That's 1 billion barrels from one well. The grand total could be much larger.

We should just throw all the criminals on some remote island.

Why take a step backwards and test lawyers? Aren't the rats closer to being human?

Yeah, but coal seam fires gave us Silent Hill, while nuclear disasters (and weapon tests) gave us Godzilla. Now tell me - which is *really* the bigger evil?

The judge may have said it can be used in this one case, but unless struck down by another court, it sets up a precedent for other judges to do the same.

Yeah, government never comes up with any interesting research results, like the internet (DARPA), GPS (DoD), touchscreens (CIA/NSF), or Siri (DARPA).

This was more the case of "Don't want your car stolen? Don't leave the windows down and doors unlocked". The thief still has to hot wire the car, and he/she still takes the lion's share of the blame, but it doesn't detract from the fact that it is really stupid to leave your car out like that.

It doesn't work for average businesses any more than it works for average citizens (and for the same reasons). It might work if you were a billionaire, though.

A better analogy is one where you purchase a vehicle capable of going 60MPH, but unbeknownst to you ahead of time, it gets throttled remotely to lower speeds if you drive to Chicago or LA because those cities did not pay the manufacturer enough extortion money. Oh, and it can go 90MPH to Destroit because the manufacturer is based there.

Assuming that it was impossible to have *any* privacy, you would immediately see widespread persecution of anyone who didn't fit the "norm". Shortly afterward, anyone with any intelligence would cease any public activities which did not meet general approval and start looking for ways to engage in them so that only other people with those hobbies would know about it - in effect, clamoring to restore the lost privacy.

In short, a life without privacy is one where you must live according to how everyone else wants you to live, whether than living how *you* want to live. It is a prison without bars.

In the context of a single argument, you are correct. However, in the scope of society as a whole, public shaming of people who are willfully ignorant would hopefully serve to discourage those who see it as a badge of honor to argue a topic while being completely ignorant of the facts. However, I would be happy if we could at least drop the anti-intellectualism which permeates US culture.

I wouldn't call it stupid, but it is a logical fallacy. Given what we knew 10 years ago, it was only logical to point out the fallacy of assuming that everything you said or did was monitored, because there was little/no public evidence of such. That it turned out to be true does not make the past arguments any less fallacious.

Why should a copyright ever extend past the life of the author? For those 10 years you propose after the author dies, what additional works will that author create as a result of the additional copyright protection? And will zombie works be good enough to be worthy of copyright protection?

In the case of the US, it's a secret court with secret proceedings - as far as anyone knows, the actual approval for surveillance is rubber-stamped by circus clowns. Even then, it was shown that much of our surveillance was done without consulting the special "court". I don't see why we should assume the UK system is any different.

China could probably imprison everyone who *might* dissent and still have fewer people incarcerated than we do in the US.