Not once you put the car in park, turn off the engine and engage the hand brake. Up until that stage yes you are driving.

It's not bumping quota. You are inattentive when texting at a red light. You are not in a position to see the change to green and will not have situational awareness when the person behind you hits the horn because you are texting. So yes texting is dangerous even when stopped at a red light. This is nothing compared to those that relax pressure on the brake pedal and creep into the car in front / behind because they are distracted.

And most of the boxes you have are perfectly safe to run without a external firewall. Just keep the software up to date. The firewall really only needs to stop spoofed traffic (in and out).

No. Most devices do not need any external firewall in front of them to protect them. Linux boxes don't. Windows boxes post XP SP2 don't. Mac's don't. i* devices don't. Even networked printers don't as they have filtering capability built into them.

Modern devices are designed to be directly connected to a hostile internet. The need to have a external firewall has basically gone the way of the dodo. Just the myth that you need a firewall remains.

And if ISP's would get off their collective butts and deploy IPv6 you could get rid of all the problems caused by using NAT. You still have firewalls to deal with but establishing bi-directional communication between two out bound only firewalls is trivial for UDP and should be trivial for TCP with simultaneous open.

Get rid of the firewalls and it is trivial. For the most part you don't need a firewall. Most devices are quite capable of being directly connected to the net safely.

As a retailer you get charged VAT by your wholesaler and you charge VAT to your customer. The difference goes to / returned from the government.

So something that ends up being tax exempt as a retailer you recover whatever VAT you were charged on the product. Schools are often tax exempt but you buy from the wholesaler as if you are selling to the public.

If you sell at a loss you recover the VAT you lost.

The fix to which is to encrypt all communications from the home / office to the rest of the world.

The first thing ISP's could do is stop supporting insecure communication channels to/from their customers. There is no reason to not use STARTTLS with submission. There is no reason to continue to support POP/IMAP without SSL/TLS.

Next they should use DANE to publish their CERTs to ensure that active MitM attacks are not possible.

I call on all ISP's to disable unencrypted mail submission / retrieval with their customers.

Most service providers have just about completed migrating their whole systems to IPv6. They are at the end of multi-year plans now.

As for home users the cost is basically to upgrade the router+modem to support IPv6. Most of the rest of the gear already supports IPv6. The PCs support it (anything installed in the last decade). Networked printers support it. Mobile phones and tablets support it. The few things that don't are not a big issue as they will continue to use IPv4. When you next need to replace them find a product that does both IPv4 and IPv6. If you can turn on IPv6 at home you will probably find that over half of the traffic will switch over to IPv6. I know over half of the external traffic at my home is IPv6 traffic (myself, wife and teenaged daughter). For most homes I suspect it would be similar.

For businesses turning on IPv6 will allow them to work out what parts of their custom software needs to be upgraded to support IPv6. The hosts already support IPv6 and unless you put a AAAA record in the DNS you won't draw traffic to the servers. This gives you the time to test which is best done when you have working external IPv6 connectivity. If you bring up IPv6 as a internal only service you then run the risk of finding out which pieces of software behave badly when one of the addresses of a multi-homed server is unavailable.

It's illegal to carry a knife without a valid excuse. There is no "Period". It is not a absolute prohibition.

"For protection", however, is not a valid excuse.

Finger printing identifies a individual. DNA identifies a family members as well as individuals.

Of course you have control. You don't have to accept unencrypted communication. Just reject with a temporary fail and a message that says 'The use of STARTTLS is required for this recipient". If enough sites did this plain SMTP would disappear in almost no time flat.

Even with DANE most people use a third party (gmail, hotmail, yahoo or their ISP) to store their email on as ISP's block direct to customer emails.

No company can, in good faith, claim that they are not distributing confidential details to a third party if they send them in the clear via email.

All it verifies is that a card with a mag strip programmed with your data has been presented. That card could be library card, hotel door key ....

The messages are processed automatically and are not read by humans other than the recipient. They are reject or filtered to a "SPAM" folder. The expectation of privacy is still met. The ISP is processing the email for acceptance or rejection, it is not redirecting it to another party. Additionally the checks are being done on behalf of the recipient and can often be disabled by the recipient.

You mean the encrypted data streams. :-)

SMTP, IMAP, POP all support encrypted data streams. There really is no reason these days for email to be sent in the clear other than laziness.