I have a Mac Mini server set up hosting about 8 TB of primary data on mirrored USB3 drives. I then have it running Time Machine on all of that to a 16 TB RAID5 array on a NAS. Total cost (not including the server itself)? About $1,000... and that's for two sets of backups, one for drive errors (primarily) and one that has an always-available actual backup.

I agree. I've been re-reading the entire Jack Ryan/John Clark chronology and it gets more boring post-cold-war and then much more boring post-9/11. Now the military fiction I read is the futuristic kind such as Honor Harrington.

Unless you're like a thousand years old there has never been a time it hasn't been political. The Olympics are entirely a political statement... it's all about interaction of nations.

Was Steve Jobs right? Is a single, restrictive & tested, marketplace the way to go?

Steve Jobs has never claimed credit for any of this. But what he did do is reinvent those things in ways that made regular people like them and want to use them.

They're only state of the art if you ignore the fact that Star Wars came out FIVE YEARS before it.

I don't think that term means what you think it means.

While your point is valid, I'm not sure T-Mobile really counts as a competitor? They're a Google partner, last I checked?

It is legal to reverse engineer things for compatibility promises - unless you explicitly sign a contract saying you won't do that. If Palm didn't sign on to use USB, they'd be allowed to reverse engineer until their hearts were content. But they've signed a contract waiving the ability to, among other things, use a forged vendor ID.

This is not reverse engineering.

Well like I said, I wasn't passing judgment as to whether that argument is right or wrong. Just commenting upon it.

That being said, I challenge you to find a major ISP that currently says their service is unlimited.

No, /. (and most net-savvy user websites) gets pissy when they go after the 1% because after all, they agreed to X Mbps, they should get to use that 100% of the time.

Whether that argument is right or wrong, the two situations combined (the one in this article and the one I'm laying out in this post) equate to a catch 22 for the ISP. The ISP's only remaining choice is to drastically lower promised speeds, but that's a marketing disaster, and really a technical one as well, since most people do sometimes use the top speeds, but don't do so regularly - makes them happy to have it available when needed though.

Sure, but /. gets all upset when Comcast/etc does that as well. Many ISP's either do that or have done that - and everyone gets pissed every time.