Paying $30 for a DVD and then making a thousand copies of it still makes them $30 of profit.

As "they" love to point out, the thousand people you give those copies to are now less inclined to pay $30 for a copy.

How hard is it to learn LaTeX, anyway?

Extremely, as soon as your boss/customer/instructor asks you to make some silly change to the document formatting that LaTeX and/or the template wasn't designed to make easy. I gave LaTeX a try and it didn't take long for it to become incredibly hard to use in those cases.

You must not have used Amazon in a while. Over the past year they started requiring the use of their downloader for more and more stuff. I stopped using amazon and started using rhapsody instead.

No. Preferably without that useless special downloader program you have to use to actually get the MP3 files you bought from amazon.

Don't you have sshd enabled on your mac with an appropriate 50 character password?

Why on earth would anyone have a 50 character password for SSH when SSH supports public key authentication? Don't you have sshd enabled with an appropriate public key?

They were being sent in clear text all along anyway. The login isn't done over SSL.

Sounds like you know what the root of the problem is. The solution isn't to physically destroy part of the computer.

Why on earth does plugging a flash drive into a USB port necessarily need to cause a security compromise? Just don't execute anything from the drive. It really isn't that hard.

In production for 17 years or not, there is no brand-new car available today that costs $3000. I'd certainly buy a 17 year old design if it were still made new today for $3000.

I meant better security-wise. Yeah, I agree, the existing remote console things are all kind of flakey.

Probably no more secure than the existing PC remote console systems (i.e. not very good). I don't expect this to be any better than the existing stuff, just cheaper. Hopefully this thing by Intel will have it's own network port or at least the ability to be on it's own vlan like the existing ones so it can be segregated network-wise.

There have been remote console mechanisms for PCs for a very long time now. I don't know why everyone suddenly thinks this is something new and shocking.

Why have you been waiting so long? If you've wanted to set up your servers incompetently this way it's been possible for decades with DRAC or ILO or LOM or IPMI... or hardware serial consoles for longer than there's been an Internet.

Why would any CA publish a database of good certs? That's the whole point of the signature with their private key. The valid signature means "good".

Wouldn't it make more sense to require all requests to be confirmed in the database?

In what database? The CA's signature on the certificate is supposed to be confirmation that cert is legit.