MAC addresses ARE recorded by Google Street View vans. They scan wifi as they drive. Have you noticed that your Android phone has location-aware services even with the GPS disabled? Part of that is done based on a fingerprint of wifi networks in your area.

Which is why you put the HTTPS work on the load balancer/proxy, and do all internal communication between the proxy and servers via HTTP.

Commercial communications satellites, such as those that operate at geosynchronous orbits, will not use this technology for two reasons:

1. A satellite which fires a thruster for too long for ANY reason is just gone. Once it's spinning, not where it is expected to be, or otherwise unable to communicate with its control center, it's dead. Dead with $300m down the gravity well.

2. A geosynchronous satellite's lifetime is determined by its thruster fuel. The satellite must make periodic corrections to maintain its "stable" position. Engineers carefully order these thruster adjustments every few weeks or months. If the satellite were free to do it itself, every mistake would reduce lifetime and increase the cost of that satellite's radio capacity (which is what pays back the launch investment).

The question is - do you trust the engineers or the software more? I doubt Intelsat will adopt this until it's been tested by someone whose primary motive is not profit.

Mod parent up!

My child gets the actual Lego advent calendar, which is totally secular. So far she's gotten a snowman and a child minifig with sword (!).

No, each ISP chooses what routes to accept from what peers. It's called a filter. Smart ISP use routing databases like RIPE to verify what they'll accept and reject automatically. Others do it by hand. Dumb ones accept updates from peers without filtering. It's this last group that needs to update their practices.

Take rsnapshot one step further, and you have BackupPC. Which is what my company uses (mid-level enterprise), and it's awesome.

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

Indeed. I've done so, and documented it:

http://www.tolaris.com/2010/05/06/moving-an-existing-backuppc-partition-to-lvm/

People smarter than me documented a way to move the data, live, even when the partition is nearly full. See the comments there.

When I was in University I got into the habit of always putting my backpack's shoulder strap over one knee or around an ankle when I sat down. That made it virtually impossible to walk away from it, to steal it, or even to unzip it without me feeling the movement.

Someone has helpfully compiled Gears for Firefox on Ubuntu 64-bit:
http://blog.celogeek.fr/linux/linux-trucs-et-astuces/google-gears-compilation/

I've been using it with Wordpress for 8 months now.

First, do the math. Calculate the run-time power consumption of your servers. The easiest way is to use real numbers from the existing UPS units, or by using a kill-a-watt.

Second, buy APC UPS units to meet your need. UPSes are rated for the number of actual watt-hours they support. If your servers consume 1500 watts, and you need them to operate for 30 minutes on battery, you'll need at least 750 watt-hours. Considering adding 50% for battery deterioration, and future expansion.

No, I don't work for APC, but they have worked exceedingly well for me and they are supported on practically any operating system you run.

In my network, we have a Linux machine monitor the UPS via USB serial cable using apcupsd, which you can find in your distro's repository. Then all the other machines are linked to that machine also using apcupsd but with an ethernet target instead of USB. When the UPS fails, the others find out within 20 seconds (or whatever your poll time is), and take action. Any data the USB host has, the others have from the network. It is easy to fetch the data via SNMP, graph it in Cacti, etc.

India already has nuclear weapons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction

You don't have to change your wireless region, it will likely just work (few use channels 12 and 13 here anyway).

Just get a plug adaptor for your laptop. The power supply for most laptops supports 100-240 VAC, 50-60 Hz. If unsure, read the label on it.

Most London streets have "look left" and "look right" painted on the road at the crossings.