It is only too expensive if you pay for cable tv. At $5 per movie on itunes plus $10/month for Netflix, we spend about $35 per month watching ~20 hours of TV, and don't have to deal with commercials.

As long as the price is commercial free, I say it is reasonable value. Add in commercials, and piracy becomes much more attractive at that cost.

That is a key point. There are things some people will do if they are sure nobody will see but they will not do if there is even one chance in thousands that someone will see and have evidence to back it up. It changes the risk/reward decision drastically.

It was too early for streaming to be a viable alternative for most people then; on-the-go wasn't viable for music until around 2010, arguably 2012.

I haven't checked IE9, but in IE 6, 7, and 8 a bit of JavaScript could steal your cookies. I'm sure it can be done in 9 as well, I just haven't had the need to see how.

Other browsers have a slightly better history.

Has anyone studied the Firefox code, you ask. Yep, I have. I happen to be a security professional too. Have all those people who used Firefox as the basis for their browser studied the hell out of it? Yep.

We know Microsoft is full of NSA backdoors. Has any government backdoor EVER been found in any FOSS, at any time. Nope.

The insistence on continuing to believe the ridiculous out of fandom is rather curious. Certainly on some level you understand your "beliefs" are laughable, but you're just completely incapable of changing your thoughts, of learning.

They allowed politicians to be a part of the process. Politicians know NOTHING about land use, management, etc.. Your city planner is a complete and utter moron when it comes to the job they have, city planning.

None of the homes need to be larger than 850 sq foot. Making a city self sustaining is certainly possible if you do three things.

1 - gather all leaders into one place.
2 - Lock all of them in a big room with no windows.
3 - let scientists and engineers do all the planning based on real data and real designs.

Sadly most people are dumb as a box of rocks and believe they cant be happy without a 5500 sq foot mc mansion and at least 2 acres of Kentucky Bluegrass that requires 10 gallons per square yard a day in water. So eliminate the people as well, at least the dumb ones.

are there really people into stalking slashdot accounts?

They drain tax money to fund all of this, so firstly, let's see if they care to pay for it out of their own pockets.

It may sound like sophistry, but in fact the government didn't take the rights from the Japanese-Americans, they still had them. What it did was fail to respect (violated) those rights. The rights are not the government's to give or take.

Admittedly, from a practical standpoint the two were indistinguishable to the people in the camps. The difference is in morals and ethics. It is unethical and immoral to fail to respect people's rights.

well to be fair, a registered republican conservative thought up the idea...

So if I run an ad-blocker so my browser doesn't request the ads, all is good?

I'm fine with actual ads on a website. It's the animated crap, the humongo flash programs and the bad attempts to give me a virus by tricking me into thinking I already have one, and burning up CPU cycles like it's a contest to see who can use the most that must go.

In return for website owners not getting too bent out of shape about that, I don't hold them responsible for the content of the ads that display on their site with their full consent.

And nobody wants to see it.

You missed the part about advertisers already refusing to respect the existing DNT flag and only being willing to cooperate at all if uit didn't actually require them to change anything in response to the flag.

W3C was right to tell them to get stuffed. Why let them do nothing and then pretend they somehow cooperated?

The problem there is that the advertisers forgot the old adage "you don't shit where you eat".

If they had simply shown a few ads and made sure their servers were up to the task, few if any would have even bothered with ad-blockers. But no, They had to plaster the page with jumping singing dancing ads that pop up and pop under and triple (or worse) the page load time. Then to top it off, they didn't even bother to make sure the ads weren't drive-by viruses or illegal scams.

Since all of that wasn't enough, they decided to also become internet stalkers.

It's only natural that people came to consider most any ad they see on the web to be a probable scam and to run ad blockers to avoid the assault on their senses and more that a few infections as well.

Then finally, when given a chance to restore some tiny shred of good will, they decided to ignore DNT.

Storms are essentially heat engines, but they do not run on the differential between the poles and the equator, they run on the differential between the surface and the upper reaches of the troposphere.

Given that, I see no mechanism for polar warming to offset warming of the oceans in the tropical zone.