Certainly shares that characteristic, yes.

This is impractical for any useful scale.

The Sealand invasion, the hostage taking, and the subsequent dawn raid and recapture were comedic stunts. Read about Sealand with a smirk and you won't go far wrong - except that yes, they really were declared to be out of the jurisdiction of British courts by a British judge.

A web of trust is only as trustworthy as the least trustworthy member of the web.

The tar is rather hot, or the feathers don't stick. Fairly terrifying I would have thought.

Wow, you could be describing world war II, Vietnam, or any number of other 'legitimate' conflicts. It really isn't that cut and dried.

On the internet nobody is completely anonymous. Everybody sends an identifier with each packet. It's called an ip address.

It also buys a lot more bacon sandwiches, which is the type of thing the 50k person would be buying with their tax, as opposed to new yachts and other luxuries that the guy with 10 million would spend it on. But the fact is, they probably wouldn't spend it, it would amass in some portfolio - rich peoples money is dead money, it does nothing to help the economy.

Tell me about it. I got DirectTV about 3 years ago and at that time I had to buy the DVRs etc. The ensuing questions regarding why I would need to "rent" equipment that I had just bought seemed to bounce around the empty head of the sales guy.

I went to his myspace page a few minutes ago and watched the video of "A Girl Like You." It's the one at the bottom of the list.

contempt is the best one could hope for. "I forgot" may be more difficult to say when you're naked in a chilled room lying in your own feces.

...

IANAB, but is this common practice in the UK?

Yep, every Saturday night after pub closing time as I recall.