What about retroreflectors? Presumably, it would require only a miniscule fraction of a missile-killing laser beam to screw up the tracking optics.

And the gunsmiths of the Khyber Pass have been making real, metal firearms on a completely amateur basis since before CNC mills existed. Not single-shot proofs-of-concept either, working copies of Lee Enfields and the like. No high-tech of any sort required.

Ammo was already relatively easy to make.

I feel compelled to point out that pigeons are dinosaurs.

As a stable, homogenous environment, and a source of heat, I find this worrying.

(Yes, I know that, jokes aside, it wouldn't last an hour against a modern immune system.)

Bash 3 can pretend TCP sockets are files.

My point is that it is *incredibly* trivial to connect to a wireless router that has DHCP enabled and just use an IP address of your choosing. It's a perfectly normal thing to do if you want to be able to predictably SSH a machine or something, and even MS Windows has a GUI way of doing it. Somebody who is sniffing network traffic and cracking encryption keys can easily determine which addresses are already in use, and in practice, if you take an address at the high end of the range (e.g. 192.168.1.250), you won't run in to any trouble with other clients.

Why would he even send a DHCP request?

(Several posts here are talking as if DHCP is a vital stage in setting up a network connection.)

And the bots are REALLY stupid. I have more than one internet-connected machine with a key-only sshd open to the internet, and, infuriatingly, they try to brute-force it anyway. That is, even though they don't even get a chance to offer a password, they still make multiple attempts to connect...

It allows for a certain amount of changes over time, e.g. changing disk. It contacts the activation servers during activation, but after that it *never* phones home.

A single motherboard swap can trip it.

If we're going to be working around the bullshit restrictions anyway, there's going to be a decent pirate edition almost immediately.

This seems completely weird to me. It's like having a free website, optimised for IE6 at 1024x768, and charging people for modern, standards-compliant HTML.

It's a misdirection. We direct our anger at untouchable faceless corporations instead of individuals who are actually vulnerable at election time.

(To make my point slightly clearer, the Daily Mail is well-known in the UK for regular articles comparing prison to a luxury holiday and demanding harsher sentances for everything.)

Better source, please. The Daily Mail is aimed directly at people who want harsher treatmeant for other people in general, and regularly lies to please its audience.