That's for like, what.... a quadplex, at most?

Why should it be Google's problem if people are superficial?

.... then why is it impacting the ability for a man to supposedly move on with his life?

If people care enough about it to allow it to affect how they judge the man today, then it still has at least some historical significance... if for no other reason than to give the people that this man meets the tools with which to know what the truth is. In the end, if he has genuinely repented, then it will still be up to each and every person he meets to evaluate the man for how he presents himself today, and it is THEIR problem, not Google's if they might still judge him harshly for it.

n one sense of the term secrecy is in itself a hostile action...

Really?

Care to tell me what hostile act wearing clothes in public constitutes? Clothes, after all, cover up your body... keep it hidden from view. That's secrecy.

Wanting to keep something private isn't a hostile act... wanting to know something that somebody was trying to keep private can be, however.

Your line of reasoning parrots those who would say that if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide...

Except that almost everyone *DOES* have something to hide. Not because they've done anything wrong, but because they have things that are private or personal.

... That even *IF* we could, however hypothetically, completely trust the government to not abuse the ability to eavesdrop on private conversations, and that the government had absolutely no security leaks whatsoever....

Again, I stress that *EVEN IF* absolutely everything was working exactly as such a government intended...

... it is unavoidably true that if the government has the ability to break your encryption, however altruistic they may claim their intentions to be, then so can the bad guys... people with less benevolent intentions, who will abuse that information, and cause harm to completely innocent parties.

This is because laws don't actually *stop* people from breaking them, they only ensure that something that is considered appropriate punishment will follow when people do. Unfortunately, such punishment cannot always negate the effects of the harm that was done while someone broke the law in the first place.

And again, this is even *IF* their system for eavesdropping on encrypted communications was function as best as they can possibly intend.

So hey, Mr. Cameron.... I can sincerly appreciate that you might have the very best of intentions, but your goals will deprive entirely innocent people of the ability to even have the most rudimentary protections from people that will use the same abilities that the government has, however illegally, to cause very harm to people who have done nothing wrong except to follow a law that says they are not allowed to take precautions against such means.

The difference makes itself up quite quickly only *AFTER* the car is finished being paid for.... The point of getting a loan to buy a car in the first place is to get some immediate benefit for some longer term sacrifice (you pay more money overall)... but paying more money every month for a car that costs more than what you'd pay for a similarly sized conventional vehicle even *after* you factor in the cost of gasoline doesn't offer any immediate benefit at all..

The alternative is to just buy a new car in cash... but not everyone has that kind of money lying around.... even if they haven't bought a vehicle in many years.

FTA:

it shares Wi-Fi passwords with the user's contacts.... Those contacts include their Outlook.com (nee Hotmail) contacts, Skype contacts and, with an opt-in, their Facebook friends

So it seems that it *DOES* send out your wifi password... and I see this as less of a problem for myself, since I am neither a windows user nor do I have a large online social network, than it is for me to let specific people use my wifi while they are visiting my place, since if they have not set their own security settings appropriately, something which I cannot administrate, my wifi password would end up getting propagated to everyone on *THEIR* contacts lists. While they may only be able to use it if they are nearby, that is entirely beside the point.... these would still be people that I did *NOT* authorize to use my network.

There's kind of a difference between storing passwords in clear text on a device that you still need to have physical access to in order to learn what those passwords are and actually broadcasting such passwords to absolutely everyone who happens to have a particular social network connection to you

The study of fourteen popular VPN providers found that eleven of them leaked information about the user because of a vulnerability known as âIPv6 leakageâ(TM).

No.... That has nothing to do with IPv6, it has to do with what those VPN's support. What that statistic really means is that 11 out of fourteen VPN providers don't really support IPv6 in the first place.

The GPL is "viral" in that if you use even a smattering of GPLed code, you are required to release ALL of your code as GPL as well.

Incorrect... Copyright says that you can't legally make a derivative work at all without permission from the copyright holder. The GPL gives people such permission when they agree to abide by its terms. If they don't agree, they don't have permission to do it in the first place, which is the default status for any copyrighted work, anyways.

What's viral about that?

I think you misread my comment... I said that it takes *LONGER* than the duration of the loan for the money saved on gasoline to start to pay for itself in money saved compared to an otherwise comparable ICE vehicle. The example you gave, a Prius, which isn't even a full EV and requires you to still use gasoline, still costs nearly twice as much as some other new cars of similar size and quality. And even if it were a full EV, it would still work out to costing about $600 per month for just a 5 year loan compared to about $350 or so for a Corolla, for instance. The difference in monthly costs for the first five years being more than what you would spend on gasoline in that amount of time with a car of that size anyways. Saving money every month on gasoline doesn't really carry a whole lot of weight when the increased price of the car makes your monthly payments larger than what you would otherwise spend on a typical car *PLUS* gasoline.

I assumed that we were talking about new cars here... since the issue at hand is price disparity between EV's and conventional automobiles. Not very many people buy brand new cars without getting a loan.

The problem with EV's that cost so much more initially is that it typically takes longer then the duration of the loan you would get for the car before it starts to pay for itself... so your monthly payments on the car are even more than what you would be spending on a conventional automobile *including* gasoline.

This is a self fixing problem

You are right... in the sense that after a sufficient number of generations have passed with people expecting that the next generation will take care of it, the depleting resources of the world will be incapable of supporting what by that time will be a vastly larger population at what would be considered a modern level of industrialization... People will die because resource distribution won't meet people's needs, and all but the richest of our descendants will end up living much like people used to in the 16th or 17th centuries... without any ability to develop technology any further because there won't be enough resources left to do it.

So yeah... it's a self-correcting problem, as long as your idea of a good future for our society is having almost everyone live like the Amish.

... where people could sign up to be drivers for people who wanted to share rides to work during rush hour commutes.

It was expected that passengers would at least be willing to compensate drivers for gasoline used, but there was also a general practice of passengers giving drivers an honorarium for their time, typically once every other week or so. The latter of these two was not actually permitted to be demanded by the driver, but it was still a general practice among club members, so in the long run, it was still profitable for a driver.

When I first saw Uber, I at first thought it that it was basically the same thing... Can someone explain why Uber can be against the law when the aforementioned carpool club was not?