The significance of this development is probably not obvious unless you have ever been to Japan. Vending machines there are absolutely everywhere. Whether you're in the city, some suburb outskirt, a picturesque country side village, or even halfway up some random mountain, the nearest roadside vending machine is rarely more than a few stone throws away.

Since Asahi is one of the big players in the market, this could be made into a huge WiFi mesh.

1) Deprecate SSL in favor of a web of trust; a decentralized pool of user verifiable certifiers as mentioned before on this site.
2) Use the above to encrypt all your web sites.
3) Watch as the concept spreads and a significant percentage of personal content on the web is encrypted as such, after which businesses and browser makers follow through by popular demand.
4) See the old status quo become deprecated. Meanwhile, all countries filtering this "illegal technology" see their internet go stale, and eventually give in to an increasingly discontent populace.

Of the above (1) and especially (2) face the worst odds, but they're also the points where you, Slashdot nerds, have the greatest power to make a difference.

Whether it's the flash player doing something silly or mplayer going or leaving full screen, occasionally the proprietary nvidia driver crashes, and I don't understand why X then lets my entire system crash with it. Nothing responds (except sometimes my mouse movements). That should not be possible. It's 2011, dammit, modular coding practices should be in place by now. [/rant]

He might be Dutch. They always make this mistake when writing in English, because in Dutch both 'then' and 'than' is written as 'dan' (i.e. in Dutch there's no syntactical distinction between the two). I bet they make this mistake so often on the internets that they're increasingly confusing native English speakers.

Finally I can look forward to returning to my hometown...

Yeah... he really gave it away by jamming "best possible tools" and "Silverlight" into the same sentence, didn't he?

Uh, no. The Chinese government will just block everything but their own mandated and back-doored encryption alternative to SSL?

Wait for the Chinese population to be as economically dependent on e-commerce as we are (which will happen very soon with widespread broadband availability). That will make it seem very unreasonable for the government to outlaw SSL without a major outcry from its populace. After that, the world should gradually move to make http over SSL the norm rather than the exception. Webmasters of the world, I'm looking at you. Let's see if the "great firewall" can handle that proficiently.

This. Spend time and energy chasing the fantasies of the gullible, and you'll be seen as lending credence to their beliefs, while you're chances of success are as good as trying to disprove the existence of a god. Zero.

Umm, what about Shigeru Miyamoto?

Ahh, wait, no, his head would be built out of sprites.