Oh, my mother also has the herpes since birth. It runs in the family, so to say.

I got herpes already at birth. Pray tell me, o wise Anonymous Coward, how I could have possibly avoided it. (Herpes is a STD in just the same sense that the Common Cold is a STD. It can also be transmitted through sexual contact, but this is not their main infection vector.)

I was just browsing my own business mail, and I found that 90% of them don't belong in public, because they are talking about customer installations (information which belongs to the customer, not us) or about internal administration and HR (like courses, oncall schedules, sick leaves, vacations). Only 1% are directly about what I am doing, like solution concepts, scripts or possible configurations. I can imagine that this is not so much different from most other people's business email.

There is lots of administrative stuff, human resources details, meeting arrangements and much more in daily mails, which all belong to your work, and none of them belongs into the public.

Asking for vacation, sending in sick leave requests etc.pp. is all business, and none of them belongs to the public.

Actually, "civilisation" is derived from "civitas" (town), thus originally a civilisation has started to live in or around cities, which has happened already during the Copper Age. There are even Late Stone Age towns.

Actually, they don't. There have been situations where a seed company was collecting seeds of traditional crops, selecting the ones with the most marketable potential, patenting and reselling them again and suing the farmers they got the seed from originally from infringing the patent on the seeds and prevailing.

Curse the judges that handed down the verdict and the laws that allowed the company to prevail, but currently there is nothing that prevents a company from doing the same again and again.

In a certain way they are, if you have a contract with them allowing them to do so.

Contracts have not to be signed. It is sufficient if both parties have an agreement. The signed, written form makes it more easy to prove afterwards which conditions were agreed upon, but it is no requirement.

As you buy the stuff not at the company, but through a trader, the only contract which exists, is the contract between you and the trader about the transfer of money in exchange for a box of cereals. So there is no contract you could be ever ignorant off. First Sale Doctrin and all that...

Guns in the hand of people also means that the people who can afford the largest guns also have the largest influence. It makes no difference to a system where money buys the government directly, except that it requires more bloodshed.

Or just be like me and not care about in-car-entertainment. All I use the car radio for is listening to some news channel. I don't have ever burned a CD for my car, I never took a bought CD in my car, I don't have any USB-based devices or anything else.

Sometimes I wonder how many people like to state that "The car body is made from steel" to make an argument the car was not blue. It seems to be some sentence once learned in some class or read in some book that reoccur again and again without ever being called in question. There are other themes (like: "Nikola Tesla is the most underreported inventor"), but this one always striked me as especially odd.

I once learned that Democracy is a measure of how easy it is to remove someone from power. If it requires a bloodshed, you live in a tyranny. If it requires some violent pressure on someone, it's not as bad, and if all it takes is a public statement of wishing someone else in power, you are pretty close to a full democracy. Elections in this case are just a means to an end, a way to formulate a public statement. A referendum would be another way. As it seems from the study, it's nearly impossible to remove someone in power via a public statement, because the amount of money to bend the public statement in your favor is so exceptionally large, that only some elites can afford it.

I think what we have here is you pulling accusations out of your ass without backing them up.

And you expect the media to be able to correctly asses the abilities and the inner workings of a secret agency in a foreign country? And not just blindly speculating what could have happened? Does the media read the press releases of the KGB, where the KGB announces his new spy programs?

If there are any new tactics at the KGB and the chinese Zhong Chan Er Bu, they surely will not tell the papers you are reading. And if any american intelligence agency detects new tactics of foreign spy agencies, they won't put out a press release either. So we have wild guesses in the news papers you read, and nothing else.

What we have is the former head of the NSA excusing before Germany for completely misunderstanding the german sensibilities when it comes to complete surveillance of everyone. We have about every intelligence agency running to their respective government to demand more money, and we have the intelligence agencies of Brazil and Germany begging for pardon for being that inept.