All along this has looked like a continuation of Steve Jobs' fury over Google's android challenging the iPhone, which he thought of as a betrayal. Being motivated by spite, it has backfired. As an Apple user and iPhone owner, I am disappointed. I don't think you can just throw money at this problem -- Google has been rolling out infrastructure for a long time and Google Maps is a great product. Why jettison it?

No matter how abhorrent the movie, what sparked the violence was the acceptance that violence in the name of Islam is justified.

The way I see it, increasing spending on regulations is not the same thing as regulating. Spending money on regulating just means more bureaucrats shuffling papers and more lawyers. The size of the government is also the wrong thing to measure. The things to measure are stability, justice and infrastructure, which can be indirectly measured with the percentage of people in prison, the number of people on welfare, and the success of NEW business ventures. GDP is another red herring which tends to measure nowadays the success of the financial sector (investment banks) and a few mega corporations. We need to stop focusing on money and start focusing on real results.

"Free market" is a canard. Every market exists within a society and the rules and norms of the society operate to distort every market on planet Earth. An unfettered free market is a bad thing.

Right, and of course the laws are always just, the people enforcing them are good people, and those people from the government are really here to help you.

Instead of trying to hold onto our vanishing privacy, which is already a losing battle, we need to shift focus onto shining the light on corporate and government officials' activities. Honestly, they mostly don't care what we're up to, most people lead boring lives, but we all know that they mega-rich don't want us knowing what they are doing behind closed doors to the rest of us.

Does anyone taking these polls ever suspect that respondents are just plain fucking with them?

Only a lawyer can imagine a world where a person agrees to paying a 22.5 million dollar fine and then can seriously claim they did nothing wrong.

How about using a light signal instead? Turn a light green for go.

Rather than focus on preventing government from spying on us and collecting information on us, which is futile, we need to focus on collecting information about our government and the actions of elected officials and making it transparent and easy to access for all citizens. The problem is that there is an inequality in the available information and that leads to too much government power. I seriously think our congressmen should be filmed 24/7 and all their motions made public, perhaps 1 year later to avoid the threat of assassination.

I think it's ironic that a company whose CEO has repeatedly made it clear from the start that user's data should not be kept private is claiming to improve security while they themselves have intentionally and willfully made users' private data public again and again by changing default settings and making it hard to change them back. Or has everyone already forgotten? I for one assume everything I post on Facebook is going to become completely public, including private messges. Have you ever read the permissions you grant on any application you use (I don't use FB apps because of this)?

The very idea that the police have any right to say what the citizens can or cannot do is wrong. The police are there to uphold the law, not make their own. It's good that they are recognizing their limits here, but they do not have any bragging rights for doing so. It's sad he has to give a General Order to keep his fascists from wielding their clubs against innocent photographers documenting their actions, but I'm glad he has given it.

So BSD isn't a "real unix" to you?

I do not presume any such thing. I asked a question and you read your own biases and presumptions into it. I do take issue with YOUR presumption that government has the necessary information and expertise to analyze corporate doings. I think you probably overestimate the ability of government and underestimate those of the free market, but as I said, but which you will probably again ignore, we need government regulation and oversight of companies.

I agree. We need government regulation and oversight of companies. But let's not make the mistake of thinking government is more or less trustworthy than corporations. The government needs to be transparent in order to be effective. What happens now is "regulation" == "licensing and red tape," not really oversight. Also let's not forget that corporations own our politicians. As I said, I trust neither of them.