The cynic in me says that any request you make about your email address just makes that a more valuable address!

Ablock, on the other hand, seems to do the trick pretty well for many people. Adblock plus actually right now - but there is a growing controversy about it.

People always claim that bad beer tastes like piss. And I always wonder how they know! Which reminds me of a childhood memory. We were in the Catskills in what was then called a bungalow colony. One day, for some reasons, the owner had to siphon some gas, which he started by sucking on the hose. My dad asked what it tasted like - it tastes like manure he said. Once we were away, my dad wondered aloud how he knew.

Removed java a while ago. I haven't found a site a cared about that needed it. We should all pressure any sites that still use it to get off it.

This was the beginning - the "new" keyboard on the T530 and brothers. It's OK - but not the wonder that my ancient T40 had. I simply make more typing errors, for a bunch of subtle reasons.

The story prompted me to look at bing maps. Very first direction request produced a poor route. When dragging the route to change it gives less time and distance, you know it's not the source to use! There is no way to reset a drag! etc. etc. I'll stick with google.

But one wonders how this government agency was co-opted.

The obvious argument for ext4, the current ext version, is that it's been around a long time and is very solid. I'd only use something else if I knew the performance of ext4 would be an issue.

It has been pointed out many times that the security question system is dangerous if the user does what he's told. It is in general easier to find out what someone's high school mascot was than to guess his password! My approach it to provide nonsense answers I can retrieve for all such question. No one's going to guess that my mother's maiden name was bottleofbitsofstuff for example. You can use the same answer for all questions if they let you, or use obvious variants otherwise.

I was amused by the comment "If that incr(0) were allowed either some temporary that nobody ever saw would be incremented or - far worse - the value of 0 would become 1. The latter sounds silly, but there was actually a bug like that in early Fortran compilers that set aside a memory location to hold the value 0. "

Back then, I wrote Fortran subroutines which took computed dimension arrays by declaring the arrays with crazy bounds, numbers I hoped would never be used as constants, and then "assigning" the real bounds to the "constants".

Those were the good old days.

Got my Chase letter. It warns about not sending information by email. Nothing about not clicking on links. In fact, it contains the lines:

The security of your information is a critical priority to us and we strive to handle it carefully at all times. Please visit our Security Center at chase.com and click on "Fraud Information" under the "How to Report Fraud." It provides additional information on exercising caution when reading e-mails that appear to be sent by us.

chase.com is a link!

All a phisher needs to do is send this exact email, pointing to a dummy Chase page, and encourage the victim to log in when he reaches it.

Clearly they are either very stupid or really just don't care. I'll go for the latter.