I would love for gmail to give people the option of a random noise uuencoded .sig to be attached to each and every e-mail. Flood the world with random data and this issue goes away. No one would be able to say for sure what was encrypted or not. If done ubiquitously, it could bring all the STASI-like agencies to their knees.

I believe cron job technology might be able to pull this off.

Yeah, I always wanted to do a UK trip, but their crazy laws have always kept me away. Not even because I'm worried that I'll get caught up in them, so much as I look down on them as a people for institutiting them in the first place.

And no, the irony isn't lost on me that many do not want to visit America for the same reasons. I probably wouldn't either, if I weren't a native.

That would be my first assumption. Or what if you were using a key file, that you no longer have? I never really used PGP much, but I must have set it up a dozen times, with a different random password each time. And I certainly couldn't tell you what those passwords are now. It's barbaric to convict someone on this basis.

If anyone has broken the internet lately, it would be the NSA. Net neutrality is about given more power to the people behind that. And more power to the studio executives who have compromised that agency.

I suspect one day, the term Net Neutrality will be considered as "neutral" as the term Patriot Act is considered "patriotic." Once you empower the FCC on this front, they won't hold back.

Believe me, I understand its importance. It's very much a necessity to me. But hyperbole aside, I haven't seen any problems to date. The internet has been a wonder and still is. How will this legislation actually make things better than they are now?

Netflix was always smooth before, and now after the comcast deal, I finally have enough bandwidth to access the 3D content. That's the only change I've seen so far. If they start actually blocking my access to stuff, then I'll walk and they'll have to respond. But why would they risk that in the first place?

You say we shouldn't fuck it up and I very much agree. So why introduce regulations that weren't there to begin with? Do you really thing it will stop with simply making things more fair for the customer? This to me is a case of, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

It works in the real world too, since it gave us the internet we have today. Everybody is trying to fix something that isn't broken and that never ends well.

Touché.

So society encouraged me to be a computer geek?? Ahh...no. Just the opposite. I did it anyway because it appealed to me. And if it doesn't naturally appeal to you, then you won't have that lifelong instinct to learn more, that is required to make it in this field. What happens with these girls, when the money runs out?

Good point, I should have said the media.

Because once the next presidential election cycle is over, people will go back to not caring.

No, but I do sit 8 feet away from 133" projector screen. I can imagine the upside.

Do you remember having to count your minutes on long distance calls, because it was so expensive? Even local calls were more expensive than they are today, without even having to account for inflation. And none of it came with free text messaging. Perhaps you ought to read a little history yourself.

It doesn't matter. It's the perception that counts. And when it comes to my phone, I always double-bag it.

I trust my home computer more because those open-source apps weren't designed with data harvesting in mind. Actually, I also stopped ordering anything from Windows computers years ago, because I couldn't trust them anymore either. I had more spyware/virus scanners than actual software, by the end.

As for sandboxing, that doesn't work so well once you root your phone. I can choose not to root, but then the phone wouldn't be nearly as useful to me.