I've still got one of those, somewhere. Best TSA checkpoint reaction, when I used it? A smile and a nod.

"Show us your bits!"

And that service is providing a sync path for my data. I'm willing to pay a premium for it. Yet I can't use and enjoy my Android phone with a simple sync path for any price. Its practical functionality depends upon me handing over all of my info to Google's cloud (and that's just for the basic apps, nevermind what I'd like to add on).

Rob Rosenberger at VMyths notes:

et’s cut to the chase. U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III wrote an op-ed for a commercial publication in which he claims a single USB thumb drive caused the worst military data breach in history. And according to Wikipedia, that one little USB stick led to the creation of the Pentagon’s new Cyber Command.
[. . .]

I’ll bet it took so long only because it was a classified operation. This malware would have blown over in a week if DoD-CERT had issued an email saying “hey, there’s a new virus running around, please scan your PCs for agent.btz.”

{sniff} I can definitely smell a lot of groupthink here. Not to mention hype, which goes hand in hand with groupthink.

Lynn suffers from a short memory span. We know this because he thinks the Pentagon got “a wake-up call” when agent.btz slithered into classified networks. If Lynn’s brain had more RAM, he would recall the Melissa virus did EXACTLY the same thing in 1999. It infected classified U.S. networks at a depth & scope even I myself would label “impressive.”

So why this story? Well (from the same source):

You can see I’ve got a healthy dose of skepticism over Lynn’s “Buckshot Yankee” revelation. And I’m not alone: Wired filed a story with the headline “Insiders Doubt 2008 Pentagon Hack Was Foreign Spy Attack.”

Waitaminit. GCN’s breathless story includes the phrase “Lynn said Wednesday in a teleconference with reporters.” You mean to say he gabbed with the media on top of all the hype he wrote in an official capacity for a commercial publication? {sniff} I smell a book deal in the works when Lynn’s boss retires next year.

What a fine bunch of people you are.

actually engaging in it.

Back before gift cards, when there were only gift certificates, states started passing laws that if a gift certificate was not redeemed after a certain time, the retailer was required to turn that money over to the state.

Citation needed.

Or is turning it off just too much to ask?

Never been to Vu's Bar, have you?

has created a sizeable percentage of the space-junk it's now offering to track.

Nifty business model, that.

Except for that, very amusing.