Take out the anthropomorphising and you can see the intended meaning: "It is a unavoidable property of information that it can be and will be replicated and dispersed."

Fake as all the others.

The man acted like a redneck idiot. He used deliberately common-folk language, avoided long words. Soundbite quotes wherever possible. But his educational record is very good, and he even graduated Harvard business. He knew that a popular, everyman president would play well, and an intellectual would be regarded as 'elitist' - so he put on the act he knew would give the best advantage in his career.

That applies if you're talking about software packages for individual use. I don't think that is where the legal concerns are addressed - how many people actually use gnupg? The legal concern is directed at services. Facebook, skype, whatsapp and so fourth. In these cases there is a service provider which, unless they actively take measures otherwise, has the capability to access communications. All that is required is a legal framework to compel them to hand over whatever the government requests (Either by above-board, judge-approved targeted warrant or by super-secret 'give us everything you have or else' order) and a legal requirement that they retain all communications for a sufficient period of time and do not implement technology that would prevent them from doing so.

I've read that the US is trying. Their advisors recognise the importance of encryption and are trying to keep their political ally Cameron from making a fool of himself. While he wants to ban encryption, the US favors a more conventional regulatory approach of allowing encryption but making sure someone (ie, any company with any US presence) has both the capability and the legal requirement to decryption reception of a warrant. Or presumably a flimsy super-secret tell-noone blanket order requesting all their records in the name of national security.

I favor retroshare myself. It's got excellent file-sharing capabilities too (Yarrr!) and, as well as being encrypted to NSA-annoying levels, it's also decentralised and cannot be readily identified via traffic analysis, which means it's very hard for governments to block without blocking a lot of other applications too.

In downside, it does have a few minor bugs, and there's no android or iOS client.

"You have a friend request from NSA."

There are only two situations I can think of where a working knowledge of assembly would be useful:
1. You write compilers.
2. You work in embedded device programing, where some IO requires you to count instruction cycles to ensure correct timing.

I've never worked with Itanium or Alpha, but on PCs the Pentium 4 was the undisputed King of Watts. Power usage on it got rather silly. You see that odd little four-pin power cable you going to the mainboard in addition to the main power bundle? That's the supplimentary power supply introduced to feed the insatable demands of the P4.

How do you calculate that 400% figure as relating entirely to going after pirates?

Identify the software, and I will find you a cracked version. I'll even time how long it takes me.

The movement in religion seems to be towards the extremes. Fundamentalism and atheism are both on the rise - it's the middle that is in decline, the people who profess belief but only go to church for weddings and funerals, and who never actually read their bible. There's a contradiction in such people - they openly profess a belief which should define their lives, but ignore it in all their actions. So it's easy to confront them with this and force them to either turn devout and practice what they claim, or admit they were lying to themselves about believing all along and abandon their religion altogether.

Naughties arguably fits in some regions, as one of the characteristic aspects of that decade was a relaxation of sexual taboos.

Indeed. The mufti system worked back when there was a caliphate, much like when the Catholic church was the only Christian game in town (Well, no-one cared about the Orthodox). There was a clear chain of command and structure of authority to decide who gets to be a priest and who doesn't, and set rules as to what areas priests may have authority over with procedures for dispute resolution. If there was a disagreement over what the religion is supposed to mean, you just go up the chain until someone is willing to resolve it, and you can disregard anyone who claims to be a religious teacher but isn't recognised by the dominant authority. Then the protestant reformation comes along, or the caliphate ends, and there's no more power structure. You get one priest screaming that infidels must die, and another screaming that they must be allowed to live in peace and receive preaching in the hope they will one day convert freely, and another screaming that they may live but need to demonstrate subservient status, and another saying believers should have no contact with them at all - and there is nothing at all to say the opinion of any is more valid than another, so in the end the most charismatic personality with the largest band of followers wins.

While a fatwa must be issued by a qualified mufti, it's less clear how one becomes a qualified mufti. There are quite a lot of them, and they routinely issue contradictory fatwas and declare their rivals to be heretics.

The social networks are trying, but even the low-tech army of IS is good enough to make new dummy accounts as needed. If my mother can figure out how to use facebook, so can IS.

cheap, easy: Those motion-activated light controllers that go in the light fixture above the bulb.
cheap, good: Warm up the soldering iron and do it all yourself. May involve pulling cable and lots of assembling interface circuits on stripboard.
good, easy: There are several expensive commercial solutions, starting with the Nest thermostat and getting more elaborate from there. CES was flooded with them.