This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
-- TS Eliot

I'm probably going to get modded down for this, but it needs to be said:

a doctor diagnosing patients in the rural areas of Africa or a Homeland Security agent working to thwart an act of bioterrorism

One of these doesn't belong. I'll give you a hint: There are billions of one (that we don't hear enough about from anyone), and like three of the other (that we hear way too much about from certain mainstream media sources).

You're arguing semantics. My point was that in the usual function of a modern e-mail system, only the sender and intended recipient are going to see the message; someone would have to "go out of their way" to spy on that message, even if technically speaking that would be very easy (as I said, technically speaking, slicing open an envelope is easy too).

Obviously you've never run a BBS in the old days...

Neither have 99% of the e-mail-using public, so I fail to see how your arguments are relevant to modern-day technology and privacy issues, especially in the context of the 4th amendment where the concept of "reasonable expectation of privacy" factors in.

I strongly disagree. I've said it before, I'll say it again: It's not like mailing a postcard, it's like sending an electrically encoded text message over a packet-switched data network where the only expected viewing point is at the intended recipient's terminal; this is how the e-mail protocol was designed to work. Sure, a malicious party can read it because it's not encrypted, but someone can easily slice open a postal mail envelope and read the contents of that, too. (You can encrypt the text of your postal-mail letters, but one already has an expectation of privacy, so few people bother. Same as e-mail.)

The bottom line is, since a non-trivial effort has to be made to read the contents, and since the service has always been presented as a "sealed letter" (via GUI icons, ISP adverts, etc), the average user is not unreasonable in expecting privacy.

It should be obvious that the 4th amendment applies to e-mail.

...require extraordinary evidence.

Or you may have
- poor apps whose layout breaks at low DPI
- poor apps that don't resize icons for lower resolutions
- apps that down-sample resolution poorly
etc.
And so people should run their screens at high resolution. Not.

The point is that you shouldn't have to change your resolution or worry about resolution or its affect on your apps. The OS should put the resolution at an optimal value for the monitor that you are using. That's what Fedora does for me.
A GUI or app that assumes a fixed resolution or font size is a poor app. If you don't use or buy them they will go away.

I think you mean capitalism (mostly the same thing, but sure). You know, the whole, priced to what the market will bear nonesense that is the fundemental underpinnings of our economy. In this case, the cost of batteries for garden tools is lower because NiCa and other technologies are still viable alternatives, whereas in the laptop segment they are not. In other words, there are more competitors and a higher supply in one market segment than another.

This idea is impractical in so many ways. Leaving aside the privacy issues raised by the prerequisite of collecting the kinds of information the author mentions, he makes far too many assumptions (and of course, does not back them up with any hard facts).

Even if his assumptions are partially correct, he fails to factor in how real security software interacts with real users. Modern viruses are very fluid things, and thus modern virus detection is non-deterministic (and so is this author's system as far as I can tell). So in order to catch all viruses a certain level of false positives will inevitably arise. And it doesn't take many false positives before the user starts to ignore the warnings.

The electromagnetic spectrum is not a hard concept to grasp. Radio waves are about the most harmless radiation there is. They have a lower frequency than microwaves, infrared, or fucking ordinary visible light. Are they going to blow up the sun next?

Yet another group of ignorant children playing dangerous games in the adult world. Sigh.

Do what, parse JavaScript into plain text? You're right, anyone can do that if they really want to take the time. But for whatever reason spammers don't bother going that far.

I'm no fan of security by obscurity, but let's be pragmatic: people will get less spam if Google fixes this problem.

This can easily be fixed, and should be right away. If Google is turning JavaScript into text output, they can easily parse that output (just like the spammers currently are) and see if the text contains an e-mail address. And if it does, they should omit it from search results (unless the address was originally plain text and not obfuscated, in which case they can assume the author wants it searchable).

I often have about 50 tabs open in Opera, and I can handle them just fine. Right now I have about 25 tabs open. Most of them are documentation (eg. mysql, posix threads) or work-related (lua binding tutorial, stackoverflow threads) or news (Slashdot!).

In Notepad++ I also have lots of tabs open. I need lots of tabs in order to do my work; I always have lots of things on the go. I like to have as much information layed out as possible, with everything I have worked on recently open and "stacked" much like papers or books would be on a real desktop. I guess I'm a very spacial thinker.

A few times I lost my Opera or Notepad++ sessions, and then I felt very lost.

There really should be no expectation of privacy in e-mail.

Who are you to decide that? Like I said in a post on a similar topic:

"...the canonical user interface icon for e-mail is... a sealed envelope. Even ISPs will present their e-mail services with such an image.

In other words, the snagging point is the definition of "expectation of privacy" -- but the situation is really quite simple: The average user simply expects privacy, but the government is trying to force them to abandon that expectation, so they can then go and install ubiquitous e-mail surveillance without violating the letter of the US Constitution. The government is trying to win by arguing semantics, so what I find hardest to believe is that anyone is taking all this blatant skullduggery seriously.

... It's not like mailing a postcard, it's like sending an electrically encoded text message over a packet-switched data network where the only expected viewing point is at the intended recipient's terminal; this is how the e-mail protocol was designed to work. Sure, a malicious party can read it because it's not encrypted, but someone can easily slice open a postal mail envelope and read the contents of that, too.

The bottom line is, since a non-trivial effort has to be made to read the contents, and since the service has always been presented as a "sealed letter", the average user is not unreasonable in expecting privacy."