It's not about my attitude, it's about the above poster being platantly wrong.

Actually, it makes it right. Right enough to be legally enforceable. You can go rabulistic about monopoly if you want, but that doesn't change the fact, that the legal term "monopoly" was found to fit Microsoft's business.

So I demand my data back from Google then, if it's of no value to them.

Actually he was quoting a thesis from the ancient Greeks about the reasons why we have a brain.

About any non-ruling party has more emphasis on citizen's rights than the ruling ones. Sometimes they differ in who they count as citizens (or humans). They have the big advantage of not having to compromise between conflicts of interest in actual decisions when one's rights are limited by other persons's rights, thus "individual rights" is a nice and unchallenged battle cry. If the party has some local influence (e.g. majority in a city council or similar), the party also calls for more decisions on a local level. And of course any non ruling party is in favor of changed rules to make it more difficult for the ruling parties to stay in power.

So nothing to see here. Just your average opposition party's positions.

An NDA would run afoul the aforementioned law, because it explicitely states:

In this case, the disclosure takes place in Ireland, as the data is actually stored there. And that's sufficient here to fall under irish legislation.

I don't think you get the real problem. It's not about the export of data (which is not at issue here), it's disclosing private data to a third party. This doesn't mean export - even if the third party in question appeared in Ireland in front of the data center, this still would be illegal.

The physical location of the data matters because of European Data Protection laws. Microsoft would run afoul of the laws of Ireland if they gave data stored on servers in Ireland to a third party without the actual owner of the data agreeing or a court order by an Irish court. The government lawyers obviously tried to argue that they don't need an Irish court, and the U.S. judge at first bought the argument. And now it seems as if the U.S. court might have changed its mind but want this to be sorted out by the higher court.

It is sufficient to collide one hash to compromise the certificate. With two hashes offered, you cut the strength of each hash effectively in half.

The textbooks are out there. There are the IPCC reports. There is basic physics. You actually can create a greenhouse and measure the effect yourself. Go to the next department store, buy four planks and a sheet of acryl and put them in the garden as a small greenhouse. You also can go through old textbooks and look up the number for carbondioxide in the atmosphere. And you can graph the values in a time line, and you will see that they nearly linearily increase from 270 ppm around 1900 to 400 ppm today.

I for instance have an old book about the planets (author: L. Ksanformaliti, if anyone is interested) from 1984. This was long before any politically heated discussion about climate change. It was full of data on the atmospheres of the planets and of the local greenhouse effects, and how dependend the actual greenhouse effect is from the actual levels of the different gases like Methane and Carbondioxide, and that the Earth has a considerably high greenhouse effect, which increases the average surface temperature by 15 Kelvin compared to a Black Body. And it had references to other planets, and how the high levels of Carbondioxide in the Venus's atmosphere amount to a greenhouse effect of more than 400 Kelvin, and how the very low levels on Mars cause a very small greenhouse effect.

So when the debate came after the Kyoto protocol, I was always wondering how the deniers could be so ignorant of long known facts, as if they heard it for the first time, and how they could consider it made up and falsificated and whatever the accusations were. And I knew that this was primarily a political debate of not having to face the consequences of their own doings, and one way was to call the scientists who were just publishing the collected facts of their field fat and lazy and government paid shills. And then I saw that the discussion was mainly an U.S.-only debate cooked up by paid shills and astroturfers, and I knew everything was well.

Do you see pockmarks on the earths surface which result from baseball impacts at 100 kph? Even if you do, wind or the next rain wash them away very fast. And the energy of the cosmic particles was said to be comparable to a baseball at about 60 mph, thus you won't expect any more impact.

You know that Gnome is actually a result of The GIMP and not vice versa? Gnome builds on GTK, which stands for GIMP Toolkit (and not Gnome Toolkit). Gnome is basicly a standalone version of GIMPs UI widgets.

No, since 1973 copyrights don't have to be applied for. It is sufficient that the Work of Art was created, and that the level of creativeness was high enough. And yes, in theory you could leak some Work of Art of you and then sue the people who distribute it. But the problem is: Your Work of Art has to be appealling enough for people to actually wanting to copy and to distribute it.

Why should it be illegal, and who should get the blame if it happens anyway?