Maybe useful, but all you've done for them is saved them the trouble of cutting the wood themselves.

and God forbid those pesky Africans be spared of menial work by using more efficient, automated tools.

That will work only until wikileaks' opponents force them to switch to another IP.

OF COURSE there is a clause that allows them to jump of the deal unscathed. That's precisely my point: the disparity of power between the parties makes the contract horribly biased, and that sucks.

Amazon charges for usage in arrears (i.e. after the resource is consumed). That means AWS is extending credit to all of their customers. When businesses extend credit, there are always credit limits in order to limit potential credit losses.

Or, if you are a nice guy, you contact your client to warn they may be incurring in a huge bill.

Or, if you want to be really cautious, you stipulate quotas in the contract according to the client's credit history.

Now I don't work for AWS, and I have no knowledge of the specifics of this case, but if I had a brand new customer run up a massive bill with no prior payment history, I'd cut his ass off.

In my book, "cutting off" means suspending one's account until problems are solved. Say you are an ISP and a zombie-customer gets infected and starts spewing spam - you suspend access and attempt to resolve the case. AWS didn't try, afaik.

It seems to me that AWS booted wikileaks like, forever. What if wikileaks had the actual means of payment? Again, a good shop would try one of the approaches I suggested above.

If you read Sonny Yatzen's first comment in this thread, you'll find his speculation that wikileaks' high load during cablegate launch was the underlying reason for amazon booting wikileaks. My comment addressed Sonny Yatzen's second comment, where he defended business entitlement to change their minds.

My argument is:
1) amazon did not boot wikileaks for high load - they actually charge per usage, so it's not really a problem to them in terms of money

2) business should not be entitled to change their minds at will like that. Contract drafting is already biased for them as it is.

Nonsense. A business ought to understand the risk before accepting the deal. If they underestimated the risks, they are punished with loss of revenue; if they correctly evaluated the risks and priced the service accordingly, they stand for a profit. A business' duty is to honor the contracts they sign. Of course, this is in the ideal world, where parties signing a contract have a fair balance of power; in the real world, amazon dictates the rules, and is in a position to craft some really vague ones at that.

The way I see it, amazon isn't simply breaking the contract over the direct cost of the demanded service like GGP supposes, mostly because the added cost caused by the "unexpected" traffic of cablegate is only marginal to amazon. Also, it is my understanding that amazon charges for bandwidth spent almost linearly, so all this "unexpected" traffic is being charged to Assange anyway. I believe they think there's a indirect cost in upsetting a potentially large client such as the US govt. In other words, they weighed the loss of reputation and money for booting wikileaks against the future loss of opportunities with USG and decided for booting wikileaks.

Granted. In a quick back-of-the-napkin calculation, I got that log256 16^32 is 16, meaning that, in theory, all 16-char passwords *could* map to all possible hashes. So, passwords longer than 16 chars, when stored under md5, collide with 16-char passwords, making the former somewhat useless.

Maybe a good idea for picking a password is to somehow ensure no shorter password would yield the same md5. A daunting task by any metric.

While I concurred with your point somewhere else in this discussion (regarding the usage of salt), I wonder if there is any possibility that an attacker, having a sufficiently large corpus of your stored hashes, would be able to extrapolate what salt your application is using.

I don't see how password length makes any difference here. Most applications naïvely store hash_function(password) in the database. If you manage to find a 4-char string whose hash is the same as the one stored in the database, it doesn't matter if the original password has 300 characters. The best course of action for any application is to store hash_function(password + secret_salt) in the database.

Ostensibly, when you buy a ticket for a given seat in a given flight, you're actually hiring a transportation service from one airport to another.

Airline companies usually have a tiered fare structure, having a fixed amount of tickets for each fare-class in a given flight. Quite naturally, the cheapest tickets get bought earlier, and the company gets the money quite in advance of the actual flight. Should a company allow their tickets to be transferred at no cost, a lot of front-running would occur, setting a higher price-point to the end buyer, and skimming the profit of company towards the front-runner. However, if said front-runners somehow ADDED value to the process (e.g. by setting up web sites that actually work), it wouldn't be unfair.

The article is talking about the possibility of there being billions of inhabitable planets on the Milky Way Galaxy alone. The Milky Way galaxy is very finite.

One should consider how the humanoid cylons were created: they are a result of cooperation between the arrived-from-nuked-earth-final-five (who had resurrection) and and the centurions (who had hybrids). Cavil hacked the centurions so that they wouldn't be capable of sentience and critical judgement. He did so by installing the "telencephalic inhibitors". It is quite clear that the centurions did not appreciate the idea, given what happened when the other cylon-humanoid faction removed the inhibitor from a centurion by season 4.

There are several methods I have seen in my life as a young student:

1) have the teacher take a roll call - boring, slow, but some teachers assign numbers to each student to have it go faster
2) class mirror - teacher has a paper in his desk indicating where each student is supposed to seat. A quick glance for empty desks will tell who is absent
3) by one student - every week a different student is responsible for taking attendance of his peers and report absences to the teacher. Of course, this method only works well if there is some way the teacher can cast doubt on the student's report (class mirror or no extraneous desks). I've only seen this work in military schools, both because of stricter punishments and sense of camaraderie.

This would be vulnerable to MITM.

Or is he assuming that Adam and Eve's sin has somehow tainted the aliens across interstellar distance (after all, it is supposed to taint us across thousands of years of time, why not distance as well)?

Also, how fast is this taint travelling? It certainly couldn't go faster than light - otherwise we would just build spaceships fueled by taint.