The one I hated the most and am glad to see gone is the status bar scrolling messages... arrggghh!

Or slashdot circa 2008.

Oh wait...

Suppose you go make a reservation on an airplane, from an IP address that is currently mapped to tor.

If you were in the FBI, would that be a flag for you to dig deeper?

What if you made a reservation on an airplane, from an IP address that is currently coming from a proxy.

You get the idea.

Is there a way to get the mac address of the pc if it connects to a commercial wifi service (like Hotspot, for example?) Would Dell, HP, ASUS or any other identify the purchaser of a specific mac address owner?

There are many ways to find out who is who if you are the government and you tap the internet tubes, and you have secret rooms in the communication companie's headquarters, and you know what you are doing, and the NSA is helping you out.

I know I would be digging for that sort of stuff if it was my job.

And two of these are always US Air Marshals.

I'm being facetious, but not that much: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TRAVEL/03/25/siu.air.marshals/index.html.

Let's say the traveler cancels at the last minute, and the plane blows up. They go check it out, because maybe he/she was tipped off by a friend not to get on the plane.

I knew a guy who was supposed to be on flight 800 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800) but that morning he fell down carrying his metal trash down the stairs and injured himself. He went to the hospital and was OK but he had missed the flight. The next day the FBI came over and wanted to know why he had not been on the plane. He had to convince them that he had gone to the hospital. They went and checked out his story.

Because people in the US have guns and use them. There's a long history of US politicians having been killed/shot at by US citizens.

(Lincoln, a couple of Kennedys, Reagan come to mind)

And they can't get the laws changed because, well, people have guns.

I personally think that's a good thing (The gun ownership part, not the (shooting at|killing) politicians part).

This is why governments are not completely in sync with the Humanness of the People that compose them. In the end, though, humanness prevails, and governments fall. Never bet against Nature. She will always win. Always has.

The more a government steers from the natural inclinations of its citizens, the less stable it becomes.

The USA is steering away, and Obama getting elected was the people saying that the government was going in the wrong direction.

As far as FB is concerned, they can do whatever is legally allowed. They can also lose members.

Actually, since it seems their bandwidth bills are churning through their cash and in this economy it's hard for them to raise more, the worst thing that can happen to them now is to sign up too many users. See: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/31/facebooks-growing-problem/ for more on that.

An interesting tidbit from the link above: only on in four facebook members comes from the US.

That would be revolution around the Sun.

Interesting. Thanks for pointing that out.

Which is why the Toyota Prius was developed by a Government Agency. The Toyota Government Agency.

No wonder GM and Chrysler can't compete against a government-funded entity.

knoppix cd. So no CD/DVD drive.

And no USB, because DSL, Belenix, other.

So basically you'll have one geek at the high school burn a stack of knoppix cds, and he and all his buddies will be surfing porn and chatting online and doing all that bad evil stuff.

Can't be done.

So he doesn't forget how to spell it?