Oh, and maybe a few million people who get jobs. But hey, darn those evil corporations.

I spent a few weeks in NZ in 2006 and it was FAR better than you describe even back then, and that was in a small town far from any large city. Either it's gotten much worse over the last few years, or you're not being entirely honest.

Metering makes less sense for broadband because, unlike water and electricity, the marginal unit cost of sending "one more gigabyte" over the network is negligible; the main costs are capital costs (investment in infrastructure and expansion) and maintenance. The only actual marginal cost of sending a signal over the network is a tiny amount of energy. If you don't understand this, imagine you purchase a 100Mbit switch and some ethernet cable and create a network between you and your neighbor ... now consider the relative cost of installing that setup, vs. sending enormous amounts of data across that line ... you can pretty much keep that cable saturated and your marginal costs will be miniscule. Comparing this to gas or water is a false analogy.

http://www.google.com/search?q=virtual+machine+vulnerabilities Sigh ... when will people ever learn.

No.

And yet for many, many years HD manufacturers all used the base-2 definitions, and in fact only very recently (in computer history terms) changed over to the base-10 definitions. So certainly there was a very well established de facto standard of using the base-2 definitions amongst HD manufacturers.

That I know of, anyway.

It's possible, I don't know. I must say though, I own a small ISV and one day I discovered pirated copies of our own software on RapidShare. I fired off a letter to their abuse address, and within 24 hours they had removed (and, they said, permanently blacklisted) the content and sent an apologetic response. It was certainly a more positive response than I had expected. This was about 3 years ago, and I haven't yet seen any of our software appear again on RapidShare.

This has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not it's a good idea to keep a gun 'loaded and ready for home defense', because doing that wasn't the cause of this negligent accident: This guy left the thing *loaded and lying on a table near a 3-yr old*, something you just don't do regardless of whether or not you prefer to keep a gun loaded and ready for home defense. Why are you trying trying to turn this into an argument about something it isn't, and falsely equating what he did with general carry for home defense?

And how has the NSA "won" exactly? You think they have secret 'backdoors' for all major encryption algorithms? And if they haven't actually "won", why hasn't there been the disaster you predict?

If you ask me, most of the rhetoric one hears from government officials is more about money than anything else; warning of a 'rapidly expanding cyberterrorism threat' is mainly scaremongering that translates to 'give us a bigger budget than ever'. Not saying there aren't vulnerabilities; certainly there are, just look at all the Windows botnets and viruses (and nowadays PDF seems to be a primary attack vector). If there was a "cyberwar" already being waged, it would probably already have been lost. But giving more money to some state department to employ a building full of people somewhere to 'tackle the problem' is hardly going to fix things like IE and Adobe's PDF reader.

Um, no, fallacy of false choice - not having DECENT healthcare insurance services is what is detrimental - yet you posit that the only choices available are "universal healthcare" and crummy healthcare. Yeah you got crummy healthcare, but there are other reasons for that (e.g. lack of competition), most of which are probably fixable in other ways without having to create "universal" healthcare. You didn't need *universal* healthcare in your case, you just needed a decent option.