The difference is, religions typically believe their "creator was, and always has been". OP (I believe) realizes that humans evolved without a "divine touch" and is talking about a possible next step in evolution. Just because "nature" doesn't make it happen, doesn't make it any less significant. We are a product of nature and evolution after all.

The salt also (helps) prevent the use of rainbow tables. Most organizations don't want to force their users to memorize 20+ character passwords. So they set the password limit to 8-16 characters. Normally, a rainbow table with computed values for 8 character passwords would work on _some_ users' passwords. Now add in the salt. If your salt is a 20 character string on its own, the attacker would need to have rainbow tables computed (for at least) 28 character passwords; a feat exponentially harder than 8. Or at least that's what my Sesame Street security has taught me.

Data and voice operate independently of one another. While 3G/EDGE service may be disrupted it won't affect end-users' abilities to make calls over GPRS. And while it may further reinforce AT&T's point that their end-users gobble "too much" bandwidth, the publicity that it could generate would be a nice way of sticking it to yet another corporation that enjoys selling "limited-unlimited".

It IS somehow special now.

While it's true anyone can walk by and see a house, thereby making the outside public, not all houses have the same expected "audience". For example, I live in Chicago. I have zero expectations of privacy on the outside of my unit, because I'm surrounded by 3 million other people.

However, if I move to a tiny town of 20,000 people, I expect the total number of "views" that my house gets will drop substantially. There's an expectation that on a given day, I might not have more than 5 people look at my home. With your home posted online, it becomes trivial for millions of people to see it almost instantly.

I think people concentrate too much on public vs. private, without taking into account the fact that privacy is not binary.

I'm not for censoring data on the web, but it certainly makes sense why some people are, I think justifiably, upset by this. The barrier to to home viewing has dropped from people driving over (for say a fair or special event) to simply clicking (because your house's address got published on Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc.).

I agree completely, but... Arresting her??? Suspension, detention, loss of "citizenship points" I can see. But really, calling in a police officer and arresting her? By your own example, you would have a student passing notes in class taken out in HANDCUFFS??? Even if she "refused" to stop, you wouldn't arrest her. That's what a principal's office is for. I don't know, maybe I'm just old fashioned...

Really? I know this is /. but come on...

Possibly. Personally, as much as I love Apple (and hate censored music/movies), I'd rather save the $0.36 and manually drop the track into iTunes. Thirty six cents seems a bit much for a click and drag, IMO. But hey, that's just me.