How do you know that? Clairvoyance?

For all we know by now it's possible and not implausible to assume that MITM attacks are conducted routinely by various intelligence agencies across the world. SSL is broken. You should not rely solely on CAs anymore. Use physically delivered security tokens (such as encrypted random data on a USB stick) and/or the trust model of ssh instead.

Stop making a fool of yourself, you've already shown to be wrong.

Question:

Answer: The fact that US law doesn't allow for censoring of the views of political opponents by the government, whereas new Turkish laws have just provided the means for that.

Moreover: Court decisions are not always taken in a democratic way, you are mixing up jurisdiction with legislation. And not all laws that get passed by the legislative in every country are democratic either. Laws themselves are only democratic if they are based on democratic principles. Finally, censorship is not a relative concept. There are different degrees of censorship in different countries that can be measured quite easily.

People do not want to get filmed by strangers without their consent, be it with a phone, camera, or Google glasses. What's so hard to understand about this? Did you grow up in a household with a public toilet cam or what?

I don't know which anti-social world you live in, but I have never met anyone who did not have a problem with a phone pointed at him by a stranger without asking - or a camera, for what its worth.

I see a few problems with your advice:

1.) Storing encrypted mail on the server only really works in practice if the sender encrypts the mail he sends to you, but sometimes people send unencrypted mail to you.

2.) Encryption and data integrity are in natural conflict with each other and most encryption programs do not introduce enough redundancy to improve the latter. Twiddle a bit and your data is gone.

3.) Technical solutions to social, moral, and legal problems? If the cloud provider was legally allowed to snoop on you as they like (as Microsoft seems to claim), they can always find a way to do that. Example: Many backup providers auto-update a backup program on the user machine that has root privileges. Other example: Microsoft has total control over everything running on any Windows machine. Ever.

I'm not saying people shouldn't use encryption but that's not the solution to the real problem in this case.

Really, news for nerds? I've never heard that name before in my life. And what is a "science guy" anyway? Sounds pretty stupid to me.

Anyway, got to go to work now - science calls.

You could also just not take any pictures while you're visiting, but of course I understand that to you and many other people this seems like a totally crazy if not impossible idea.

"You see, in America, critical thinking is prized right up to the point where an important person(tm) speaks. All subsequent critical thinking is conspiracy nut batshit tinfoil hat wearing wacko pluck-your-banjo-with-your-single-tooth teabagger loony."

What is called "Critical Thinking" is responsible for a steep decline of academic proficiency. Right next to my work place is a room full of people who work on critical thinking theories every day, yet they have a hard time formulating sound arguments, lack any math or formal reasoning skills whatsoever, and pull the content of their qualitative 'research' essays out of their asses.

I'm not saying critical thinking is undesirable in general, but what runs under this label nowadays clearly is. For real critical thinking you need to first learn how to think, learn the state of the art and acquire hard skills, and then you might be able to criticize. Not vice versa.

That's also the problem of the conspiracy nuts. They confuse making up a coherent story with science. And even worse, they usually get the 'coherence' part wrong, too.

None of what you say is news to me and I'm also not basing any of my assessments on any US media, because they total shit. (Well, I do sometimes take a glimpse at the NY times web pages which are not too bad.) I'm also not from the US.

It is an undeniable fact that Putin is about to annex Crimea in violation all treaties with Ukraine and international public law. It is also a fact that Russia has no track record of protecting minorities in their own country, in fact they suppress them brutally and Moscow's streets are roaming with all kinds of thugs and Neo-Nazis. Putins alleged "reasons" for protecting the Russian speaking population of Ukraine are ridiculous and entirely made up. Moreover, it is a fact that Crimea was occupied by foreign enemy forces and you must be a complete moron if you think that about 16000 to 30000 "pro-Russian self-defense forces" suddenly emerged from the Crimean population, incuding Russian military trucks, Russian combat fatigues, Russian arms and specialized Spetznaz equipment.

The way you depict the political situation is also not quite right. You've fallen prey to propaganda in Russian media, which works even if you think it doesn't (like advertisement). Everybody knows that about 60% of the population on Crimea speaks Russian, but doesn't mean that they want to join Russia. In any case a referendum is staged and meaningless, even the decisions of the Crimean parliament are not worth the paper they are printed on as long as it is occupied and controlled by Russian troops. It's not as if Russia had free elections, it is essentially a dictatorship run by cleptocrats and former KGB officers.

You also seriously underestimate Putins efforts if you think all those "pro Russia" cheers are honest expression of feelings. He can literally spend billions of dollars on the Crim to assure the right outcome and will still make a bargain. Perhaps there is a slight real majority for becoming a part of Russia there. We will never know because the whole situation and the referendum has has "FSB" written all over in huge letters. Until now the situation was halfway decent but it's getting uglier each day. The Ukrainean minority on the Crimean peninsula is already starting to suffer and it's also not so easy to flee.

You are right if you think that Putin has no partical interest in the Crimea per se, though. All he wants is to keep the Black Sea Fleet were it is, access to the ports and consequently keep Ukraine out of Nato, and he will do anything to ensure that, even if it means that he has to invade Ukraine as a whole and install another puppet regime there. The people in Kiev know that, of course, and that they would loose any direct confrontation, hence the restrained reaction. That being said, he is right in one thing: The Svoboda party is a bunch of Nazi thugs. But as mentioned before, it's not as if there weren't any Nazis in the Duma ...

Contrary to what your propaganda sources claim there is not the slightest doubt that Putin has violated public international law and basically all existing treaties between Russia and the Ukraine. It also doesn't take much intelligence to see who's the bad guy here, namely the one who sends masked soldiers as thugs into a peaceful neighboring country claiming they are there for "protection", besieging army bases and threatening & beating up inhabitants who do not speak Russian. The act is particularly evil, because the Russian and the Ukrainian speaking people in the Ukraine never had any problems getting along with each other, and now Putin's thugs are creating unrest in order to destabilize the new government in Kiev.

It's a fucking disgrace and you know it.

It's because of Beta, which totally sucks. And perhaps also because the stories and comments have declined constantly in quality over the last decade and very rapidly over the past few weeks. Slashdot is full of shit now. A rotten piece of advertisement Web-junk.

I would be gone too if I hadn't forgotten to include the Beta subdomains when I configured Leechblock. :(

Bullshit, the situations in the two countries are not even remotely comparable. You should check your reality distortion field.

The opposition leaders in Thailand do not want to have any new elections, not now and not later, and have publicly declared their intention not to have elections. (They would invariably loose them.) The protesters in Ukraine have already fixed the date for a new election. They got rid of a completely corrupt vassal of Putin who enriched himself, put an important opposition leader into prison by the same methods of corrupting justice as Putin uses, and poisoned another important opposition politician. And that's only the beginning of the differences ...

It used to be like that in 19th Century, but that time is long gone ...

That depends very much on the business and the situation as a whole.

For example, I wouldn't mind if some homophobic racist piece shit owner of a local bar in Arizona would deny handing me over a drink, but it would be problematic if the only ISP in town could refuse a gay person as a customer or if all gas stations in Arizona would decide not to offer their services to owners of "gay cars". and what if you're living in a small town with only one grocery store and the next town is hundreds of miles away? Perhaps you don't care because you live in a place where there are plenty of choices, but that's not always the case.

So to answer your original question: Yes, in many cases the state should regulate business and tell them they must not refuse service to gays, christians, people with freckles, or brunettes. It's kind of obvious if you give it some thought.