So, in order to prevent the whole thing from crashing down, there has to be a safety margin of extra ribbon above GEO, meaning some extra tension in the wire, even at ground level. That barge can't be too light-weight, or else it'll turn into a space-barge...

Actually, pulling up is much worse than pressing down... The cable would just rip the foundation out from the bedrock. So you'd need to drill really deep to suitably anchor this beast.

But beta still sucks...

... and in an open plan office, your nosy neighbour on the other side of the cupboard still overhears you call...

If people behave in such a way, they'd be vulnerable anywhere (cybercafé, airport, hotel or even at home (thanks to the many router vulnerabilities)), not just at their place of work. Microsoft, and Microsoft-induced behavior carry security risks. Deal with it.

However, what sets the workplace situation apart from the other scenarios is that if done properly, the employee would see no warning. Because the IT department included the employer's certificate into the list of roots trusted by the browser.

Obviously, if you used the guest Wifi, you'd use your own device, which would not be infested with the fraudulent root certificate of your employer.

Worse than, the "SSL accelerator" box would now be responsible to check the certificate of the server, in order to be sure that there isn't a second man in the middle further down the road. But the thing is, how would it react if it encountered a bad certificate:

- if it rejects the connection, suddenly lots of low sensitivity sites which just have expired certificates, or which rely on the user to manually verifiy the fingerprint become inaccessible,
- if on the other hand it accepts (or doesn't check in the first place), we have the security issue outlined above.

Many Europeans have accounts at gmail or hotmail. In this case, the email does indeed cross the Atlantic and back.

O, and "creative" routing, as you outlined, does happen often enough too, unfortunately...

But a large contributing factor: ...the outbreak of a great fire in the heart of the city of Boston on November 9th was a disaster. Firemen were reduced to moving all of the necessary firefighting equipment by hand, and the size of the fire in this particular incident did not allow for such slow movement to be effective. The firefighting sans horse power was so ineffective that the fire raged on to become one of the worst disasters in the history of the city. Reports indicate that the blaze killed 13 people, destroyed 776 buildings, and caused $75 million in damages – the current equivalent of roughly $3.5 billion.