If the government can listen in, so can all the other "bad guys". I want tech that solves the problems, not laws. All government needs to do is move out of the way and stop proposing dumb things like outlawing strong encryption.

And again, my media PC combined with torrents is still better. It can already play 4k videos. Don't have to buy any new hardware, don't have to re-buy movies I've already bought. Don't have to worry about the kids breaking the disk. Don't have to worry if that disk you bought in Europe will work back in the States. DVDs were a large upgrade from VHS, the next step is better digital distribution. Blue-ray and UHD are just stepping stones to them realizing physical media is dead.

Give me a digital distribution system that will work even if the company goes out of business. One that I allows me to backup the media. One that allows for offline storage so I can watch when I don't have internet. One that works on all platforms. One that I can re-download the file if I do lose it. The only thing that satisfies all of that is DRM free files. Until they provide that, torrents will still win.

The question shouldn't be if they can legally do it. The question should be why is this type of interception even possible without the cooperation of the phone company? If they can do it, so can the "bad guys".

Keep the kids longer and don't send homework.

For many children, success in school depend on 1-on-1 help with homework. In many households, parents are not able to provide that help due to work schedule or their own lack of education. Depending on homework seems to disproportionally affect children living in poor, uneducated households. Those children grow up less educated and end up with a lower paying job, so when they have children of their own, the cycle continues.

A great example of this is the very debate over "the core curriculum". The debate's loudest voices are from parents that just don't understand what the new methods are trying to accomplish. The parents all agree their child should be taught math, so the debate should be between educators on *how* to do it. I guarantee you that there would be next to no debate if parents were not asked to help with homework. If we limit what we teach to what all parents understand, then we're done. Turn the lights off and crawl back into our caves.

They tried to charge me for not returning my own modem as well

Same thing came to mind

Google Wallet still has limited usefulness. NFC payments are still only supported on a tiny fraction of Android users, using a custom build of the wallet app not available in the Google play store. Only some phone distributors are given access to this custom build. My phone has android 4.4, NFC support, and Google wallet installed, but I can't do NFC payments. How do they expect to compete like that?

Canceled Comcast internet and got a letter in the mail a few weeks later saying they were withholding my prorated refund check until I returned their modem. I have never own one of their modems and have never been billed for one of their modems. That took 2 hours on the phone to get straight.

What about your username and password? Blocking TLS also sends your credentials in plaintext.

"Proper" sounds dogmatic to me. If you want to focus purely on health, there are tons of studies out how a vegetarian diet is better for you. I take it you don't like green beans? This article from the other day seems relevant, http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Meat will make you sick if you haven't eaten it in a while

Vegetarian sister lost tons of weight because they couldn't just give her a damn apple. She had to find other inmates willing to trade their portion of veggies for her meat.

Chop the finger off and burn it. Better than some sentences that could be handed out.

There are tons of reports (just google them) of the server side cpu load being minimal to encrypt traffic. My guess is either the load balancing setup they have doesn't support SSL or their 3rd party ad network doesn't.

In general, I think sites don't support https because of a) the extra cost of a cert, b) they don't care, c) the extra cost of a dedicated IP (SNI isn't supported on IE on XP). You can say "screw XP" all you want, but a good 20% still (of at least my traffic) comes from IE on XP.

I'm aware. I used some random site I found on google that displays my sent headers.