Remember, this is a generic internet service. While it may mostly be used by mobile devices a lot of rural areas are forced to use these connections for their home internet connections and that includes providing service to the 70" UHD internet connected, voice activated television that knows when you're fridge ran out of beer.

This would destroy the major USA ISPs. Most of them advertise "up to" speeds that are asynchronous and rarely live up to half their expectation. Many of the larger ISPs depend on this lack of clarity to arbitrarily over subscribe their customers. This would drastically destroy many of their shady marketing practices. 3 Here's to hoping...

The U.N. has already partially done this. Unfortunately it's not a binding treaty but rather a recommendatory resolution, but through time and acceptance it's risen to the level of customary international law. It's specifically in the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19, which states:

It is very broad and open to a large amount of interpretation, but you find that in all international laws. Removing or restricting access to dissenting political bodies access to the information would be a pretty clear cut violation of this. Once again those, this isn't an enforceable or binding treaty and several significant countries oppose it becoming one (not surprisingly, primarily China and Russia).

Separately, I disagree with government attempting to censor misinformation. I know it's a huge problem, but when the government gets involved at that level it sets a dangerous precedent of authority against people who disagree with the government or statements made by the government. Ideally I'd want to support no form of government censorship at all (leaving individual site censorship up to the operators of the site), but there are to many possibilities for direct and blatant harm to individuals through harassment, threats, posting private information, etc. for the only repercussion to be loss of access to a public site.

I semi-regularly ssh into a server that's running linux 2.2, and AIUI the home directories for that and the desktops in the building (that I do use regularly) are served off an ancient SGI mainframe. I also regularly use a server running AIX 5.3; I have no idea how old the hardware for that is (AIX 5.3 came out in 2004).

Thus, I'm reasonably sure 15+ years old is not an overstatement. Yay for universities.

That said, even my desktop is over 6 at this point.

What you seem to be assuming is that their is only one work. If you contact a programmer to make you a specific program you are paying for the creation and license of that work. You own a copy of that work. The programmer owns the work.

If you did not get the copyright from the photographer taking wedding photos, they could not come to your house and take the pictures of your wedding off your wall. You own those copies, just as you own a copy of the software written for you.

If a competitor of your company wants the same software made by the same programmer there is nothing stopping that programmer reusing the code they used to make yours and adjusting it to fit your competitor's needs and be well within his rights to create a derivative work based on something he owns the copyright to.

What your missing is that by paying for it, your buying the right to use the software anyway you see fit unless your contract with the programmer states otherwise.

If you higher a contractor to build you an internal application and then you try to sell that as a product, you deserve the legal ramification that will come from this. The programmer should retain the rights to the code that they have created. The ability to reuse common code between jobs makes things go quicker for both you and any other clients that the developer chooses to take on.

The next time your hiring a programmer try asking them how long the job will take if they were not allowed to reuse any code that they already have.

Your argument has a significant flaw in it. Architects do not create the building, they create the blueprints for the building. Architects can then take bits and pieces of that blueprint and reuse them in any other building that they design. This is true with source code ownership. While you as a developer do not own the product, you should be able to take the pieces that you did make and reuse them as you'd like effectively owning them. This doesn't apply in the face of the construction phase of creating a new building because you can't reuse the same physical material without removing it from the original. It's meta-physical existence vs physical existence. This is what spawned copyrights in the first place. "Copyright is the set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work."

While I'm not disagreeing with you, there are absurdly good players at any game out there, there is also a wide range of people that actually do hack. In the case of the entire call of duty series there is a group that has turned it into a business of selling hacks. Here they are.

There are definitely people that call out good players as hackers, but it's usually pretty obvious to me who is a good player and who is a hacker. Quite a few them don't even have any problem admitting they are using hacks, commonly saying things like "If you don't like me using them then leave the server".

The ranking system built in to modern warfare 2 is also a bit of a give away right now. It takes a significant amount of playtime to get to "Level 70" in game. Once you reach level 70 you can go into prestige mode which starts you back at level 1. Most of the players that are Level 70, prestige 10 (essentially level 700) are hackers. Not at all of them mind you, there are some people out there that seem to have legitimately put in the ridiculous amount of hours to do that legit.

TL;DR Hacking is extremely prevalent in MW2

Encryption is separate from authentication. As it stands right now quite a few people assume they are the same thing. Encryption ensures that once you and whatever it is are talking to each other that session is private and only the two of you can understand what is being passed back and forth. Ensuring that your talking to the right person before starting the session is not the job of the encryption.

I understand that this view is wide open for man in the middle attacks but tying encryption and authentication together has been a big mistake. It is a convenient way to authenticate a server or a client and that is why it was implemented this way and continues to be implemented this way. A authentication handshake could easily be performed over and already encrypted session and verify the server for who it is.

"It turns out that portions of the disk are opaque " Maybe I'm off my rocker but the way this is stated, it sounds like a fact they observed rather than a model that they created. While this "fact" makes logical sense it is far too often that I see the statement "It turns out..."

I think that at least the latter half of this post is missing one huge piece of information. How can you be sure that it is Google that is defining public/private data. A lot of organizations are required to follow federal standards which in themselves define what is public and private. Social Security Numbers and Credit Card Numbers are always at the top of every one of those lists. For reference look at PCI DSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_DSS), FERPA (http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html), and HIPPA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Portability_and_Accountability_Act). Now while FERPA and HIPPA might not have anything talking about SS#s and CC#s take this excerpt from FERPA: "Schools may disclose, without consent, "directory" information such as a student's name, address, telephone number, date and place of birth, honors and awards, and dates of attendance." If a school can publicly disclose addresses without consent which they collect mandatorily, why can't Google, who is just indexing information that was already public not link to it? The problem with the private data online isn't Google, they are just the biggest target that happens to have been hit by this guy's particular wild shooting.

I'm kind of surprised that this hasn't been mentioned yet. I stumbled upon it on accident while looking for the same thing. A product named DimDim. It's open source and basically webex. It's free for conference rooms that have under 20 people. You can also host a server yourself. Using this I have helped many friends and family members overcome different problems. Setting up my own server was pain (dependency nightmare) but I like to know what information goes where (yeah I'm a bit paranoid).

"6-10, and some of them haven't heard of my hometown"? Forget that, I can stay within my state and most of the people I meet haven't heard of my hometown. Some of us don't live in cities, you know.

Who was the retailer? We need to know, so we can avoid them.

Beats me, you'd have to ask on the coreboot mailing list.

My best guess, though, is yes. (Excluding, of course, Windows startup.)