Yeah, disposable email address providers can disappear. I used emailias.com for several years and suddenly the whole service just disappeared. There was no warning in advance. It wasn't fun to log in to tens of services just to change my email address, and I didn't even have a list of places where I had given emailias.com addresses. Now I use my own domain for generating email addresses although it takes more work.

You're not forced to use the search box or the default settings, but I recently found an annoying feature in Opera. When I start typing something in the address field Opera would automatically offer me search suggestions from Google. I'm not sure I'd like this feature be on by default, but I didn't even find a setting for turning it off. Editing Opera's search.ini manually solved the issue for me, although I'm not sure if you can achieve the same thing by deleting Google from your list of search engines and re-adding it (if you want).

I could imagine that humans are well adapted to the other positions you mention, but squatting? I'm curious – do you have any references for this or is it just your feeling?

These news might explain why earlier this spring I started receiving spam to the email address I had given to LinkedIn and no one else. The format of the disposable email address was such that it could not be guessed. I have something like 100 of these disposable email addresses and the others and the others haven't leaked so I don't think the leak happened at my end. That leaves LinkedIn as the source of the leak and I was wondering if they knowingly sold out my email address that shouldn't have been public or if they got hacked. Now it seems it might have been the latter. This comment says: "I changed my LinkedIn password a while back (about a month ago or so) my old password shows up in the Hash not my new password." ( http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2898871&cid=40232837 ). That would fit with the idea that the breach happened some time ago, not in the past few weeks. I contacted LinkedIn and asked for an explanation but they didn't bother to answer. I'm sure they were too busy investigating the breach and informing their customers that their data has been stolen or something. Well, in the end I don't know why my email address was leaked. But I do think that they should at least have provided an explanation and an apology when I contacted them.

I'm a Finn and I'd probably sign such an initiative. Before that I'd probably study the matter a bit since I can't say I KNOW that shorter patents and copyrights would be better, but I expect I'd come to that conclusion.