There are plenty of current businesses that make a profit off of private data. However, something is only private if you keep it private. Credit agencies thrive off of the exposure of your information whenever you apply for any kind of credit.

So what is the limit of cars you can send around listening to unencrypted WiFi packets? You seem to think it takes a "fleet" to make it illegal. If it takes just one car, then can I be arrested for doing it in my personal car? What about a fleet of vehicles with directional audio recorders to listen to people in their house? What about one car doing that? What about a person standing in the street with an audio recorder?

Where is your line? And make sure the definition of that line isn't some 100 page document that no one understands that has 5000 loopholes.

I would think even the most evil a people would leave the first footprint untouched. As well as the flag. But anything else? Who cares. Maybe leave the golf ball in orbit (if it still is).

A mobile website typically has completely different usability requirements than a tablet/desktop website. People that try and pack a website into a phone shouldn't be making mobile websites. The business analyst should assume that someone on a phone is on the move and doesn't have an attention span longer than 10 secs or at most 1 min.

You are probably correct, but you left out a step. "When he asked people" includes some White House polling service. It was determined that X% of Dems and Y% of Repubs agree. It also show that Z% of people ages 25-35 agree, while A% of people ages 50-60 agree. After all this, it was seen as a "Good Thing" and minimal negative impact, and so it was made public.

This is how much overhead there is on something so simple and basically common sense.

You think State governments are more corrupt than the Federal government? Really? Do you think County and Municipal governments are even more corrupt? Are the parents of a family the most corrupt of all? Just curious...

I have used Linux for 13 years now. I don't want to build stuff myself like when I was running Gentoo. I don't want to "./configure && make". I have contributed to mythtv code myself and like to have nightly/binightly builds so I can contribute to the testing for the developers.

MythBuntu provides more than the mythtv/mythbackend/mythfrontend packages. It provides a decent configuration UI and other minor integrations/apps that I don't want to deal with. Some of it is useless to me, since I have been running the same basic MythTV configuration for 6/7 years now.

What about those using MythTV? Is there an equivalent of MythBuntu? Or is Mint just for basic desktop/server installs?

That more along the right path. However, I think it will just wind up like the patent industry. APIs will be used as blackmail against each other...effectively crowding out the little guys and startups.

Is that like playing Risk where no one attacks each other? Of course it yields many many more armies and everyone lives in harmony. But it is completely uninteresting and lacks creativity. May as well live without possessions like a Franciscan.

To be fair, Microsoft's lawyers for each case probably wasn't aware of the other case.