It turns out that the numbnuts at PogoPlug have somehow arranged to forbid pasting userid or password into their login form. I emailed them about it and their response was that they would consider changing it as a feature enhancement. So keepass is useless there and I have to hand type my complex password. Idiots!

Would you like some cheese with that whine?

It is not necessary for our inability to achieve perfection to get in the way of having good practices. A few commonly accepted things could form the start of a set of best practices. Stuff like handling passwords correctly and preventing buffer overflows. We need some sort of professional organization a-la AMA or the Bar Association or various engineering groups to manage and promulgate a set of best practices. And yes, if we could develop that and then a systems engineer or programmer or their management were to ignore best practices and foist really stupid stuff on the public, especially fo money, I would support a trip to civil court.

We have lived too long with the "not responsible for anything" license and it is time to start moving toward making that disclaimer "against public policy".

I went through most of the comments on this article and I can not find any that address the root problem, which is this: Where the hell does Intel get off telling its customers what they have to build with their chips? If I were a designer of equipment and considering these chips I would tell Intel to ESAD.

Ya forgot the rule: don't feed the troll.

Whatever became of Eudora? When Qualcomm bailed out of it there was talk of integrating it into one of Mozilla's products -- Thunderbird, I guess -- but I haven't heard much about what came of that. So I'm still Macgyvering Eudora to work on XP.

He throws the word "anonomous" around as though it was honestly being applied or even possible to achieve. Balderdash!

He spends considerable effort pointing out the amount of money to be made by advertisers and advertising media. This argument is rooted in the premise that we live in a consumerist economy and that because advertising increases consumption it is a good thing. In case you haven't noticed, we are in economic trouble precisely because people were encouraged to spend beyond their means and it has come back to bite us. So no, that which encourages consumption is NOT automatically good for the economy or thise who comprise it.

He tries to make a case for targeted advertising, as opposed to general advertising. Other articles I have read seem to be leading to the conclusion that targeting does not increase the effectiveness of advertising. An even if it does, I don't care because I value my privacy more than his increase of sales.

Would you let someone who wanted to sell you something come into your house and poke around your pantry, your clothes closet, your medicine cabinet, and all your drawers so he could more effectively convince you that his product was something without which you could not live? And spread that knowledge around beyond your control to others unknown to you? I surely would not, and letting someone catalog everything I do on line is at least as creepy as that to me.

So if we have to invent a truly anonymous on-line micro-payment system and use it to fund the parts of the web that we use, I am willing to go that route. Meanwhile, Wheeler should get off my grass.

I guess the reason I'm dragging my heels is my complete mystification and annoyance that the designers of IPV6 didn't do something sensible like make some small corner of the V6 address space map to the V4 address space. So instead of being simple and seamless, I have to spend some time fooling around with my equipemnt and software to work around that omission. A pox on the designer's heads.

In current usage that is probably right. But at least give some acknowledgement to classical Latin, in which virii would, indeed, be the plural of virus. I've never figured out why we use the Latin word but refuse to use its Latin plural.

Foul! Some of us old codgers invented the darn internet thingie :)