Personality disorders, like, extreme anti-government paranoia? Or confusing basic regulations for Stalinist policies?

The problem with the "free market" is it isn't free -- the big players have made sure that nobody will ever be able to compete with them thanks to lock-ins, onerous penalties on contracts, and other anti-competitive measures. Not to mention the billions of dollars necessary to start a cell phone service on a national level.

"Free markets" are a myth; you either have regulation or monopoly. Neither of which are very desirable, but that's the way things work outside an Ayn Rand book.

In related news, the same body has approved a special security packet encapsulator consisting of pigmented lipids that bond the rolled packet together, with a special imprinted signature to establish non-deniability of the transmitter and ensure the packet has not been intercepted and examined by third parties.

The standard was submitted for approval in '02.

That is, 0002.

I think Adblock may do more harm than good. With all the major browsers moving towards HTML 5, advertisers will have many more opportunities to inject intrusive advertising into web content with simple CSS commands. We have already seen CSS-layer popups that require JavaScript to be enabled to make them go away -- which then allows the other ads to display.

At some point these industries have to make money, and they only make money from advertising. There has to be a decent middle ground here.

The problem is that we are basing our species' survival on a resource that was already formed when the dinosaurs first showed up. "Market forces" tend to be more like collapses and disasters, rather than gradual shifts. I think I would rather transition to renewable energy smoothly, than Use the Market Force, Luke. Because there definitely is a Dark Side to it.

Cowboynealium?

Same here. At $89, SpinRite is a bit on the pricey side, but I have recovered data from hard drives that I thought I had zero chance of saving. I figure since it saved hundreds of dollars in labor -- several times -- it was worth every penny. Especially in those circumstances where your highly paid datacenter techs thought it was a great idea to construct a RAID 5 from all identical hard drives from the exact same manufacturer lot. Sucks when two of those drives experience the exact same fault within a few minutes of each other. Fortunately I was able to whip out SpinRite and save the day, because otherwise we were looking at days and days of restoring from incremental backup tapes.

It's an ancient-looking DOS command-line utility, but I definitely give props to Steve Gibson for keeping SpinRite up to date to where it works on modern hard drives. $89 versus days and days of overtime pay for IT guys -- it certainly made me look pretty good come performance review time.

Rule #1 is:
Security through obscurity isn't.

Rule #2 is: Making a huge stink about your private neighborhood against a well-liked company like Google will probably mean you're going to get a lot more attention than if you just let well enough alone.

Think about people in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Ohio, etc -- they need those over-the-air TV signals for severe weather warnings starting in April or so. The TV is often the difference between life and death in Tornado Alley. So if people are stuck without the money to buy a converter, then by all means, let's give them a bit more time. It's not like DTV hasn't taken off.

In the long term, I think Time-Warner has the upper hand here. Viacom is wanting Time-Warner to pay a significant chunk of more money to carry its commercial-laden content. If Viacom is unable to fund itself through these constant deluges of crass commercials, then perhaps Viacom needs to find itself a better revenue stream. Squeezing the pipe that actually delivers the eyes that the advertisers are wanting to get in front of is not a good idea. TWC owns the pipe, Viacom simply owns the content. Which one is more valuable? Considering how digital on-demand style services are taking off, I think Viacom is playing a dangerous game here. TWC can afford to lose a few channels for a while much more than Viacom can afford to lose ad revenue due to 13+ million eyes disappearing overnight.