The first version of something doesn't work as intended and needs mods. Sounds like every software project I ever worked on.

My name is my personal information and I do not want anyone else knowing it!

And who should write the law on this? Who enforces the law?
I don't think I want the 'International Internet Police' coming to my house to see if I have applied the correct level of security to the passwords stored on my computer.
Hell, I don't want the 'International Internet Police' coming to my house for anything!

I think you might have slightly better hardware now than some years ago.
Load XP today on the same hardware you had years ago and it will run the same as it did back then. The XP bits didn't change to be smaller and faster, your hardware got much faster.

Do you think anyone would know? How many people have real clue how to measure how many kw of electricty they use, or how many gallons of water flow through their house each month?
I have no idea how many gallons of water I actually use, my bill could be off by a factor of 10 and I wouldn't be able to tell.
And truthfully I wouldn't really care, what I care about is if my bill is in line with others that appear to use the same as me.
They can call the units anything they want to call them as long as I can get a reasonable estimate of how much more my bill will go up when I use twice as much..

>>Judges shouldn't be accountable to anything but the law

Unless we don't like the law. And then they should ignore it and pass judgement the way we all know it should be.
And if they don't rule the way we want then we can vote them out of the office!
Or... wait. Wrong argument. Sorry.

Replacing OTA with internet downloads will only be an option once everyone has an internet connection cabable of doing it.
Someday that will be the case, but it will not be any time soon. I still know a few people who can only get dialup internet today, and I do not have a cable option for my house (not even for tv).

>> That is the biggest issue I think, microsoft is hiding the details from the company that can actually fix it.

Google can't find out what MS is calling infringement? Can't they ask B&N? Or maybe do an internet search on it?

Microsoft may be hiding the details from the public, but they are not hiding them Google.

>> All at the expense of having very little privacy, and of course opening the door for massive abuse.

Except that in all the cases you describe they have always been able to be there and monitor us, it was just more manual and luck based.
It was easier for us to look around for a man in a uniform watching, or a marked patrol car following, or a plane in the air, but they could always be there.
We aren't giving up any private area, or any privacy, we are just giving up our odds of being viewed in what was always a public area that we could be watched in.

I don't think it the 2 party system that is the problem, more that we (voters/public/peons) expect to find someone that will take a position on all the issues that we agree with. We could have 20 parties and different canidates from each and still not find one that agreed with our views.

That and our 'if you are not with us you are against us' mentality.There is no bend in what we will tolorate anymore.

I don't have a problem with the $ from corporate and union donors, I have a problem with the either outright lying or badly distorting the facts with the money. Any money that is used for something that was proven to not be 100% factual should have a penality of 10x that much to be split up amoung the opposition.

But we all know two wrongs make it right :)

Or it could have been a parent trying to keep track of their kids. Since I would really have expected law enforcement to come get their equipment back when they were done with it. After all they would have known where it was. I guess another question on these things is are the ones people are finding normally wired into the cars wiring? Not sure why but I assumed they would have their own internal battery and a big magnet to make it easier to install.

>> The only thing I can think of is that IE7 and beyond stepped up security enough to make a major impact

Or maybe, just maybe, Norton/McAfee is actually doing something usefull?

And I thought they googled for the numbers.

I live in St Louis and can say that I have DSL and a dish, but cannot get cable. They won't run a wire down my road.

Up until about 3 years ago I couldn't even get DSL, I paid for a dedicated dialup.

So there are still places in some largish cities without a full set of options.