Flashin' that terabyte

Lawmakers are accusing the CIA of misleading the makers of the movie Zero Dark Thirty, by telling them that waterboarding and similar techniques helped track down the terrorist. A three-year Senate investigation showed that such methods produced no useful intelligence, but I'm sure that a healthy dose of Justin Bieber pumped right into the suspect's ears would get something useful. Also useful would be a 1-terabyte flash drive. That's right, thanks to Kingston, you can carry a swappable memory drive as large as one terabyte around with you. You read that right: one terabyte of memory - generally a unit of memory expected for the modern PC which can be easily achieved for less than US$80. However, Kingston is marketing this tiny behemoth of a USB for US$1,750. Comparatively, this seems like a complete rip-off in pricing, but you must consider a) how difficult it must be to fit that much memory onto a stick the size of your thumb, and b) the fact that a USB uses no moving parts, making it direct opposition to magnetic media, a huge factor in that competition. The big problem here, of course, is price. And speaking of price, there has been some buzz about how Mashable.com’s Chris Tayler broke the story that it would cost you a cool US$100 if you wanted to put a message into Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s inbox, rather than having it sent to the less recognisable and oft-forgotten “other” box. Apparently, Facebook has been testing this new pay-to-message model since last year. The goal is to lessen the amount of spam that is sent by adding a hurdle, the size of which raises or lowers dependent upon the relative importance of the recipient. Prices have been seen at the US$1 mark for users at the bottom of the totem pole, and go up to US$100 for Zuckerberg’s own Facebook account.