And this helps our corporations how, exactly?

Go read Peter Gutmann's X.509 Style Guide if you want to cry. If that doesn't work, try implementing an ASN.1 library from scratch.

I'll take SSH and SPKI any day over the X.509/TLS mess.

That's possible, but easier said than done, and would require fundamental changes to the way the justice system operates. Who would prosecute the case? The Crown (government), whose agents were the ones who violated the person's rights in the first place? The judge? Our rules of procedure aren't set up to handle prosecution from the bench---who would be the disinterested arbiter, then?

The Canadian courts have overlooked rights violations in criminal cases before, under the grounds that to dismiss the case would bring the justice system into disrepute (i.e it would be really, really bad). In this case, if all the guy did was to access child porn online, then there's a good chance that whether he is punished or goes free, the number of abused children won't change. Child porn law is like tax law. If one guy doesn't pay his taxes, it doesn't really make a difference, but the country is in big trouble if lots of people don't pay their taxes, so we prosecute those who don't pay their taxes.

Now, if he were directly producing the child porn, it might be a different story.

Uh...

If I could have an IPv6-only network with a SOCKS proxy or NAT-PT for v4 connectivity, I'd love it. IPv4 is such a pain to administer.

People like you are best ignored.

Sole dissenters? Quiz: How many bit-per-second in a 1.544 Mbps DS1 line? Or a 64 kbps telephone signal? Or a 100 Mbps Ethernet line?

SI didn't pop into existence out of thin air. The cgs system of units "goes back to a proposal made in 1832 by the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss." The Turing machine was described in 1937, and Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" was published in 1948.

Also, people in digital communications always used base-10 units, anyway. A 64 kbps data line is 64,000 bits per second, and so on.

No, it wasn't. It meant, variously: 1000 bytes, 1024 bytes, 1000 bits, 1024 bits, or "approximately 1000 bits/bytes". There was also the goofiness that if you transferred at 64 kbps for 10 seconds, you ended up with 62.5 kb, and when you formatted your 10 GB hard drive, you ended up with only 9.3 "GB" of space.

It confuses ordinary people for no good reason.

Boo hoo. It's part of the cost of doing business. With me, anyway.

Oh, I was wondering: Is it true that the German Wikipedia doesn't have non-free material? I don't speak German (are their policies listed anywhere in English?) but the Veganism parable suggests that the "fair-use rationale" thing only exists on the English Wikipedia.