Your landlord exists in a competitive market, where there are other choices. Unlike broadband/fatpipe Internet access in the urban US. My market is served by 2 providers. One is accessible from my curb - next to a major university, I might add.

DIY

We aren't talking business. We're talking about
building your own shed - instead of renting a storage facility.

You are the enemy of DIY.

Are you connected to Stoolpigeon? He's living in Budapesht.

He just posted a great JE about traveling from Hungary through the northern Balkans into Italy.

I can almost smell the air, from your descriptions.

Your kids will grow into it.

Yeah, right. And home of the brave who tolerate this, huh?

Hey!

I winked...

Bingo.

You go to the second argument. I needed to cross the first one, before opening the second.

Bullshit. You're a pissant.

There's no reason I can't or shouldn't provide remote access to my files for my use, and those of people I chose, on a host of my choice, on my uplink.

There's no reason I can't or shouldn't run my personal mail server - as long as I am able to prevent relaying or other abuse.

This is the purpose and tradition of the best-effort, edge-service, peer-to-peer design of IP packet-switched, interconnected networks. PERIOD.

Driving me to GMail's business model, or Dropbox's or anybody else's is abuse. Corporations don't acquire special rights through monetising service offerings. DIY for home/limited scale is the point - or you can go back to TV and Radio.

I always pointed out on slashdot, just HOW MUCH trust was being put in Google, with how little understanding of their operation as a publicly traded company.

The fanbois for Google - which have a huge intersection with slashdot readership - nearly always mod-bomb these observations as flamebait or trolling. Contrariness is only rewarded when it chooses a popular target. ;-)

Google's hand-waving of good will always gets trumped by their desire to control revenue. But like a stage magician, those who want to believe continue their suspension of reality.

Google's real motivations afford them selling out customers for the value of their "private" information. You can now see, in this one, more obvious way, how principle is secondary to business and profit - through the artificial tiering of "business class" service. There is no "business class" IP.

Punishment for breaking a formal oath is usually much harsher for the same act performed while not under an oath. A person's "word" should be taken seriously and should be punished if broken. Of course blind trust is pure stupidity, but the expectation that an individual should "keep his word" is not. It's called "having principles", but be warned, these so called "principles" are expensive. Snowden and Manning took an oath that (at the time) they believed did not conflict with other strong principles they already held. Ironically the conflicting principles can both be described as patriotic.

If there's an independent witness then it's a solid verbal contract in most legal systems around the world. In this case we're talking about the military who have their own oaths, laws, courts, police, judges, and jails. A soldiers "pinky swear" is taken very seriously by that system, especially when it's broken. I've never been a soldier but the fact that you appear to believe a (wo)man's word means nothing outside a court of law indicates the principle of "integrity" is too expensive for your particular personality.

The reason freedom of the press exists is so that you don't have to rely on the goodwill of the government to "do the right thing" when you tell them you have found out what they are doing. WL is a legitimate press organization, they released the manning stuff at the same time as three well established and respected newspapers they partnered with, Guardian, NYT and Der Speigel. The news people did what WL did not have the resources and expertise to do, redacted the names of informants. The result - WL cops all the flack from the spooks, while the release and the role of the established newspapers is ignored.

Freedom of the press does not mean individual publishers have to apply for a license to publish.

Disclaimer: I don't like either Rupert Murdoch or Julian Assange steering the views of the public, they both have lousy personalities that I wouldn't associate with unless absolutely necessary, but they most certainly have a right to their freedoms, and not the least of those is the freedom of the press.

"The first casualty of war is truth" because people like you are more than eager to drown it in a bathtub.

That means the envelope Google sends to the NSA will be twice as heavy. ;-)

Life there is pretty good. And it's beautiful, right time of year.