first there was letters people would send, and people would try to secretly read from eachother, and govts try to read from people.
pro: quite easy to detect sniffing (letter would be opened)
con: cumbersome

then telephony came, again people tied to spy on eachother and the govt tried to spy on its people.
pro: less cumbersome
con: harder to detect sniffing

now with the internet we are in control. people 'could' get proper end-to-end encryption schemes and signatures, but generally we're too lazy. so we leave the encryption up to the protocols and therefor merely use connection encryption. the govt is now easily denied its spying rights.
pros and cons aside: it's a game changer.

large govts have tried to deny us state-of-the-art encryption (the US), now they are directly demanding access at the companies that facilitate the communication. but the reality is that a youngster with a bit of interest in encryption easily sets up communication channels that the govt will never be able to access: so who want to go private, can go private. additionally the volume of communication is so high the govts will have a really hard time to scan us all.

i think the govt will at some point understand that they cannot (very specific cases aside) effectily spy on us anymore, it is simply too expensive.

i should incorporate methods of direct democracy.. please let me remind you all that the representative democracies (vote for representative who then vote in the parliament) we have today, are the result of the ancient greeks not having an internet.

early democratic societies allowed everyone to vote (everyone was defined as: all rich men). but as societies grew and the notion of everyone changed, representative democracies emerged. i say thas was merely because we did not have a read+write medium that could connect everyone in a whole nation: the internet.

so with the internet we (the people) could, should and will reclaim control over our nations. and not allow multi-million dollar lobbies to set the agenda of highly corruptible small group of people that claim to "represent" us.

http://truetopiaproject.org

i get the feeling its not just microsoft being "clever" in always offering highly discounted versions as a last resort to prevent a free software takeover. it is also governments who cleverly threat to switch to free software (back up by some actual action), on which microsoft drastically cuts price.

i think the same about china for instance. they wanted to put the whole government and education system on their red flag linux. microsoft now gives them windows+office for a couple of euros (or even less i forgot) per machine.

so i suspect free software is used as a threat in order to make microsoft cut its prices. is that a problem? i think it contributes to free software's growth in the end -- but it is surely not as beneficent as the free software actually being used to run on computers.

im traveling in china for the last 6 weeks and the state of internet connections here is very random.

domestic sites, like the immensely popular QQ and baidu, are always _very_ responsive.

google sometimes gets a slow down to the extend that it is nearly unusable (that really help people here to move over to the super fast and slightly more chineese friendly baidu).

the main thing is the randomness, if it is connectivity/ congestion issues, or some conspiracy: no-one knows.

strange this hasn't been mentioned yet (over i overlooked it)..

when using a condom the foreskin cannot move freely. the foreskin is (in my opinion, and by just counting the nerve ends) more important than the head of the penis for sex. it also (in my opinion) helps keeping the vagina lubricated nicely, and naturally.

so when using a condom the foreskin doesn't move: missing that pleasure and have to use some artificial lube. no problem for me: i keeps some lube with my condoms and beeing a litte less sensitive can have its advantages (as the foreskin-less amoung us often advocate).
i rather have the sexual freedom that condoms bring me.

so solution: sell each condom with a small package of lube (preferable high quality like durex sensilube), that, to me, would solve half of the problems associated with condoms.

good luck with the research!

(ohh.. just to mention: several girls have told me that the condoms+lube thing also made the sex better for them, especially in the end of a session)