...the police were probably just following orders...

"and suggests (yet again) politicians who are regulating a technology they simply do not understand" Actually I think that they do understand...maybe you live in a police-state? Or as Wendell Phillips said, "...power is ever stealing from the many to the few

The people who chose to live in these areas should finance their own government...after all they are the ones who elected them.

They would have to ban the use of SSL, which is not likely. Some of the VPN providers already use port 443 (standard port for HTTPS).

Its only torture if they die or the organs fail...

What we really need a 3-strike rule for stupidity. If the system had worked as intended "file-sharing abusers" would have been carted off to a judge after 3 warnings. The information from Trident MediaGuard would have been presented as reliable information from a safe and secure system... Ironically, under the Hadopi laws internet users who fail to secure their connections can be punished for the acts of others. Also ironic is that this is the third strike for Hadopi: 1 - They pirated their logo font 2 - Their website was turned into a Pirate Bay search engine 3 - The company licensed to spy on p2p users failed to secure their own systems. ...and lets not forget this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/08/nicolas-sarkozy-french-pr_n_313723.html By rights the French government should be banned from the internet!

Tax-payer funded agencies / departments always end up being controlled by the politicians! This would be no different. And herein "lies" the problem. Bill Clinton demonstrated with his "not sex", oral sex, sex scandal that truth, for politicians, is a matter of definition. (It was Bill Clinton after all who famously said, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is"). A more scary example: During the Bush regime, the definition of torture was adjusted so that that it required

Americans don't kill "children"...the preferred tern is midget terrorist.

Let me Google that for you... "The report also found that 46 per cent of the victims of US air strikes whose gender could be determined were female and 39 per cent were children." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/5161326/Number-of-women-and-children-killed-in-Iraq-air-raids-disproportionately-high.html Not exact but good enough?

Why don't the students start their own independent newspaper / news site?