Yes, and in the 'real' world anyone can break into your home, take your stuff, rape you, kill you, and eat your liver with fava beans and a nice chianti.

So forgive me for staying in the fictional 'legal' world; I'm not quite ready to throw away all of civilization whenever it happens to inconvenience me.

Who said anything about a buck?

1. Create script to register Amazon Turk account and spin up EC2 instance for an hour
2. while (true) { run_script(); }
3. Profit!

Also, criminals are asked to kindly inform local law enforcement before committing their next crime.

Well, they obviously aren't moving their legs fast enough.

I keep cutting my fingers on my 2D smartphone. And it sucks when I lay it down on a flat surface.

Fixed: typo

Corporations — Less pissy than governments, since 1347.

It's a losing battle, unfortunately. We can't remember one simple 2048-bit private key, we emit all varieties of radiation, we leave a literal trail of identifiable chemical signatures, we're susceptible to an enormous variety of attacks, have only a vague notion of what's going on around us (or, for that matter, inside us), have predictable needs and habits, share important details of our lives with others, and last but not least, are frequently willing to trade our privacy for a little convenience or money.

In short: we're loud and messy, and trying to make a human invisible to the technology of today and tomorrow is ultimately futile. It's like DRM; the most you can do is make it slightly harder and impose laws declaring the water should stay in the sieve.

Hopefully we'll wise up someday and stop caring about the pointless minutiae of each others' lives, and decide that as long as technological advance means we're heading for a panopticon anyway, it needs to be owned by all the people.

Not holding my breath, though.

Actually, science supports the theory of a Great Flood: the end of the last glacial age. Sea levels rose more than a hundred meters, glaciers collapsed, colossal floods submerged plains and coasts. It changed the whole map of the earth.

It didn't all happen at once, of course, but neither was it without punctuation. Bursting glacial dams and mega-tsunamis are sudden and apocalyptic by anyone's standards; combined with the incessant rise of the tides it's easy to see where so many cultures got their legends of civilization-ending floods.

That reminds me of the Drake equation, which lets you calculate based on the observed size, age and biodiversity of the Earth, the mobility of civilizations and the growth of population and technology, how incredibly unlikely it is that there could be other intelligent life on the planet who hasn't already made your acquaintance.

And the next day, Sir Francis Drake shows up and enslaves you.

True, but I'm fairly confident dried, heated and rinsed urine is still going to be cheaper than platinum.

(If you disagree, would you consider a trade?)

Of Johnson County.

I was just thinking "I don't own enough expensive single-use gadgets whose meagre functionality could be replaced by a few lines of code."

A significant part of their job is deciding whether threats made against said VIPs are serious or not.

It was true for a long time, but then someone trying to be helpful changed it to "Linux == Secure" and it was no longer.