Static IP addresses contain whatever the operator sets. Automatically assigned IPv6 addresses used to be MAC based on Ethernet/Wifi, but few do that these days.

This makes no sense. Routers do not care how addresses are assigned, they use neighbour discovery to find the hosts.

That is a vendor-specific bug unfortunately.

In many places, using a forged document is a crime. In Denmark at least it has a maximum penalty of 2 years in prison. It is possible that the interaction with Facebook does not actually involve a legal agreement, and so the law would not apply, but I would hate to rely on that argument in court.

The article does not say that he did that. Instead, the article says that the banks bought insurance against mortgage defaults (credit default swaps), and that prices of such insurance was very low. John Paulson decided the price was too low compared to the risk, so he bought a lot of the same insurance. When the mortgages started defaulting and prices for insurance went up, he sold the insurance on to the banks at a profit.

If there had been a hundred John Paulsons out there, credit default swaps would have gone up in price much earlier, forcing the mortgage lenders to rein-in their subprime lending, thereby either defusing the crisis entirely or at least making it much less bad. Alas, there was only one, and he was good at not getting the word out, so not many copycats. John Paulson did everyone a service and should be rewarded, not punished. The people who lend out money to people who had no chance of paying back should be punished, not rewarded.

Anyway, I have not read other articles about him, so maybe he does deserve his apparently terrible reputation.

I am somewhat surprised that it has fallen to me to defend a 1%'er. This is not exactly my usual modus operandi.

In many places electricity is taxed or high distribution tariffs apply. When you combine that with low feed-in tariffs, those with solar panels have a strong incentive to use their own power rather than export and import power.

Thus, it is cost effective to store energy for the consumer, not for the power companies -- and sometimes it is cost effective for the consumer to store energy expensive high-demand power from the middle of the day and use it during the night when power is otherwise cheap. Some power companies are investing in batteries to do the exact opposite, of course.

In the grand scheme of things there are larger fish to fry when it comes to tax and tariffs though, where the interests of society do not align with the incentives provided to individual people. E.g. it is rather stupid to tax labour, which is a clean and beneficial way to improve our society, instead of resource consumption which causes pollution and poverty.

Depends how you define modern windowing OS. As soon as you require modern text rendering, you are in many-MB territory, and just a 1080p framebuffer is fairly large.

Printer sharing. A problem that was solved well in the 80's and since re-solved slightly worse every few years. It is difficult to imagine a worse way than NetUSB, but I am sure there are developers out there with a better imagination than mine.

There has been practically zero progress on handling the demand side. Doing so would require a radical rethink of how Western countries deal with drugs and drug addiction. This is not likely to happen in the next 20 years at least, and it is stupid to condemn other countries to 20 more years of violence by keeping our focus on limiting supply.

If we eliminated the need to grow opium, a some countries would find their economies transformed. Imagine Afghanistan without opium financing various criminal factions. We just need to figure out how to make cocaine without coca, and Middle America would be changed too.

Of course that relies on the secret getting out. Otherwise we are still stuck with the morass of violent crime.

That is exactly the tradeoff. If you do not like it, do not allow electronic voting.

Defending against this requires secret ballots. If you can verify how a person voted, then that person is at risk of coercion. Online voting cannot provide secret ballots. If you want secret ballots, do not use online voting.

I thought I wrote that clearly enough in my first attempt, but apparently not :)