We're forced to purchase car insurance with no government-provided option, BY LAW.
How is that a bad thing? You might feel differently when your car is totaled by an uninsured driver, who has no money to pay for your medical bills even if you sue him.
I honestly don't even think IPv6 is needed. We just need recall some of those huge blocks of IP addresses that have been allocated for no good reason and implement NAT/proxies more widely.
NAT requires jumping through all sorts of hoops to try to get back to the host-to-host connectivity that IP used to allow. It's slowing the adoption of things like IPSEC and makes any application that requires peer-to-peer connections a chore to set up. NAT is not a good thing.
Just about every single company uses firewalls nowadays anyway, there is absolutely no reason for them to have huge blocks of IP addresses like they currently do (they don't even use them!).
While I agree that some organizations have many more addresses than they will ever use, firewalls have nothing to do with NAT. Every company *should* use a firewall, of course, but firewalls worked perfectly well before NAT, and they will continue to work after NAT dies a deserved death.
Standard certs do nothing to establish identity. They merely establish that the site is not being spoofed.
Isn't "preventing spoofing" just another way of saying "establishing identity?"
Have they ever advertised against Firefox?
Oh, yes they did!
The magistrate isn't going to care that the contract was too long for your little brain to easily comprehend.
Apparently they do care... that's why the companies are being fined. Contracts require a "meeting of the minds" and an unreadable EULA should hardly qualify.
Congress shall make no law
... abridging the freedom ... to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
I assume this is the part you're referring to, but I don't agree with your interpretation. I don't think petitioning "the government" in this case means that harrassing one government official in particular is necessarily Constitutionally protected behavior.
If Thompson's bill was worth supporting before, then his bill should still be worth supporting after annoying e-mails, spam or for all I care: murder.
Clearly you don't understand how the Senate works. Bills need support to pass, regarldess of their content. People make deals to support each other's bills. Having friends in your court is crucial if you want to get anything passed. Is this right? Maybe not, but that's how it is, and it's not exactly a secret. For more information, I suggest reading Fight Club Politics, available at your local library.
"But all that means is that the CAN-SPAM act isn't the appropriate law to attack him with: instead, the Senator should just go for plain-old harassment" did you not understand, dumbass?
I think the part he was actually responding to was "Spam is commercial email. This is email about a pending legislative action, and thus Jack Thompson has the right to send it because he has a right to free speech." Spam isn't necessarily commercial, and no he doesn't. The fact that the CAN-SPAM act in particular may not apply doesn't change the widely accepted definition of spam.
"What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry Pournelle, about space flight
