My apologies, I misread your post and made myself seem a little bit dafter than usual. I mistakenly believed it made you sad that Apple were being strong-armed into following local laws, rather than sad that they had to be forced to comply with local laws. Hence my rather unfounded sarcasm in the previous post. My bad.

Thankfully, with the ugly exception of worldwide tax avoidance, it's only in the USA that Apple appears to be above and beyond the law. Because you love them so much, this genuinely makes you sad?

3 - Get Amazon all over the global news around the time of the Christmas shopping rush.

It's not as daft as you might first think. This is a genuinely serious avenue that many will believe should be monitored.

When I worked for another huge online MMO catching exploiters, botters, real world traders and gold farmers, there was a genuine and perhaps justified concern about real life criminality among the player base. The fact is that virtual currency has real world value. Buying very sought after items or mountains of gold and then reselling it in a different currency gives you a perfect way to quietly transfer funds from one country to another or launder it. Even just using in game private messages to pass on information.

No, its cameras. Suddenly we will have millions of cameras in the sky but I'm sure we can comfortably trust our respective governments with that..... right?

It's possible this gig is a double bluff and is actually a rival oil company or environmental group trolling BP by accusing them of trolling others. Note the lack of direct evidence in the article.

Seen as its not easy to judge a countries health care with limited information, I looked instead at life expectancy instead to get a vague idea and your right... only countries like the USA have real health care. Why on this link the average American male lives two full years longer than the average Saudi male. Imagine that!
Of course the typical American male lives about 3 - 4 years less than someone in Europe due to their primitive health care system so I guess they are also screwed if this thing gets out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

US politicians, bent you say? Surely not!

Delicacy tends more to be some horrible crap that poor people would eat to survive. For example haggis, the Scots delicacy is made from all the garbage left over after that you cant sell after you butcher a sheep. It's padded out with oats and has the bad taste of the offal covered up with spices. Seems this coffee started out in a similar way. Poor people not allowed the coffee beans found some they were allowed to use in cat shit. mmmm the taste of culture mixed with the chic of poverty. So now they can't eat them from the trees or harvest them from cat crap. Poor guys lose again.

For those that don't want to actually read the loose blog post (its just an opinion from some unknown guy and backed up with no actual facts by the way. It's not actually news at all).
In the comments is a reply apparently from DuckDuckGo :

"Hi, this is Gabriel Weinberg, CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo. I do not believe we can be compelled to store or siphon off user data to the NSA or anyone else. All the existing US laws are about turning over existing business records and not about compelling you change your business practices. In our case such an order would further force us to lie to consumers, which would put us in trouble with the FTC and irreparably hurt our business. We have not received any request like this, and do not expect to. We have spoken with many lawyers particularly skilled and experienced in this part of US and international law. If we were to receive such a request we believe as do these others it would be highly unconstitutional on many independent grounds, and there is plenty of legal precedent there. With CALEA in particular, search engines are exempt. There are many additional legal and technical inaccuracies in this article and I will not address all of them in this comment. All our front-end servers are hosted on Amazon not Verizon, for example."

I must have missed the part when people got to vote on the candidates' policies about the role, powers, leadership and reach of the NSA.

The problem is that the media has managed to alter the perception of formal democratic protest to be little more than a hobby for jobless extreme left liberals, making it something to be ashamed of and even arrested for.

Agreed, even after getting to know someone it can be hard to spot tell-tale warning signs. People can spend their life hiding things and get quite good at it. It was only after a girlfriend of mine moved in that her schizophrenia became apparent. She was very good at hiding it but put far less effort into that after she moved in. Warnings like when she yelled at me for listening to her thoughts all the time. That said, maybe I was the one that drove her crazy.

I'm simply staggered by the number of nay-sayers posting here and being modded up to +5 who are doing little more than desperately grasping at straws while denying the staggering array evidence in the world around them. Ignoring such overwhelming proof isn't even a matter of blind faith, its just willful ignorance sponsored by parties with a massive financial interest in staving off the inevitable as long as profitably possible.