A truly erroneous hard-left outlook, but stupidity is fitting given your account name. Jihadists are very clear about their intentions. It has almost nothing to do with forcing our economies on them. The primary driver of jihad is the desire to subjugate the entire world to the dictates of Islamic dictatorship. Radical Muslims view the non-Muslim controlled parts of the globe as the world they are at war with, and the war they are waging is to impose their religion on all non-Muslims. Other justifications for jihad are at best secondary motivators. And shame on you for whitewashing and apologizing for the unquestionably evil, outrageously heinous campaign of misery and death waged by radical Islam.

Or perhaps America can elect some real leaders who will dismantle the unconstitutional Socialist Entitlement state so that we won't have to depend on foreign powers to buy our debt?

Is this article FUBAR? What's with the title? What do the terms "Intimate Social Graph" have to do with law enforcement snooping on stored electronic correspondence? Anyway, I think the safe thing to assume is, anything you send online in the clear is potentially open for anyone with interest and some technical experience to intercept and learn about you. There should be no expectation of privacy for that sort of information. If you proceed with that assumption in mind, you won't be disappointed if you find out you're being snooped on, and hopefully you will have taken some measure to guard yourself based on that realization.

I'm glad it works for you, but I have trouble trusting a tax preparation firm that screws up its own taxes over multiple years.

If a party arose that pledged as part of its platform to abolish the IRS and fundamentally reform government, getting us off the speeding train wreck financial course we're on presently, wouldn't such a party do really well electorally? Why hasn't any party to date come up with a clear message to that effect? OR am I deluding myself by thinking that Americans still want to enjoy the fruits of liberty?

Especially in the face of other powerful corporate interests that like to flex a lot of legal muscle? Such instances are few and far between. I don't have any plans on living in the UK, but I'd like to support BT. Their ideas intrigue me and I'd like to subscribe to their newsletter.

On a similar note, I've seen one web hosting company that won't buckle on illegitimate DMCA complaints without being compelled by court order to suspend service. The company I'm thinking of is Hostway. Their service plans and features aren't very good for the money, but if you need a host that will be in your corner in case someone is playing unscrupulous tricks on you with the law, that's one company to look to. Any other examples of corporations truly serving their customers well even when under some level of legal threat?

Blizzard was kind in supporting Power Macs as long as it did after Apple's Intel defection.

Off-topic reply:

That is utterly terrible advice. High quality stocks will always outperform the returns posted by the indexes. You have to know if you're investing for growth or income and how to diversify a portfolio, but you can do much better than the market average if you know what you're doing. If you don't, you're right buy a spider fund and hope for decent returns.

Btw, I used to day trade stocks, and it's a losing proposition unless you've got the resources to do it properly so that you can weather the inevitable volatility and manipulation of individual stocks.

A very interesting story. I wasn't aware of this CALEA law until I just read about it in a previous story in Slashdot, and it's very disturbing that the increasingly tyrannical rule (albeit a mostly soft tyranny for the time being) of the US Federal government and it's concomitant level of imperial arrogance has supposedly endowed an even more evil regime to further terrorize the world. If the US made Ahmadinejad's (YM"SH) life easier, government officials should be prosecuted and punished under the anti-treason provisions of the Constitution, but then again that can be said about many aspects of the US's ruling elite.

We must strenuously oppose any more encroachments on liberty and privacy, including the latest attempts by the Barack Hussein Obama regime to mandate backdoors in nearly all communication devices. This is a far more severe threat to our lives than ACTA. I can live without secular entertainment, but I don't want to live in a perpetual police state. We have to be mindful of the possibility that multi-national tyrannical forces are coordinating their efforts to bring a form of superlative form of international fascism (think 1984) in which all of humanity is shackled and enslaved.

Call me an alarmist if you wish - I am very alarmed.

often do not make right, as the old saying points out. It's an interesting legal question, though: Does a country have a right to use information illegally obtained by a third party to enforce laws against those implicated by that tainted information? In the US evidence that is obtained without legal authority to obtain it can often be thrown out of court through the "exclusionary rule," a legal doctrine often mentioned in connection with a concept of some evidenced being obtained as the "fruit of a poisonous tree." I wonder if the UK has any similar sorts of protections - note that I'm not implying that such protections in the US legal system would necessarily protect anyone if this story had occurred in the US instead of the UK. Governments are clearly zealous about protecting the tax revenue they take from their citizens.

Actually, even if that comment had been intended as humorous, Apple has been pushing speed and specs on the iPhone as an inducement to buy since the 3GS. Apple has set up an expectation that every new yearly iPhone release will be faster than the previous generation, so if Samsung has dual core cell phone chips coming I imagine Apple will be among the first to adopt them.

Why would I want to read anything by an author who uses the ungrammatical form "much more rich"? The superlative of rich is richer, not more rich.

Thank you, AC. Perfect case in point.