Not sure about the laws, but I think you may have missed a small detail in GP's argument: he was trying to suggest that while a *random* stop may be illegal, a *universal* stop may not be.

Meaning: if they're pulling everyone over, as opposed to every N cars, it's not a "random" stop, and it may be okay there. Of course, now I'm curious about my local laws and have to go do some research.

I think more to the point... it sounds like what they did was find the vulnerability that they'd detected some folks working really hard on an exploit to, and worked with industry to close it. While good for the country (and probably me individually), I'd hardly call it "foiling a plot".

Frankly, I have a hard time believing that China was really just about to try to destroy the economy of such a large trading partner.

I don't believe Starbucks can forbid that, actually (well, around here anyway - different jurisdictions, different rules, etc). They *can* ask you to leave at any time, however.

Man, I sure hope so. This thing is pure gold.

For the record, the part of the scripting that I use to handle launching/using/killing instances:
(admittedly not spot instances, but still might be useful)

https://github.com/Klaital/toolbox/blob/master/bin/ec2_workers.rb

I find it a reasonably fun problem to work on, so I'd probably be willing to help more if you need.

Hate to break the news to ya, but it's not too hard; I set up such a thing in an afternoon to generate traffic to load test an app I am developing. The commandline tools are pretty well documented for this standard workflow.

I do the first part manually, using the web console: 1)
1) launch an instance, install your code on it. Bonus points: write a script to parse the UserData so you can tell it where to pull the source data from (I keep such things in S3 if needed)
2) use that instance to create an AMI.
3) Use the run-ec2-instances command line tool to launch some instances of your AMI
4) Either configure the instance to auto-run your tools on boot, or use ssh to remotely launch your script. ssh -i key_pair.pem ec2-user@public-hostname.amazonaws.com '/path/to/my/script.sh'
5) Make the last command in your script 'sudo shutdown -h now'

Bam. Automated computing, complete with shutdown. Just make sure it stores your output somewhere. If you really can't figure it out, respond here and I can provide some code snippets later.

When you zoom out the map far enough, that's totally close to the Pacific coast. If you compare the location to, say, Luxembourg.

Does it matter which they come for first? Each will be defended with both.

I worked support for a while, and found that most users knew well enough not to give me their password. There were always those who volunteered it, though. My personal favorite was an individual who sent me an animated gif of him copy/pasting his credentials from notepad into the app I supported.

Sadly, given that failing to enter one's password correctly into the app actually *was* a common problem, that gif was actually pretty useful to me.

I truly hope they don't migrate to FTP only. Using it as their *canonical* download might be ok, but as plenty of other people have mentioned, FTP is a bit outdated. Really, if you're already migrating to a dedicated host, why not use HTTP? And put a BT link up for the majority of us with a client already installed.

(using BT as the sole source isn't really a good solution for folks who don't have admin rights to install a BT client, such as on my work box here)

ITYM lost*

No, I think that just makes them 88% correct.

Aye, worked well for Nostradamus!

Sadly, I would wager that the reason his comment will not be read by many folks has more to do with how far down the page it is, rather than the karma rating.

(I browse at -1 anyway)

As per my citation above (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Parliament#Titles_and_citation_of_Acts), I'm in agreement about the name. Let's go back to letting uninterested clerks generate the reference name - I'd expect it to end up with a much more descriptive title that way.