It all comes down to the exact meaning of the word "year" ...

Is this the broken cruise ship fallacy?

Or we could go back to the actual original length, zero years. :-)

Copyright was only ever necessary to protect the publishing and distribution chains, and for most types of entertainment both of those are fast becoming obsolete or trivial depending on your point of view. As artists can increasingly just upload their stuff and have it instantly accessible by their fans, copyright will become a redundant artifact of a bygone era and might as well just be done away with.

Depending somewhat on how screwed up your country's copyright legislation has historically been, copying off the radio or off of a friend's tape isn't copyright infringement because such activity isn't restricted by copyright. The infringing activity is the mass scale redistribution of copyrighted material that we saw happening with the P2P technologies from the early days of the public Internet and on into the present.

Carrier IQ may still be snooping at a level closer to the user, and therefore getting more accurate information.

I have set up my Android browser (Firefox) to use a local proxy which is an ssh tunnel to a trusted web server somewhere. I do this so I can happily use all manner of suspicious open wi-fis at restaurants, hotels and such. (I wouldn't mind running without the ssh tunnel when I'm using mobile broadband from my telcom but switching Firefox back and forth between the two modes is just too impractical.)

In this case, my telcom/ISP wouldn't see my web traffic only by inspecting my packets because they're all ssh traffic. Carrier IQ might still have the actual URLs though if it captures them directly from the web browser.

Wikipedia has, among other things, this to say about the attack on the USS Cole:
"President Bill Clinton declared, "If, as it now appears, this was an act of terrorism, it was a despicable and cowardly act. We will find out who was responsible and hold them accountable". Some critics have pointed out that, under U.S. law, an attack against a military target does not meet the legal definition of terrorism[32] (see: 22 USC para 2656f(d)(2))."

So you are right in what you say, and political leaders tend to hate every single bit of that.

Cattle, wheat and potatoes are selected for being easily harvestable, among other things. Fish, now, well that there could be the beginning of a very nice disaster movie plot! :D

What if your password is "IkilledmywifewithabigwrenchthatIhaveburiedundertherosebushesatmyformeraddress" ?

You are throwing your vote away in any case: no one ever won a national election by one single vote's margin. And if that situation ever even comes close to actually happening it's going to be decided by the courts anyway, not by your one single vote.

You're basically throwing your vote away whether you vote D, R, or third party. So you might as well throw it away on something you actually believe in.

There is a strong tendency for people to want to feel part of the winning side, and such people find great comfort in voting for a party that has about a 50% chance of winning because that gives them a 50% chance of, themselves, "winning" the election. This is silly and irrational and you should resist such an urge.

Kittens?

Oh, you mean land salmon.