Actually, it's conceivable to allow secure storage of data remotely, in a way that prevents even the storage provider from accessing it.

You can't trust storage providers today to implement that kind of functionality, unless you analyze the source code of the scripts on the service's webpage every time it loads.

However the browsers could add functionality to enforce that. They could offer "protected" input forms, input from which is tagged. Every protected input form would be visually indicated and made it apparent what encryption key it's supposed to use. The browser then ensures that any data in DOM nodes and JS objects tagged as protected cannot be sent to the server.

To remove the protection tag from such data the scripts on the page need to pipe it through a builtin encryption function with the indicated key. The protection tag needs to be viral so that any data derived from protected data is also protected and any JS objects created after a branch based on protected data are also protected.

On the decryption side, a builtin decrypt function would produce data tagged as protected.

In short, make browsers ensure that input from indicated form elements is
* always encrypted before being sent to the server
* encrypted with the desired key

Naturally that doesn't fix the stupid user problem, but it'd make smart users happy.

What could be simplified, for starters, is the presentation. I live in Poland, there has been a controversial bill passed recently and I wanted to look at its legislative process closer. Turns out it's nothing but pain, because you have to cross-reference multiple sources to get the full picture.
On the parliament's website I can get:
- Summaries of voting sessions, with each member's vote, but no reference to the topic of the vote.
- Texts of stuff being voted on, without references to relevant voting sessions.
- Full logs of parliamentary sessions, which reference neither the voting session numbers, nor the text numbers.
Moreover the texts given are only diffs against earlier established law, so to get the full picture you also need to find the current laws and manually apply changes.
So it's a ton of work to know who voted for what exactly.

In comparison, it's easier for me to check how things work in the Linux kernel. I may not understand the intricacies, locking disciplines, non-uniform memory management etc. but I can look at the complete source. Any programmer can read the data structure declarations, the general control flow and can get an idea how certain things work. You can grep it, you can check who wrote something. It certainly feels a lot more open.

The first step towards the reality of the recent movie, "Gamer"?

I for one welcome our new remote spine-controlling overlords!

Under Wine I usually get between 20-45fps on a two generations older 7600gs, in windowed more with around 1400x1000 resolution. Definitely very playable, outside of crowded outposts like Kamadan.

and if I'm not mistaken its write speed should be fast on just about anything.

Until you fill up the drive and the garbage collector needs to kick in. From what I know, their garbage collector is currently very basic and unoptimized. It's probably going to take a while before we get the perfect filesystem for the old, cheap SSDs.

Phoronix benchmarked JFS before:
* on a cheap SSD here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_ext4&num=4
* on an expensive SSD here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_x25e_filesystems&num=1
The results were less than impressive, but they could be different in a HDD benchmark.

If they keep this shit up the USA is gonna be left all alone as some "insanity island" while everyone else gets with the program and moves to the 21st century.

Except, you know, the same (or similar) corporate forces behind the intellectual property push in the US are hard at work in the EU and in international organizations such as WIPO and WTO.
ACTA is being worked on by the US, EU, Japan, Australia, NZ, Korea, Mexico, Canada and Germany, among others.

I actually took the time before the EP election here in Poland to look for a candidate that I could feel represented by. The problem is that my candidate was from an unpopular party and that you only get one vote in our voting system.

Essentially that means that I had two choices:

• vote for my favorite and lose my vote (when the party doesn't cross 5% the vote is discarded)
• vote for some people I don't trust at all - so that my vote actually influenced the final results.

This is what disenchants me about our democracy. It doesn't really work. IMHO, we desperately need a single trasferable vote system to make voting worthwhile again. That way people could vote for their unpopular favorites and influence the outcome of the battle between the dominant parties with one vote. This can give fringe parties like the Pirate Party or the Greens a much better chance of getting in, diversifying the political landscape. And if this doesn't draw disenchanted voters to the booths, I'm not sure what will.

Gee, a wikipedia editor with a sarcastic remark. How unexpected.