OMFG, Timothy, did you really just copy and paste that paragraph without bothering to edit it? You didn't even bother to cut out the stock quotes from the middle of it.

But apparently not so difficult as to make it impossible? Is there something I don't understand here, or was this summary just horribly written?

An old Army Special Forces sergeant once explained to me that before an op, they would take a bunch of MREs apart and toss out all the extra things they didn't need, like duplicate silverware and such, and pack the rest up to take with them. But they always made sure to take some Tabasco, because with a little bit of that, "you could eat the crotch out of a dead camel."

It's not just the exchanges that have to have confidence behind them. The exchange (or, at least, some Bitcoin owner out there) has to have confidence in the short seller as well. This is because the short seller borrows BTC to sell on the exchange. The short seller is then expected at some point to pay back the lender in BTC to cover the loan. Because of the additional routes for anonymity that Bitcoin provides, the short seller could abscond with the non-BTC currency as long as they can launder it, leaving the lender high and dry.

As you noted, regulations, law enforcement, and substantial recordkeeping on the part of brokerages keep this from being particularly successful in normal equities trading. If nothing else, a brokerage might require a short seller to keep cash on hand sufficient to cover the short sale, and then call in the debt if it looks like their cash on hand is coming close to being insufficient to cover. (Some brokerages let you use a margin account for this as well, if you have good credit.) The short seller would then be unable to run off with the cash because the brokerage would not release the funds until the short sale is covered. This is a solution that some Bitcoin exchanges might have problems with, because they would be keeping government-issued cash on hand in a customer account as well as BTC, which opens up several other cans of worms.

Filtering ingress packets with RFC1918 source IPs may be useful in some circumstances, but it doesn't help in amplified attacks.

The source in these cases will always be a legitimate uninfected machine that is just doing its job (such as a DNS or NTP server). The source IP will be whatever IP the requester expects to see, such as the destination IP of the initial request.

In amplified attacks, the forgery occurs in the initial request packets, all of which have the source IP of the DoS target, which must always be an actual external IP. This is where egress filtering is useful, because none of these requests should have an IP outside of the subnet serviced by the egress filter.

Are you telling me that I might have a shot at a 5-digit user ID?

Sign me up, dude! :D

(But seriously, sign me up.)

The USGS says that daily overall water use in the US is 410 billion gallons.

Basically, if this report wanted to have meaningful statistics, they would have focused on small watersheds and communities currently stricken by drought, to look at the water usage of the community as a whole and of the fracking taking place in that area.

Also, beta sucks.

I can't figure out where Radio Shack is going to get the money to renovate all of their stores after they blew their wad on a Super Bowl ad.

This will be great news for all those people who think they aren't getting nearly enough information through Facebook about their friends' Candy Crush exploits.

I bet I can get them to pay me.... one million dollars... not to go through with this plan.

This is the sort of case that needs to be appealed to the Supreme Court instead of being settled, because there's plenty of uncertainty in prior court precedent as to whether linking to infringing content is itself an infringement (particularly with reference to DMCA takedown requests).

And then afterwards, Tarantino could write and direct a new movie about the case, which would probably include Ruth Bader Ginsburg mowing down hordes of zombie attorneys in slow motion with an M249.

Separate Internet Explorer from Windows?! That's impossible!

Did your ex-wife go to prison for defrauding the state?

I have it on good authority that Kanye West is a genius.

That's kind of why I cited the GAO report which confirms that while the damage was substantially less than what was originally reported by some parts of the media, the thing about the W keys turned out to be true.