What is the obsession with nuking from orbit? If you're in orbit, a kinetic projectile of sufficient mass will get the job done. No nuclear materials, or any sort of intelligence on the projectile is needed. A sufficiently massive chunk of iron at sufficient velocity will get the job done.

If you can't quite make the leap to the Nest, and what you really want is the ability to run the thermostat from your smartphone, 3M makes a nice WiFi Thermostat that you can pickup at Home Depot for under $100. I was motivated by laziness to switch out my old programmable thermostat for the 3M one a few months back. Yes, it's not as cool as the Next, but you can switch it into away mode from anywhere you can get online if you forget when you go on vacation. The 3M thermostat uses Radio Thermostat Company of America's WiFi module and software interface. I haven't read into it much, but it appears that the API is open so you can in theory write your own software to control the thermostat in the event of the company going under and their web services disappearing.

If you get a SMS message in Russian...

Wait until the middle of the night to access the laptop as the theif will be able to see you moving the mouse around via LogMeIn. Go to town adding security software and such to track down your laptop, or just get annoying and do all you can to brick it. Set a password, require password to disable screen saver, require password on wake, turn on FileVault, etc.

If you get your laptop back or replace it, set a password on the laptop, make sure the laptop asks for the password on wake and for disabling the screen saver, and turn on FileVault to encrypt your home directory, and use CrashPlan or your cloud backup service of choice to backup your data. At least then if your laptop grows legs you're data won't be lost as well, and the theif can't access your files.

Netflix and iTunes have some of the season 41 episodes, as well as no shortage of previous seasons. You can also grab the Sesame Street Podcast for numbers and letters.

Microsoft Support for Windows XP Professional SP3 ends in 1033 days. My thanks to Apple for giving users another reason to upgrade their Operating System or replace that old PC.

My understanding is the customers impacted by the Amazon outage weren't paying the higher price to have their data spread across multiple data centers. It was a decision made by Amazon's customers, and they chose to take the risk and go with the lower priced service, or their customers didn't understand the risk they were taking.

As Microsoft Security Essentials is offered for free for personal and small business (up to 10-PCs) use, the only reason I can think of to pirate AV software is because you're also pirating Windows and can't pass the WGA validation test. Even then why bother...just use the free version of Avast that doesn't care about WGA validation.

Many Bothans died to bring us this information.

Doesn't matter if they are lagomorphs or rodents. They are still cuddly and delicious.