OK, I'll cop to feeding a troll. My bad.

Aw, c'mon, typo purist! He clearly meant "life". No need to rub his nose in the typo. :(

They should ban the gathering, or at least the long term retention, of all that data.

Yes, it makes a difference. My first exposure to computers was a tour of a Univac-I in 1955. Then in 1958 at college I saw an IBM-650 churning away without doing any input or output. I asked the guy near by what was up and he said it was emulating the Burroughs 220 we were getting the next year. I asked what he was running on the emulator and he said the 220 emulator was running a 650 emulator he was writing so people could continue to use their existing programs. I wound up doing a college project on the 220 in assembly language, and in 1959 I worked on an IBM-704 using FORTRAN. Those were fun times.

About 1970. CP/M. This one had add-on 8" floppies (almost wrote "flippies", and I did do some of that) and an add-on hard drive. That drive weighed a ton! I used it heavily until I got a 286 about 1982.

It's not dying for bills in my house. The billers have really screwed up electronic billing around here. They don't email you the actual bill, just a notice that your bill is available on their web site. For 'n' billers I am expected to maintain 'n' user-IDs, and passwords and go fetch 'n' bills. Pox on that. USPS has business with me until the e-bills are pushed to me.

It's a dstinction without a difference. They're lurking in the shadows between me and people (and web sites) I communicate with. It's creepy and I don't like it and I hope to find convenient ways to make it harder.

WGET is available for Windows and it runs fine.
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.ne...

I guess this was intended to be funny, and it hs been modded as such, but I find it beneath contempt to make jokes about pain management, which is in such miserable shape in America.

Yeh, yeh, I know ... bye bye, karma

It turns out that the numbnuts at PogoPlug have somehow arranged to forbid pasting userid or password into their login form. I emailed them about it and their response was that they would consider changing it as a feature enhancement. So keepass is useless there and I have to hand type my complex password. Idiots!

Would you like some cheese with that whine?

It is not necessary for our inability to achieve perfection to get in the way of having good practices. A few commonly accepted things could form the start of a set of best practices. Stuff like handling passwords correctly and preventing buffer overflows. We need some sort of professional organization a-la AMA or the Bar Association or various engineering groups to manage and promulgate a set of best practices. And yes, if we could develop that and then a systems engineer or programmer or their management were to ignore best practices and foist really stupid stuff on the public, especially fo money, I would support a trip to civil court.

We have lived too long with the "not responsible for anything" license and it is time to start moving toward making that disclaimer "against public policy".

I went through most of the comments on this article and I can not find any that address the root problem, which is this: Where the hell does Intel get off telling its customers what they have to build with their chips? If I were a designer of equipment and considering these chips I would tell Intel to ESAD.

Ya forgot the rule: don't feed the troll.