How does this differ from a typical search warrant for a premises? While you can get a search warrant to search "room X at property Y", more often than not the search warrant is for "property Y", which is exactly the same as a gmail account in entirety.

Actually most get a token from their payment provider and store that for future use - only the very large sites which have their own merchant accounts and card provider systems will store the card details.

In the UK, most card providers require you to enrol into something called "3D Authentication", which sets up a password for your card - when you make a payment online, you put in your card details, billing address etc, and then you are asked for three digits from your 3D Authentication password. The way in which this works is its handled directly by the bank, not the payment provider or the vendor website - the payment provider returns a response saying "3D Auth required, go here to complete..." and you redirect your user to that website, they do the additional authentication, the bank then sends a result back to you, and you send that on to your payment provider.

If you are pointing out how clear Ukrainian airspace is, try looking at the same map from two weeks ago, or even earlier on the day of the shoot down - Ukrainian airspace was being used by most airlines on that route, it was only afterward that airlines started avoiding it as a matter of course.

Which democracy is that, the one before or after the overthrow of the democratically elected government?

Of course there are things to dispute, because both your assertions have bias in them - the Ukrainian air defence system was on a higher state of alert because they had accused the Russians of shooting down a Ukrainian air force jet earlier that day, and the Ukrainians have the missiles that are alleged to have shot down the 777 (but we have no proof at all of the type of missile, just assertions coming from the Ukrainian side). So its well within the realms of possibility that the Ukrainians shot down the jet thinking it was a Russian air force incursion.

As for who claimed the shoot down in the immediate moments afterward, remember how many groups claimed 9/11 before it was finally pinned down to Bin Laden.

If you look at this from a neutral point of view, then nothing has been confirmed or proven yet - other than the 777 crashed of course.

There is a fuckton more content on the internet today than in 1998, so what worked before doesn't necessarily work today and vice versa. To take the YouTube example of the story author, we have two sides to it - those who post the content without having to worry about being hit by a massive bandwidth bill, and those who view the content without having to whip out a credit card to pay for it. In between those sides, we have Google who is paying the infrastructure bill and funding the means to pay that bill by showing ads.

People on here and other open forums regularly bitch about paywalls, so there are only really two other alternatives - find another way to pay the bill, or offer the content completely for free. Offering the content completely for free doesn't work for a lot of companies, because they are there to make money....

Rebels that come from the Ukrainian military.

A goal for all those zero sized models and weight loss fanatics to aim for!

Damn right an Apple monopoly was the worse situation - I can read my Kindle books on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows and a whole load of other platforms. Where can I read my Apple iBooks? Uhm... iOS.

And companies have turned to privateers to protect their claims and ability to function in the past - the East India Trading Company had quite the military arm...

It doesn't matter that they aren't a Chinese corporation, they have a presence in China that can be held to Chinese law and jurisdiction.

That's entirely what's happening in this case with Microsoft - the US administration is not simply saying "all US corporations must adhere to US law, regardless of where the data is actually stored", they have actually gone as far as to say "if you have operations in the US, you are subject to US jurisdiction even if you are a foreign corporation and even if the data is not in the US."

So the grand parents situation is entirely valid - what happens when China says to Apple "give us all your data, wherever it is held"?

The US court does not care about the rules of another jurisdiction (as they should not) - they will make it quite plain that they still expect the court order to be fulfilled and its up to the party that is subject to the court order to fulfil it. The fact that the party would do something illegal in a foreign jurisdiction is something the court should not have to take into consideration because the party is in the courts jurisdiction.

Its up to the party involved to not put themselves in such a conflicting situation in the first place.

Its actually very relevant to the discussion at hand because it shows that there is already precedence set for data in a foreign country being accessible by US courts if there is a US presence of the company holding the data.

A company is as fictitious as the property deeds for your home or car...

Its worth noting that the politician that announced it comes from a Scottish constituency...