Of course we would never ban encryption. That would be unworkable and crazy!

Think of the children though. Criminals are using encryption to target the MPAA - I mean boy bands - wait The Children. That can't be allowed to continue!

Encryption is like lock picking tools. It's only ethical to possess in the hands of the media cartels - I mean professionals. It's use will be restricted to those who pass certification exams and are granted per website permits.

ISPs will be required to block all encrypted traffic, unless the destination is validated by our permit list server.

And that's how they could do it...

Cops often demand unlawful searches, order dispersal, or deletion of photos/video when they have no legal basis to do so. If you don't comply with their order, they'll arrest you for obstruction, failing to follow a lawful order, resisting arrest, wiretapping or any of a number of 'contempt of cop' charges.

Dispersal orders aren't valid unless there is a threat to public safety. Each area has it's own specific rules, but I haven't read one that I thought was unreasonable. Cops simply use the law as a threat since in court it will be the officers word against yours regarding whether the conditions were met -- unless there is video. That is why video is so hated. They can't lie as easily.

My encounter this year was a speed trap. There is a budget short fall, and the traffic cops had been sent out to help - I mean 'ensure traffice safety'. They'd been setting up seed traps and after each citation they'd pull the next car passing by over to issue another. I knew they were doing it, so I'd been driving with video rolling showing my speedometer and the road out the front window since that's about the only defense from revenue focused traffic enforcement. I was pulled over for 51 in a 40 zone, despite never going over 40. That is one of the simplest reasons everyone needs to video each encounter with cops. It's a partial defense against for profit law enforcement. (so Yes, I have video and it did happen)

Actually the pricing increase is completely fair.

The price increase covers the cost of the Whitney Houston Commemorative Rootkit!

Dell's Linux offerings began when MS was under anti-trust scrutiny. Each time I looked, the Linux offerings were more expensive or had fewer features than the system with Windows pre-installed. I.E., Dell priced Linux systems so the customer got less for more. Given the information eventually made public, it appears Dell put undesirable systems on the market at MS's request in an attempt to give MS cover at trial.

New applications may be the goal, rather than savings. If you can make the receiver end easy to tie to a chip when it's packaged, you can replace a great many pins with a fiber buss running into the chip package itself. Replace the North and South bridge CPU interconnects with fiber and the pinouts just shrank, traces and RF problems disappeared from the motherboard. If they can make it practical, I'd expect it in big iron first but it's still a promising direction for research.

If the semiconductors don't use much light, you could make the buss multicast. Pick up the signal at each card slot with local to the slot signal amps and you're well on your way to making much of the rest of the motherboard communications fiber based.

You could go a bit further and make the interconnect generalized. Make a fiber cable with a laser diode bonded at one and, an the receiver semiconductors built in on the other. Bond that to a second cable facing the other way, and you have a plug in data cable that could be used in much the same way as sata cables are now. Card slots could be relegated to providing power, with the data communications working through optical cables.

I was thinking Galaga, especially with the back flip trick.

Where is my nerf gun?

Print several C-5 Galaxy's full of the enemy country's currency and drop that over their major cities. I'm sure they'll have fun with what that does to their economy.

That could be ambiguous if they were heading for San Francisco...

You can file the request, but as they've decided to ignore FOIA obligations when inconvenient and lie when they do respond I'm not sure what that will prove.

I can neither confirm nor deny those allegations.

Mine is balanced above the door. A type of trap.

If MS does this right, any vendor who certifies their tablet will be unable to also sell that version of the hardware with an Android or Linux OS. They'd have to develop new hardware and incur the expense of distributing an entirely different product line instead of just a different software load and packaging. That increases the cost and reduces the attractiveness of MS's competition.

If you do pay cash normally, when you need a loan you need to find a bank that actually still does their job. Many now only look up a fico score. Look for someone who does manual underwriting and you'll be fine. I had no problems buying my house, but I do need to choose lenders who actually look at my creditworthiness themselves.

That is the primary thing that the printing press and a scientific community have changed. Scientists sharing information for prestige vs. craft masters concealing the secrets of their craft spreads new information further. The printing press makes it tough for political/religious suppression of information to be successful. Both together make it less likely for war to destroy everything. i.e. Kill the master, burn his scrolls, loot his works for elite who don't understand them and the breakthrough is lost - which seems the likely history of the Antikythera mechanism.

Very simple how it can work: GEMA can work with studios. GEMA can offer rebates or reduced rates for artists the studio would like to promote. The studio picks artists that are under contracts that grant most of the money to the studio. Radio stations play the music that doesn't cost them to play, retailers promote the CDs that are most profitable. GEMA defines popularity based on those engineered numbers, and makes meaningful payments to the studio on the artists behalf only for those artists. The studio charges all the rate discounts against the artist as expenses. The studio keeps all the money. In actual practice the studios work directly with the radio stations, but via an intermediary to make the collusion legal. The arrangements are similarly cloaked in legitimacy, but this is the general core of it.