yes, an ip can id someone, when combined with other data, but this other data you talk about is nearly impossible for anyone to get. Not I nor you nor anyone we know can get to that data. hell when combined with other data you can ID some by whats in thier refrigerator or by what kind of shoes they wear. we have to draw the line someplace. let me ask you something, given than your fingerprint is as solid a means of id as you can get, do you wear gloves 24/7? i bet you dont, unless youre doing something you dont want anyone to know youre doing, same rules apply with ips, there are many ways to obscure your actual ip from those you deal with online, so if youre doing something you want to keep a secret but cant be bothered to use a proxy, why then should legislation be enacted to protect you?

i see where youre coming from, but attaching an ip to an individual for any reason is foolish what with dynamic ip adressing used by many isps. Something like a name or social security number identifies you and only you, and isn't at all easyto change, but and ip address is fleeting, and the only entity that can tie an ip to a person is the isp that assigned it to them, and that only tells you who pays for it, not who was using it at a given date and time, and even with a court order the isp may not cooperate, and without that an ip is as useless a means of identifying you as is the serial number on your tv... and in response to you, i dont care if my ip is in a list of people who purchased viagra because noone who reads that list will see my ip and know I was a customer, so that does little other than support my argument. The point im making is that an ip at best narrows the possibilities of who it could be down to a small group and even then only to those who have access to your isps billing information, and therefore shouldnt be considered the same as drivers license number or ssn or whatever

there are no less than 8 people who have the key to my network, and at any given time there are half a dozen computers connected to it between me and my roommates and the upstairs neighbors so to say that my internet facing IP positively identifies any of us is "absurd". I will however be positively delighted if my IP is ever used as evidence agaisnt me in court, because It carries with it more than enough reasonable doubt.

I installed slackware 12.2 on my eee 900, (had to do it from an SD card, but thats not too hard) and everything works. I didn't have to monkey around with anything to get anything working. I just copied my rc.inet1 from another machine to bring up the wireless at boot and viola. It's wayyyy faster than XP too. Feels really good on that little machine.

Informed customers are few and far between buddy. I have an EEEpc 900, and anyone who uses it looks at the silly little xandros desktop that came on it and asks me "what the hell is this?" so I tell them all about it, and 9 times out of 10 they ask me "It doesn't have windows?" and only use it for about 10 seconds. The average person on the street will use a slower machine without even a moments thought on the matter, so long as it has windows, and looks farmiliar to them.