Put on your best Hugo Weaving voice and imagine Elrond saying "Hobbits ... are a disease; and we are the cure."

That reminds me of one of those classic lists of airline mechanic log entries:
"Evidence of oil leak on landing gear. Signed, Joe Pilot"
"Evidence removed. Signed, Bob Mechanic"

I highlighted the space between the lines. HTH

If your problem is 20 year old solaris machines, perhaps a fire drill is just what you need to demonstrate to the executive level that they need to budget for new equipment. "According to the consultant, our machines failed the disaster recovery exercise so if we had a real problem we'd be out of business."

Or maybe they already know that, and their business plan includes a suspicious lightning strike next fiscal quarter?

Some companies have already been caught ignoring the opt-out flag. It's also subject to change, or mistakes made through whatever errors, and virtually impossible to prove. Google's said their opt out is only to remove an identifying tag from your info, but they still include the info that you triggered in things like hit counts via googleanalytics.js; they also don't say that your data isn't correlated, just that it's not identified as being yours.

I dislike third party tracking because the data that correlates well-traversed links also provides correlation to marketers and those SEOs who would game the system for their own benefit. It's in our best selfish interests to not reveal the surfing habits that lead us to making a buying decision, so the SEOs don't know which blogs they should pay astroturfers to pollute: epinions, disqus, wordpress, slashdot, or wherever.

But if you run NoScript, all of that third party tracking goes away.

I'm still running V28 of Firefox, and it's working fine. I won't upgrade because they changed sync, and I no longer trust its security.

Chrome sucks. It feeds Google everything that happens, and doesn't let you disable it, it encourages you to continue to send the data with an opt-out flag. WTF should I trust a flag, when none of that info is ever any business of theirs?

The whole "only veterans are citizens" concept was central to the book. That pretty much defines a military-based society.

And if you're using the Klingon Imperial System (and not the derivative Romulan Empire units,) he would be even 20% cooler.

But once you try to convert back into SI, you're still never going to exceed the threshold by which you won't get beat up for your lunch money. Maybe not quite as much of a beating as the guy with the fez and the bow-tie, but still, the gymnasium locker room exchange rate is abysmal.

The choice of protocol is going to be your first decision. I picked Z-wave because there are many different manufacturers and a wide variety of devices. Every so often, someone will have devices on clearance or closeout. And you can find them in lots of places: Home Depot, Staples, and a wide variety of online merchants carry them. If you go with a more proprietary system like Insteon, you'll pay more per device and be more locked in.

The hub cost should be less important to you than the per-device cost. You need to buy only one hub, but you'll end up buying a lot of devices. Be prepared to pay about $40/device (list), or $10-20/device (clearance).

Unlike the protocol, the controller isn't something you have to be stuck with forever. You can upgrade them. Z-wave controllers are available in a USB stick form factor, which means you can build a home controller out of any computer you want. I chose to buy a Vera because I wanted an open system that didn't have a monthly fee, and I wanted the whole controller as a turnkey system. The Vera has a really good UI and a lot of mobile phone clients that connect to it, but there are several other Z-wave controller options, including HomeGenie (completely open source, designed around a small platform like the RasPi or the Beagle Board), and OpenHAB (platform agnostic Java, completely open source, but very weak UI.)

People have recently started rooting the Wink, which is a really cheap controller with a lot of connectivity options (including Z-wave), but it's not an open source device. And the Staples Connect Hub (made for them by D-Link) has lots of connectivity options for only $49. My Vera2 is currently at the limits of capacity for all my devices, so I'm considering options besides migrating to their Vera 3, including building my own HomeGenie system. The Vera 3 is about $299, but I think I could build a very capable HomeGenie box for under $100.

Consider this scenario.

1. Evil hacker creates some malicious javascript that does three things: it attempts to connect to a local Asus router; upon finding one it reconfigures it to allow external access; after successfully hacking a router it opens a connection to his server to report another victim.
2. Evil hacker sets up a rogue WiFi hotspot in a coffee shop near your office, and lures people into connecting to his evil open proxy (check out the WiFi Pineapple if you want to see how such a device works, or if you just want to purchase one.)
3. The evil proxy injects the javascript into the bottom of whatever pages the victims visit, and modifies the cache-control directives to cache those pages for a long time. This is called a cache poisoning attack.
4. The evil hacker waits for one of those victims to return to your office with their poisoned laptop, reconnect to your network, open their browser, and re-visit one of the poisoned sites in their cache. The malware script launches in the user's browser, attacks your router from within the trusted side of your network, then visits his site to report "mission accomplished, here's the IP address of another hacked router." All of this is of course invisible to the average random coffee-drinking employee.
5. ???
6. I don't know exactly what happens in step 5, but it is likely nothing you would consider good.

This type of attack was fairly common when google was using http instead of https, and evil proxy operators could count on lots of people visiting the google page. It's still easy enough to do, and remains one of the biggest risks of trusting any unsecured wifi networks.

More often than not, the evil hackers are just phishing for random victims. But by setting up his access point in a coffee shop frequented by your employees, this is one way the evil hacker could target you specifically.

Don't forget the robust community that supports Vera. It's easy to create new devices, and people have. This is extremely helpful for devices that Vera can't reach via Z-wave or any other technology. For example, I installed a "device" that talks to the Craftsman AssureLink web service to find the status of my garage door (the AssureLink internet bridge talks only to their service, and I haven't yet found it to offer a locally accessible interface. Time to break out wireshark, I think.)

There are also many "virtual devices" people have written to do all kinds of interesting things. One will monitor other devices, and fire an event when certain combinations of things are met. I have a virtual switch that pings our phones' local wifi IP addresses so the house knows when we're home. It can fire an event when our phones connect to our access point, or fire one when we've been out of range for 15 continual minutes, or whatever. Someone built an interface to Apple's locator service, so I could have the house know when I was approaching within 5 miles, but that had the unintended consequence of draining my iPhone's battery flat after about 6 hours - I uninstalled that one.

Sorry to deliver the bad news, but home automation systems will never contribute more than about 100 milliFonzies to your Coolness score. There is very little cred amongst most people about having an automated home; only the nerds seem to care, and the Nerd Equivalent Factor of .1 means that even if your home automation system rated a full Fonzie, the owner simply cannot be that cool.

I also have a Vera (the older Vera 2) and highly recommend it. No cloud server needed, although you can optionally set your Vera up to communicate with their servers for free, if you want. (If you don't want, you can set up a VPN to access it from outside the home.)

It's built on OpenWRT, and has a robust community building support for all kinds of devices. It's primarily a Z-wave controller, but it can talk to Insteon systems if you buy the appropriate hardware.

I'd recommend getting whatever the big version is, instead of the Lite version. My Vera 2 is running out of horsepower, and I don't have all that many devices.

I can't figure out if he's trying to be Fozzie Bear or PacMan.

And what makes you think I missed it? Heinlein was a strong advocate for a military-based society; Verhoeven camped it up to its absurd extreme.

It's camp. It's entertainment. Laugh. But if you are concerned that people are learning social structures from it, then you've probably been watching too much Fox News.