I'm not sure I understand the problem. In your example, if Y has a public key, X encrypts the message with Y's public key, and Y's private key never gets to Google or Yahoo, then the NSA knows who sent the message and who received the message but not what it contained.

You understand the issue. Knowing who sent what to whom, the envelope, is the metadata that people are objecting to. Encrypting messages if one doesn't care about metadata is a much easier problem.

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As for PGP . I agree this sort of thing needs to be part of email clients. But it is a hard problem to solve.

I gave to examples above that came out of research and in their current products: F# and LINQ.

Who cares about the EU-citiizenship? This is about standard ways of fixing computer problems. You live in Europe not on Mars you follow normal customs. Finally, Lessig is American.

Price X and up is "cherry-picking"? Apple takes over 1/2 the profits in the whole handset industry they don't need to be defended.

Yes, it is a total quantity thing. I suspect if we were spending 4x as much per year we could have been done during the Clinton administration, and I imagine the total cost would have been close to the same under that expedited process. The level we choose is indicative of the priority which is we want this to be a smallish line item that doesn't squeeze other priorities but we want progress. Plus there may be a defensive purpose. Because of the cleanup teams, we have large numbers of people skilled in working with and neutralizing chemical weapons. Many of the enemies we are/were likely to face (Iran, Iraq, Syria) have chemical but not nuclear weapons. I think the Army likes having this skill set so why rush?

As the fools behind the policy that was the USA people. And the sanction they are facing is paying for the cleanup. We all embraced and continue to embrace a weapons policy. Chemical weapons aren't remotely expensive compared to the costs are for nuclear weapons. The Republican party just last year ran a candidate for president who advocated building the next generation of these weapons and replacing our entire current generation. He got 2.5m votes shy of 1/2 the vote. The #2 guy in the Senate on the Republican side, John Kyl, makes nuclear weapon enhancement a high priority consistently. We as a people wanted the chemical weapons policy we had same as we want the nuclear policy we have today.

A monopoly is based on share of the market not based on theoretical choice. You are making precisely the argument the sugar companies lost with: theoretical choice for consumers was fine their actual choice didn't matter. A monopoly is defined in terms of the actual choices consumers make, competitors are viable only if they actual sell.

In terms of global search worse numbers are Google 90% with Bing, yahoo and other at 3% each. That would be a monopoly. If you count differently (customers and not search volume) then the market looks more diverse or count certain Asian providers that aren't tied to the advertising industry then the market does look more diverse. But clearly Google is still dominant enough, even with those counts that undermining Google is enhancing not diminishing competition.

, I really want to know what you call companies like Microsoft regarding desktop operating systems - or the phone company - or patents/copyrights for that matter.

Microsoft was a monopoly as well, even though there were dozens of other desktop operating systems available. They made the same argument you did citing Amiga OS, MacOS, the BSD, AIX, IRIX Didn't work. They were found to be a monopoly that had abused their position.

As for the phone company, I assume you mean in the 1950s-1970s. And they were a regulated utility who agreed they were a monopoly and subject to strong constraints on price to act in the public interests.

Grounds for voiding a patent would be that it establishes a monopoly. As for copyright I don't see the connection.

If you look at a lot of the anti-trust people they wanted smaller companies that were more easily manageable by the government and more importantly had diverse and conflicting interests. Their primary interest was not the underlying products. Which if you think about where they applied this first: sugar, oil, steel; these were products who are literally commodities and thus commoditized.

One of the harms often cited for monopolies was excessive prices. And certainly the OPEC cartel has a similar reputation today. (I'm freely intermixing monopoly, trust and cartel for this post). But I can't think of many if any of the anti-trust laws that were passed so as to encourage "better" products. Quite often better products (i.e. expensive niche items) were dismissed as irrelevant as they didn't give consumers effective choice even if they created theoretical choice.

1) That's not the correct action. The correct action with a failed installation is to reinstall not to return.

2) If Lessig had tried the reinstall the way Apple instructed him to (i.e. force the update of flash) it would have worked. He may have tried it himself prior to having received instruction from Apple and been successful.

The seller was willing to do that. In this case it was a 3rd party advising buyers to mislead the seller as to the nature of the problem and not let the seller fix the problem.

Sorry the "C" above should have read C-Omega. I used the greek and /. dropped it.

The innovation was making database objects act like primitives in a general purpose high performance programming language. That was the big idea behind C which is what became LINQ. I'm not saying that Microsoft invented an entire field or anything but that's a rather important recent innovation.

I'm not saying "rather". I'm saying it isn't anti-competitive. Little guys can gang up on a potential monopolist, that's considered preserving competition.

As for someone forking Android that's been done in China. There is also the Amazon and Nook versions. Cyanogen... If those start to sell enough then there is no longer any potential monopolist and the whole thing becomes moot from a competition standpoint.

Yes. We started with the massive quantity stuff and then had to go to the more specialized stuff. From what I understand the easy stuff we could just heat up 2100F and it was ruined. The harder stuff you have to carefully add neutralizing chemicals to which makes it into only standard toxic waste. Figuring out the right process + mixture + manufacturing the chemicals +.... is about $.5b / year job. It is more like the 80/20 rule the last 20% is more difficult than the first 80% several times over.

Syria is always going to have the capacity to openly start massive chemical weapons production. That's not a question. They have the capacity. But there will be satellites and intelligence in Syria for the foreseeable future. Syria isn't permanently giving up the weapons by more than treaty.

True. But GP was making a claim about Google directly. As for ads... I have to tell you as someone who was on the internet from 1988. Advertising was not late in 1996. Business on the internet was really a 1995 idea.