*these sites

I also want to add an example: consider it like the game Guess Who?. Knowing the person has glasses may not help you, but once you know it is a male with glasses and no beard suddenly your choices are narrowed significantly.

Yes but alone an IP address gives you a pretty good idea, especially when combined with what sorts of stuff is being visited and behavior on this sites. There may be lots of public networks, but most people still browse the internet at home, with a small number of people on a single IP.

Additionally, as above, these different devices can usually be distinguished from each other by comparing the browser request headers. This gives an additional heuristic to determine who is doing what.

This is a situation where you have a bunch of hints, and any one may not get you that far. However, if you combine the information from all of the available hints, you get a pretty clear picture. The military likes to call this type of situation 'total information awareness.'

I was more thinking people just went to the website. Making a copy of a website and calling it an 'app' never really seemed that useful to me, especially since the limitations on what you can do without a connection are likely to be severe in many applications.

I've never personally used a 'web application,' I go to the website. There is no reason for it to be able to store anything on my local machine; it stores what I tell it in the server session.

Most people seem to expect to need a connection to do anything now anyways. ChromeOS seems to be designed around that idea, that you will always have a way to connect, with the 'offline apps' being really an afterthought to counter potential criticism. After all, Google wants you to be online all the time so they can track you and serve you ads, right?

If you are at work or at school, probably. But not at home...at least not with the biggest ISPs available in my area (and most of the US at least).

He also doesn't use an alarm clock or a watch anymore, despite the fact that cell phones in 2005 were just as capable at displacing those functions as they are today. He simply chooses not to use them now.

Ham radio cannot be used for any commercial purpose. If a commercial spaceflight pilot could use it as their main communication channel, then every other company could use it by some similar logic. Then things would just degenerate to a war to see who had the most powerful transmitter or something. It would be bad.

Your IP address and browser request header makes it easy to correlate your travel across several sites. As long as you do anything with that IP ever that ties to you, they've got you. With many ISPs, your IP can last for months.

"Web application" with an "offline mode"?? People actually use those?!?!

Nope. Judges have absolute immunity for anything they do from the bench. This even applies when the judge's actions were malicious. Check out Stump v. Sparkman if you want to make yourself sick.

I don't have a right to forbid people from tossing crap on my property? If I tell them I don't want it and they should not drop it there, they are trespassing.

This is equivalent to saying that someone is allowed to sit in my living room and yell about their political views, and I can't tell them to leave, because their speech is protected. The 1st amendment does not provide a defense for trespass.

A typical solution to this 'problem' would be to require a license, predicated on a series of vague requirements, with broad discretionary authority for rejection. That way it could be ensured that only proper cronies gain access.

Perhaps the law actually says "reasonable articulable suspicion"? That is an existing standard for searches, like a Terry Stop.

As usual: one rule for the state, and one rule for the peons. They just forgot to add exemptions for their pals in certain industries.

Ack! The 'passcode' on the ones on the website is a mere numeric pin. This essentially guarantees that if someone steals the unit and removes the drive/memory chip(s) etc, brute forcing of the pin will be trivial. I might give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they know this is just a minor obstacle to stop non-technical thieves, except their pages are plastered with the phrase "military grade." They even have pictures of people in camo uniforms using it.

The false sense of security from such a device is extremely dangerous!

Nah, I was actually talking about the "mainstream acts." I know there is, and probably always will be, quality stuff being put out by lesser known folks.