That depends very much on the business and the situation as a whole.

For example, I wouldn't mind if some homophobic racist piece shit owner of a local bar in Arizona would deny handing me over a drink, but it would be problematic if the only ISP in town could refuse a gay person as a customer or if all gas stations in Arizona would decide not to offer their services to owners of "gay cars". and what if you're living in a small town with only one grocery store and the next town is hundreds of miles away? Perhaps you don't care because you live in a place where there are plenty of choices, but that's not always the case.

So to answer your original question: Yes, in many cases the state should regulate business and tell them they must not refuse service to gays, christians, people with freckles, or brunettes. It's kind of obvious if you give it some thought.

If you're an asshole, then Yes. Otherwise, No.

Especially given the fact that Apple has never done anything that hasn't been done before...

Instead of ranting against them (not that I disagree) you could also just not use any cloud services. Their TOS and EULAs are usually unacceptable anyway. I store everything on my PC and backup the contents of this machine in encrypted form to georedundant servers. The rest is just a matter of using remote desktop login, ssh, and similar services.

If you don't want to set up the services on your own, there is a little Danish company that produces sort of two matching, paired USB sticks that allow you to move files between any two endpoints, including very sophisticated NAT traversal. It's nothing you couldn't on your own in software but seems quite handy to me. Can't remember their name though.

Snowden's probably right. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the new Slashdot design (aka "B e t a") were one of the devious DDOS attacks of the British online intelligence in order to further the agenda of the British Broadcasting Corporation and weaken US media influence. Think about it: What a heinous plan to implement a new web design and then let the rest of the DOS attack be done by the crowd - and with a jolly good sense of British humour mixed in, I may add! So what do you think? Is it possible that the Brits are behind all this?

I can't read it, because when Beta smears all over my screen I have to close my eyes :(

We want /. classic!

Beta is like curved mobile phones, nobody needs or wants them.

It doesn't work.

But then Beta was switched on and I quickly turned away. :(

Glad I'm still on classic. :-)

Hardly. People would just use Freenet or Gnunet instead.

Tor provides anonymity, not protection against eavesdropping. For the latter, you need to use additional endpoint-to-endpoint security like SSL. Of course, you also shouldn't announce to the whole world who you are while browsing with Tor, which is surprisingly harder than some people might think.

Wow, they encrypted their intra-datacenter comms! Awesome! That so totally shows how much they are fighting against the NSA ... as much as the fact that their SSL connections still use unbreakable, military-grade RC4 encryption!

There is nothing wrong with the Internet tubes per se, as long as they are used in the right manner.

Lots of weed. Wait, what was the question again?