Fortunately using it isn't mandatory - ISPs are free to ignore it (some do, including mine) or provide it to their customers as an optional service (most of them do that, some make as opt-in, some as opt-out). I don't think any of them enforces it on their customers any more.

Here in Finland there was a court case a while back where a man was convicted for using neighbour's unprotected WLAN without permission. Rather amazingly, that lead to a new law passed by Finnish parliament just a few months ago, which explicitly allows such use. (Disclaimer: I was rather heavily involved in the campaign for the law, as then-chairman of Electronic Frontier Finland.) Moreover, just about all landline network connections here are uncapped, and there are enough free WLANs around that using or offering them is not suspicious in itself. Nowhere near enough though, so a campaign like this could be very useful here as well.

Really? That's somewhat surprising, given how often people confess to things they haven't in fact done. Some have even been executed for false confessions (like the case in England that led to the abolition of death penalty there).

Right. In winter, I go to work before sunrise and leave after sunset, which is pretty depressing. Then again, in summer I go to sleep before sunset and wake up after sunrise, which is pretty nice.

(I live in Finland, little over 62 degrees North. In mid-winter there's about 4 hours between sunrise and sunset; in midsummer, 20 hours. Here, shifting the clocks for daylight savings never made any real sense, except in synchronizing schedules with other countries. Today, it makes little sense anywhere, and it'd be best to drop the whole practice entirely ASAP.)

Around here (Finland) it seems quite a few people do, at least if some librarians are to be believed...

Two reasons. First the obvious: most would-be attackers are clueless, even little increase in the complexity of attack will stop lots of them. The second you already note:

That is *the* reason I'd want to be able to use https without expensive certificates without scaring the user (but also without showing the lock symbol or otherwise advertising security, just make it look like unencrypted http to the user).

I've been using syncevolution on the N900 for over six months now, and it's been working like charm, no problems whatsoever.

Unless (unlike Appelbaum) you're a non-citizen trying to enter the country. In that case, refusing to talk or requesting a lawyer means with practically 100% certainty that you won't get in. What you can do, however, is ask for an interpreter - and it may be a good idea however good your command of the local language is (as long as you aren't a native speaker). Interpreter's presence may defuse the situation with a suspicious border control official, interpretation gives you more time to think about your answers, and interpreters are often quite helpful and less, eh, scary than the interrogators (not without exception, of course).

As far as I know that is pretty much a US-only phenomenon. At least in most of Europe, the notion of "positive credit history" is all but unknown, when applying for a loan it doesn't matter if you've ever had a credit card unless you've failed to pay up. In many European countries many people don't have credit cards at all.

Sorry, typo: I meant OSI of course.

So do I (yeah, I'm old). Did you really use the term "open source" then? I'm sure I didn't, the vendors certainly didn't, actually I'm pretty sure I never heard the term back then.

Of course I may have missed someone using it, but it certainly wasn't a common term.

As far as I can tell, the very term was invented as a generic term for freely redistributable source - as a substitute for "free software", which had too heavy political and philosophical connotations.

Can you point out any references to "Open Source" that predate the current common meaning (that includes free redistributability)?

I don't think you can. Feel free to try though. OSI is not bound to your reading of their definition - or any other outsider's reading of it for that matter, and they can ignore obviously unintentional loopholes, or amend the definition to close them if they choose.