seized and business halted for a year. See how they like it.

Awesome. I'm sure government security contractors, the paragons of efficiency and inexpensive solutions that they are, will step right up and make everything cheap.

&_&

I don't know that it *is* more likely to catastrophically fail. Just make the landing zone on one of the more reliable drives, or better yet mirror the landing zone with RAID or ZFS. That way your landing zone is redundant, and the only way you could realistically catastrophically lose a fresh file is by having exactly the wrong two drives fail within at most a few minutes of each other.

I've been personally working on switching my own file server over to greyhole (from ZFS) this week. I'm doing it because instead of defining redundancy on a per-device basis, it lets me set redundancy on a per-directory basis. In the end that will let me make a more thorough use of my set of drives and their mismatched sizes. I have a relatively small amount of files that are actually very important and would be genuine problems if lost.

With greyhole I can mirror those truly important files across multiple drives for redundancy (and even send them off site for super safety), while all the MP3s don't need the same kind of redundancy. If I lose them I can just download them from Google/Amazon again, or rip them from CDs again.

I think the main draw of greyhole is that flexibility in how the redundancy is handled. It lets you make the most efficient use of your drive space, as long as you have a similar situation, with files that have drastically different redundancy needs.

Another thing I enjoy about greyhole is that its failures won't be as catastrophic as RAID or ZFS. Since it's dealing well above the file system all your files are still just files. Even with zero redundancy if a drive fails the entire pool doesn't drop dead, you only lose whatever files happened to wind up in that particular spot, and all the others are still safe.

I think you missed the point, that the government may be dumb, but the private sector is plenty dumb too.

Takeaway: people are dumb.

Second time today I've seen a story on /. about a patent that's just an obvious/existing concept basically with just "on a mobile device" or "across a network" added to it.

Using a radio transceiver to communicate with another radio transceiver? Not novel in the slightest.
Using NFC for payments? Not novel in the slightest, see the decade or so of prior art all across the world.
Consolidating the physical content of cards? Also not novel. For years people have been photocopying the barcodes of loyalty cards and taping them together to make single cards with all the barcodes on them. And believe you me: if the technology to do the same with NFC and magnetic strips were as accessible as copy machines they would do that too, because it's obvious as hell.
Parental controls on payments? You've gotta be kidding me if you think that's novel.

But take those four non-novel, extremely obvious ideas and slap "on a mobile phone" in there somewhere and suddenly you're Leonardo da fucking Vinci.

So sending and receiving a digital file (after all, that's what the annotations are, at the end of the day) from a server is non-obvious? You can't say "well, nobody ever sent and received *this particular type* of file before, so I'm inventing!"

Fuck that. A file is a file, and syncing it with a server is syncing it with a server, regardless of the content of that file.

I think Wikipedia could count as prior art. After all, it's nothing but a system for storing/receiving annotations to a digital work, and then distributing them to users depending on various criteria. Annotating text is annotating text, whether that text is hypertext or an ebook...FFS most ebook formats ARE hypertext in a stupid wrapper.

Not exactly. I imagine it would have slightly different harmful fumes.