That's thinking small. I have fantasies of blowing up the entire Ministry of Education with a TTC subway car laden with explosives, on November Fifth, wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, playing the 1812 overture.

This is an entirely original idea, by the way.

As far as I can tell (and correct me if I'm wrong) these systems merely inspect public data on the Internet, as any ISP (or perhaps even individual) could, so the only people who should be affected are those who make false and foolish assumptions of security. Obviously, nothing is safe on the Internet in the clear, but it seems to me that this system could well be thwarted by encryption and proxy.

This is part of the reason that OSS is better than closed-source competitors - the bugs are widely-known, and therefore can be more readily fixed.

This is also part of the reason that the quality of OSS is trending upwards.

I thought that I would have to re-design all of my amplifiers.

This is late, yes, but I couldn't resist: http://xkcd.com/553/

Well, I ordered a new computer in a cardboard case on my mother's credit card, and wound up grounded, so there's no worry.

Several hundred dollars, not worth the Windows Genuine Advantage (tm)? Gasp! Surely you jest.

5. A plethora of linux distibutions affords a user a great freedom of choice.

There, fixed that for you.

One simply must consider which distribution fits one's needs, and make a decision. I have done so on several occasions and I regret it not.

Seconded. I am the hacker type, but I generally need a gentle introduction to any particular program or system, before I can become proficient with it. Good tutorials would be especially helpful - highly in-depth technical documentation is useless if I can't tell a widget from a dongle.

Specifically, this applies to source code documentation - one of the key advantages of open source is serviceability, since the source is, er, open (go figure). However, often one has no idea in which file or directory to find a particular function or piece of code, or how it works, or what it in turn uses, &c. Comments are nice, but real, dedicated documentation (like the Documentation directory in the Linux kernel tree, say) would be nicer.

Point. Any browsers included on the ballot would gain the same distinct advantage that IE had, albeit to a lesser degree.

Which, being licenced under the GPL or some other such free software licence, is also my version.

By the way, this is from Microsoft - as in, the company who employs this guy. Still, I suppose there is no accounting for (sexual) taste.

Gasp! Edison surely rolls in his grave. Knights of Direct Current, Unite!

Silence the Alarms, I say.

While I am generally quite wary of anything which may invade my privacy, in this case, I am not terribly concerned. Everyone seems to be working themselves into a righteous frenzy over what amounts essentially to a trifle. With no warrant, this bill only allows the acquisition of specific pieces of general information such as name and address, for which there is no reasonable expectation of confidentiality - indeed, little more than could be expected from a telephone directory. A telephone directory is not a wiretap. Likewise, this bill would not allow the acquisition of content without a court order. That said, I am not completely indifferent as to the passing of this bill - I believe that, as always when privacy is concerned, we should proceed cautiously, but not immediately and indignantly strike this bill down as an affront to our privacy.

If you are worried, try:
- IPsec
- Tor
- SSH
- SSL
- GnuPG
etc, etc.

P.S. Mr. Van Loan: A rotary telephone sits atop my desk. I use it regularly.

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