I reckon they'll start lobbying to make free web porn illegal. Probably by requiring a credit card be involved to "protect the children." Anything that causes ISPs or the *AA to make less money than they'd prefer is criminal, after all.

MS did not own QDOS when they sold it to IBM. Oh, and Bill Gate's mother was on the board of IBM. And what a crap OS DOS was; it held the industry back 10 years. Thankfully MS no longer has that sort of power; you could tell they were slipping when they failed to smother the Internet and force everybody onto MSN. Now, the only real drag they can impose on progress is via patent shakedowns.

“We’re currently working to develop a policy that balances the effective use of this powerful law enforcement tool with the privacy concerns we’re keenly aware of,” Harris said.

That can only mean that they won't record license plates belonging to Republican politicians near gay bath houses.

I was going to say negative numbers are accepted. I also meant to say "iris database". Most current images probably do not have the resolution for that; but give it a year or two.

How long until they scrape Facebook photos to build their database? After all, anything that's detectable in public is fair game.

I'm not a Dan, but hey, they called it.

Astronauts don't read Arabic. He should have written it in... Cyrillic? Mandarin?

And Comcast is called Xfinity. Change your name to Xsomething and people will forget whatever you did before, apparently.

What's funny is that the scans are not mandatory at the airports I've seen; they only cover half the lines. Just note which line ends in a rape-scan and go to the other ones. They tried to make them mandatory leading up to last Thanksgiving, but so many people were going to opt out that they backed off to avert a PR nightmare. So they still get most of the money, but a real terrorist would just skip the machines. Without 100% coverage, the machines are useless. But with 100% coverage, people opting out will slow the system to a crawl and they'll have to give up. So they are sticking with an approach which is 100% useless (except to train the slave class to live in fear).

We will add you to a list of dissidents and you will receive super-enhanced screening.

Their entire purpose in life is to lie and cheat in order to make money. Anybody who expect voluntary ethical behaviour from a marketer doesn't know marketers. And don't talk to me about the mythical wise, long-term thinking marketers.

So if I see a guy punch himself in the nuts and screaming, and I decide that this is not for me, I owe him money?

The interesting thing about this is it sets a value on not using Windows. To many, many millions of people, it's worth $5 + markup to not have to use WP7. So the market has determined that WP7's value is -$5.00. I'm sure it's worth more than ten times that negative amount, but MS can't rush the shakedown too much or they'll either kill their hosts or ramp up the immune systems of their hosts (i.e., companies which aren't just parasites, because they actually produce value).

Why wouldn't we give one of the least ethical companies in the world access to everything we do at home? They already inspect and record everything we do online.