If there was no state by the name "Palestine" in 1947, pray tell, where was the state named "Israel" located, at that time?

In those days, rockets were made of thin pieces of wood and launched from a device resembling a stringed musical instrument. As a result of their brazen unprovoked attacks, their civilisations were wiped off the face of the Earth by the technologicall superior interlopers a few decades after arrival. Kind of like the Palestinians. Isolated by the lines that the British drew all over the Middle East, impoverished by a long standing blockade and confined to the largest concentration camp in human history, all the while being bombed, starved and shot into annihilation.

How dare some of them get angry enough to attempt to fight back?

While I agree with you on your overall sentiments, your general tone is offensive. Many who died may have prepared, but the means to do more may have been out of their capacity. What would you do to prepare for a storm? Board the windows? Brace the doors? Put everything sharp in a closed, low height cupboard? How would that help if Sandy dropped a few cars on your house, levelling it? And even if you did survive that, remember, the biggest killer in natural disasters is the disease and sepsis that follows.

Off your high horse, buddy.

I believe that the flow of digital information will shape the human landscape as powerfully and inexorably as water carves continents.

In other words, not at all?

Yea, I think it's called C-SPAN.

I don't understand why there's all this focus on finding the caller via technical means. Just listen to the calls and fine whoever is being advertised.

Scenario 1: Slashdotter:
RoboCaller: Hello, I would like to tell you about the fantastic new insurance policy from RiskAway Inc!
Listener: Dammit! Another robocaller. We need to have a carrier-administered party authentication system regulated by the FCC to ensure that all calls can be traced back to their origin.

Scenario 1: Regular guy:
RoboCaller: Hello, I would like to tell you about the fantastic new insurance policy from RiskAway Inc!
Listener: *Looks up RiskAway Inc in the whitepages*

My niche: Agricultural simulations built atop large social networking site APIs.
My blog title: How modern technology has consolidated around Farmville and the rise of Farmville Cash will eventually replace the global currency markets.

Given that the US needs Taiwan far, far more than Taiwan needs the US, I think Taiwan can do whatever the hell they want. Taiwan remaining independent is more important to the US than it is to Taiwan.

That's old fashioned thinking.

Aah yes, you are correct from a trust point of view. However, from a trust point of view, how can you really ever be truly sure of whom you are talking? Impersonation is always a problem, and then there's the issue of double agents and infiltrators. Then there's the whole sci-fi aspect like in the movie Face Off.

Actually, that's not correct. You do not need even one guaranteed interaction in order to establish an encrypted channel. Diffie-Hellman key exchange is pretty secure, as long as your encryption protocol is not broken.
Whatever the circumstances, you need trusted endpoints, and you need a viable encryption protocol. You need those two. Not two out of a set of three, which include those. Untrusted endpoints means you're open to side channel attacks or simple bugging. Even if you have bulletproof protocols and 100% trusted interaction, it's no help if your endpoints have keyloggers sending their data to Eve.

That would only be the case if they threw a MacBook through the window instead of a cinder block.

Why would I be upset at your wife?

This of those are "DRM and other features that were friendly to manufacturers" ?
I scanned the list, and saw a few that might qualify, but I had to stretch.
Your initial assertion that Vista was somehow Microsoft's foray into a walled garden and represented an exploratoy policy which was abandoned in Win7 but will come back in Win8 is nonsense and not supported by the evidence that you have provided.

Yea, 90% of the world uses Windows, therefore it is a de facto standard. So it's a good thing when MS puts pressure on OEMs to ensure that they do not ship PCs or laptops running non-standard, obscure operating systems which would only fragment the marketplace for applications and confuse users.