Just fine, at least I do.

That's great to hear. Seriously, I'm not being snarky. It's nice to see more guys that can deal with different environments well. You're absolutely right that it's not rocket science, but a lot of guys don't get past the abstract model of the machine that their dev environment/language provides for them.

I get pissed when you hear programmers say "Oh memory is cheap, we don't need to optimize!"

Preach on, brother. I'd love to see how some of these guys would function in the embedded world, where you often get 1K of flash and 128 bytes of RAM to work with.

I would love to be able to purchase extra throughput, without having to pay for higher speeds at the same time, but such a plan doesn't exist.

Look into any business plans your provider offers. They're more expensive for a given speed, but are often uncapped, plus you get better customer service.

I rather like diesels myself, but part of the problem that I've seen is the price premium associated with them. Most trucks will command an additional $3-4000 for a diesel option, and having just glanced at the Chevy Cruze, it looks like there's about a $6K difference between the starting prices of the gas and diesel models with a 6-speed automatic. That's not going to start paying for itself until you get around 60,000 miles on the car (($6000 / $3.50/gal) * 35 mpg), and even that's not factoring in the higher cost of diesel fuel.

More importantly, they have the legal monopoly on the use of force, which is what it all boils down to. The government has shown time and again that it respects the laws it chooses to, and when voluntary compliance with the law doesn't work all you have left is the use of force.

If you're buying it to make money mining cryptocurrencies, does it really matter whether it's $100 over retail? The parent poster said they were "almost impossible to find now", which clearly is not the case.

I wouldn't say I've been "played", as I think the entire Senate Intelligence Committee is as complicit in this as the NSA itself as they had knowledge of the program, yet still did nothing. That Wyden intentionally put Clapper on the spot doesn't change the fact that Clapper and Alexander both lied to Congress - *why* they did it really doesn't matter, IMO.

This. It's a reasonable way of making a gaming hobby pay for itself.

It's so impossible to find that I just looked it up on Amazon and found more than half a dozen different vendors on the first page of results that have it in stock.

And the other part of the problem is that those charged with enforcing the laws won't do it. Both James Clapper and Keith Alexander have openly admitted to lying before Congress (which is a federal felony) regarding the NSA issue, and no one responsible for enforcing the law has said boo about it.

The general consensus is that the data not actively needed at the time gets sent back to Utah for storage in case it turns out to be of interest later.

This just states the conclusions, without the arguments in support of each conclusion.

You're totally missing the point. Slashdot "articles" are supposed to be a SHORT SUMMARY of a given newsworthy item, so the detailed arguments that lead to your conclusions are neither necessary nor appropriate there. You can always link to your own blog (or a Slashdot journal) where one can examine your analysis in further detail if readers are interested enough. Slashdot is a tech news aggregation site, not your own personal blog.

What's a paragraph you didn't think was necessary?

Most of them. This article boils down to:

"Google was returning credit card numbers in their search results. I wasn't happy about that, and wrote a blog entry about it. Google then changed their search results a bit to reduce these kinds of search results. A security researcher wrote to me to say that he found there were still ways to get card numbers in the search results. He wrote to Google to tell them about this and got no meaningful response. Fast forward several months - I posted in a Google forum about this issue, quoting the researcher, and a couple of weeks later Google fixed this issue. I'm not happy that neither he nor I got any credit for it or received a reward from the bug bounty program (even though this wasn't a bug and was a personal issue with the search results that were returned from a valid query), because I'm quite sure I'm the one to which they were responding when they "fixed" the query results. Here are some further ideas I have for improving the way these results are computed, and you should pay attention because I'm Bennett Haselton."

So what does everyone think?

I disagree. A paragraph is supposed to convey a single train of thought. When it's broken up into multiple paragraphs, it makes it more difficult to parse since one is expecting that the expressed thought is complete and is expecting something new, but has to rewind a bit. At least that's my opinion, and that of many others as well. It's just bad style.

Yes, and I would still consider 10% a "rather small minority". It still means that 90% of all 15/16 digit numbers would be inappropriately filtered. One could restrict the result set even more by only looking for leading digits in combination with digit counts that correspond to known card issues and bring that percentage down quite a bit more.

The point was that given a random 12-16 digit number, it's not very likely that it will be a valid credit card number (even if the check digit passes), and even then the card number is useless without other unique identifying information.