Because it's not secure enough unless they can put a "DoD home grown and raised" sticker on it.

It's fat, white actors all the way down, son.

Content is more important to you. To the companies providing the content, however, money made off your intake of the content is worth the sacrifice of screen real estate.

>consumer protection laws
Clearly you are not familiar with America.

Sooooooo...H.264 needs to be the standard because it's the standard? Your argument is kinda cyclical. IE6 used to be the ubiquitous. used to be acceptable to use. Why aren't they anymore? Because something better came along. Tech isn't good just because it's universally supported. It just makes it hard to transition away from.

Pretty much, as long as you could change the front-end to use some other VOIP protocol other than Skype. In fact, what I'd like to see is something like Pidgin for VOIP. Transparent support for many protocols. Then you can just have your contact list of friends and call them, regardless of what they use.

So....you're saying that the aircraft is going to be vulnerable to anti-aircraft missiles. Stop the presses.

Really. If the blimp can be built cheaper than an airplane/UAV, and cover loads more area, then it getting shot down would be unpleasant, but a loss less expensive than losing a plane, its fuel, its weapon payload, its pilot, and so on.

Although technically what you present as an average slashdotter's mindset is true, it's an oversimplification. Music piracy is condoned or at least given more leeway because it's largely the symptom of a bigger problem, that being copyright and DRM asshattery where a user who pays for music ends up unable to use it for whatever reason.

ID theft, though, is simply theft and exploitation of others for profit.

At least, that's how I see it.

I was getting into the whole suggestion, but halfway through, I realized something.

At least in America (I'm not very familiar with court systems around the world), there's the whole legal system of "innocent until proven guilty" and the fifth amendment and such. This means that even if you DO have an encryption program installed, until the prosecution can present sufficient evidence that you're storing child porn within some encrypted volume, you can't be asked to give up your password, or even charged with possession.

The futility of this guy's talk is, if you're NOT in a court system where you're innocent until proven guilty, whether it's some backwater third world nation or some secret prison camp in the U.S., whether or not you've got a super stealthy encryption tool, if the Bad Guys think you've got state secrets hidden on your laptop, they're gonna break your bones until you tell them where the secrets are hidden. All in all, it'll be futile. You're fucked whether or not you've got the secrets.

Amen. Nobody seems to understand that we (at least in America) live in a hugely capitalistic society, and that means that we as the consumer hold IMMENSE power. It's all well and good to buy an ipod and then write to Apple complaining about DRM, but that doesn't mean much, because they've got your money already.

Exercise your capitalistic rights to control the market.

tl;dr ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWAH