but it doesn't seem to be a likely threat vector.

Do some traffic analysis on your target's porn habits at the ISP, leave a compromised disc about his favorite kink in a bag on the ground near where he parks his car, and use his "connected" player to zero-day the other equipment on his LAN, installing the APT without even needing to pretend about premesis warrants or anything.

I will preface this by saying "this is really true" because you probably would otherwise read it as a nonsense, sarcastic, or glib comment.

I heard a conversation the other day about some of the terrible new buildings at the nearby university. A very senior administrator said (paraphrased), "you need to hire a hot architect and pay him 20% of the project price to come up with some really shocking architecture, to prove to prospective students that the school is still relevant."

I think he was talking mostly about the atrocity that they added to the Medical School, which looks suspiciously like the post-accident Chernobyl reactor. The "architecture" part of the project probably added $20M over making it look like a classical higher-ed building. I believe this administrator had final sign-off on such an expense.

It is not like an educated population is some kind of public good.

It's not, if you're speaking about the economic term. A 'public good', to an economist, is something that cannot be provided by the private market (a "market failure") and therefore must fall to a government to provide. Education is one where the private market excels in comparison to the public provision, which would be a counter-example.

And how should the government do that? With the tax income that these companies managed to avoid paying? Cool story bro.

The government should take money from the poor and funnel it into the coffers of these corporations. Did you miss the part where government is for the privatization of gains and the socialization of losses?

The alternative is asking for bankruptcy.

I can just about guarantee you that several buyers of bandwidth in Phoenix had contracts with the people who owned this fiber and those contracts specified multiple redundant paths out of the city.

Odds are we're looking at backup system failure or contract fraud. Probably the former.

How so? Everyone gets the same speed....

It's almost as fair as the toilet paper supply in Venezuela, Comrade!

That fact that they need to put a multi page FAQ on their website to explain how to create a login account without a credit card number is telling enough.

Ah - they'll face opposition in some southern cities where they want to expand Google Fiber, but they won't suffer the wrath of the LGBT... community.

In their defense SAP's software is even worse bloatware than the crap McAfee puts out.

So how many times did iTunes ask you for your credit card number?

Actually it isn't. This service only works for full retail versions of Windows. If you are an OEM user it won't work.

Put the key in off the license sticker on your PC

Yeah, the one that rubbed off the bottom of your laptop in three months and you forgot to take a picture of it when it was new...

You're wrong. They had the ISOs publicly available at Digital River for yonks over FTP. Then they pulled them down.

MS just likes to make things harder for paying users than needs be.

Ah, I hope Redbox helped fund this feature since they're going to be a primary beneficiary!