You want to keep your conversations private? Then I will assume your motivations are NOT honest.

I am stunned that you're ignorant enough to believe there's any truth to that, yet also able to type. Go forth and educate yourself. And no, I am not your teacher.

Is this another one of those for-sale-low-/.-UID accounts? Sometimes I wish I had weaker memory.

(a) Only old people used GNOME. XFCE or LXDE for the easy wins, plus openbox, e, or even KDE if you're a glutton for punishment. Plus, others for the asking.
(b) X has become so good that a configuration file is simply not needed for a single-monitor user. I've only encountered one machine in the past 4 years where X didn't work, and that was for a video card/mobo combination that wouldn't even display console (a pizzabox PowerPC (Damn you, Apple!)).
(c) Skype can't figure out the mike, yet audacity does, and audacity isn't written specifically for linux. I'd be pinning the blame closer to skype than the libraries.
(d) Now you're just making shit up. Kaddressbook (Kontact is merely a front-end for a set of programs) imports/exports in CSV, vCard, LDIF, and a couple other formats I've never heard of before looking into this.

At which point, I give up. I bet you feel validated as a troll because I wasted 30 second researching and a moment or two typing. At least it was a canonical troll, false notions presented in a plausible manner, rather than flamebait, designed to incite emotional reaction.

You should have lost all of it as of November 25, 2002.

The Iranian Navy are pissing themselves laughing.

Do you really think they haven't figured out that a certain percentage of the db entries will be inaccurate? Inter-database correlations are powerful - e.g. there is a strong chance that this person nicknamed "Adolf Hitler" with a known birthday and an invalid address (and a 95% certain GeoIP) who wrote an online review of "Predator" is the same person as someone with the same birthday and ordered "Predator 2" a week later, and, oh look, the shipping address is close to the GeoIP area. That the errors are deliberately introduced on your part doesn't change the correction mechanism.

"Strong chance" given that a birthdate and a zip code have something like 95% odds of identifying a unique person. My understanding of stats is primitive at best, but I imagine you'd need more than 50% bogus entries to make a CPU twitch, and more than 95% bogus entries to make a measurable difference in load average.

These numbers are pulled from a hat, so I welcome more accurate numbers.

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/09/16/1631239/can-anyone-become-a-programmer
If you want to dig deeper, here's a page with the link to the 2006 study. Short version: not only can not everybody learn to program effectively, but that there's a simple test to predict if someone could or not without putting them through a year of school:
http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/
The overlapping bell curves explain a lot about grade distributions when I went to college.

Give up your franchise because you work for the government? That's novel.
Working for the government doesn't change your citizenship. If you think that a weak argument, then consider this: you still pay taxes, and that alone normally provides a legitimate claim to a vote.
You're one of the people who decide what agencies get funded. Even soldiers retain the vote.

While you're entitled to your opinion, it's demonstrably incorrect. Plus, you're an asshole to bring up this solipsistic argument because now the adults have to waste time refuting it - thankfully, it's a variant of The Worst Argument in the World, recently covered on lesswrong.com:

"X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features, even though it doesn't."

Mutatis mutandis, this is what your argument looks like:

Criminals value privacy to conceal their crimes. You value privacy to conceal your conduct. Therefore, your conduct is criminal.

And if you can't see why that looks incredibly stupid, $DEITY help you, because you're probably not smart enough to manage your own affairs, and good luck surprising your spouse on Valentine's Day.

Fuck, this is so basic and it's not a trivial point: evolution is an observation. Natural selection was a theory to explain it.

Why is anyone anywhere still getting this wrong? "On the Origin of Species" is a deadly boring read because Darwin went into nit-picking detail about extremely obvious items, just so that people would see that there was no theory or speculation involved.

When I see pols going about using demonstrably incorrect definitions, I regret my choice to follow a path of non-violence.

BINGO!

If being able to disable it is part of the UEFI spec, what are those Windows 8 ARM devices using?

You noted,

...with realtors keyword spamming and posting the same ads multiple times a day; nobody flags them.

Seeing as you didn't say "nobody else flags them", I have to assume that you're part of the problem. Flagging a craigslist ad is simpler than setting your threshold on slashdot, and doesn't even require a login. Yours could be the click that throws them out, but if you don't do it, the spammers win.

But as government is ultimately here to serve the people, you can't exclusively have distrust of every single action government takes.

In the case of the NSA and the FBI at least, historical evidence shows American citizens would be wise to.

(i) So says an anonymous coward. (ii) Fuck you you fucking fuck. This is a logical and argumentive fallacy, akin to the "No True Scotsman". There exist government agents that have no compunction about ruining the life of a merely annoying person. Is a soldier less brave for taking the precaution of wearing body armour in combat?

I AM an ISP, you insensitive clod!