Little Johnny had a test tube
he filled it full of gas
he pointed it while heating
and blew off half his... fingers
Acutally, our entire year 11 class (30-odd people) except me believed dhmo.org when we were shown it... during a Theory of Knowledge lesson all about not believing what you read. Hmm....
As a teenaged myself I must say that trust seems right.
My parents have done all the same sort of stuff I'm doing now, so to prevent hypocracy they leave it be. At age 12, when I first got a computer in my room with internet access, my dad sat me down and talked to me about pornography... then left me to it. His incompetence was probably the major reason he didn't scour the logs, but even so...
Look, your average computer user knows how to clear their history, cover their tracks. And you know what, even if my dad had found my early pornographic explorations around the internet he would have left me be. I know what sites my younger brother visits, but I leave him be, because it's normal.
The worst places kids can go online really arn't that bad. More likely than not they would be disgusted by anything that would disgust you. Especially the 15 year old - they can handle things by themselves.
So yes, trust is important, and with your children you can be fairly certain that nothing they're doing is that bad. If it is, you'll see much more obvious signs in real life.
True and laudable, but not relevent to the original point - US crime levels are ridiculously high
When those laws are put together by the dictator's club called the UN, you bet. You know, the place that puts Syria and Libya on the "human rights committee"?
Yes, part of that freedom of speech of unpopular opinions you were talking about... Anyway, I think the original poster was refering to violations not just of international law and UN resolutions, but also of the ideals presented in the UN Charter and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Where freedom of speech applies to EVERYBODY, even the ones with unpopular causes. Hint: popular causes don't NEED freedom of speech.
Again, commendable that the US has such freedoms.
Hint: our popular culture dominates the world. Deal with it.
Homogonisation of culture is often non-voluntary for the countries involved but a results of the dollar diplomacy practiced by the US - excessive control exercised by economic power.
Where food is so cheap that even the poorest can (over)eat.
And while the US poor overeat, the rest of the world remains hungry due to import tariffs and price-hiking for personal benefit
God Bless America, wasting billions to attack foreign countries
They're ours to "waste", Saddam-lover.
No, they're not. Those billions could be used to make those poor you talk about richer. Or feed the starving. Or do anything. Hell, you could suddenly introduce a new currency and declare the old one worthless - throw away your money. But while it has some effect on others, you do NOT have the right to exercise your will AGAINST THE WISHES OF INVOLVED PARTIES. Oh, and by the way: if they're against you they're not necessarily with the oposition - I don't support the actions of Saddam Hussain OR George W Bush.
Seriously though, if used as a power source, what would be effects on, say, the ozone layer?
When I was younger I thought "Oh look, great idea, let's focus the sun's energy and catch it." Then I realised that by doing this we'd burn a permenent hole in the ozone layer and do other damage to the atmosphere caused by pumping high energy high frequency beams through it. The safest (only?) option would be geocentric, which would do permenent damage to a small area of the atmosphere.
Is this perhaps worse, given the overall environmental cost?
If a user wishes to be part of a legitimate mail list then there should be a way to authorize that host to send messages.
Sorry, but spammers are people too. They can get authorisation for an address, spam from it, once it gets removed from the whitelist, change it, and move on. Email addresses, vhosts, domain names - a dime a dozen these days. Well, not litterally, but cheap and easy enought that this type of whitelisting would not help.
So to you I would say, yes, we need to wake up, and so does 94% of the world that hates us, maybe if they focused that energy on hating thier own oppressive puppet governments that hold hands with the "US Fascist Regieme" the world might be a better place to live.
Two problems:
The US, as the most powerful nation, is setting this trend
Just because everyone else is doing it that doesn't make it ok
Give YOUR money to whoever the fuck you want to and stop telling other people how to spend theirs!
So if I decide to spend my money on hiring a hitman to kill you, that'd be cool? You are advocating non-interventionist moral theory: a SERIOUSLY bad idea.
Yes, no-one can force you to spend your money in any way (except gov't through fines, but thats something different) but everyone has the right to tell you what they reckon as to how you should spend your money. And they might be right that there are better causes than "creativity".
So stop advocating the violation of rights which you hold so dear. And to prevent anger, may I advise that you cease using profanity?
The only way to stop spam is to make it stop being cost effective, that involves causing e-mail to be an expensive operation if it involves untrusted e-mail servers.
Apart from the problems in forcing people to pay for email (at what end, how to enforce cross compatibility etc), I want free email. It would really suck to pay even $0.01 (or even $0.001) for every message I send.
Simply deal with it. Install a decent filter, with lots of herustic and baysian checks, then deal with the one or two that leak through. Yes, spam of 50+ a day is bad, but most of that can be easily blocked by common, easy, free spam filters on any platform, even with settings so low that there are no false positives.
Alternatives such as charging for email or enforcing use of cryptography suck generally (signing requires me to type my password, or compromise my security by caching), but more than that they'll never be implimented. Forced signing (or somesuch thing) is standard with IPv6 - but has it been implimented? Try getting everyone to change; not going to happen. Install a spam filter and deal people.
IANAL, but executives can be held accountable, e.g. corporate manslaughter where AFAIK bosses can be held personally accountable for unsafe working conditions.
IANAL either, but I think that's more about negligance. However, executives under Australian law have limited liability - which means you can't take everything from them. However, this liability is limited to (au)$7m. I think.
I think the mouse is here to stay in one form or another (until VR style gloves become common or hand motions in open air are detected by lasers).
The problem with this stuff is you really need a specialised easily accesible device, rather than something which responds when you wave to your wife coming home. To quote the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams:
The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years
radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning
dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the
controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the
panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your
hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It
saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you
had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to
the same programme.
Could someone explain why people are comparing the Talaban to Al Queda?
I think that their direct support of Bin Laden makes a clear case that they are culpable for terrorism. And I don't even agree with the war on Iraq or any of the dozens of stupid things the Feds have done in the name of defending us from terrorism.
Umm...
Iraq was not in the name of terrorism, it was in the name of preventing proliferation of WMD
The Taliban was put into government in Afghanistan by the USA
Aiding and abeting terrorists does not make them culpable
Even if it did, someone helping someone who helps terrorists is not a terrorist
In the archilles paradox, the runner will always have further to go. If time and space can be divided into discrete slices, then the runner will have to transverse an infinite number of slices to get to his destination, which is impossible.
Agreed, hence we come to a conclusion that there is a smallest bit into which the world can be divided. Hence, if there is a smallest division, the number of "slices" is finite and hence they can pass the whole thing without difficulty. The difficulty only arises when you attempt to divide the world into an infinite number of slices. Of course that won't work, because infinity doesn't exist!
having people who don't care not vote means you are getting a more reasonable representation of the people -who actually have an opinion-
Ah, no. You see most people know basically what they're voting for. That way you at least know that x% of EVERYONE in Australia likes BASICALLY what the ALP have to say. Rather than "Of the 49% of America that bothered to get off their ass and vote, x% like George Bush". People do have opinions in the US, I have seen it. And these people don't vote, because they don't have to. People not only have a right to have a say, they have a responsibility. If you really don't care, put in a blank ballot paper.
I don't think random voting is a problem at all. All we get is a better representation of what people want.
[in Australia] everyone turns out, and it is a much better system. We actually get a reasonable representation of the opinion of the people.
Um...how exactly does that make it better?;)
Sometimes I'm tempted to agree;), but that's just the arrogant eletist bastard in me coming out.
In reality the system is better than non-mandatory voting, but the represetnation is still through politicians, who arn't neccesarily brilliant and doing what the people want... e.g. asylum seekers (link just one example) or the war in Iraq. (*Note*: I don't claim these sources are any good, just quick google news searches).
Keep in mind that these fraudsters aren't going to fix the hole and "turn it back over to the community". They will have plenty of time to find the exploits and they will exploit it on election day.
Yes, but so does everyone else, and most people will fix the problems. Especially international people reviewing it. So while there is a chance that some clever guy will spot a hole that no-one else can see and this guy uses it to further his own ends, I consider that less likely than some guy putting in a hole because he's the programmer and no-one will ever get to see the source.
[In Australia there is compulsary voting,] even if you vote "abstain", or you get a small fine (unless you CAN'T be there, ie are hospitalized)
Yes, voting is compulsary, but thanks to protection of privacy there is no way for them to know whether you actually voted or no. You just have to turn up, and place a ballot paper - it can theoretically be blank, and for some people often is. But everyone turns out, and it is a much better system. We actually get a reasonable representation of the opinion of the people.
But with response to the article:
Yes! There is a need in the US for a better voter turnout, and if machines are in use it needs to be difficult to be forge or modify votes. Go me, master of the blindingly obvious!
With proper addressing schemes, IPv4 still has a ton of life left in it
Yes, but we don't use proper addressing schemes do we. What we have now is an IP address shortage because we use block assignments. So all we need to do is unassign a few blocks, rearnage all the IP addresses on the internet, give most everyone new ones, and we'll be right!
Why don't we just increase the number of IP addresses and not confuse things further, while maintaining backwards compatibility, and increasing security (IPSec) and speed (simpler headers require less processing)?
IPv6 is better, and should be implimented yes, because we need more addresses, but also because it offers more and better features than IPv4.
1. Anonymous file sharing. I think the technical challenges to this are pretty huge. There are legitimate reasons to allow anonymous information exchange, and even the US government seems to desire this to promote favored political dissidents. If someone can geninuinely overcome the challenges, I imagine peer-to-peer networks will survive, but I'm not very sanguine about this.
Freenet has overcome these technical challenges. We do have an anonimity protocol, I just haven't seen it implimented in a mainstream P2P program yet. Sure, it's slightly slower, but the only way they can sue you is if your ISP monitors incoming packets, and IIRC this is illegal. Besides, the incoming packets are (I think) encrypted.
2. Private networks. Rather than letting just any yahoo search the files on your computer and suck down your precious bandwidth, I forsee private networks where friends and family can share files, but strangers can't. As long as you keep your list of buddies under reasonable control, it's going to be difficult for anyone to track file back to you.
The problem is I already have all the songs my friends have. We have a sort-of unofficial private network thing already - the guys with broadband download, the guys who go to giant lan parties in the city download, and we all meet for a lan party once a month and leech the hell out of each other's hard drives. But quite a bit of what I like in the way of music my friends don't like. Besides, small private networks defeat the purpose of P2P - that is, anyone anywhere can have the file and you can get it.
3. Local exchanges. Even more extreme than a private network, people might make direct device-to-device copies. Go over to a friend's house and download their entire music collection to your laptop. Meet someone at the library and sync up your iPod. Whatever - by cutting out the middleman, there are no sticky subpoena issues with your ISP. Think about it - as data storage and data transfer rates improve, it'll be feasible to exchange files with any person you casually meet. Instead of meeting for the coupon swap, you can bring your PDA/iPod/laptop/hard drive and swap with your friends.
Again, too limited. The system as it stands simply requires greater anonimisation - anyone want to chip in for an anonymous proxy on Sealand?
PS:Honestly - I haven't downloaded ANY music and I've still only bought about 2 CD's in the past year. It's all crap.
they just have to sue that ones with large caches of files
True, but I don't think that will help. The popular files are very widely distributed - you can't sue the 100,000 people who (probably, I haven't checked) have a copy of Sk8er Boi on their computer. And because there are so many popular songs the "small fish", the ones who share maybe two or three ripped cds, no enough for the RIAA to bother suing, will still distribute all the music. And because of the way these programs work, the more popular something is the more widly distributed and hence the easier to download. P2P relies more on there being four million users with four trillion files between them than ten main servers with those 400 billion files each. That's the POINT of P2P.
So yes, they can sue the big guys. But all it will do is remove the obscure music, and the RIAA is loosing most of its money to sharing of the big hits.
Now, I'm not from the US, but isn't the first amendment freedom of expression/speech? What does that have to do with spam?
Yes, you have a right to speak. But you do not have a right to come into my house and yell at me. I have a right not to go out and hear what you say; you don't have a right to force me to hear what you say.
Isn't the first amendment then irrelevant when it comes to spam?
The reason for this law is simple: organizations are trampling all over peoples privacy rights because it's too damn easy to do so.
Yes, cookies can be used to invade privacy. So can tracerts. So can credit cards and other sources of info for data miners.
Please realise that most cookies are used for good - saving a state, saving passwords, saving "logged in" status between pages, saving preferences, skinning, cross-page information transfer... the list goes on. Although they can be used to monitor and report back on people's web behavior this is relativly difficult, often pointless, and in reality most pages that use cookies don't use cookies for this reason.
While there is a small privacy concern directing it at cookies is like directing a concern over drink driving at cars.
IANAL, but isn't this public broadcasting: displaying to several people. Don't the warnings say you are not allowed to (for example) show a movie to an entire office.
Equally, if you own 1/1,000,000 of a company, and the company owns one million cds, you own 1/1,000,000 of each cd. You're still not an owner of each cd.
Slashdot Mirror
Little Johnny had a test tube
he filled it full of gas
he pointed it while heating
and blew off half his... fingers
Acutally, our entire year 11 class (30-odd people) except me believed dhmo.org when we were shown it... during a Theory of Knowledge lesson all about not believing what you read. Hmm....
As a teenaged myself I must say that trust seems right.
My parents have done all the same sort of stuff I'm doing now, so to prevent hypocracy they leave it be. At age 12, when I first got a computer in my room with internet access, my dad sat me down and talked to me about pornography... then left me to it. His incompetence was probably the major reason he didn't scour the logs, but even so...
Look, your average computer user knows how to clear their history, cover their tracks. And you know what, even if my dad had found my early pornographic explorations around the internet he would have left me be. I know what sites my younger brother visits, but I leave him be, because it's normal.
The worst places kids can go online really arn't that bad. More likely than not they would be disgusted by anything that would disgust you. Especially the 15 year old - they can handle things by themselves.
So yes, trust is important, and with your children you can be fairly certain that nothing they're doing is that bad. If it is, you'll see much more obvious signs in real life.
True and laudable, but not relevent to the original point - US crime levels are ridiculously high
When those laws are put together by the dictator's club called the UN, you bet. You know, the place that puts Syria and Libya on the "human rights committee"?
Yes, part of that freedom of speech of unpopular opinions you were talking about...
Anyway, I think the original poster was refering to violations not just of international law and UN resolutions, but also of the ideals presented in the UN Charter and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Where freedom of speech applies to EVERYBODY, even the ones with unpopular causes. Hint: popular causes don't NEED freedom of speech.
Again, commendable that the US has such freedoms.
Hint: our popular culture dominates the world. Deal with it.
Homogonisation of culture is often non-voluntary for the countries involved but a results of the dollar diplomacy practiced by the US - excessive control exercised by economic power.
Where food is so cheap that even the poorest can (over)eat.
And while the US poor overeat, the rest of the world remains hungry due to import tariffs and price-hiking for personal benefit
They're ours to "waste", Saddam-lover.
No, they're not. Those billions could be used to make those poor you talk about richer. Or feed the starving. Or do anything. Hell, you could suddenly introduce a new currency and declare the old one worthless - throw away your money. But while it has some effect on others, you do NOT have the right to exercise your will AGAINST THE WISHES OF INVOLVED PARTIES. Oh, and by the way: if they're against you they're not necessarily with the oposition - I don't support the actions of Saddam Hussain OR George W Bush.
Offtopic, but it needs to be said.
Anyone else think "ion cannon"?
Seriously though, if used as a power source, what would be effects on, say, the ozone layer?
When I was younger I thought "Oh look, great idea, let's focus the sun's energy and catch it." Then I realised that by doing this we'd burn a permenent hole in the ozone layer and do other damage to the atmosphere caused by pumping high energy high frequency beams through it. The safest (only?) option would be geocentric, which would do permenent damage to a small area of the atmosphere.
Is this perhaps worse, given the overall environmental cost?
...set up Proxomitron to render the ads but not actually *display* them...
Best of both worlds: users don't see irritating ads, providers get their well earned money. Why hasn't it been done?
If a user wishes to be part of a legitimate mail list then there should be a way to authorize that host to send messages.
Sorry, but spammers are people too. They can get authorisation for an address, spam from it, once it gets removed from the whitelist, change it, and move on. Email addresses, vhosts, domain names - a dime a dozen these days. Well, not litterally, but cheap and easy enought that this type of whitelisting would not help.
Two problems:
Give YOUR money to whoever the fuck you want to and stop telling other people how to spend theirs!
So if I decide to spend my money on hiring a hitman to kill you, that'd be cool? You are advocating non-interventionist moral theory: a SERIOUSLY bad idea.
Yes, no-one can force you to spend your money in any way (except gov't through fines, but thats something different) but everyone has the right to tell you what they reckon as to how you should spend your money. And they might be right that there are better causes than "creativity".
So stop advocating the violation of rights which you hold so dear. And to prevent anger, may I advise that you cease using profanity?
Any suggestions for the trophy design?
Does it come with a $1.2M commission?
The only way to stop spam is to make it stop being cost effective, that involves causing e-mail to be an expensive operation if it involves untrusted e-mail servers.
Apart from the problems in forcing people to pay for email (at what end, how to enforce cross compatibility etc), I want free email. It would really suck to pay even $0.01 (or even $0.001) for every message I send.
Simply deal with it. Install a decent filter, with lots of herustic and baysian checks, then deal with the one or two that leak through. Yes, spam of 50+ a day is bad, but most of that can be easily blocked by common, easy, free spam filters on any platform, even with settings so low that there are no false positives.
Alternatives such as charging for email or enforcing use of cryptography suck generally (signing requires me to type my password, or compromise my security by caching), but more than that they'll never be implimented. Forced signing (or somesuch thing) is standard with IPv6 - but has it been implimented? Try getting everyone to change; not going to happen. Install a spam filter and deal people.
IANAL, but executives can be held accountable, e.g. corporate manslaughter where AFAIK bosses can be held personally accountable for unsafe working conditions.
IANAL either, but I think that's more about negligance. However, executives under Australian law have limited liability - which means you can't take everything from them. However, this liability is limited to (au)$7m. I think.
The problem with this stuff is you really need a specialised easily accesible device, rather than something which responds when you wave to your wife coming home. To quote the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams:
ALP, figures... well at least you've given away your socialist credentials.
Heh. Actually, ALP is just simpler to type than Liberal, and the website is easier to find. ALP.com.au, whereas liberal.com.au doesn't exist.
The point of my post was not so much a link to the ALP website as to point out the advantages of mandatory voting.
Umm...
- Iraq was not in the name of terrorism, it was in the name of preventing proliferation of WMD
- The Taliban was put into government in Afghanistan by the USA
- Aiding and abeting terrorists does not make them culpable
- Even if it did, someone helping someone who helps terrorists is not a terrorist
Just a few clarifications...In the archilles paradox, the runner will always have further to go. If time and space can be divided into discrete slices, then the runner will have to transverse an infinite number of slices to get to his destination, which is impossible.
Agreed, hence we come to a conclusion that there is a smallest bit into which the world can be divided. Hence, if there is a smallest division, the number of "slices" is finite and hence they can pass the whole thing without difficulty. The difficulty only arises when you attempt to divide the world into an infinite number of slices. Of course that won't work, because infinity doesn't exist!
having people who don't care not vote means you are getting a more reasonable representation of the people -who actually have an opinion-
Ah, no. You see most people know basically what they're voting for. That way you at least know that x% of EVERYONE in Australia likes BASICALLY what the ALP have to say. Rather than "Of the 49% of America that bothered to get off their ass and vote, x% like George Bush". People do have opinions in the US, I have seen it. And these people don't vote, because they don't have to. People not only have a right to have a say, they have a responsibility. If you really don't care, put in a blank ballot paper.
I don't think random voting is a problem at all. All we get is a better representation of what people want.
Sometimes I'm tempted to agree
In reality the system is better than non-mandatory voting, but the represetnation is still through politicians, who arn't neccesarily brilliant and doing what the people want... e.g. asylum seekers (link just one example) or the war in Iraq. (*Note*: I don't claim these sources are any good, just quick google news searches).
Keep in mind that these fraudsters aren't going to fix the hole and "turn it back over to the community". They will have plenty of time to find the exploits and they will exploit it on election day.
Yes, but so does everyone else, and most people will fix the problems. Especially international people reviewing it. So while there is a chance that some clever guy will spot a hole that no-one else can see and this guy uses it to further his own ends, I consider that less likely than some guy putting in a hole because he's the programmer and no-one will ever get to see the source.
My $0.02
[In Australia there is compulsary voting,] even if you vote "abstain", or you get a small fine (unless you CAN'T be there, ie are hospitalized)
Yes, voting is compulsary, but thanks to protection of privacy there is no way for them to know whether you actually voted or no. You just have to turn up, and place a ballot paper - it can theoretically be blank, and for some people often is. But everyone turns out, and it is a much better system. We actually get a reasonable representation of the opinion of the people.
But with response to the article:
Yes! There is a need in the US for a better voter turnout, and if machines are in use it needs to be difficult to be forge or modify votes. Go me, master of the blindingly obvious!
With proper addressing schemes, IPv4 still has a ton of life left in it
Yes, but we don't use proper addressing schemes do we. What we have now is an IP address shortage because we use block assignments. So all we need to do is unassign a few blocks, rearnage all the IP addresses on the internet, give most everyone new ones, and we'll be right!
Why don't we just increase the number of IP addresses and not confuse things further, while maintaining backwards compatibility, and increasing security (IPSec) and speed (simpler headers require less processing)?
IPv6 is better, and should be implimented yes, because we need more addresses, but also because it offers more and better features than IPv4.
1. Anonymous file sharing. I think the technical challenges to this are pretty huge. There are legitimate reasons to allow anonymous information exchange, and even the US government seems to desire this to promote favored political dissidents. If someone can geninuinely overcome the challenges, I imagine peer-to-peer networks will survive, but I'm not very sanguine about this.
Freenet has overcome these technical challenges. We do have an anonimity protocol, I just haven't seen it implimented in a mainstream P2P program yet. Sure, it's slightly slower, but the only way they can sue you is if your ISP monitors incoming packets, and IIRC this is illegal. Besides, the incoming packets are (I think) encrypted.
2. Private networks. Rather than letting just any yahoo search the files on your computer and suck down your precious bandwidth, I forsee private networks where friends and family can share files, but strangers can't. As long as you keep your list of buddies under reasonable control, it's going to be difficult for anyone to track file back to you.
The problem is I already have all the songs my friends have. We have a sort-of unofficial private network thing already - the guys with broadband download, the guys who go to giant lan parties in the city download, and we all meet for a lan party once a month and leech the hell out of each other's hard drives. But quite a bit of what I like in the way of music my friends don't like. Besides, small private networks defeat the purpose of P2P - that is, anyone anywhere can have the file and you can get it.
3. Local exchanges. Even more extreme than a private network, people might make direct device-to-device copies. Go over to a friend's house and download their entire music collection to your laptop. Meet someone at the library and sync up your iPod. Whatever - by cutting out the middleman, there are no sticky subpoena issues with your ISP. Think about it - as data storage and data transfer rates improve, it'll be feasible to exchange files with any person you casually meet. Instead of meeting for the coupon swap, you can bring your PDA/iPod/laptop/hard drive and swap with your friends.
Again, too limited. The system as it stands simply requires greater anonimisation - anyone want to chip in for an anonymous proxy on Sealand?
PS:Honestly - I haven't downloaded ANY music and I've still only bought about 2 CD's in the past year. It's all crap.
Oh god, you are so right about that.
they just have to sue that ones with large caches of files
True, but I don't think that will help. The popular files are very widely distributed - you can't sue the 100,000 people who (probably, I haven't checked) have a copy of Sk8er Boi on their computer. And because there are so many popular songs the "small fish", the ones who share maybe two or three ripped cds, no enough for the RIAA to bother suing, will still distribute all the music. And because of the way these programs work, the more popular something is the more widly distributed and hence the easier to download. P2P relies more on there being four million users with four trillion files between them than ten main servers with those 400 billion files each. That's the POINT of P2P.
So yes, they can sue the big guys. But all it will do is remove the obscure music, and the RIAA is loosing most of its money to sharing of the big hits.
Now, I'm not from the US, but isn't the first amendment freedom of expression/speech? What does that have to do with spam?
Yes, you have a right to speak. But you do not have a right to come into my house and yell at me. I have a right not to go out and hear what you say; you don't have a right to force me to hear what you say.
Isn't the first amendment then irrelevant when it comes to spam?
The reason for this law is simple: organizations are trampling all over peoples privacy rights because it's too damn easy to do so.
Yes, cookies can be used to invade privacy. So can tracerts. So can credit cards and other sources of info for data miners.
Please realise that most cookies are used for good - saving a state, saving passwords, saving "logged in" status between pages, saving preferences, skinning, cross-page information transfer... the list goes on.
Although they can be used to monitor and report back on people's web behavior this is relativly difficult, often pointless, and in reality most pages that use cookies don't use cookies for this reason.
While there is a small privacy concern directing it at cookies is like directing a concern over drink driving at cars.
Target the driver, not the motor industry.
IANAL, but isn't this public broadcasting: displaying to several people. Don't the warnings say you are not allowed to (for example) show a movie to an entire office.
Equally, if you own 1/1,000,000 of a company, and the company owns one million cds, you own 1/1,000,000 of each cd. You're still not an owner of each cd.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.