Wow! What a great idea! Light field communication!

Didn't this used to be called "posting a sign?"

People coming from different backgrounds bring different perspectives to the Trayvon Martin shooting. Everyone feels they are right, and everyone feels strongly. Is it possible for commenters to keep that in mind? I see an early post opportunity, so I figure I'll offer the proposal.

One of the things that has bugged (oops) me about the NSA news is the assumption that non-US citizens aren't entitled to privacy. Here the NSA doesn't even need a warrant if it guesses (50%+1) that one of the people communicating is non-US. Why any foreign company would want to use a product from a company that can be forced to feed all info to the NSA is beyond my ability to understand but, then again, those paying for the privilege of using Microsoft products have always been a mystery to me.

Microsoft: (Violating) your privacy is our priority(, because who doesn't love a police state).

"At this rate, within the next five years the stack of DVDs could reach higher than the orbit of the International Space Station."

Use more than one stack. You're welcome.

Yes, Anonymous Coward is an appropriate name for you. Someone who signed up for the military following 9/11 certainly does not need to justify their actions.

Was the Iraq war a "good war?" No, not in my opinion. But that war wasn't started by the military. It was started by the unprosecuted war criminals who were almost voted into positions of power, men like George W "Decider" Bush, Dick "Dick" Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

And a jury should engage in nullification, to prevent a heroic man from being further punished.

The government is not our country. Our country is defined by the constitution.

The government can be (and has been) bought. Our constitution cannot.

It does seem a bit unfair to build a Department of Snooping, Lying, and Cheating and then complain when it snoops, lies, and cheats. It's so sad that the United States government is now (and has been for at least fifty years) the most frightening enemy of the United States Constitution.

So now, not only do Twinkies offer no nutrition, but the employees who make them get slave wages. Mmmm-mmm, sure makes that synthetic lard sweeter!

I'm all for METI as long as it's honest.

Really, what you want is a layout of chairs on the train that can easily be moved onto a plane's fuselage by a device that needn't fly. You don't want to make the train into a plane, you just want a convenient way to move people and their carryons into the fuselage without making them lift their buttocks an extra time.

The reason New Hampshire is functional is Boston. Yes, Boston is in Massachusetts, but southern New Hampshire is an easy commute to Boston and its northern suburbs. Massachusetts taxpayers provide all the high tech jobs and cultural amenities that the libertarians of New Hampshire want to have but don't want to pay for.

Google could charge a monthly fee for the service, or a "don't be evil" company could start a competitive service and try to eat Google's afternoon snack. The interesting thing about the computer industry has always been how rapidly product loyalties shift.

Keep in mind that you'll get a better group of people choosing to use an encrypted service than those choosing to leave their laundry out for others to observe at will, so you could probably charge a premium if you decided to sell them non-targeted advertising crap as an additional source of revenue.

The other aspect of this is that, if/when it turns out that the companies DO know and HAVE known about PRISM, user trust in corporate assertions is likely to decline substantially. Why base your business plan on cooperation with a known liar?

If it is true that Google, for example, is unaware of PRISM, then an appropriate response from Google would be the rapid development and deployment of an EASY TO USE, MULTIPLATFORM browser add on to enable its users to CONVENIENTLY send and receive pgp-encrypted gmail that prevents plaintext from ever reaching Google's servers.

Encrypted mail is a problem of convenience, not technology. Google has the resources to provide the necessary convenience to a large enough user base that encrypted email could become an expectation.

I hope one of the major companies is sufficiently principles and sufficiently independent of the United States government (and its academic/corporate/lobbyist friends) that it is willing to do this.