Actually, no. If you look at most laws governing Child Pornography, it has jack squat to do with the abuse of children and paying for images of abuse. Virtual CP is illegal and criminal in many countries. Staged CP (adults dressed up as underage teens and purported as such) is illegal as well in most countries. Even actual consensual "CP" is illegal (ok, borderline, but google Traci Lords to see what I mean). If the abuse of children was what is was all about, authorities would do something serious about Human Trafficking, which victimizes 100's to 1000's of underage females yearly.

Don't get me wrong, I have serious issues with Child Abuse, but the whole fight against CP is symbolic and based upon morality. It is not doing much for the actual victims. Most abused children probably never end up in online CP. They remain anonymous in some dark basement or illegal brothel. And how often do you hear someone about that?

Not sure about the glide angle of a 747 (1:10 - 1:15?), but it doesn't go down fast (it isn't slow, but not fast either). In fact, the have been a handful of incidents where a large passenger plane lost all engine power and was able to glide to a (safe) landing place. Even a field is possible, except your going to end up with one heck of a bill. The real issue compared to a Cessna is the amount of fuel a passenger plane carries and the odds of it causing a deadly fire.

Some of us actually like driving. Robotic cars sounds nice, but what does that say about humans? We're evolved, just not evolved enough to drive a car? No one should be allowed to drive by hand, because some are incapable of doing so safely? Because some of us are obsessed by statistics? Perhaps it is me, but what is this obsession of improving the ... deaths per year at all and any costs?

There is not one meaning to version numbers. Never was, never will be.

It is not in "beta", it is production quality. The fact that it is 0.5 indicates that it is not complete and perfect yet.

It is not "just another", it is the most important and most used open-source codec library

That is not entirely correct. They can request a wiretap of JAP-client with a warrant... which is not much different from your normal Internet connection and phone.

Given the daily growth of the net, no.

Sorry to ruin the joke, but on a serious note: With 1 Terabit/sec and 30 seconds, you might be able to download a millionth of the Internet.

Shouldn't that be two Service packs?

The internal batteries (for the clock and such) in those devices are not going to like it, especially not if they are turned off like that for prolonged periods of time.

As for the digital cable box, I'm wondering how much energy is wasted that way.

Have to disagree here. They'll just use new attack vectors. I venture into some of the shadier place's once in a while and it seizes to amaze me how creative some are in finding new scams and ways to infect people. If you get rid of p2p-networks, people will move to other means to get their music, videos and software. Cyber scum will follow in their footsteps.

I think Kazaa is long dead and neither Shareaza or Limewire contain malware. Most p2p apps don't, it's just a handful that gave all of them a bad name. The p2p networks themselves is something else, but any reasonably sane person can use them without catching malware. The people who download exe's when searching for an mp3 are the problem.

That is the principle a police state is based on. And it doesn't protect anybody. How am I protected for instance? And who said I needed protection?

The reason I block ads is not so much that I don't follow them (I don't, though I occasionally turn on adwords), but there are just too many sites with invasive and aggressive advertising. The ones that put content around the advertising so to speak.

A while back I needed to install some applications on a friends PC and I found myself looking for the damn download-button. The ads where everywhere and I actually had to scroll down down to find it.

And that was a completely legit site. Go down your average torrent-site and you're bombarded with AFF and pr0n-sites. It is fun the first time, but it gets tiring after a while.

I use AdMuncher and NoScript. The only times I see ads is when I fix computers or visits friends. I don't mind a few ads, but the amount of ads on some pages is borderline insane.

They want to tax people on a per-road and time basis, to combat high way traffic jams in peak hours. Odometers won't work for that, plus, they can be tampered with. With a GPS-signal, you can crosscheck it with license plate registration camera's (they use them for speed checks). Difficult to fool the system, plus, they're going to put insane fines/jail time on tampering.

They already do that. In fact, I think we have the third highest gasoline prices in the world (diesel is cheaper). And that is next to the annual road tax and a special car tax on top of the sales tax.