My stock Nexus One running Froyo (Android 2.2) gets an effective 34 MFlops on linpack (and I didn't even kill the background tasks).
This is better than 1969's top supercomputer (theoritical peak of 36 MFlops, effective ~10) and equivalent to 1974's top supercomputer CDC STAR-100 that had a theoritical peak of 100 MFlops but which had much lower realworld performance.
The nexus one cost me 600 with tax and shipping. The CDC 7600, which is easily beaten, cost 5 millions in 1970's dollars.

Run-of-the-mill modern desktops are much more impressive; a 300$ nVidia GPU can easily push a 800$ desktop (total) over 1 TFlop, something which supercomputers only achieved back in 1997 with Intel's ASCI Red 9632.

Oh and btw Android already runs a very nice app called Tricorder. It's already here ;)

all of these can be changed, erased or dropped without changing who you are. Somewhat hard, but not much of a sacrifice involved.

On the other hand... Browsing patterns? Favorite geolocations? Depth of knowledge in differing fields, education, type of belief system, likes and dislikes in music, movies, sports, arts, philosophy, politics, rhetorical style, general attitude and personality that can be inferred from shyness, aggressiveness, type of humor, and so on and so forth? Most of these can already be cross-correlated to some extent (and the correlation algorithms/analytical engines will only keep getting better at it), and will draw a portrait of you that you will not be able to evade lest you sacrifice a significant part of who you actually are.

My personal take about this is one of general powerlessness, as justified by the history of how I used the intertubes. I started using the net when I was really young (10 years old, 1996) and left a huge real-name trail of info that squirmed and shifted through the years, yet always followed me. I began forming a deep understanding about the nature of internet quite too late (maybe around 1999), way back when I started lurking on slashdot, and then I had on-off phases of differing commitment to privacy, but I could always see that the trail had not dissipated behind me.

So I joined facebook and accepted that information wants to be free. I've found it easier and easier ever since, as I began ascribing to the motto, "if you don't think it, don't say it, if you don't believe it's right, don't do it". Thus I can be quite revealing online yet don't feel the slightest unease, even when I get into deep political/economical/philosophical/etc arguments. Sure, maybe some bible-thumper or political radical or such will get offended sometime, and try to give me trouble for it, but at that time I'll be happy to defend myself as I am proud of who I am and where I am going. So should some bureaucrat ever be offended at my omnipresent anti-fascist, anti-MIC rhetoric, well bring it on.

As E. E. Cummings once said, "to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight, and never stop fighting".

Well, it's not necessarily creepy.
For instance, I have the habit of checking my favorite webcomics in a sequential bunch.
I open chrome (or take an existing window) and ctrl-t about 5 times, type xkcd, ctrl-tab to the next tab, type cad- (comic.com gets suggested), ctrl-tab, type pen (ny-arcade gets suggested), ctrl-tab, type dil (bert.com is suggested)...
So what if, when I opened five news tabs all at once, and started to type xkcd, chrome would recognize (locally) my pattern and fill in the other 4 tabs with the url of my favorite webcomics?
I wouldn't consider that intrusive, assuming the pattern recognition was wholly local and opt-in.

Unless your day to day operations commonly entail corruption and war crimes.

Hmmm, no. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a major american geostrategist that served as United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981 (and then to various very influential neoconservative thinktanks) boasted himself that he enticed the Soviets into Afghanistan as a way to pull them into a quagmire, weakening their empire. (Many more links of similar interviews with him are available if you look, he was quite open about his strategies a decade and two later)

Also, here's a more recent interview with the man himself, that reveals depths of geostrategy that you might not even have dreamed of.

Under customary international law, it is a war crime to wage a war of aggression, where a war of aggression is defined as a war without the justification of self-defense.

Dozen of post-WWII US wars have tried to skirt around this by either twisting the definition of a war (oh, this isn't a war, this is "police action" or some other BS) or trying to define self-defense extremely broadly (oh, look, a couple of private citizens have done an act of terrorism against our citizens, and it seems they might have some ill-defined link with an ill-defined group that's currently working, among other places, in Afghanistan, so lets go at war against Afghanistan. But lets call it a war against terror so they don't think it's personal...) Same rhetoric for the war against Iraq (Hussein must've got weapons of mass destruction, we still got the old receipts, so let's wage war against his country under the pretense that he could somehow decide to hit us at some time, even though that would be clearly against any of his interests... that rhetoric could as well be used to justify a war against Canada, since canadians might think about burning the white house, because they've already done it once)

Anyhow, both the Iraq and Afghanistan war clearly fall under the umbrella of War of Aggression.

Well, you did manage to get your point across quite vehemently in 104 characters, and so did I just now!

Not even voting is not a valid criticism, though. Voting lends legitimacy to the elaborate hoax of pretenting we have a choice, and that this choice matters, in a false bipartisan paradigm.

But most of them don't even know/think that, so they can't use it as justification.

Yet they don't even vote.

Well, a good defense always starts with a good offense.
You americans understand, what with this being codified in your constitution, the blood of patriots and tyrants, etc.
So, if you cannot afford a big honkin' gun, or are in a nation where that basic necessity is overlooked, you should definitely look into potato guns, and molotov cocktails.

Trust me, you'll need that firepower.

Actually, sounds like a serious case of education to me. Sounds like there's some sociology, economics, and political science in there. There's even a preexisting condition of history; some nasty shit.
Got bit by that bug a while ago, never got back on my feet. Seems like the aches are even worse lately.
Can't you tell in your bones when a storm is coming?

Well, I think the more interesting question you should be asking yourself is, what are the courts' qualifications that makes their insights about the issue better than a random dude on /.?

I mean, I'm a pretty open-minded guy, and as such, I tend to abhor arbitrary authority (where an entity presents itself as being right, and thus deserving of trust - institutions such as religions and governments often base their authority on this). I prefer rational authority, where the confidence factor into a source's opinions is based on their qualifications and the soundness of their discourse.

And I find Random Dude's opinion convincing, while I haven't seen any rationale for the courts' decisions. And so I'd prefer not to lend them any trust until I have something to base it on.

I mean, if you haven't observed the courts' utter failure to comprehend technical issues time and time again, then you must be new here*.

(4-digit UID notwithstanding)

Well I'd think that a propagandist fits within the definition of media terrorist. Which fits what Ravell is doing here.
An interesting thought to hold in mind is that information always has two main meanings; the information itself and the information of what your interlocutor wants you to believe.

And you stop grumbling at about -40. At that point you just do whatever needs to be done and get the hell back to shelter ;)