If starting an install from scratch with no legacy software, I'd probably go with homebrew. But it's a real pain if you've already got a bunch of stuff installed and configured on your machine from over the years. It does not play well with other systems (e.g., fink or macports), but then again, none of them really do. I'll give it a shot on my next build.

Also, the system is not tied to the Kindle. It needs to be able to push content to iPhones / iPads, Android devices, Blackberries, Windows and Apple PCs over a global 3g network. Hell, the global 3G network is going to cost more than 16M over the life of the contract. According to Amazons 3g coverage maps, they've got the North America, most of Europe covered (except for Belarus), India, Japan, Australia, and a few spots in South America, the Middle East, China, and SE asia.

I believe he or she's referring to themselves.

You've supported this company for years and still haven't made a standard system image? I guess if they don't know any better it's a nice way to milk your customers. Good job, you make us all look great. And what company over 5 people buys machines with bloatware? They going into Bestbuy?

Chimera.

So you put the guards and the doors of your facilities. What's the problem?

That's what insurance is. It's everyone subsidizing everyone else. It's pooled risk.

But they're not paying Microsoft, they're paying $99 to Verisign for a certificate. It's just like getting an SSL cert, it's a non-story.

No, 100 is by definition the mean IQ score.

They leave you in your grandfathered plan until that plan expires, usually 1 or 2 years. They simply don't allow you to renew that plan.

But that only works for repeated transactions. Due to the types of projects Kickstarter is trying to fund, I person will probably only have a few projects in their lifetime. I do agree with the verified identity though.

Your analysis is wrong. The search space is still the same, all possible combinations of allowable characters up to the maximum length allowed by the system. Rainbow tables don't help with partial matches. The hashed value of "horse" in a rainbow table wouldn't match up with the hashed value of "a horse". In the case of brute force cracking, whether you came to any answer faster than any other answer is going to be based on your search algorithm. The system doesn't know that the password has X characters, but it might know it has a minimum of Y characters. Is your search breadth first or depth first? to what depth? Even if we can know a priori that the password is made up of 4 case insensitive random words and not individual letters, how many possible words are there? The search space is 4^(num of possible words). Let's say there 10,000 possible words [that's not unreasonable, wiktionary has over 3 millions entries], according to wolfram alpha, the number of possible combinations is 9.98 x 10^6020... or over 6,000 decimal digits, the number of seconds since the big bang is on the order of 2x10^17, about 18 decimal digits....

Here, it was registered with US Copyright Office in 1983: http://ia601207.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.nvd.86951/gov.uscourts.nvd.86951.1.1.pdf

18th hour? You mean 2 hours after you would normally go to sleep if you slept an average of 8 hours a night. Or the normal end of the day for most people who usually get 6 hours a night.

The reality TV aspect of the the Hunger Games doesn't really appear to be that hugely important, at least in what I've read so far [book 1 and half of book 2]. While the games may be looked at as entertainment for some, it's stated early on that the main reason for the games is as a form of punishment for a rebellion years before. It's a form of social control, a pure display of power by the capital. The game makers want the games to be entertaining, 1) because the capital likes entertaining games and 2) because the districts are forced to watch their children get slaughtered and it's more torturous this way. There's a major theme about keeping up appearances for the audience and playing a somewhat assigned role, but that's not just a reality TV mechanic, that's just life.