Everything you "own" is protected by a government enforced monopoly over that item - why are the laws which protect your stuff better than the laws which protect other peoples stuff?

Problem with sat based transmissions is that they require decent weather, otherwise you are out of luck.

The problem is that over large tracts of water, transmission range is a huge issue - turning back aircraft traveling toward the US over the Atlantic or Pacific oceans on 9/11 was very problematic because they were out of radio range and the long range communication system had no guarantees on ability.

The maintenance data stream is also incredibly restricted by bandwidth, so a continuous audio stream at a fidelity which can cover voices in the cock pit *and* instrument activation noises (something people talking about CVR use often miss), you are talking about a data stream that often isn't viable.

Check out the 60 Minutes story on Luxottica. Oh man, what a racket.

Except Apples drivers for Windows are really bad, not fully featured and they regularly deprecate versions of Windows on their kit for no reasons - for instance Windows 8 on 2006 Quad Core Mac Pros with 16GB ram, or indeed any 64bit install of Windows on that hardware will cause Bootcamp to say "nope", despite it working perfectly well.

You are completely misrepresenting the point. It is not claimed or supposed to be cheaper than Big Ag. Read the summary - the stated appeal is: "access to open space, verdant fields and fresh food...To be able to walk down the street with my kids and get fresh, healthy food is amazing." Where did you pull "cheaper" out of that? This one-track mindset is so pervasive we have become blinded to it.

The Guardian link is reporting on a likely confirmation of gravitational waves. But the seismograph study seems to be ruling them out, at least near the frequency of 1 hz. They made a new, more sensitive detection mechanism and found nothing, thus ruling out the existence of any wave above a very low energy level. Am I missing the point?

If I really want to tell the cops to shut off all of their cameras, I'm sure they will be happy to oblige.

The results dispute your claim:

I know this is difficult for one-track minds like this AC to understand, but many issues are in fact nuanced and complex. Shockingly, law appears to be one of those. Just to name a single example: data retention laws. They vary by jurisdiction.

I have always wondered how they handle heavy users, like if they allow commercial use, or if there is an unpublished cap. You could imagine somebody running a rural general store on it, or one kid at a dorm charging hundreds of others to use his Prime account for $2 a pop.

As someone who runs NoScript, Adblock Plus and various other user scripts, I think it's a good thing to be able to take control over your own experience. It's good not to be passive. It's good to see only what you want to see. The more people do this, the more these companies have to comprehend that this is the nature of the network in which they have chosen to participate. The Web would lose most of its appeal to me if it were entirely corporate controlled like television.

What's really sad is that other mediums like television, radio, and periodicals are one-to-many, heavily centralized, and don't include such great control over what you see. They're package deals that require you to accept the crap along with the content and are often not worthwhile.

I use startpage.com myself. I like the idea of getting actual Google search results without any sort of Google tracking. They don't even log your IP address and they're outside of US jurisdiction.

By the way I hope our federal legislators appreciate that. I hope they are proud that now, "outside of US jurisdiction" has become a selling point.

The satcom device does not have to have been on the aircraft.