Until you know everything that is going to go into it and more importantly the usage patterns that are common, you can't determine energy consumption.

Until you know the realistic energy consumption you can't determine what size battery to put into it to give a runtime of at least X hours.

Can I get your SSN, bank account numbers and e-mail passwords?

Hmm, this person is hiding these details from me, he must be doing something wrong...

Just so I understand your point, which person is being identified by the wifi cafe's public ip address? Assuming the ISP keeps those type of logs, which person is being identified by the public address given by your ISP?

"Personally Identifiable Information (PII), as used in information security, is information that can be used on its own or with other information to identify, contact, or locate a single person, or to identify an individual in context" - This is the definition from wikipedia, if you are happy with this definition then all of the above case are quite valid as they fail to identify a single person.

I am aware that the wikipedia page points to a NIST document that identifies ip addresses as PII but a read of the actual NIST document shows the circumstances under which such an conclusion is reached (example 2 on page 22). It revolves around having the equivalent of a domain access system (or at the very least 802.1x) which keeps track of all ips and which users were logged into them at the times which allow ip data to be co-related (typical of an enterprise network). Both NAT and an unlogged DHCP server break those assumptions (even if the DHCP server is logged the mac can still be spoofed, something not easily doable in an enterprise environment).

Google is the only company that violates your privacy?

A bit late for that IMHO...

I can't find the article now but didn't either one of these PVR services or a music storage service get in trouble over de-dup?

If memory serves, the court ruled that because it was reading exactly the same locations & sequence of bytes for all the users with the same file it equated to a public performance.

Yes, its called Reverse path forwarding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_path_forwarding for this specific case you would want the unicast version (uRPF).

The concept boils down to a simple question,

"I just got a packet from A.B.C.D on interface ethX, if I had to send a packet to A.B.C.D would I use ethX?"

If the answer is yes, then the packet goes along its merry way. If the answer is no, then the packet is most likely spoofed and is dropped.

The performance impact is negligible as such lookups for the destination are already fully optimized by ASICs (hence a cisco 7600 with a measly 300Mhz processor can still route gigabit at wire speed), multi-path is a non-issue (assuming a non-brain dead implementation) as if multiple paths exist the answer to the question would still be yes as long as it came from one of the valid paths.

There might be valid reasons for asymmetric traffic which may prevent this from being universally deployed (say some satellite providers which only send download via satellite and upload is over something else) but for the vast majority of ISPs its safe to deploy.

At the ASN level each ISP is assigned a block of ips, if you are not a transit its a simple matter of just filtering to ensure nothing leaving your network is saying otherwise. Once you hit transit links both this scheme and RPF lose their power as depending on the failure almost any transit link can be a valid path. For such a scheme to work it has to be implemented as close to the end point as possible (which is the general structure of the Internet, intelligence sits near the edge where traffic volumes are reasonable, core is dedicated to just high speed movement of traffic).

Probably won't have to manually add them, someone at Prenda has to have gone to the blogs and seen something they don't like and would have only gotten worse as more people in the company go to the blog to see what all the fuss is about so their ips are most likely there already.

a) If I were a medical practicioner and thought this about one of my patients, I'm not going to show them their records until I got the big guys with the straight jacket on hand and a restraining order done up (not like that going to stop a nutjob, but it helps to have some legal footing).

b) So telling someone you think is lying to you that you think they are lying to you seves what purpose other than to give them feedback that they are not doing a good enough job of lying?

The parts of your medical record I have no issues with are in the hands of your insurance company, the raw facts of what was done and what where the results / outcomes of tests / procedures performed.

Maybe you should read the lead up to this... the patient refused to see anyone else. Given that "their" doctor was not there (he retired so it wasn't just a case of calling him / her in), the only other conculsion I see would have been to turn him away with no treatment (something that goes against the very core of the medical profession, I'm also quite sure the doctors involved aren't proud of having to trick the patient).

I'd understand the explanation if they offer a course of treatment. If you want a full explanation go become a MD, otherwise the risk will always be there that some part of the chart will be taken out of context.

A counter argument is such full disclosure closes off a very (when practiced correctly) effective course of treatment, I'm sure you know what a placebo is and how it is used. The other way is instead of telling a patient their cholesterol level (for example) is off by 30% you tell them it needs to be corrected by 5% and after whatever time with positive results the number is increased slowly so the patient doesn't feel the stress of having to make a big change all at once (I have no stats to back up this claim but most of these cases I would guess occur after some sort of 'incident' where the patient is already in a state of panic, the other time I would expect such a "talk" would be those lucky times where it is caught before an incident, last thing you want is to induce stress which may become the trigger).

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you haven't had any major work done to your car (guessing oil changes, air filters, and you mention a belt being put on backwards). Dropping an engine to change a transmission is far from a fast job and if you have time to stay by your mechanic for something like that then kudos, I gotta get back to work, can't spend all day at the mechanic.

Also I'd hazzard a guess your mechanic is a small shop as most of the mid-size to bigger mechanic shops I've been to can't allow customers in the working area for safety / insurance reasons.

I was going to say check out the kickstarter page but its in the summary:

'The people making the pen set up a Kickstarter project yesterday with a $30,000 goal.'

The R&D is already done, I'll hazzard a guess it is beacuse the factory isn't going to make 1 or 2 but needs an order of a couple hundred at least.

I don't think thats a fair comparison, the parodied material is not what is being pirated.

The copy of MS Word is being pirated, no questions asked, so MS may have a claim but J. K. Rowling probably won't if you are making a parody off of her works.

There never was a need for sites like TPB, just look at pretty much all the P2P software that preceeded it. eMule, Kazaa, etc never needed a central server to host the equivalent of a torrent. Bittorrent itself is also moving away from the torrent site structure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Distributed_trackers . The reason I believe these features are only now being developed in Bittorrent is most likely because a simpler / easier way existed and the demand for such a feature was not there.

The reason I think people use TPB, et all instead of google is simply the fact that Google is a general purpose search engine. Search for Ironman in Google you get a bunch of different results including wikipedia pages, links to the movie theatres, stuff completely unrelated to the movies / comics like the "Ironman Triathlon", etc. Do the same search in TPB the latest movie is going to be the #1 result the vast majority of the time. Add in little nice-to-haves like "only give me torrents that are being seeded" which is a very simple specialization based on knowledge of the protocol and its usage makes TPB the clear winner in terms of efficiently finding what the user wants.

This takes nothing away from google search as a tool, just that a better tool for this subset of tasks exists and users are simply following the mantra of "Using the best tool for the job".

Question: How much will it cost to oppose the mark? You have to remember this is a non-profit org, this situation is still in the early stages so it may be possible to prevent this from reaching the courts. This assumes someone reasonable at the trademark office....... *thinks about what goes on in the US patent & trademark office*. Oh god they are screwed...