It is true and has always been that the best way to get the attention of large megacorporations, technological or otherwise, is to hit them in the pocketbook. Until Mr. Snowden came along, most of these tech companies willingly, some of them enthusiastically, cooperated with the government spies who were going to pay them considerable amounts of money. Phone companies even set aside special rooms and equipment to facilitate the spy agencies desires to scarf up terabytes of data. Now that all this has come to light, these tech giants stand to lose a fortune as others who do not wish to be spied on take their business elsewhere. How will common ordinary people ever know whether big government and big business are NOT under the same blanket, telling monstrous lies whenever it suits their agendas? Thank you Mr. Snowden!

Since ancient times, governments have always spied on one another with varying effectiveness. It's just in our modern times, with the advent of the Internet, governments not only spy on each other but on as many others as they possibly can. Unlike governments of course most people don't have such deep dark secrets and their communications with one another are almost always quite boring. Would it not be nice if all the spies got bored to death by all the mundane things we have to say to one another?

Don't you think that your phrase "we assume facts" is contradictory? Facts are facts and when you assume something you believe it and don't know it but are guessing. We know that mass gives rise to gravity, and that the Higgs boson is somehow involved with mass, but we really have not figured out yet what about mass makes gravity. Also, there is no experiment you can do that can differentiate gravity from acceleration.

The evidence we have is that the galaxies don't move according to our understanding of the laws of gravity. Does that not assume that gravity is the only force controlling the motion of those galaxies? What if there is another force that also controls the motion of galaxies in addition to gravity? Is gravity the only force we know about that can act over great distances? Compared to other forces in the universe, gravity is extremely weak. It would not take much of a component from the electric force to augment the effects of gravity to the extent that it corrects for and explains the observed motion.

The electric force is 10^39 times stronger than gravity, so it would not take much of a differential electric field to make the electric force dominant over gravity. We know there must be enormous electric fields over vast distances, because the Earth is constantly bombarded by charged particles with energies far greater than any human accelerator has ever achieved. Only electric fields can accelerate particles to such energies as we observe. If there are enormous electrical potentials between different parts of galaxies or between galaxies, could those account for some of the observed motion?

Some states have an initiative process that voters can use force such laws down the throat of recalcitrant & bribed politicians. Voters used that process while we were still living in California to the reign in overzealous tax collectors and beat politicians into submission with the famous proposition 13 way back when. Oregon voters did the same thing with measure 5 not too long after that.

Well we already have a pressure cooker and my wife canned some green beans from our garden harvest. Now the NSA, CIA, KGB, Gestapo and similar agencies will know this! So now when they outlaw pressure cookers, only outlaws will have pressure cookers and we will be classed among the outlaws. :)

That is why I don't use Google mail or any of the other "free" email services

I know there a problem with the party system, but even so, if all those that are currently in office found themselves to be unemployed, it would send a message to whoever did get elected, to heed the voters more rather than the lobbyists who bribe them. Also the laws could be changed so that anyone who registered as an independent voter, could vote for any person running for any office in any election, whether primary or otherwise.

I don't think it is possible to vote FOR anybody anymore. What we can really do is to vote ALL all the scoundrels out of office by voting out EVERY person now in office. Sure that might mean throwing out a few good eggs with the rotten ones, but most of the eggs in the box that have been in the box for an awful long time are rotten and stink to high heaven.

That does not mean that those who are running against them are all that much better, since the really decent, smart and good people have long ago given up running for public office, especially the higher positions, because of the muddy election campaigns, where complete life history of a candidate is put in the public spotlight. Because nobody is perfect and everybody makes mistakes and those mistakes are most likely information available to the political opposition, these mistakes then end up in the headlines.

The perhaps lesser scoundrels hoping to benefit financially from public office and endure that public election ordeal, would get the message from the voters that they can be thrown out by the electorate and that it will take at least a while for most of these newly elected ones to re-establish the bribery networks the present ones now have with the lobbying establishment.

My wife and I recently searched the Internet for some shoes for her and now I see lots of ads for shoes. What is so bad about that? I would rather see that than random ads for condoms or sex enhancement drugs.

The government has never shown that spying on millions of people has netted them any real valuable information, such as preventing terrorism. If the NSA wants to know that I am going to visit my grandson on the weekend, who cares? Most things that most people communicate about, whether on the phone or on the Internet are so mundane, that if the NSA would pay attention to all that, they would all die of boredom. There are thousands of websites where hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have made negative comments about our government.

If the government wanted to arrest everyone that has made in some cases some very nasty comments about Obama and his administration and other politicians, they would need a huge army of goons willing to do the dirty work and would overcrowd our prisons to the bursting point.

Instead of wholesale spying on everybody, the NSA could concentrate its resources on targeted surveillance on people that are already suspect of suspicious behavior or that they may be warned about by other governments. If they had done that, they could have most likely prevented the Boston Marathon bombings.

I certainly agree with you on that one! I will take a good earthquake any day over tornado or even a hurricane. I went through the 1989 earthquake in the Bay Area, the one that collapsed the Bay Bridge and a whole section of the Nimitz Freeway. In our house, we only suffered was some broken dishes. We now live in Oregon and are told that we are due for a 9.0+ earthquake similar to the one that ruined the nuclear plant in Japan. Fortunately we don't have any of those in our neighborhood. We don't live on the coast, so we don't have to worry about a tsunami.

If two criminals want to communicate securely with each other by cell phones, they can do so if they keep their conversations short and by using prepaid phones such as trac phones bought with cash. Their CIA, NSA, KGB or whoever can listen in on their conversations, but they don't know who is talking.

On your phone, you have bigger problems than someone listening to the sound of your keystrokes on a keyboard. Everything I have read, is that iPhones are particularly resistant to getting malware on them.

who know less than nothing about engineering, making engineering decisions. Next thing you know these idiotic politicians will also extend their stupid mandates to other areas of technology. It appears that in some ways, European politicians are even stupider than the ones we have over here in the states. Standards should be come up with by engineers who know what they are doing, rather than politicians. I do not think for a minute that the engineers at Apple changed the connector on their iDevices for no good reasons. If politicians legislate in this area, they can do nothing less than stifle technology and innovation.