2nd breach in the past 13 months. If you're ok with that, then you're nuts.

You're recommending Linode? Are you fucking kidding me? They just had a data breach a few days ago, that they completely fucked up. Lost credit card data, passwords, etc. Originally claimed a single account was attacked, so they reset EVERYONE's password... if that wasn't dodgy enough, then they announced the breach days (a week?) later. The hacker says the public AND private keys were stored on the webserver.. so if he's telling the truth, you'll need to get a replacement card soon from your bank.

Like CLEP?

Both terrible examples.. because the dessert cups were paid with after tax dollars, and the dinner was also paid with aftertax dollars. Only in the Google example is someone receiving a gift that was paid for with before-tax dollars... meaning no tax was paid on it at all by anyone.

It appears you're unfamiliar with a common practice: regularly scanning and auditing computers on your internal network to catch comprised hosts.

Since they are doing part of your job for you, send them a nice Thank You card for helping you out.

Hmm... my figures come from the annual reports filed by the company and include links to the reports... someone with no references says my figures are off... wonder which one of us is wrong....

Sorry to destroy your little fantasy, but Google has 60b in short term assets (cash and equivalents):
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=GOOG+Balance+Sheet&annual

Disney has 39b in stock holders equity:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=DIS+Balance+Sheet&annual

NBC Universal has 29b in stock holders equity:
http://apps.shareholder.com/sec/viewerContent.aspx?companyid=cmcsa&docid=8075925

So there goes 113% of Google's short-term assets with just those two companies... and they would have to take on 55b in additional liabilities. So they would have 0 cash, no short term assets, and over 75b in liabilities.

In other words.. never going to happen.

The default in s3 has containers set to private. The 'flaw' here is that public containers can be listed by anyone.

1) set container to public
2) shout loudly that the public can see inside your public container

I'm tempted to call the author a moron.

Amazon gets about 1 billion in revenue from their web services division. That is 1.67% of their total revenue. It's such an insignificant part of their business that they group it together in the "OTHER" category on their income statement.

So is Amazon a bookseller. Damn right they are. And in order to sell books over the internet, they have some servers (duh), which they are happy to rent out to gain an extra 1.67% increase in revenue. To sell 60 billion of goods over the internet, they have _A LOT_ of servers, and a lot of tech knowledge in-house. But don't deceive yourself. At the end of the day, they are a RETAILER.. which is where 98.33% of their business is.

You raise a good point. In my state, Colorado, use tax is required to be paid for the difference (unless it's negative, in which case you get/pay nothing to Colorado).

So just like online sales, people shopping outside of their tax district is a problem. To make it fair, every physical retailer should be required to ask for the shoppers address, so they can remit the sales tax to the correct district.

But that would be outrageous, right?

1) that is exactly what the article is doing, and 2) he tried appealing to the users, and only 2.5% disabled ad blocking.

This is all in the article.

Hello.. this is your credit card company. Looks like they followed their clearly posted refund policy, therefore your chargeback has been denied.

--

Seriously.. your credit card company doesn't just do whatever the fuck you want. They follow Visa/MC/Discover/Amex rules.. and those are for the consumer AND merchant.

No, they don't have to do any such thing. They will replace it with another copy of the same software if it's defective.

The only thing they HAVE to do is post their return policy.. which they have done.