Well a gentleman's agreement between corporations are lubricated with money. Between a government and a company? I assure you Uncle Sam would appeal to patriotism and expect one to lay back and take it while thinking of their country with nothing more to ease the experience. Probably even given threats as to what would happen if one did not cooperate.

Now albeit through anonymous sources that government powers are developing malware, how will it be either through legislation, treaty or "gentleman's agreement" that anti-virus software manufacturers will have to look the other way for certain payloads? Is this already happening? Certainly the Third Amendment tells us we don't have to use our homes to quarter soldiers, but will the government use its citizenry's hard drives and bandwidth to host a weapon?

Does the line: "car security systems will begin have a real impact to every day use if a thief can simply walk up to your car and drive it away." seem to imply car thievery is a new thing? Thieves have been stealing cars since you had to hand crank the engine. Sure the techniques in 1911 were different from the techniques in 2011 but this is a a bit hysterical isn't it? Criminals are always getting better than security which leads to better security which leads to more cunning thieves, like any living system, it will continue to evolve.

If we are reading scrolling text, would we then be paying attention to the ad's content? This seems less like a way for users to see advertising content and more an exercise in dickery. I am finding more and more content behind 30 second video ads. My current behavior is just go read something in another tab and come back to it after the ad is done. My prediction? Captcha ads will tank site readership. Seriously there is nothing I can think of on a chewing gum site that would require me to answer a pop quiz to view.

There are actually reasons behind this. I've got a /29 from Charter Business myself, but this is why it is the way it is, based on my experience as a former Charter engineer.

In the days of old, customers were assigned their statics in WAN-side way as you describe. My parents used to have a static assigned to them from a WAN block on their CMTS. This was great because whatever allocation assigned was very efficiently used. Granted, this was back when nodes were combined 4:1 or greater on the small CMTS that was being used. A uBR7246 with 1x6 cards in the day could easily route traffic for over 48 cable nodes, at 2:1 combining on the upstreams, and 12:1 on the downstreams. (A whopping 150mbps for 48 nodes ... laugable today).

It wasn't all that long ago I remember some towns sharing a single downstream port. Now, enter node splits, and combining gets down to 1:1 in many cases. Even with a much larger CMTS (uBR10012 vs. uBR7246), it can't handle the same number of nodes. With redundancy failover switchboxes, there are only 35 downstreams per box (assuming 5x20 cards).

Now a problem exists as soon as the box's capacity is reached. If I need to split your node and move it to another CMTS to increase your available bandwidth, I need to coordinate with everyone who is moving who has a WAN side IP and tell them that their IP address is going to change on whatever date. This turns into an incredible shitstorm when one person stammers their feet and cries up the escalation chain and then delays necessary work because they bitch. Then capacity continues to be in hell until the move is finally approved. Then, there are the customers who ignore your voicemail and phone calls and then cry for a credit because they didn't pay attention until the move date.

So now what everyone is doing in order to make this easier is to assign you a /30 or /29 or whatever which you get from your modem. The modem sends that assignemnt up via RIP and it gets redistributed into the network. Now, it doesn't matter what town you're in or what CMTS you're on. Note splits and changes can essentially happen without you ever having to renumber your side. With the growing demands on bandwidth, it's not unheard of that you could move a couple of times per year, depending on the scope of the engineering changes.

Seems wasteful, but that's the sense behind it.

They cradle my balls, stroke the shaft, work the pipe, and drink the gravy.

Yes but you still need to type it when making a hyperlink in your mark up language of choice.

But they will still need Latin characters to type "http://"

My dreams of a robot girlfriend are one step closer to being actualized