They did, last week.

Given the content of the patent, near-term expiration, and the fact that you were specifically targeted as a small business unlikely to have significant resources, the entire business model of this "law firm" revolves around extorting "license fees" from scared small businesses like yours. If you voluntarily agree to pay them, they win. If you tell them to buzz off, they move on to find the next sucker.

What _doesn't_ fit in to their business model is taking even one person to court. The cost of a single suit would negate the free money "licensing fees" from potentially hundreds of suckers who just went ahead and wrote a check out of fear.

Google and Microsoft only create accounts with the names you feed them from your own identity management system - so this is a relevant policy/programming question regardless of who runs the server.

According to who?

I see this particular bit of rhetoric bandied about quite a bit recently but find zero supporting evidence for the claim that the defining characteristic of an "assault weapon" is the capability for fully-automatic fire. Neither the technical or colloquial definitions I've come across seem to suggest this. It is most certainly not the case when referring to legal definitions.

The theater serves a mountain area of many small communities. Total area population is in the 40k range.

This is my local theater.

Last night they announced that they hit the 3,000 subscriber mark they were shooting for and will make a go at opening.

I wish them the best, though I think there are still some very big questions to be answered about the viability of the business model. Will the studios go along with it? Will subscriptions _remain_ high enough after the buzz fades away to be a viable business? I hope so, but only time will tell. The local economy is almost entirely tourism based, and their model effectively shuts out tourists who I think will be reluctant to shell out $16 for a day pass - so long-term local support is essential.

People still run their own email servers?

One explanation I heard for the typical RAM limitation is that the Intel Ultrabook spec requires the machine to wake up from hibernation in a specified period of time - and it's short enough that even fast SSDs have trouble loading much more than 4GB of data back into memory within the allotted time - So most manufacturers are limiting their systems to 4GB to keep the free marketing and awareness that comes with being an "Intel Ultrabook (tm)".

I just happened to be on US 50 in the Sacramento area when it flew overhead. Traffic slowed to a crawl to get a peek, some people just stopped. Very cool that these things can cause that type of reaction - even as they're being mothballed.

Unfortunately the spectacle caused more than a few fender benders.

If the TSA doesn't get you in there, Larry Craig will...

You're welcome.

The remaining 2% is owned by the state... maybe he can convince them to put it up for a year's worth of maintenance on their DB servers.

... "cold" is not a flavor.

The future of ZFS and the product that was OpenSolaris has really started to take shape over the last few months and there is a lot of good work going on around it. Illumos has set up a proper foundation that will be shepherding the development of their OS and ZFS fork. They've got some good commercial backing (Nexenta, Joyent, and others), and many of the original ZFS engineers from Sun are actively involved in the development. A lot of work is going on right now in terms of revamping the versioning scheme to ensure some level of feature interoperability between "open" ZFS and "Oracle" ZFS (assuming Oracle chooses not to play ball in the long run).

If you're looking for an inbetween solution, Nexenta is at an interesting place in the market. They are an order of magnitude cheaper than the tier 1 providers, but you're not completely on your own if you still have interest in some sort of commercial support contract. For the record I'm not affiliated with them in any way other than being a satisfied customer.

I'll also echo the previous comments about ZFS dedup and RAM - you need enough memory for the entire dedup table to fit in RAM (or a fast L2ARC SSD) or performance will tank. There is a formula buried in the documentation somewhere for determining requirements based on the size of your pool.