Jack Valenti is still dead.
April 29th, 2007 | by Scott Jennings |A few months ago, I dropped about $30 on one of those keychain USB flash drives. Mine holds 1 GB. I needed to help a friend move some files from an ailing computer, and for some reason, USB was the only option. So I bought the drive, put it on my keychain, did the job, accepted her thanks, and didn’t think about it again.
That may have been the best $30 I’ve ever spent. Since then, any time I’ve been hanging out and someone fires up their iTunes and I hear something I like, I pull my keys out of my pocket and gank it onto the flash drive. This process presented itself to me as though whispered by some sort of copyright infringement angel — I thought, “hey, I sure do wish I had this music on my computer,” and I heard a voice say, “well, is that a 1 GB USB flash drive in your pocket, or your erect penis? They’re about the same size.” Drive goes into computer, directory tree pilfered. And should my host want something I happen to be mule-ing via non-volatile memory, the files keep moving. Everyone wins.
I’m sure I’m not the first person who’s thought of this; for all I know, this could be the intent of the engineers all along. Still, I have no idea how I lived all these years.
