Well, to be fair, your Treo was just an example you gave. Do you use Firefox, NoScript and Cookiesafe on your Treo?

Or, you could add the known Google advertising URLs to your hosts file, with the added benefit of adwords javascript not loading at all. Personally I do this as well as block cookies from the google.com domains.

Do you see the pattern there? 4 or 8 year terms. One comes in, does some bad stuff, gets removed. The successor is the popular choice (and B.O. was a popular choice in a mass-hysteria kind of way). No government is going to reduce their own power.

I don't think it really matters who comes in - as some say, they (reds and blues) are just two arms of the same body.

Oh, I know. The world is a corporation and the corporation is everywhere :)

I suppose I'd move to somewhere much less alarmist and less abusive of the system. Somewhere on the continent - Turkey, perhaps. I don't know. All I know is that the way this country is going just downright scares me.

I honestly see this as less of a reaction, and more of an excuse to control the Internet in the country.

Next chance I get, I'm off.

It's all about perceived and purported stereotypes:

Politics: boring!
Cinema: Fun!
Law: incomprehensible!
Soap operas: addictive!
Economics: complicated!
Reality TV: Best thing ever!

I reckon 'they' are quite happy with these stereotypes. It lets them run the world while the majority sit and absorb rubbish.

Well, this is just it. By law, a 'person' is an entity to which rights and responsibilities are ascribed. For example, being a person allows you to engage in commerce with other 'persons' such as corporations etc.

A cartoon is not a person, and cannot possibly be so, in the eyes of the law. I cannot even begin to fathom how this has happened. I'm at a total loss for words. There are more plot holes than in The Matrix. Surely there must be some kind of investigation into this nonsense?

Some references would be nice.

Vintage 2004?

On a related note:

I have to wonder if this launch has any input from the Department of Redundancy Department.

Or, you could serve Googlebot different content to that which you serve other agents (cloaking: blackhat SEO 101).

I think, more to the point, your average user doesn't really understand quite what a corporation (of any size) can do, nowadays with that data.

Information in this new digital world is a far cry from disclosing your information to marketing surveys that would simply end up with your address on multiple mailing lists. Now it can tie up what do actually do online and off, where you do it and who you do it with, and that's probably the tip of the iceberg.

My opinion is that if governments had this kind of insight, would you trust them not to abuse it? Would you trust a profit-driven company more, or less?