But the classic Canary Trap requires someone to modify the document manually, which is hard to do on a large scale. Here it is being done automatically by an algorithm.

However, I am aware of published methods for this problem dating back to 2001 by Mikhail Atallah at Purdue. In fact Atallah received a patent for followup work in 2007, a year after the Amazon patent was filed.

Here are a few hundred papers on the subject, via Google Scholar. Some adjust whitespace, some modify images of the text, and some attempt fairly sophisticated syntactic analysis and restructuring of selected sentences.

I apologize that I haven't read the Amazon patent, or read the prior literature carefully, or gone to law school, so I can't comment on whether the patent seems valid or not.

That's true to some degree. But computers do slow down as they age. Components damaged by the constant heating cause more errors and therefore require retransmission or error correction, slowing things down.

My Dell desktop from 1999 has been running like the wind again since last week, when I reverted it to its 2002 state from backup tape. It goes superfast now that it's virus-free, off the network, and running old apps on Windows 98.

I was only trying to recover some old files before junking an unusable machine, but I may keep it around now as a non-networked machine for the kids.

Is there a major I can take in college?

Johns Hopkins University, near Washington, DC, offers a master's degree in Security Informatics. This is through their Information Security Institute, which was founded several years ago and includes several well-known CS faculty.

The curriculum includes many technological courses (theoretical and applied crypto, network design, network protocols, red-teaming, etc.), but also some public policy courses. I'm guessing that their graduates will be prime candidates for these jobs.

Of course, major in CS first.

I heartily second this. I've been using Thinkpads (T-series) for the past 10 years. The trackpoint is great -- you can navigate quickly and precisely while keeping your hands on the keyboard. No batteries, wires, or desk space needed.

It sits in the center of the keyboard, between the G, H, and B keys, where you can reach it with either index finger. That puts your thumb right over the mouse buttons that are under the spacebar.

They corrected some early kinks with resistance and calibration, and the trackpoints work about perfectly now.

It's true that for mouse-heavy activities, like drawing or editing graphics, it still feels a bit more fluid to use a real mouse or a tablet -- I have a lovely Graphire-4 tablet with a pressure-sensitive pen. But I never seem to use them, because almost everything I do needs the keyboard too, and the context-switch slows me down too much compared to the trackpoint.

He played it at friends' houses, according to this account of the trial (which also uses the word "homebound" -??):

Daniel's lawyer, James Kersey, gave a short opening statement. He said his client had been under great stress at the time of the shooting because of a snowboarding accident that resulted in a severe staph infection. It left Daniel with such severe spinal damage that the slightest injury could leave him paralyzed.

Daniel was homebound for a year with nothing to do but watch television and play video games, Kersey said. It was during that time that he became fascinated with the Halo series and would play them for hours at friends' houses. His father forbade the games, saying that were too violent and sexually explicit.