Trouble is once they have access to that garbage email account, they can sign you up for services using it along with other easily had information like your birthday, place of residence, etc.. And a lot of times they don't even have to get all of it right, comanies don't double check it, all they're interested in is signing up someone for a service and billing some account.

Its actualy not hard to do, just requires a little bit of effort on the part of the user to "change over" their whole password system.

1. Start with a "complex" base for a password, something with various character types that you can remember -- along the lines of the first letters of a phrase. (My Birthday Is In December. => m3iz1N12.)

2. Then for each application specific password append, preprend or insert (in a systematic way that again, you'll remember later on) something unique to that service. Probably best to stick to a character limit for easy recall. Maybe even include a numeral for its "version number" (explained below)
eg. Facebook might be m3iz1N12. + F4Ce + 10

Result: you have a unique strong password for each service you subscribe to, with a systematic method for remembering it if you forget (base + your indentifier scheme) without having to rely on security questions.

Then when it comes time to update your password, which you should be doing periodically anyway, you can increment the "version number" while keeping your password similar to but yet still "strong"

Of course this is a moot point if the service gets breached, but it shouldn't stop you from having good passwords of your own.

for fucks sake yes. I called my doctor the other day to have them fill out a form and they "don't do email". wtf

I get the whole "he should do his job thing," but I'd agrue that he is. His job is to improve/develop that company's infrastructure. It doesn't matter that he doesn't have ALL the knowledge in his brain to do this from scratch. He's researching using the tools he has avaiable and one of those tools is the knowledge base at slashdot. Except unfortunately it seems everytime someone asks the slashdot "community" for help with anything. They immediately get thrown under the bus for asking the question in the first place. So much for the "community" and helping colleagues in the field.

im not sure spell check would have picked up on "tam" http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/tam

I don't think its about having another tool to post 140 characters... there are tons of tools already and each just provides a different interface to do essentially the same thing... These different sites aggregate the social clamor around a certain topic... look at the success of StockTwits... Forum and blogs and sites where people were having conversations about stocks and the market already existed, but existed in a fragmented way... StockTwits brings them all together on the Twitter backbone... I'm not sure where i read it but it was said that Twitter and Facebook and the likes may or may not be useful in and of themselves, but what they are doing is providing the backbone for what will be (sort of already is) social interaction via web...

newsflash, other OS's are already gaining market share.... http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=9