Where do you live? I also have RoadRunner. It costs $45/month. I get one (1) IP address. Each additional IP costs $15. If they catch you using a NAT box or any kind of server they come and rip the cable out of the wall and sue you for damages.
I really want to know which RoadRunner you use because it sure isn't the one I use.
On the other hand... I've been waiting since September 2000 for SBC to activate the "pronto" box on the corner so I can get a DSL line. (They have PROMISED I'll get it in May, for what that's worth.) Of course, I'm not using SBC/Prodigy for my ISP so I'm going to have to pay a little more. But, for the cost of putting two computers on RoadRunner I'll be able to have all seven of my machines on the DSL line and run any kind of servers I want.
If my RoadRunner service let me do all the things YOUR RoadRunner lets you do I'd be a most loyal customer. But, around here they abide by the TOS posted on their web site and sue people who violate it.
Last time I read the patent law (yeah, I've actually done that.) It said you had one year after first public disclosure to apply for a patent. Since it usually take at least a couple of years to get a patent by the time you realized you could patent it the time would have run out.
At least one public standard was in development for exactly this purpose in 1989. Second and third generation standards (DIS, VRM VRML 2.0) were in development in 1996, the date fo the patent filing. The rest of the contents of the patent seem to have been in the original MUD in 1978.
IANAL
But, unless you are a very large corporation I would not lose sleep over this patent. The large corps. with deep pockets are likely targets for suits over this "patent."
The IP protocol and the whole routine structure were origianlly designed to provide redundant connections between TRUSTED hosts. Further it assumed that the transport was on top of the highly reliable PSTN which in the US is build to DOD standards.
It was never designed to operate in the presence of HOSTILE hosts and poorly designed transport networks.
because the amount of money they make off of them is rapidly dropping toward zero. The big telcos have high built in costs so they try to only offer services with high built in profits. When the ROI on a service drops below certain level (usually what they could make if they invested in T-bills or their own stock) they sell off the service.
If you go and look at the sec filings for the big telcos over the last 5 years you can chart to rather sudden loss in revenue from pay phones. That means the big telcos have to get out of that business.
It's just business folks.
Of course, that doesn't mean that someone with lower built in costs couldn't offer the service. And, they are doing just that.
But, I have read a book on copyright law and taken a course on Internet intellectual property law. I wound up doing all that because I was threatened with a law suit for having registered my family name as a domain name.
The law allows the owner to use copyright law to control the distribution of their property as they see fit. The difference between web pages you can down load for free and mp3s that you can't is very simple. The web page owner let's you look at the page for free because they make money by selling advertising to other people and maybe by selling products and services to you. It might surprise you but there are many many web pages that you CAN NOT look at for free. The most useful databases and documents require payment to view them. Companies I've worked for have paid tens of thousands of dollars to see some of those documents.
The owner of the mp3 makes money by selling music.
Just like any other kind of property the owner gets to decide what is done with the property. Most owners are out to make the most they can from the property they own. So the web page owner lets you look at the pages for free and makes money indirectly from you while the MP3 owner makes money from selling music and considers "free" access to be theft.
Think of it like this. A free web site is a lot like a store. Their aren't very many stores that charge people to get in and look at the products (but there are some). An, mp3 is a lot like a watch. A store will let you look at a watch for free. They'll even let you try it on. But, don't try to take the watch home for free. You'll wind up in jail.
with 32 megs and a Sierra wireless modem. 32 meg seems like a lot of memory until you load a video player and a few videos and DOOM and a couple of wads and then start looking to load Quake...
The iPaq is simply amazing to a guy whose first personal computer had 16K (kilo not mega) bytes of RAM and a 2mhz z80 processor...
Really, the wireless network is to slow for serious use, but works ok for email. And, 32 meg is not nearly enugh memory if you plan to use the machine for entertainment. And yeah, it runs DOOM pretty well.
Other people point out that it has already been done with 35 year old technology. I have done the math and lived the history. You might want to read some of the history of SSTO systems.
You are right and wrong. Atlas was disposable, the modified Saturn was NOT intended to be disposable and is the great great great grandfather of the DC-X.
Lumping X-33 and DC-X together is interesting. X-33 was a political move diesgined to discredit DC-X. DC-X might actually work. But, notice that the X-33 has hypersonic glide cabability, just like the shuttle. You need hypersonic glide in military applications. DC-X has no hypersonic glide capability. And was skillfully killed.
I am not a rocket scientist, but I am married to a rocket scientist who has helped design both orbital and suborbital vehicles. I trust here judgement.
I am so so so sick of NASA's lies. They have blocked every attempt to build cheap reliable space launch technology. X-33 was known to be so risky that very few in the aerospace industry ever expected it to fly. The tanks that failed were of a design that was rated as one of the highest risks in the entire program. That was known from the very first.
SSTO is not hard to do folks. Remember Mercury capsules from the early '60s? Launched on an Atlas missle developed in the '50s? Tha Atlas was nearly SSTO capable in 1960. The second stage of the Starun V, you remember, the moon rocket? WAS SSTO CAPABLE in the middle 1960s. The first proposal for a man carrying SSTO was a version of the Staturn V third stage that was sligthly longer and had a crew cabin. It could have been flying in the early '70s...
I could go on... Why is the tooling needed to build space shuttles owned by the US-DOD and not NASA?
Why is space transport the only socialist program left in the US federal government?
If you want to go into space, you have to hate NASA. If you hate the way NASA wastes money, then you have to hate NASA.
I was 8 when Gagarin went up. I was excited that someone had gone into space and disapointed that it wasn't an American.
Mostly I remember the fear. Everyone knew that a missile that could put up a ship the size of Vostok could put an h-bomb on any city in the world. We started having air raid drills at school and the city tested the air raid sirens for the first time since WWII. The Soviets had sworn to bury us, they had h-bombs, and now there was no way to deny that they had a way to deliver them.
It's hard to believe just how badly the entire US was scared by this single event. One night I heard a police siren and ran for the basement thinking it was an air raid siren.
In many ways this was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. It convinced us that they were a real threat. A threat so great that they had to be removed. It took a long time and nearly bankrupted the US but there is no Soviet Union any more.
I think it is the connection between space flight and weapons technology that has caused all the worlds governments to block private access to space and space flight technology. The availablity of cheap simple space ships like the DC-X make it just to easy for someone to carry out atomic, chemical, or biological attacks anywhere in the world. Just build your weapon, hijack a ship and BOOM!
Let's take it one step farther. Let's say your company accounting software is rented as a service over the net. Everything is web based and you just pay a monthly fee to use the application. Then application provider goes out of business. You suddenly find that not only does you application stop working but, you can't change over to another application because all your billing information is "unavailable." You see, as part of the "service" they store and protect your data too.
Then you either pay up to get the data or you go out of business. You can sue the provider but they've already filled for bankruptcy.
Or, say that application is written using Curl from our friends at Curl.com. And... One sad day one of their data entry clerks makes an error and your ASP's monthly payment is credited to the wrong account. This tiny error automatically instructs the curl plug-in in browsers around the world to start refusing to let anyone access the application. Then both you and the application provider go out of business. The ASP dies because of all the suits from pissed off customers and you die because you can't bill your customers. Then Curl.com dies because you all sue them.
Well, probably not. But you get the picture. Everything is connected. Anyone stupid enough to rent software that way or to use spyware like curl gets what they deserve. You see....
When I was a senior in high school I was 6'1" tall and weighed in at 180 poinds. Think of me as the USA. Their was this sophmore, he has maybe 5 feet tall and weighed maybe 90 pounds. And, he kept challenging me to a fight. Think of him as China. The situation looked like a lose-lose situation for me. If I fought him, and won, I'd be seen as a big nasty bully and get in all sorts of trouble. So, I didn't fight him. And, he went around telling everyone I was afraid of him. So, I had lost face.
He kept challenging me and I kept refusing to hurt him and I kept losing face and he kept gaining it. sheesh...
One day he publicly challenged me in front of a group of my firends and I refused. He called me a coward and turned to walk away. I picked him up by his belt, grabbed an ankle and held him upside down until his wallet fell out and he said "uncle." Then I gently lowered him to the ground. As I put him down I said "I'm sorry if I hurt you." He went his way and I went mine. No one said anything about it ever again.
The Chinese demand that the US apologize is exactly the same as that little kid demanding that I fight him. The US needs to very diplomatically hold China up by its belt, shake them a little, and then very gently let them go.
Or else we could just nuke the airbase. But that would get us into a LOT of trouble.
Read the license agreement at http://www.curl.com/html/products/surge_license.js p and tell me why I, or anyone else in their right mind would load a plug in that allows the plug in to report on what you have viewed with it and also allows the plug in to block content!
Then wander over to http://www.curl.com/html/products/pricing.jsp and look at the fact that you have to commit to sending Curl a minimum of $1000/month (max of $50,000/month) to use Curl to deliver content. And the cost is based on how many characters you serve. Not, on how much revenue it generates.
This product looks more like misguided megalomania than like product that stands a chance of actually being used by anyone.
Technically, it acutally looks pretty good. But, the business model and the privacy policy are, well... They're insane.
Is that we learn new things very easily. In fact,
we deliberately seek out new things to learn. And,
we get a thrill out of learning new things. This makes
us uniquely and fundamentally different from the other 95% of the human species. The worst thing about us is that most of us are completely unaware of this difference.
For most people learning to use a new OS/Office Suite/Browser is something they did once because they had too. And, rather like a root canal, something that they hope they never have to go through again.
Face it, for the vast majority of people learning Linux is alot like having a root canal and they will not do it until they have the equivalent of a puss filled abscess forcing them to either do it or die.
What will lead to wide spread adoption of Linux is Microsoft excercising their legal right to audit fortune 1000 companies for license violations. Those audits and the forced purchase of licenses cost real money. Just one audit can cost 10s of millions of dollars to conduct and can cost 10s of millions of more dollars in added overhead expenses to make sure they always pass the audits.
What will REALLY hurt Microsoft is when school districts stop using Microsoft software in classes because they cannot afford the cost of an audit or the cost of new licenses to replace ones they own, but cannot produce.
Microsoft license audits are the puss filled abcess that will push the adoption of Linux more than any other single force.
A press release from a national lab gets the escape velocity of the Earth wrong?
Earth escape velocity is ~7 MILES/second or ~ 11.3 KILOMETERS/second. But the officials at our national lab says in the article that it is 7 KILOMETERS/second and then goes on to use that to show just how fast this thing is...
Maybe I'm being too picky but it does make them look like idiots when they don't do trivial fact checking.
I was once in the position of having to negotiate a contract when I was in a very weak position. I was being fired... At the advice of my lawyer and with the help of his staff we took the termination agreement I was offered, created a new one with the same front and back page, but with some parts in the middle modified to my benefit. I then signed two copies of it and sent it back to company in the envelope they provided. What we did was not only legal it was done at the advice of my lawyer.
I don't see any legal difference between the two hacks. There is a huge moral difference.
In my case I was being fired to force me to give up minority ownership of the company. In the other case people are stealing from the stupid.
Hmmm... is it actually immoral to steal from the stupid?
I have found that a simple letter sent to the presidient of the company works very well for these types of cases. The important part is to send it as a certified letter return reciept required. That way someone very high in the organization has to actually sign for the damned thing. Since this is the way that legal documents are sent you are sure that someone with authority will actually read it letter.
You are absolutely correct. The space shuttle
design was a compromise forced on nasa by the
politics of the situation. To get support to
build the shuttle nasa had to have the support
of the US air force. That meant that the shuttle
had to meet USAF requirements for payload capacity
and it had to have a large cross range on landing
capability so that it could deorbit under attack
and still reach an landing strip. The shuttle also
was designed to be able to duck into the atmosphere
and then pop back up into orbit to evade attack.
A wingless design could not meet USAF requirements.
There were several much lower cost higher payload designs considered including water landing designs. They were dropped because they did not meet the military requirements for a space transport. Wings on a spaceship are just plain stupid.
Don't believe me? Ever asked who owns the tooling needed to build a shuttle? It isn't nasa. It is the US DOD. That's right, nasa cannot even build spare parts without permission from the US Department of Defense.
BTW, I saw a Challenger launch in 1984 (a successful launch) from the VIP viewing stands. I have talked to the Thiokol engineer who said don't launch and I have talked to several Thiokol managers that backed him up.
First saw the idea of using direct fission products for propolsion in an SF story published in the '40s, I read it in the '60s. Gas core nuclear rockets based on u235 hexafloride were studied in the '50s, 60s, and '70s. Uranium saltwater rockets get the same performance but are a lot easier to build. Looks like the first u235 saltwater reactor was build during the manhatten project and I believe the use of such for rocket propulsion was patented (secret patent) at that time.
It does look like using americium would simplify things... But, since large scale americium production appears to require the use of breeder reactors it is a political dead end in the US right now.
So, why are Americans (USians) so much different from the folks in the rest of the world? The answer is actually pretty simple. Just take a look at who our ancestors are. Some of us (many of us) are descended from the natives who have survived the 500 year onslaught of a tecnologically superior force of bloody handed invaders bent on genocide. The modern survivors are tough and smart.
Many more are descended from slaves. We survived the same brutalization and dehumanization that was passed out to the natives. The survivors and their descendants are tough and smart.
The rest of us are descended from those bloody handed invaders. Every opportunist, every body who was just pissed off with what was going on where they were, everyone who just wanted to see what they could be if they weren't under the control of an entrenched aristocracy of one form or another. All of those moved to the Americas. And, after the revolution more and more of them came to the US.
The key thing about the immigrants is that they weren't willing to put up with what they had and they believed in their personal ability to change things by their own actions.
In other words, we are descended from tough, mean, people who have survived against extreme misfortune and are willing to get up off their butts and take a risk. Of course we're different from the rest of the world. Everyone in the world who is like us has tried to move here for the last several hundred years.
stonewolf
P.S.
I'm proud to be able to claim all of the above groups as ancestors.
Some one smater than I am said. The most vigilant are the woried and paranoid. It is people like you, the worried, who are willing to get up off their butts and make sure that freedom continues to thrive in the US.
Your question proves to me that you are the kind of citizen the US needs to maintain the freedoms we have. Please stay.
One thing though... freedom and saftey are almost always opposites.
Unless you are using a satellite link this is actually very easy to do.... It might be easy to do with satellite links but I don't know enough to answer that case.
Even mobile communication is based on physical devices in known physical locations. If you connect through a cellular or PCS or similar system then the system in the tower knows to with in a few hundred meters exactly where you are. If you connect through a phone line then the phone company database can locate you to within a few dozen meters. This is how 911 systems work in the US. People seem to forget that at some point your Internet traffic leaves the backbone and gets routed to a single logical circuit with a known physical source and destination. The location finding ability of these systems is based on a trusted third party, the last mile transport provider, and can't be easily spoofed by any end user. Sure, you could tap into your neighbors phone lines or use a stolen PCS connection. But, you would still be locatable within a few meters of your actual physical location. Which is good enough to control access to services.
Slashdot Mirror
Where do you live? I also have RoadRunner. It costs $45/month. I get one (1) IP address. Each additional IP costs $15. If they catch you using a NAT box or any kind of server they come and rip the cable out of the wall and sue you for damages.
I really want to know which RoadRunner you use because it sure isn't the one I use.
On the other hand... I've been waiting since September 2000 for SBC to activate the "pronto" box on the corner so I can get a DSL line. (They have PROMISED I'll get it in May, for what that's worth.) Of course, I'm not using SBC/Prodigy for my ISP so I'm going to have to pay a little more. But, for the cost of putting two computers on RoadRunner I'll be able to have all seven of my machines on the DSL line and run any kind of servers I want.
If my RoadRunner service let me do all the things YOUR RoadRunner lets you do I'd be a most loyal customer. But, around here they abide by the TOS posted on their web site and sue people who violate it.
StoneWolf
IANAL and the law was changed not long ago.
StoneWolf
IANAL
But, unless you are a very large corporation I would not lose sleep over this patent. The large corps. with deep pockets are likely targets for suits over this "patent."
StoneWolf
It was never designed to operate in the presence of HOSTILE hosts and poorly designed transport networks.
Can you we all say "oops!"
StoneWolf
If you go and look at the sec filings for the big telcos over the last 5 years you can chart to rather sudden loss in revenue from pay phones. That means the big telcos have to get out of that business.
It's just business folks.
Of course, that doesn't mean that someone with lower built in costs couldn't offer the service. And, they are doing just that.
StoneWolf
But, I have read a book on copyright law and taken a course on Internet intellectual property law. I wound up doing all that because I was threatened with a law suit for having registered my family name as a domain name.
The law allows the owner to use copyright law to control the distribution of their property as they see fit. The difference between web pages you can down load for free and mp3s that you can't is very simple. The web page owner let's you look at the page for free because they make money by selling advertising to other people and maybe by selling products and services to you. It might surprise you but there are many many web pages that you CAN NOT look at for free. The most useful databases and documents require payment to view them. Companies I've worked for have paid tens of thousands of dollars to see some of those documents.
The owner of the mp3 makes money by selling music.
Just like any other kind of property the owner gets to decide what is done with the property. Most owners are out to make the most they can from the property they own. So the web page owner lets you look at the pages for free and makes money indirectly from you while the MP3 owner makes money from selling music and considers "free" access to be theft.
Think of it like this. A free web site is a lot like a store. Their aren't very many stores that charge people to get in and look at the products (but there are some). An, mp3 is a lot like a watch. A store will let you look at a watch for free. They'll even let you try it on. But, don't try to take the watch home for free. You'll wind up in jail.
StoneWolf
The iPaq is simply amazing to a guy whose first personal computer had 16K (kilo not mega) bytes of RAM and a 2mhz z80 processor...
Really, the wireless network is to slow for serious use, but works ok for email. And, 32 meg is not nearly enugh memory if you plan to use the machine for entertainment. And yeah, it runs DOOM pretty well.
StoneWolf
Other people point out that it has already been done with 35 year old technology. I have done the math and lived the history. You might want to read some of the history of SSTO systems.
Lumping X-33 and DC-X together is interesting. X-33 was a political move diesgined to discredit DC-X. DC-X might actually work. But, notice that the X-33 has hypersonic glide cabability, just like the shuttle. You need hypersonic glide in military applications. DC-X has no hypersonic glide capability. And was skillfully killed.
StoneWolf
I am not a rocket scientist, but I am married to a rocket scientist who has helped design both orbital and suborbital vehicles. I trust here judgement.
SSTO is not hard to do folks. Remember Mercury capsules from the early '60s? Launched on an Atlas missle developed in the '50s? Tha Atlas was nearly SSTO capable in 1960. The second stage of the Starun V, you remember, the moon rocket? WAS SSTO CAPABLE in the middle 1960s. The first proposal for a man carrying SSTO was a version of the Staturn V third stage that was sligthly longer and had a crew cabin. It could have been flying in the early '70s...
I could go on... Why is the tooling needed to build space shuttles owned by the US-DOD and not NASA?
Why is space transport the only socialist program left in the US federal government?
If you want to go into space, you have to hate NASA. If you hate the way NASA wastes money, then you have to hate NASA.
StoneWolf
StoneWolf
Mostly I remember the fear. Everyone knew that a missile that could put up a ship the size of Vostok could put an h-bomb on any city in the world. We started having air raid drills at school and the city tested the air raid sirens for the first time since WWII. The Soviets had sworn to bury us, they had h-bombs, and now there was no way to deny that they had a way to deliver them.
It's hard to believe just how badly the entire US was scared by this single event. One night I heard a police siren and ran for the basement thinking it was an air raid siren.
In many ways this was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. It convinced us that they were a real threat. A threat so great that they had to be removed. It took a long time and nearly bankrupted the US but there is no Soviet Union any more.
I think it is the connection between space flight and weapons technology that has caused all the worlds governments to block private access to space and space flight technology. The availablity of cheap simple space ships like the DC-X make it just to easy for someone to carry out atomic, chemical, or biological attacks anywhere in the world. Just build your weapon, hijack a ship and BOOM!
StoneWolf
Then you either pay up to get the data or you go out of business. You can sue the provider but they've already filled for bankruptcy.
Or, say that application is written using Curl from our friends at Curl.com. And... One sad day one of their data entry clerks makes an error and your ASP's monthly payment is credited to the wrong account. This tiny error automatically instructs the curl plug-in in browsers around the world to start refusing to let anyone access the application. Then both you and the application provider go out of business. The ASP dies because of all the suits from pissed off customers and you die because you can't bill your customers. Then Curl.com dies because you all sue them.
Well, probably not. But you get the picture. Everything is connected. Anyone stupid enough to rent software that way or to use spyware like curl gets what they deserve. You see....
Stupidity is its own reward.
StoneWolf
He kept challenging me and I kept refusing to hurt him and I kept losing face and he kept gaining it. sheesh...
One day he publicly challenged me in front of a group of my firends and I refused. He called me a coward and turned to walk away. I picked him up by his belt, grabbed an ankle and held him upside down until his wallet fell out and he said "uncle." Then I gently lowered him to the ground. As I put him down I said "I'm sorry if I hurt you." He went his way and I went mine. No one said anything about it ever again.
The Chinese demand that the US apologize is exactly the same as that little kid demanding that I fight him. The US needs to very diplomatically hold China up by its belt, shake them a little, and then very gently let them go.
Or else we could just nuke the airbase. But that would get us into a LOT of trouble.
StoneWolf
Then wander over to http://www.curl.com/html/products/pricing.jsp and look at the fact that you have to commit to sending Curl a minimum of $1000/month (max of $50,000/month) to use Curl to deliver content. And the cost is based on how many characters you serve. Not, on how much revenue it generates.
This product looks more like misguided megalomania than like product that stands a chance of actually being used by anyone.
Technically, it acutally looks pretty good. But, the business model and the privacy policy are, well... They're insane.
StoneWolf
For most people learning to use a new OS/Office Suite/Browser is something they did once because they had too. And, rather like a root canal, something that they hope they never have to go through again.
Face it, for the vast majority of people learning Linux is alot like having a root canal and they will not do it until they have the equivalent of a puss filled abscess forcing them to either do it or die.
What will lead to wide spread adoption of Linux is Microsoft excercising their legal right to audit fortune 1000 companies for license violations. Those audits and the forced purchase of licenses cost real money. Just one audit can cost 10s of millions of dollars to conduct and can cost 10s of millions of more dollars in added overhead expenses to make sure they always pass the audits.
What will REALLY hurt Microsoft is when school districts stop using Microsoft software in classes because they cannot afford the cost of an audit or the cost of new licenses to replace ones they own, but cannot produce.
Microsoft license audits are the puss filled abcess that will push the adoption of Linux more than any other single force.
StoneWolf
Earth escape velocity is ~7 MILES/second or ~ 11.3 KILOMETERS/second. But the officials at our national lab says in the article that it is 7 KILOMETERS/second and then goes on to use that to show just how fast this thing is...
Maybe I'm being too picky but it does make them look like idiots when they don't do trivial fact checking.
I don't see any legal difference between the two hacks. There is a huge moral difference. In my case I was being fired to force me to give up minority ownership of the company. In the other case people are stealing from the stupid.
Hmmm... is it actually immoral to steal from the stupid?
Some times old tech works best :-)
stonewolf
A wingless design could not meet USAF requirements. There were several much lower cost higher payload designs considered including water landing designs. They were dropped because they did not meet the military requirements for a space transport. Wings on a spaceship are just plain stupid.
Don't believe me? Ever asked who owns the tooling needed to build a shuttle? It isn't nasa. It is the US DOD. That's right, nasa cannot even build spare parts without permission from the US Department of Defense.
BTW, I saw a Challenger launch in 1984 (a successful launch) from the VIP viewing stands. I have talked to the Thiokol engineer who said don't launch and I have talked to several Thiokol managers that backed him up.
It does look like using americium would simplify things... But, since large scale americium production appears to require the use of breeder reactors it is a political dead end in the US right now.
I hope someone has the guts to try it.
stonewolf
Many more are descended from slaves. We survived the same brutalization and dehumanization that was passed out to the natives. The survivors and their descendants are tough and smart.
The rest of us are descended from those bloody handed invaders. Every opportunist, every body who was just pissed off with what was going on where they were, everyone who just wanted to see what they could be if they weren't under the control of an entrenched aristocracy of one form or another. All of those moved to the Americas. And, after the revolution more and more of them came to the US.
The key thing about the immigrants is that they weren't willing to put up with what they had and they believed in their personal ability to change things by their own actions.
In other words, we are descended from tough, mean, people who have survived against extreme misfortune and are willing to get up off their butts and take a risk. Of course we're different from the rest of the world. Everyone in the world who is like us has tried to move here for the last several hundred years.
stonewolf
P.S.
I'm proud to be able to claim all of the above groups as ancestors.
Some one smater than I am said. The most vigilant are the woried and paranoid. It is people like you, the worried, who are willing to get up off their butts and make sure that freedom continues to thrive in the US.
Your question proves to me that you are the kind of citizen the US needs to maintain the freedoms we have. Please stay.
One thing though... freedom and saftey are almost always opposites.
Even mobile communication is based on physical devices in known physical locations. If you connect through a cellular or PCS or similar system then the system in the tower knows to with in a few hundred meters exactly where you are. If you connect through a phone line then the phone company database can locate you to within a few dozen meters. This is how 911 systems work in the US. People seem to forget that at some point your Internet traffic leaves the backbone and gets routed to a single logical circuit with a known physical source and destination. The location finding ability of these systems is based on a trusted third party, the last mile transport provider, and can't be easily spoofed by any end user. Sure, you could tap into your neighbors phone lines or use a stolen PCS connection. But, you would still be locatable within a few meters of your actual physical location. Which is good enough to control access to services.
stonewolf