Eh this is the classic guns kill people vs. people kill people argument. Not having guns or bombs isn't going to stop a war. Some of the bloodiest wars in history were fought using swords and spears.
How about cheap, nearly unlimited electricity (nuclear), medical scanning devices that use radio isotopes, radiation therapy to treat cancer, or a variety of other technologies based on the early work of physicists.
I was under the impression wireless bandwidth is always one generation behind cable bandwidth. Are they doing this because they are too lazy to upgrade their network and maintain their competitive edge over wireless? I can't imagine a state of the art cable internet connection could ever be seriously threatened by a wireless connection that offers what, 6Mbps under the best conditions? With the rise of internet video it seems like physical line internet providers are here to stay.
With HSDPA/HSUPA you can get 14.4 Mbps down and 5.76 Mbps up (under best conditions, of course). Yes, it is slower than state of art wired connection, but is the state of art wired connection available? Do you have 1.25 Gbps FTTH or 300 Mbps DSL available?
Wired providers became complacent, but wireless didn't. They caught up with wired and offer extra convenience, usable everywhere, not just at home. Wired providers should be afraid, very afraid and do something to change the situation, fast.
It's just a value-add thing. I work for one of the smaller MSOs that hasn't yet deployed wifi large scale but all the vendor material I get on focuses heavily on the value-add angle. I'm not super convinced it works but let's say you're considering a switch to telco video or satellite you might think twice about it because you use Cablevision wifi at the coffee shop. Telcos pioneered most of the bundled wireless deployments so there's some pressure for cable to offer it just to say they have it. It's cheap to deploy and maintain too so why not? For the bigger MSOs it's a tiny expense.
This article had great perspective. We tend to believe our current fiat money is something "new" and "modern" when in reality metal/virtual currency seems to move in cycles (as the author points out). We also tend to believe this most recent economic crisis was a modern contrivance as well, when in reality it bears striking similarity to many crisis from previous centuries. Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart wrote about the similarity between the current economic collapse and previous valuation bubbles and currency crisis in their book "This Time It's Different" which might be good further reading for anybody who was intrigued by this article.
The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA have been extremely damaging to innovation and research in the US. There was a great lecture at defcon 17 about the specifics of the laws regarding jailbreaking and reverse engineering (when reverse engineering actually is legal, usually only to create/implement interoperability).
If I'm not mistaken, and I may very well be, this new facebook paradigm shift is just friend feed on steroids, and since facebook didn't create friend feed, they bought it, can't somebody come a long and just make a new version of friend feed that embraces authentic openness instead of this command and control, top down, DRM vendor lock in dystopian reality that corporations seem to love so much.
The law on this matter is, as I understand it-IANAL, that a password is a product of the mind and so it would be a violation of your fifth amendment rights to compel you to give up the password, as it would be "testimony against yourself." A password written on a piece of paper or a physical key would be a different matter. This doesn't mean they can't confiscate your laptop and/or image the hard drive to try and crack your encryption later though, it just means if you have encrypted files you can't be penalized for failing to disclose the password (probably).
What an impressive sample size they have there.