The danger is that there's no way to know whether they picked those 60 or the other 60, and there's very little oversight to ensure that they always limit their surveillance to the 60 terrorists and not the 60 well-connected random citizens.

And your Blue Ray[sic] collection can burn in a house fire or get stolen.

And, subject to a deductible, my insurance will replace that collection if that happens. If an online-DRM-encumbered collection becomes unplayable because the DRM servers went away, that's just money wasted. There's no recourse, no way to get that collection back (legally), and you've spent money for a content license that just became worthless because you can't (legally) use it.

Talking about wills and inheritance. Just give them the account and password. We're talking aobut movies and tv shows, not family heirlooms.

What you're missing is that physical items are transferrable, and thus have actual cash value. Just like all the other random crap you have around your house, when you die and pass on those Blu-Ray discs to your kids or grandkids or coworkers or cats or whatever, chances are they won't want very many of them (if any), because they'll already own copies of any movies that they want, and they won't care about the rest. However, they can A. resell them on Amazon and make a few bucks, B. dump them in an estate sale and make a few bucks, or C. take them to Good Will and take a tax write-off. Either way, your heirs get something (usually $$) from your collection.

With digital downloads, your heirs have to transfer the passwords for the whole collection to one person, who will want maybe three or four movies out of several hundred. In effect, unless you happen to have a grandkid who wants your entire collection en masse, the rest of the movies in your collection become instantly worthless.

I'll rent DRM-encumbered movies. I'll pay a monthly fee to stream DRM-encumbered movies. I won't buy DRM-encumbered movies unless the DRM is irrevocable and not tied to any particular player hardware or software.

It's gotten to the point that I categorically will NOT buy and Blu Rays with the Ultraviolet crap -- I'm not signing up with 3 different places to have a piece of digital media which needs to call home every time I want to play to confirm they've not revoked my license. Because sometimes I want to watch the movie when I do not have network access (like on an airplane).

Personally, I like the Ultraviolet copies; they make great coasters, or passable flying discs (read "Frisbees"). Oh, you mean the data on them? Yeah, that's useless. As long as the price is the same and it doesn't take up any more space than a single BRD case, I don't care, though. I certainly won't go out of my way to avoid the extra piece of plastic. To me, it has neither a positive nor a negative value.

No. No, it does not. People use Blu-Ray players in their cars. An always-connected player would defeat the whole purpose of physical media. AFAIK, the only players that require Internet access when playing a Blu-Ray disc are ripper apps and other unofficial player apps that folks use because of lack of any proper players on any platform besides Windows. They, in turn, use Internet access to grab a copy of the pre-decrypted disc key, avoiding the need to actually break the copy protection at all.

I suppose pedantically, if a player's key is compromised, they can make future discs for which that player's key is blacklisted, at which point the player will require a firmware update to get a new key that will play titles made after that date, but short of a firmware bug, there's no mechanism for making existing media unplayable, and in particular, there's no mechanism for revoking a particular disc's keys after it has been pressed.

That's arguably too weak. If they come across a conspiracy to commit any capital crime or other act of violence or physical abuse, I would expect them to act on it, whether we're talking about terrorism, murder, rape, child molestation, etc. I would not expect them to act on anything else.

Information theory tells us that everybody in the world is within roughly six degrees of separation of everyone else. I suspect that if you collected data within two or three degrees of separation from 60 people, you'd cover nearly the entire (*) over-18 population of the U.S., so long as you choose the right 60 people.

(*) Except for the actual terrorist types, who mostly don't associate with anybody but themselves.

No, no, no. You'd have dozens of U.S. corporations, each of which would have access to part of your online life, just like you do now.

This isn't even slightly hard.

Step 1: Require that the companies collect the information and retain it.
Step 2: Get a court order when you need to obtain information about a specific individual, and then obtain only that information.

It's not the metadata that's the problem. It's the fact that you're in possession of it, not just for the people you're legitimately investigating, but for everybody, and the fact that with our legal system being as complex as it is, you can almost certainly find patterns sufficient to suspect any honest person of a crime.

For example, I recently received an email about repairing strings of Christmas lights from someone whose last name is Snowden. Assuming that there's some relation, there's a good chance that my metadata is caught up in one of these f**king dragnets even though I have jack s**t to do with the guy who released confidential info from our government. There's no legitimate reason for them to study me—I'm pretty boring, frankly—but I would not be in the least bit surprised if it happened.

Umm... different rooms?

So what you're saying is that there is not some alternate universe in which I ended up with a Hollywood starlet? Man, that just ruins my whole outlook on the multiverse.

[Crash! Wham! Ow! Ow!]

Too bad, indeed.

Also, if this is the person I'm thinking about, and if my memory is correct, at least one of his victims claims that he harassed and threatened her and her family, and that one of his associates cracked into women's personal computers/accounts and stole many of the photos that were posted.

So assuming this is the same person, it's a wonder he hasn't been charged with harassment, assault, and violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, too.

The lack of change logs is why I never update the firmware on my Blu-Ray players unless something is obviously broken, and even then, only if I can find anecdotal evidence to suggest that the update will fix that problem. I've had way, way too many theoretically minor updates that break things in horrible ways, so unless an update adds some major feature that I care about, I try to avoid updating software unless A. I'm aware that it is broken in a way that affects me, and B. I have reason to believe that the update will fix it. In all other circumstances, installing an update to a working system just creates the risk of breakage without providing any obvious gain.

Considering the number of chinese that learn English in school compared to English speaking children that learn chinese, I have a feeling we will all be speaking a hybrid version of English and Chinese in hundreds of years. English isn't going anywhere, not when billions of chinese are all taught English from ages 4 thru 18.

So what you're saying is that Firefly got it right?

In active use, my experience has been that platters usually degrade because the heads get parked on a park ramp one too many times, snap off the head arm, and then get dragged across the surface of the disk.... Want your disks to last for decades? Park the heads infrequently or not at all.

But even in the absence of actual use, eventually, even on a hard disk, the bits are likely to get corrupted by random stray cosmic rays and possibly superparamagnetism. Of course, any real data loss is likely to take decades, if not centuries.