You're not beholden to a de-facto monopoly for your internet service. Have you got any neighbours within wifi distance with whom you could share the costs of satellite broadband? In the UK there are even grants available for setting up community broadband service.

And this is exactly why it's a bad idea to break the end-to-end principle.

You don't need thousands of distributed servers to run a simple directory / presence service. The primary purpose of these 'supernodes' is to set up a call between clients when both are behind NAT. The 'supernode' (just a fancy word for a non NATted server) asks each client to make an outgoing connection to the destination. It is this action which creates the permission entry in the NAT table, allowing incoming connections and thereby peer-to-peer communication.

With IPv6 this (admittedly cleverly-designed) kludge would not be necessary. Instead the endpoints can communicate directly.

These intermediary nodes are only needed because we've broken the end-to-end principle - the idea that any Internet endpoint can talk to any other. We need to wean ourselves off NAT and start to demand native IPv6.

The word on the street is that they have received around 1,700 applications.

At ICANN 43 I found three sites useful for keeping track of ICANN's moves :

• ICANNwatch
• CircleID
• .nxt

As the great man said, to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.

No, wacky heresies have surrounded the Christian church pretty much since its inception. Consider the Albigensian heresy from the 11th Century which holds that the world is a creation of an evil deity.

Reference: http://www.catholic.com/tracts/the-great-heresies

This is a common misunderstanding of the folk mythology. The North is popularly supposed to start at the Watford Gap near the village of Watford:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watford_Gap

Not Watford, the town just northwest of London.

BREIN have a history of playing fast and loose with the law, and the artists they claim to represent. Dutch performer Melchior Rietveldt wrote music for a BREIN anti-piracy video, on the condition that it was only used at a local film festival. BREIN then apparently re-purposed the music for a number of retail DVDs, without bothering to pay Rietveldt, or even ask him.

Worse, Rietveldt claims that when he discovered BREIN's omission and contacted a local recording rights group seeking restitution, nothing happened - until a BREIN board member Jochem Gerrits (who also owned a music label) contacted him to offer a deal. Gerrits would get BREIN to pay up ... in return for a 33% cut.

Since Microsoft began their Trustworthy Computing programme, they have had a reasonably healthy attitude to security. To say as you do that they 'probably' use security holes in their own products to take over botnets is plainly silly.

Microsoft have in fact been quite clever in taking down Waledac and other large botnets. The mechanism was not technical but legal: they filed a civil complaint against a number of John Does, which resulted in the judge granting a restraining order. This handed Microsoft control of 277 domain names which had been used to direct infected machines to the Waledac Command & Control servers. Google 'operation b49' for more info.