Totally different ... he got arrested.

So inefficient. In Philly they literally just hand out cash for votes

If the password was brute forced, that would involve a few billion failed login attempts (assuming it's not just a dictionary attack). One might expect a website to do something to prevent that.

The core technologies for organizing such emails are available in the litigation support industry -- they are used to group related documents/emails together so that lawyers reviewing documents to hunt for evidence can do so more efficiently. One approach is to group "near-duplicates," where documents that share some chunks of text are grouped, which allows detection of form letters or different revisions of the same document. Another option is "conceptual clustering," where the documents are grouped if they are about the same topic (they may not have any actual sentences in common). Unfortunately, all of the software that I know of is designed to analyze documents within a review platform (used by lawyers) rather than plugging into an email system for consumer use, so there would be some work needed to adapt it for the use you are talking about.

Now the shameless plug: my company makes Clustify, which does conceptual clustering and near-dupe detection.

Actually, you can use excess energy to pump the water up into a storage facility and let it roll back down later when you need the energy. See Muddy Run Pumped Storage Facility

Is it just my imagination, or is there a huge amount of traffic from AWS coming from bots that don't respect robots.txt?

Didn't I see a Windows phone ad recently that claimed other smart phones were treating their customers as beta testers? Talk about tempting fate.

Because ensuring compliance and defending yourself against accusations of non-compliance involves lawyers, and we know what lawyers cost in the U.S.

Most of the videos posted as stories recently have been advertisements. The cynic in me says that this guy paid to have this posted to get publicity for himself, which would only be achieved via video (who notices the byline in a written article?). I wouldn't have suggested such a thing a few months ago, but with the way Slashdot has been run recently the motivation behind the stories that are posted has become murky.

I had the exact same reaction when these videos first started popping up, then I realized that most of them were advertisements and I stopped caring.