My commiserations. Being Dutch, I felt proud today, because of both of the Dutch Government rejecting ACTA and Neelie Kroes (who is also Dutch) standing up for Net Neutrality. But, I'm also an American, so I find it depressing when I read about how badly the Internet is being treated in the country of its birth. The only things to cheer about are when really bad laws manage to be defeated at the last moment. Still, having spent the first 13 years of my life there, part of me will always want to believe that America is the #1 defender of freedom and democracy in the world.

Intellectually, however, I know that isn't really true anymore and hasn't been for quite some time. More than ever before, America now resembles a plutocracy. Sure, all Americans are equal, but the ones with lots of money are definitely more equal than the rest. Of course, it's still a democracy, so statistically this isn't always reflected in the guy who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but just take a look at Congress: the majority of those folks are there because they agreed to primarily to look after the financial interests of the few (in which case everything else comes a distant second).

Therefore, it's not really a surprise to see the Internet being treated poorly in the good ol' U.S. of A. -- too many Corporations are just not happy with it. They would agree with the Chinese that it affords the common man too much freedom; during arguments, they've even mentioned the Great Firewall of China as an example of how large-scale Internet censorship can also be made to work in America. So, what can we do about it?

The only real solution that I can think of is to tackle the root the problem: to get money out of politics. Take a look at this book. That's one set of solutions; it may not be the best, but nothing less than real campaign finance reform is what Americans should aim for. If successful, I think we can expect American politicians to become rather different animals: ones that will actually be capable of rational thought, finding common ground with their opponents, compromising when necessary and otherwise just plain capable of making good decisions.

That was my thought as well. Keep in mind that IPv6 addresses are often allocated in /64 and /48 subnets, so it's possible that's how the anti-piracy groups will be seeking to block them. Still, even if they attempt to block by the /48, that still leaves thousands of billions of these address ranges in which to hide. But, even with IPv4 it sounds like the TPB has address space to burn.

It's stupid, really. IMO, all that's necessary to end this ridiculous cat and mouse game is for the entertainment industry to offer streaming services to the masses at reasonable prices (per movie/show/series/episode/album/song) and all this bad behavior will be unnecessary on both sides.

Over the air? Wow, do you mean like, with an antenna? I should have mentioned: I live in the Netherlands and for us that option completely disappeared in December 2006. All that's left now are the local cable companies, each of which is a monopolist in its own area. In my city, a basic cable package currently costs $21.61 a month.

To make matters more expensive, some of my favorite programs are only on Comedy Central (part of an extra package that costs $16.34 month) and HBO (another $18.77 a month), which adds up to a total of $56.72 a month. This is almost as much as I pay for my monthly 8/1 Mbps ADSL broadband Internet access ($44,34) and my cheap-o mobile phone subscription ($12.81) combined.

But, maybe whether you think that's cheap or not depends how many hours of TV you watch. At 40 hours a month, that means the privilege of watching my favorite shows legally (including several news programs) costs me $1.42 an hour. That doesn't sound too bad, right?

Perhaps. But my point is that I'm not being offered much choice in this matter either. The local cable company has maneuvered me into paying for their most expensive product package. This about six times as much as we used to pay two decades ago and gets us access to 119 channels with probably thousands of different programs.

However, I'm only interested in maybe 25 programs on 10 different channels over the course of an entire year. Why can't I just buy access to those shows only, and then be allowed to watch them whenever I want? If done properly, this should not have to cost me $1.42 an hour either.

Yet, this scenario seems to have about as much in common with reality as world peace: many of us find it all too easy to imagine, but those in power appear to be dead set against it. Of course, with the Internet in place and all of this being just information, it's no wonder that piracy is so commonplace.

Of course, I'm not the only one who feels this way. It looks like the current TV business model has changed little over the past century (since the dawn of commercial radio), with consumers now being asked to buy packages from their local cable TV providers that are more expensive than ever despite the prevalence of broadband Internet connectivity.

What it comes down to is money and monopoly power. All I want to see probably adds up to a maximum of 10 hours a week, including the news, some sporting events and one or two TV series. Yet, the only way for me to gain access to that specific content legally is to buy a cable subscription, along with one or two supplemental packages, that include dozens of other channels, and hundreds of other program items that I have no interest in. Yet, my only choice is all or nothing, and on top of that those few shows that I am interested in are regularly interrupted by advertisements, which makes the experience a lot less enjoyable.

On the other hand, many people would be more than happy to pay to watch just those shows they want to see via their broadband Internet connections -- and without any advertising. That way also, more of the money would go to the show's producers, who in turn would have a much better idea of how many people were actually watching their show every week. We know consumers want this, because of the huge scale on which TV shows are being pirated and distributed via the Internet. Nevertheless, the only things that consumers can expect to receive directly from the studios today are personal lawsuits regarding their involvement in file sharing networks.

Perhaps getting what we want as consumers will depend on the success of sites like fora.tv, although the prices they ask for access to their content can be pretty steep (e.g. $5 to $25 to watch a single program) -- hardly a strategy likely to make much of a dent in the numbers of people watching Game of Thrones illegally. It seems to me that if an entire season of that series costs $60 million to produce, that HBO could double their money if, at 10 episodes season, 10 million Internet viewers would be willing to pay $1.20 per episode to see it. However, none of the big U.S. studios seem willing to even entertain the idea of giving consumers a choice like that. How come?

True, but an electric car offers the only way to not be tied to any one energy source in particular. Fossil fuels, such as gasoline, will only become more expensive -- that is a certainty. But you can't say the same about electricity, because we will always be finding cheaper ways to generate it. Over the years, for example, the price of electricity from renewable sources, such as solar and wind, has only come down. Also, don't forget that a typical electric motor is far more efficient than even the most efficient internal combustion engine. As the current limitations associated with owning an electric vehicle disappear, so will most people's objections to buying them.

Yet another improvement on an outdated concept. The owners of cars with this type of engine will still be stuck in a the cycle of ever increasing gas prices. These days the only cars that impress me are the ones that offer an affordable escape out of this trap, even if the range is somewhat limited.

Not so fast. I'm not very optimistic about this project ever getting off of the ground either, but the issue that you raise is easily circumvented if most of the mass for the ship comes from a captured asteroid and the whole thing is manufactured and assembled in orbit.

So, when is Johnny Mnemonic going to run into trouble at the airport?

You make the issue seem more confusing than it is.

Several years ago I started a project to set up a Linux environment at a veterinary practice in Amsterdam. It's only a little bit bigger than the Chester County Cat Hospital, but the interesting part is that it's spread out over three geographic locations. The idea was to tie it all together via some decent Internet connections, and have people's accounts and desktops follow them around from location to location while utilizing a distributed file system. I figured a system based on Kerberos, OpenLDAP and OpenAFS was really the only way to go.

Based on that requirement, I went looking for the best Desktop. I tried Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Debian. However, with the first two it soon became obvious that they had been developed primarily to function as SOHO systems for desktop and laptop machines. Yes, the Kerberos, OpenLDAP and OpenAFS packages were there, but it was difficult to get them to work. For example, Ubuntu and Mint alternatives for init, which allows them to start up faster, made things more difficult for me. The network manager was also a pain. Eventually I got it to go, but by that time I realized it wasn't going to be worth the effort.

That left plain old Debian stable (squeeze), which is also what the folks from the Kerberos and OpenAFS projects recommend. I installed Xfce on all of the workstations, so that support for older hardware would not be a problem, as well as a number of other applications, including two DICOM viewers, icedove, iceweasel, OpenOffice and three extra browsers. After the various printing problems had been addressed, everyone was quite happy with it all.

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As for the main topic, I would say that one of the reasons why Linux for the desktop has not taken off is because not enough Linux admins are familiar with Kerberos, OpenLDAP and distributed file systems like OpenAFS. It's one thing to set up a server and a few workstations using NFS, but that doesn't scale well at all. A whole lot more can be achieved using the aforementioned "magic" trio, but it does require more of an effort.

Try explaining that to Larry Wall.

Well, maybe he buy into all of that crap, but it seems he does subscribe to a good deal of it.