I pretty much left slashdot once, when Dice took over, because the quality of the content went downhill... now the quality of the site has gone downhill too. So long slashdot. BTW, for those who remember CmdrTaco, he's working on a pretty interesting new project called Trove - check it out!

Another "me too" here (for the first three)! The online medium just can't do those publications justice.

Yes, this... I can't believe there aren't more people with this answer.

It isn't that far fetched. There are common accounts of pilots seeing weather balloons (typically 2-3ft dia) at 37000ft, while flying 400mph+... Another perspective is that 200 mph is only about 3 times faster than your usual freeway speed. Think about how easy it would be to spot a 3ft quadcopter flying in a field 200ft from the side of a freeway.

Might it be that the sound was a joke going over YOUR head? ;-)

Actually, this was close to the very first thing I thought as I read this... Great, another brilliant and innovative piece of technology that is going to get banned because the government doesn't like what it might be able to do.

Yea, Gluster has a really nice API for writing what they call "translators". I would imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to write a translator that presents your cloud service of choice as a storage brick, and from there you just tie it all together as desired.

... unless the material can be proven libelous (and even then it will be a long, ugly battle). If people like Rick Santorum can't make the spreadingsantorum.com site go away, you're not likely going to make yours go away. Your best shot will be to get a positive site ranked higher using various SEO tactics.

Someday that will sound very much like the oft-repeated (and wrongly attributed) "640k ought to be enough for anyone!"

The value of the coins as historical artifacts is likely to be significantly higher than the market rate for gold.

1) Lease a box at a site with reliable, low-cost bandwidth (Somewhere like PhoenixNAP, AtlantaNAP, Rackspace, etc.) - This should run you between $50 - $150/mo for a decent system with several terabytes/mo data transfer (More than enough for Hulu, Netflix, etc.). 2) Make some friends in the Navy IT dept. - Have them help you set up a hosted VPN service on the box in their off time. This will be the lowest cost, most secure, and most reliable service you can get.

Um, you've got to go further than that. Yes it's a private company, but where do they go for their funding?