Exactly. What constitutes "use it" in "use it or lose it"?

Must I have a landing page with contact info? Must I have some sort of somewhat functional website? What if I'm using the domain to host a private VPN for me? Just an email server? Is a redirect from something.mine to mine.com acceptable?

Furthermore, if its location spoofing for US-services the VPN has to terminate in the US. We have laws and a mostly functional society over here. Thats a huge protection.

If the primary purpose of the VPN is just location spoofing who cares if its safe? Go with the cheapest option, don't give them a direct credit card payment (ie PayPal, a temporary card number, or a one time card) and use the one that works. If you need to do something 'secure' over that VPN double down and use SSL.

The evil hackers in Slobenia aren't interested in your Netflix queue.

Don't forget that when providing cellular signals to locations with poor radio reception that it somehow has to get a GPS signal. Thats a feature.

You get corporations with such an interest in the law because the law started having such a heavy hand in how you do business. If you can't open a simple food stand without getting 5 permits and inspections from 3 agencies you can bet that the entire industry is going to start seeing that as a cost of doing business and start using their lobbying power to either reduce that cost or make that cost profitable.

Why didn't you rewrite the code to not produce the errors in the first place?

I was (am?) the generation who learned to code in the mid-90s. I hate to sound lazy, but once we got over that hungarian nonsense, every team I've worked on just agreed (or had dictated) an autoformatter for our IDE and just made sure to run it before we committed. Hell one team had it setup as a pre-commit hook in SVN. It mooted many of the style arguments and let us focus on solving real problems.

Hell the more modern IDEs like Eclipse, IntelliJ, and VisualStudio even suggest variable names and hint for proper case. As programmers and software engineers should we not use software tools to do tedious and mundane work for us?

Reminds me of Kevin Mitnick. He was convicted for stealing a manual (that could be purchased for a few hundred dollars) AND for the costs to plug all the holes he found.

The difference here is that the hacker in this case seems to be outright guilty of extortion. Why not bust him for that out of the gate?

1. What is an 'essential task'? Travel for work? That vacation I planned and booked a year ago?
2. Where have you been? People stopped travelling in droves after 9/11. You recall what happened? We bailed out the airlines.

I share the sentiment, but its an oligolpoly at best. There are no alternatives to air travel.