OK lets say that in context your advice is sound and I now thoroughly understand the math behind modern crypto systems. How am I going to be sure the math is correctly implemented? Are you advocating that in addition to having a deep understanding of some fairly esoteric maths I now need to be an expert enough coder to judge the Underhanded C Contest as well? Because that is what you are asking and for 95% of folks on the net or event people here on /. that is asking the impossible.

Bonus points for creating an expert system to play back various prerecorded messages as the sap on the phones works through a generic T-Tree until they have exhausted all options but to actually bug you. Double-plus bonus points if the expert phone system was designed by the BOFH.

ProcMon ProcExp and ProcDump All go a long way toward tracking that sort of info down and are all free (as in beer) to boot.

Because "our betters" use those money-saving services. Therefore they are A-OK with storing money offshore and will not prosecute such activities.

SpiderOak would be a good one. It's cross-platform, FOSS-friendly, and has a rather impressive feature-set. I'm frankly surprised they aren't better known by now.

Not the Federal Government. The Federal Reserve is a private entity.

Are you telling me that Mexicans are not enthralled by a corporate bottom-of-the-barrel parody of their cuisine? Shocking!

This is slashdot, not R'ing TFA is par for the course, not R'ing TFS gets you a gold star!

When the cult incites or orders members to commit crimes then the cult is also criminally liable. These individuals did not act in a vacuum.

Read up on some of the shit that the CoS has pulled, Operation Snow White for starters...

No, no, no, and no. I'll refute point by point:

The barista - without further information it is most reasonable to conclude that the barista did not have malicious intent, mistakes happen

The thief - obviously the thief has malicious intent in that they stole money but not intent to kill her as you made no mention of attempted homicide, they were after the money, not the girl

the washing machine - non-sentient appliances cannot be blamed for anything as they lack intent

the ex-boyfriend - unless he also joined in harassing her then no, again, lack of malicious intent

Now compare that to two girls repeatedly harassing, intimidating, and generally being little shits over an extended period of time with clearly demonstrated malicious intent ("Go drink bleach and die")

One of these things is not like the others...

The kid could run away? Really? Your solution for bullying is to have the kid strike out on their own into an even more hostile environment that will happily eat them alive? (And keep in mind the victim here is an adolescent girl...nope, no risk of even worse things happening to her once she's out of the house, no sir!)

Please tell me you do not have children of your own. I don't think I could come up with a worse solution if I had tried.

Which is worse, the subject matter of said visualization or how aptly it applies?

Mint is derived from Ubuntu, in fact I think they still use a large part of the Ubuntu repositories

Now Arch on the other hand...

The value of gold versus dirt is not intrinsic, it is contextual.

If you and I were on a desert island and I have a cubic meter of arable soil to grow food with (i.e. dirt) and you have a cubic kilometer of gold, I'm gonna hold onto my dirt. Why? Because in the context of being stuck on a desert island, gold does not have much usefulness. It's too soft to make tools, too dense to make a boat or useful building material, and inedible. Dirt on the other hand can be used to grow food, something that I need more than any amount of gold.

Could you build some useful items out of gold on such an island? Probably. I'm sure it would make some very pretty planters or pipes for irrigation but those pipes would only be useful in conjunction with my dirt so again their value is contextual.

Ergo, in the (admittedly artificial) scenario I just described, dirt is more value than gold.