Funny? This is the most insightful post in this thread. It neatly summarizes the cause of the crisis in a sentence.

Hint: It matters if enemy troops can see that enemy troops can see their positions.

See? You can do it. Reading Comprehension Assistance: He proposed increasing other fees to make up for removing unreasonable taxes.

spend hundreds of hours every year maintaining MS-Windows domain authentication and authorization infrastructures

surely you have heard of Kerberos Tickets, Windows Integrated Authentication, Impersonation, WMI etc? (plus now there is WinRm and CredSSP) And surely it was obvious that in the GPs scenario, the terminal user is on the same AD domain as the remote server and is added to the appropriate domain or local security groups.

The GP neglected to mention which bluetooth device he bought and for how much. This is a price gouging hole because of the lack of options in the market. I found that the OBDkey you linked to costs $160 for the bluetooth, and $350 for the WiFi version.

I had discovered this $50 alternative when I had been looking, but don't know if it will work as well as the more expensive ones. ~$50 is surely a much more decent and reasonable price though.
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.16921

You can read the reviews which are ok, and it even works with the open source scantool.net software, ScanXL, Scanmaster, etc. So it can't be all that bad.Several Free OBD2 software tools are listed on this page:
http://www.webpg.net/sc/pages.asp?pageid=60
More open source ones here:
http://www.geekmyride.org/wiki/index.php/Open_Source_OBD_software

I also noticed a similar one on ebay which is more like $25. Again, no idea how good these actually are.

I have also read that bluetooth may not support sufficient bandwidth for realtime monitoring of modern ECUs with a large number of sensors, data etc. Wifi is better, but I haven't found anything actually affordable.

My own goal was a laptop-less self contained logging device that can be handed to my friends to simply plug in and go. That would allow me to log sensor data and analyse it later to diagnose intermittent issues that we cannot reproduce on demand. I didn't quite succeed in this. The most obvious option is the "Carchip", which turns out to be pretty lame. It can only record about 10 or so parameters and that only at 5 sec intervals. Many intermittent issues only last a few seconds so this would be useless for diagnostics. Its more a fleet management solution.

There aren't many other affordable datalogging devices. I finally bought the very expensive Auterra dashdyno, which turned out to be a huge disappointment also. It can log several times a second but is also limited to 16 pids. This wouldn't be such a problem if the user interface was not an absolute horror to use. I will leave that review for another post. This precludes it being used as a plug and go tool. It is for geeks only and needs babysitting.

I guess the next best idea is that I will buy that bluetooth device next and see if any data logging software is available. Also need to upgrade my phone to Android I guess. At least a laptop is not required, but still not the plug-and-log that I want :/