"... could be required to submit each network related action to a central clearing authority for approval"

Yes, we should hook all of humanity's weapons into a giant central AI for real-time arbitration of all firing decisions. We could call it "Skynet", perhaps. What could go wrong.

And another adjacent memorial could list those whose lives were lost because they had been disarmed and could not defend themselves, both from criminal attackers and criminal governments. That memorial would be at least 6 orders of magnitude larger than the first.

So why do they keep going after aircraft

They don't "keep going after aircraft" .. check the stats in my other comment next to that one. Aircraft hijacking attempts are less than 1 fifth of 1 percent of terrorist attacks. In other words over 99.8% of terrorist attacks are not targeted at aircraft, and over 99.3% are not targeted at aircraft or airports or anything airline-related. Please do yourself a favor, go to the Global Terrorism Database that I linked, download the stats, and open them yourself.

First link should have been: http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Pupils-relieved-bully-is-dead-20121122 (resubmitted with fix)

It was rather shocking actually and has permanently destroyed my acceptance of capitalism ... someone needs to legislate this out of existence because we're fucked if society ends up at the hands of nutjobs like them

A minor detail you probably failed to notice is that the primary demand for systems like this is driven by government-mandated legislation-driven compulsory security requirements. Society is already being controlled by nutjobs like them, they're called 'Congress'.

Islamic terrorists want to die in the attack so they can become martyrs and collect their 72 virgins

It is because of this that terrorists mostly prefer not to target airlines ... because airline security is so tight, they tend to end up just getting caught and rot in jail. But it's trivial to blow up e.g. a cafe in Tel Aviv for example and collect your virgins.

Because terrorists are dumb and they do keep trying to target aircraft. ... That is why they always go for the big targets like aircraft

False and false - a quick check of the Global Terrorism Database reveals that less than 0.2% of all terrorist attacks since 1991 were aircraft hijackings, and in fact less than 0.7% were targeted at any kind of airline-related infrastructure at all. Over 99% of terrorist attacks do not involve airlines or airports. (Anyone can download the database, and confirm these figures.)

Tell that to a woman walking home alone from work in a dark street. And imagine that woman might be, say, your daughter or sister or another loved one. You don't have a right to render them defenseless.

Here is your reason, but you're not going to like it, and I'll probably be modded down, even though the following is 100% factual - anyone here can confirm it by just plugging the census data and crime statistics into Excel:

http://comfortabletruth.blogspot.com/2011/01/fun-chart-of-day.html

If you normalize for demographics, the USA is just as safe as Europe. It really is that straightforward. Don't hate me for pointing it out, I'm not biased, the facts are biased, I'm just the messenger. Like I said, anyone can confirm this with Excel and a few minutes of research. We can argue endlessly about the reasons for this incredibly strong correlation, sure, but we cannot deny the story the numbers tell us.

I know Apple has a reputation for sometimes seeming a bit on the benevolent side, but I think they're making just a bit much of the "tone" being read into the message from its "terseness", and making too much of the message itself; I know a few people who run software companies and they're generally extremely busy people who deal with large volumes of e-mail and other queries continuously for years ... this leads to the habit, out of necessity, of cutting to the chase quickly and replying to things quickly and briefly. Add to that they "identified themselves as" a random Apple customer and not anyone particularly important, and it was just a short question, what did they expect? Also they didn't ask "officially, are you stating it will never support this" --- they just, having identified themselves as an 'Apple customer', asked "Will the wifi-only version somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?", which any reasonable person would've concluded was a customer asking not "Will the wifi-only ..." but "Does the wifi-only ...".

"Snow replied that when technologies are developed separately in parallel, the developers don't necessarily use the same terms for them."

Sure, and I invented cars 200 years ago, but I didn't call it a car so someone else got the credit.

The NSA may have a "deep staff of Ph.D. mathematicians and other cryptographic experts who work on securing traffic and breaking codes" but let's face it, government departments are not exactly known for being the most motivated of the various sectors, and that's further exacerbated if you know you aren't going to get credit for your work as opposed to being kept secret ... I mean, in academia, one of the major motivations for leading scientists is that they get widespread recognition for their work. I suspect the funding to maintain that "deep staff" of experts probably serves more to keep those experts from being more productive 'elsewhere'. And of course they have to maintain that they are 'ahead' if they want to keep getting funded year after year, so I'd take it with a pinch of salt.

And yet your odds of dying falling down a flight of stairs are thousands of times higher than being killed by a suicide bomber --- why aren't you more terrified of stairs?

Was that a lousy attempt a humor or a lousy attempt at a troll? I can't quite tell, but you certainly aren't making any serious points about philosophy; every one of your points is absurdly bizarre.