Rockin it old school. Simple, elegant, unobtrusive.

Duh.

Naw, I didn't miss that part, I just don't think it makes an argument for this being a failure of Amazon security policy. Given that you need to know someone's account email address (how hard is it to do foo+amazon@dingleberry.com, or some other not-easily-guessed email address?), billing address, etc, to even get an Amazon rep to talk to you, the protections on that front seem sufficient (maybe not best, but sufficient) to me. Running an auth/void doesn't really work either. Sure, Amazon has their own payment gateway, but that doesn't make it free, it just makes it cheaper for them. Given the volume of cards that they accept into their system every day, running two transactions on each would pretty quickly jack up costs considerably. For subscription services like Norton, that might make sense, because the overall transaction volume is fairly low, but for Amazon, that bill would get pretty big.
Now, compare Amazon's relatively reasonable, if not super awesome, procedures to Apple's, where all you need is the last four in order to get access to all data and devices, and tell me this is still an Amazon problem.

Every e-commerce company in the world that allows you to store your card info will display the last four digits of your card number, because what other option is there? What other unique determinant could you possibly display in order to allow people to select one card from a set? There's nothing at all insecure about that on its own, and it's silly to pretend as though everyone else becomes liable for Apple's crappy security policy. This is way more about a.) How one guy had a bad personal password policy, b.) poor security training for Apple support staff and poor security policies at Apple, and c.) How stupid it is to make any of your data deletable remotely. "There's this option to wipe all my data on Apple's site, and then these evil hax0rs totally did it, and I didn't have backups" does not translate into "Amazon has bad security policy".

Growing wheat for your own personal consumption and the feeding of your own livestock. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

"If the machine is up enough to SSH into, it's not an emergency"? Really?

• Segfaulted Apache
• Runaway MySQL query
• DDOS attack
• DNS server dies
• Full disks prevent writing session files

I'm barely awake and those popped right off my head. Either you've been fortunate enough to only have IT gigs where you weren't the only person running the servers, or you've never had anything go wrong. Either way, get your ass to Atlantic City while your luck is holding out.

I'm pretty happy with my Epic. The physical keyboard is pretty good considering the space constraints, and, as many people have already suggested, ConnectBot is a fantastic SSH program with full support for key auth, the slightly bigger than normal screen is noticeably nice, and, at least in Austin, 4G connectivity is pretty widely available and speedy.

How does a smart grid prompt people to produce and purchase more electric cars?

Energy is not fungible. I can't turn a KFC Double Down into electricity to power my car (at least, not in any way that doesn't involve treadmills, copper wire, magnets, and a shitload of inefficiency), but I can turn it into power for my body. Plus, in 300 years, you think we'll be running anything off synthetic gas? That's a pretty low estimation of mankind's ability to innovate.

There's no relationship between electric cars and windmills. The production of one does not spur the production of the other. Wind power is a (inefficient) way to produce the thing that makes the electric cars go, yes, but you still have to solve the problem (if you think of it that way, I don't) of increasing electric car adoption. Furthermore, the my argument wasn't against the claim that windmills produce less CO2, it was against the claim that windmills have a tradeoff with oil. They don't.

Faulty assumptions in your chain of reasoning that render it null:

1. You assume that the only thing holding back the widespread adoption of electric cars is a lack of grid capacity, and not the high price and low performance of those vehicles. There's no evidence to support this, anywhere.
2. Even if that were true, there's no reason to believe that the addition of a couple of inefficient wind farms to one state's grid would even match the power needs of the suddenly omnipresent electric cars.
3. Even if we needed less oil, that wouldn't necessarily translate into less foreign oil. If foreign nations sell cheaper than domestic producers, we'll just buy less domestic oil.
4. Not living in Magical Unicorn Fairy Princess Reality Mirrors My Contrived Example Land does not make one narrow minded.

But George Bachrach, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, hailed the decision, saying it was 'a critical step toward ending our reliance on foreign oil and achieving energy independence.'

Setting aside the fallacy that we can ever be "Energy dependent" or stop consuming "foreign oil" if we want to remain a first world country, unless those windmills are going to be attached to cars, it's not going to have any impact at all on oil consumption. Only about 2.5% of US electricity generation is via oil, and almost none of that is from MA. If you want to argue that having taxpayer subsidize inefficient electricity production is a good thing, fine, we can have that argument, but don't pretend it has anything to do with decreasing consumption of oil.

Stupid hippie.

Well, not everyone's name is publicly associated with their home address, especially now that many people don't have landlines that would put them in the phone book.

The "if they need anonymity, they're doing something bad" argument is a poor fallacy that's been exposed multiple times. It's the online version of "Well, if you're not doing anything wrong, why do you need privacy?" Why should someone who wants to write a blog about shady dealings at their work be forced to put themselves at risk? Or even just something that their bosses wouldn't like ? There's no intrinsic need for identity to be associated with the registration of a domain name.

Yes, a court order can (in some cases) strip off the anonymity protections, but not all. For example, InvisiHosting doesn't require that a customer give us any personal information, we allow untraceable payments, and we delete logs daily, so even if a court order comes down, there's no guarantee that someone will be exposed. Still, that same argument applies to warrants to investigate a private residence, and I don't think you're arguing that everyone should just expose all their private behavior to the world, just because cops could go in their house if they're suspected of a crime. If someone's behavior doesn't even meet the laughable criteria for the cops to get a warrant, why should their identity be exposed to the world?

As far as hacks go, that's not necessarily true. If a registrar gets hacked, that's a much huger deal than the stripping of anonymity from domains. If someone's hosting account gets hacked, there's no guarantee that there will be any personal info there, that's on the user. If the server they're hosted on gets hacked, same thing. Most hosts don't keep customer records on their hosting boxes.

NetSol looks closely at registrant data.

I'm the owner of an anonymous hosting company, InvisiHosting.com, and I'd like to comment briefly on the distaste for anonymous domain registration.

1. ICANN regulations require the listing of accurate data in a WHOIS record, with a threat of revocation if inaccurate data is not corrected. That means that anyone who has a domain name, who doesn't have a company to register it under, has to have their real name, address, email and phone number listed in the WHOIS record. While most registrars are pretty lax in enforcing this, it still leaves normal, good people faced with having to put information that they wouldn't necessarily want public. Anonymous registration makes this unnecessary.
2. Many people have very very good reasons for not wanting to be associated with a website. Whistleblowers, pranksters, bloggers, etc, all could face serious legal or social repercussions if they data they make public is attached back to them. Many of my non-American customers would be arrested or sued for exercising nothing more than the freedom of speech that the rest of us are accustomed to.
3. If this idea really takes hold, and ANONWHOIS lists are actually used to spam score email, real spammers will just find a registrar that doesn't enforce ICANN policy too strictly (Joker, GoDaddy, etc...), throw up fake data, and the list would be left penalizing honest people who simply don't want their name attached to their domain.

I've read everything of his that I can get my hands on, with the exception of his YA stuff (started straight on the adult stuff from my old man's collection when I was a kid, never went back), and yes, I think my assessment is true (although you might be right about Puppet Masters).

I Will Fear No Evil is probably the worst book I've ever read. It's the fucking Gone Fishin' of the literary world. The 2nd half of Stranger was unreadable. JOB sucked. Number of the Beast sucked. Friday sucked. I _want_ Heinlein to be good, I really do. I gave him plenty of chances, but, with very few exceptions, he failed to deliver. I mean, I get that it was a different time, and that you had to pepper your stories with a little sex to make them more palatable to the kind of people who were buying pulp sci fi, but Christ, I'd like a little bit of actual sci fi in my books, not just "Johnny fucked his mom in space again".