The problem is that they are not private networks.

The way the internet is designed you have no way of knowing the path your packets will take, or even if the return packets take the same path. Each packet you send to the same destination might take a different path. I have Charter, the server uses AT&T, but all of our traffic might go through Verizon.

You are not also paying for an IP address from their servers, there are no servers in this situation. There are routers, but just because they route for me doesn't mean they can do whatever they want to my traffic. This is especially true since at every hop on the internet there is some sort of routing happening, so you're in effect saying that every single router in between two hosts can do whatever they want to the traffic.

Real net neutrality isn't giving the government any power over the internet, but rather that the government denying power to the Telcos.

DMCA is already a US government construct, and is a darn good one compared to the alternative. DMCA gives copyright holders an opportunity to remove infringing content without resorting to court actions. Now this doesn't mean that the system isn't abused, but imagine getting sued instead of getting a DMCA request, it would be horrible!

By piracy site takedowns I assume you mean the US government seizing web addresses, which is DNS and has NOTHING to do with net neutrality. The only way that piracy site takedowns could have anything to do with net neutrality is if the US government somehow forces the routers to drop certain addresses from their tables, which would do nothing because of our good friend dynamic IPs.

They might also implement it via RED. As an outbound queue fills packets going into that queue start getting dropped. This is done to prevent TCP global synchronization, and is standard practice. But if you change the rules a little, saying that packets coming from payer X get into the queue more often than non-payer Y, you've effectively lowered Y's performance during congestion without impacting Y during non-congestion.

Or it could be done via managing router queues. In order to route a packet you must inspect it anyways. Instead of having 1 outbound queue from a router you have two, three, or more. The outbound port sends from the high-priority queue more often, but still sends from the lower priority queues, or else to the hosts it appears to be congestion or a dead connection.

It could also be done via policy based routing on the AS level. An AS is a set of routers divided from other routers by political divisions rather than any technological reasons (AT&T routers vs Verizon routers). Each AS communicates routes and speeds via BGP. You direct the payer packets towards the faster AS you're connected to, then send the non-payer packets over to the slower AS.

There is no real way to speed up some packets without slowing down others, unless you literally build a whole new faster network, in which case why not put the other packets on there too?

I hate it how anyone uses a SSN as both an identifier and an authentication number. If someone gets your SSN, then you are screwed, and getting a new one is hard because you have to go through and replace your identifier everywhere.

Really SSN should only be used as a unique identifier, especially since they are fairly predicable. If you know when and where someone was issued a SSN then you can narrow the possibilities down to just a few.

Ideally everyone would have a credit card sized device that generates authentication numbers, as well as a passcode of some sort (not a password, but a rather large number). The credit card device is actually generating public keys, which is used to encrypt the passcode.

Someone intercepts your traffic? they don't know your public key, nor your passcode
Someone steals your device? they don't know the passcode
Someone somehow gets your passcode? they don't have the device.

Thus the attacker would have to be physically present to get the device, as well as cunning to get the passcode.

The authoritative body has its own private key which is used to ensure that the response can only be from the government.

The hard part is of course getting people to remember (and not write down) their passcode, and being able to physically identify someone in order to issue them a new device/passcode.

Although not necessary you could also have the person trying to do the authentication sign another piece of data with their company's private key. You could mandate that only registered banks and government could even try to authenticate people.

I'd suggest an infrasonic microphone, feelings normally associated with haunting have been shown to also be caused by sounds in the 1-20 Hz range. Places normally considered haunted have been shown to have infrasonic sources that when turned off, cause the feelings to disappear.

http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/ghost-in-machine.pdf (7 page PDF)

You would have to get it up to a high enough temperature to stay molten throughout the night, while still providing power. It's a lot more practical to use other solar technologies for home use and keep these ones in big arrays. It's a bit like why power plants will always have higher efficiency than home generation, it's a matter of scale.

They didn't have the desert sun pouring onto a thousand large mirrors perfectly aligned on something for hours on end. Their test was more about the ability to align all of these mirrors without technology. These kind of things are dependent on energy going in vs energy going out. A thin sail surrounded by cool damp sea air only being shone upon from one side is going to have a lot less energy going in, and a lot more energy going out than a desert solar array.

If you do so in an attempt to harm or otherwise deny access, then yes, it would be. It's more akin to getting a thousand people to sit outside their building and forcefully block anyone who tries to come in.

This is on a completely different level though. The only people that have anything to do with BGP are the ISPs themselves. BGP is only used to route from groups of routers to other groups, where a single organization owns the entire group, and they're sending to the group of another organization.

Perhaps, but what choice so we have? Once we run out of v4 addresses we have to do something.
Also: IPv6 is initially allocated via geographical areas.

More importantly, it doesn't matter how sparse the table is as long as each section is contiguous. If I know I can send any traffic from (made up protocol) hosts 1 to 1000 to router 1200, and any hosts from 10,000,000 to 10,010,000 to router 4500, then my table is just fine.

As the life of an address space goes on it will tend to become less compacted, switching to a new one that is huge will make a sparse, but compacted table.

Hamachi is built on top of IP, but I don't know exactly how it works. Once the data leaves your machine the network will treat it just the same if it's hamachi traffic or not. If you can reach it via IP, you can reach it via hamachi (excepting IPv6 support, dunno where they stand with that).

Put simply, the way a transistor works requires the use of semiconductors. It's a property other than resistance which the transistor requires. When not in a transistor, materials with a high conductivity are used.

For physical products then wouldn't that be Walmart stealing? Or at least a breach of contract. If Walmart had a contract with the manufacturer saying that the manufacturer would be paid when the item is sold, and Walmart doesn't pay... The manufacturer doesn't have any right to ask you for money. You had an implied contract when you bought the item. Walmart has an contract with the manufacturer. You have no relation to the manufacturer.

Services are a little different as it's a continual transaction. At most when Verizon doesn't pay DirectTV it would cause a breach of contract between Verizon and DirectTV. DirectTV can then turn off your service causing another breach of contract between you and Verizon. DirectTV billing you should (in a rational world) be illegal, you never had a contract with DirectTV.

DirectTV can ask, but they have no right to demand payment. I'm not saying you weren't billed by them, but if I couldn't get them to withdraw the bill I'd just ignore it. Anything beyond that is stealing.

Assuming you know which numbers are pressed you don't know the order.
4 digit pin = 4 factorial -> 24 permutations
5 digit pin = 5 factorial -> 120 permutations
6 digit pin = 6 factorial -> 720 permutations ...
9 digit pin = 9 factorial ->362,880 permutations

It's pointless to bother brute forcing it beyond 5 digits, since you have to manually input the digits.

The oil being collected is generally very heavy, but can vary in composition. Oil of that type cannot be used in any normal type of combustion engine. That limits you to engine that rely solely on difference in temperatures rather than ones that try to control combustion. You could run a sterling engine off of this, but you have to consider what happens between oil slicks in the same area. If the slicks are too far apart, your robots run outta energy and just sit.

Solar energy on the other hand will always be there tomorrow. I don't know what conditions are required for these bots to get enough power out of their solar panels, but if it's cloudy and they can't do much you just have to wait a couple of days.

Well that critical mixture is more of a range. It doesn't have to be a perfect mixture, just close. There has to be enough combustible density for ignition energy to pass from one particle to another, and enough oxygen density so that the combustibles can cause combustion. This is close to how a fuel air bomb works. However it's likely that the explosion heard wasn't directly related to the hydrogen at all. (skip to the 4th paragraph)

Note that the combustible density has to be high for stable/weak combustibles, or it can be lower for unstable/strong combustibles. Hydrogen is rather unstable (doesn't need much activation energy) and thus the particles can be really close, or relatively spread out.

Not all of the combustible has to go at the same instant, an explosion in one part might cause the density in another part to change, or could collectively give enough energy to cause ignition. Some things not normally considered explosive can become explosive if given the proper conditions (including a pressure vessel). Sugar dust, wheat dust, flour, and sawdust have been known to cause explosions in very rare conditions.

A pressure vessel failing is essentially an explosion, so it could be that the tank failed, and it just happened to be filled with this flammable gas, which then caused a fire. An explosion in the tank is nearly impossible, simply because there is no oxygen. Most combustibles need some sort of a pressure vessel to cause a proper explosion, if the ignition velocity is not fast enough, then it will cause a big fireball (think Hollywood explosion) but won't cause much explosion damage.

The real safety problem with using compressed hydrogen as a vehicle fuel is that it is a compressed gas. Even if a tank failure doesn't cause a lot of damage, the hydrogen will come out very quickly, leading to a possible fire. This isn't a problem with gasoline as it is a liquid, and on top of that only the vapors are really flammable. I don't know the safety ratings on a hydrogen tank put in a car, but the tanks would have to be done very well to be equal in safety to a gasoline tank (which can have inner bladders, that don't work with compressed hydrogen).

Hydrogen stored in metal hydrates is very stable, and easily safer than gasoline. But I don't think the energy density is high enough yet for practical use.

This post ended up being a lot longer and more of a ramble than I intended, sorry.