It sounds like every single individual like you needs to start filing small-claims cases against MS. Let them deal with several thousand of those, where the money imbalance won't matter so much.

I agree that what you describe makes "consent" useless, but you don't necessarily need to outlaw it.

Just require that:
- any commercial entity that stores information on individuals (with NO exceptions whatsoever) has to provide said individuals a full dump of the data once per some time period upon request, with no conditions or cost attached, along with a list of everyone they've given it to.
- the entity must correct any incorrect information, and can't distribute any information regarding an individual until the errors are corrected.

Not perfect, but it would be a start.

Actually, if you're mailing passwords, send the FUTURE passwords. Then once you've verified that the copies have reached the recipients unmolested, change the passwords to what you sent.

Overcharging for maintenance, and conveniently collecting large numbers of scummy sales droids into one location where they can normally be avoided.

I think the best use might just be to eliminate range anxiety. Take your Tesla example - replace 100kg worth of Li-ion battery with 100kg of this new one. Now you have 4/5 the easily rechargeable range (which is still more than most people need on a daily basis), but, as long as the Al battery is stable long term, if you run down the Li-ion, or need to take a long trip, you can keep going. All without increasing the overall weight.

Apple calls it "retention," the rest of us call it "vendor lock-in."

Yeah... note to self: All the good engineers are going to leave, so all of GM's future cars are probably going to be well-described by all the forbidden words.

It could also be a grid engineer's best friend. You just have to change the way you think about it - the cars would be a *massive* local storage resource. The VAST majority of people are just going to be plugging their cars in overnight at home, and starting with a full "tank" every morning. I could imagine a system where, once electric cars are ubiquitous, most parking lots and cars would be designed so that when you park, your car just automatically gets hooked into the local grid. You set some parameters on the car for min/max charge levels and buy/sell price limits, and suddenly you don't have to worry so much about demand spikes. Demand goes up, the price/kWh goes up, and once it starts passing the "sell" threshold of the local automobile population, they start discharging into the grid. You just tell the car "keep at least X% charge so I can get home." If I show up nearly empty, and there's 1000 other cars in the lot mostly full, they could charge mine without ever making demands on the grid.

Actually, no. The problem is, they race by, stop, and then are in your way as you cruise up to the green light, causing you to have to slow down/stop anyway.

Well, if you're encrypting, it means the keeper of the data isn't supposed to know what it is, which means they can't do any data mining, selling, etc. of it anyway, which would be where the ability to do queries on the data would be useful. If you're encrypting everything, then all you need is to be able to find the records, and you could use hashed account names or something to index those.

So yes, it would be difficult to search/sort on the encrypted data, but then that's sort of the whole point...

I imagine they'd do something similar to how some of the new suspension bridge cables are designed. The main cables are actually cable bundles, and they're made so that individual strands can be replaced if necessary.

HP has been notorious for doing things like you describe... just proves the GP's point, I think. :)

Exactly... Could be the government or private company, but we just need a law that says no single entity (or parent, sibling or subsidiary entity) can own more than one of physical infrastructure, connectivity, or content generation.

Well, the metering *sort* of makes sense, but really the problem is that ISPs lie like crazy when they sell you a connection.
What they say is "50Mbit for $49.95/mo! **"
** (that you can't use at 50Mbit all the time because it's way oversubscribed)

What they *should* be doing is selling various combinations of guaranteed/burst, so people know what they're actually getting. I have a feeling that "unlimited 50Mbit" really means something more like "512kbit guaranteed, 50Mbit burst."

Actually, it went like this:
Win 95 - crap
Win 95 OSR2 - OK
Win 98 - crap
Win 98SE - OK
Win ME - crap ...