On 9/11, people were actually communicating with loved ones via Slashdot's comment system, because thanks to the heroic efforts of their admin team, Slashdot was one of the few major sites that managed to keep things running for most of the day (it wasn't entirely smooth, but it mostly worked). Serving a static-HTML version of the home page was one of the tricks they used.

A couple weeks later they posted an article describing what went on behind the scenes that day, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find a link to the article - does anyone else remember this?

It sounds like you don't understand what OneClick is. Not only was it not common then, it's not common now. Storing the credit card number is only part of it. Other than Amazon, the only site I'm aware of that does it is Apple's iTunes Store, and Apple licensed the patent from Amazon.

OneClick was something new; my recollection is that nobody had done anything quite like it - but not because it was novel or innovative. Nobody had done it before because everybody thought it was a bad idea. Store people's credit card numbers on file, readily accessible later just in case the customer decides to come back and buy something else? Click one button to effect a transaction, with money changing hands and everything? Are consumers really gonna trust you to manage that responsibly?

Amazon's innovation was proving that the answer to that question is yes. That's all. They showed that they could do it without consumers rioting in the streets. If you had asked anyone "skilled in the art" to design a system that could buy stuff online with the click of a button, anyone could have built it. They just probably would have told you it was a bad idea.

No, they can't arrest them all, because we still live in a democracy. If one kid goes to jail nobody cares and the politicians keep doing what they're doing, but when a whole classroom follows along, all of their parents start making noise, and when parents start making that kind of noise, it attracts the attention of the news media, and that attracts the attention of the politicians, and that solves the problem.

Which raises the question: will they still be willing to go die on Mars, after spending seven years turning their life around?

If you're a reporter, is there a small victimless crime you can commit in the process of accepting information from a source, such that you would be unable to reveal the identity of the source without simultaneously confessing to your own crime?

*whoosh*

Didn't we know this ten years ago? How is this news?

Those documents were compromised - by the NSA. I understand if you disagree, but I'm willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt here and assume that Snowden didn't share the list with anyone else and The Guardian wasn't going to publish it. That means that in practical terms the British agents aren't actually at risk, and wouldn't have been at risk, although I certainly understand why the British government believes they are, and they legitimately could have been (if the British police can obtain the list from David Miranda, so can anyone else). Still, I believe their intention was to publish a story that this information had been obtained by the NSA, not publish the information itself.

I wonder if it has occurred to anyone that the NSA's actions in other countries could be construed as acts of war....

Apple no longer makes computers that have optical drives. How long do you think it will be before the rest of the industry follows suit?

(Those who need them can of course still connect external optical drives.)

I'm being forced to learn Python.

Having a romantic breakup is a lifestyle choice (at least that's what the other poster is arguing), and you put it into the same category as mental illness.

FTP is a stupid protocol and needs to die. Please use something else (such as SFTP).

No need to wait for a TCP connection to time out. As soon as the page has finished loading, all connections are closed. HTTP is a stateless protocol; just because you have a web page open in front of you doesn't mean there's any connection to the server right now.

If you're not using cookies, you can use query strings to track state. For every link on the page, you add a query string to the URL containing a session ID number, so when the user clicks any link, the session ID is passed in the query string. But that looks ugly, so you should just use cookies.