Anyone else read the title and get excited that it was about the future of "BattleTech" the FASA war/board game?

Or is that 1 +1 +Forth-sighful +1?

A sawn-off tree trunk that is 60 feet in diameter? That's twice as big as some of California's giant redwood trees. Oh wait, I RTF. Sorry about that.

Free textbooks to professors isn't a kickback? I recently worked in a departmental office at a University. A professor could walk up to me with a list of textbooks and ask me to contact the publisher for copies. A phone call later, the publisher is sending free copies to the professor. While it's not cash, it can still be a kickback. Looking at it another way, some professors will require a book for their class because they like the book (that was given to them for free). They don't consider the fact that their free book will cost me $100-$200.

My thought to his "avoid the pat down" by taking the train was that will only work until trains/high-speed rail become a popular method of transportation. Then the government and the TSA will see fit to put themselves between the terrorists and the train terminals, resulting in pat downs for everyone taking the train as well as the plane.

I was a customer of their's last year before I moved. They were the only true broadband provider in the rural area I was living in. So moving to a "better" provider was practically impossible. Back then they were already running their service in fear of what their providers or the government would do to them (IMO). They were automatically blocking several ports (port 22 among others) because they are used for spam and hacking. I find it a shame really when ISPs are more afraid of their customers than they are afraid of threats from the outside.

Maybe the students figured they would get extra credit for going the extra step?

From their Terms and Conditions:

There's a lot they can potentially access beyond a simple transcript and course schedule. At least at my school, computer lab logins, library account, tuition and fees, financial aid, even purchasing a parking permit is all done through the same UN/PW pair.

No need to ... Weird Al already took care of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uQ_extNBDA&feature=related

I encountered a problem related to this recently. Back in Februrary I purchased tickets to see a special screening of Weird Al's movie "UHF". Between the time I purchased the tickets and the time I picked them up at WillCall, my bank had canceled the card I used and issued a due one due to a possible security breach. The conditions of being able to pick up my ticket was to have the credit card that I used for the purchase; that was no longer possible. (I also didn't realize there was this condition and failed to save the old CC to use as proof).

Thankfully the girl at WillCall didn't ask to see my CC and I got my tickets. But there are little things like this that could prove troublesome.

Would text messages be equivalent to e-mails? Government agencies are required to retain copies of all e-mails, IIRC. If texts are equivalent to e-mails then they would need to be saved. It may be easier for the phone provider to archive the texts than for the government agency to intercept them to archive them.

Damn... Grandma has really developed a potty mouth lately.

If you create a webmaster account with Google and register your site, Google will tell you how many people they send to you. They'll also give you a lot of other information like where in the list of search results was your website when it was clicked on.

A penny here and a penny there adds up to real money. Just ask the guy who who wrote the hack to transfer pennies from transactions to his bank account.