If you are not from the USA, that would be a pretty tactless thing to say here.
If you are from the USA, be careful where you say that.

I would hope that they need import permits for anything beyond a passive monitor.

As for all the idiots suggesting signal jammers and even GPS blockers, no chance. It's doubtful that you would get away with using them in most of your own country although big money is more effective there. In this country, even big money finds it harder. You would need some help from the police at least but would be a little more likely to succeed if you had military or spook help.

They didn't use to be. During the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq, they actually did their job well and royally p'ed off Tony Blair who muzzled them and did damage to their freedom that could take decades to recover from - if ever.

Feel free to ignore them but they are about as unbiased and global as you are going to get.

When I was at school, I tried listening to some alternative news. The funniest one was from Russia. What I have seen of RT shows that little has changed. Their presentation is slicker but they still talk b******s.
Late at night, the BBC news channel pairs up with a US channel and it is so parochial and uninformed that it is sometimes funny. That is not a counterbalance.
Sometimes I have been known to turn to Al Jazeera. They have their own biases but the main reason I don't watch it the whole time is that it can be depressing. That probably means that it can be quite accurate at times.
I'm going the stick to the BBC for most news and No Agenda for editorials with a US slant.

No. It's not illegal, or even remotely so,
In many business situations, it's pretty close to mandatory. For the rest of us, encryption has caught on because of dodgy newspapers and Nigerian street markets.

In a lecture, a couple of years ago, I was asked what the best way of removing data from old drives. My answer was "a 10 year old with a lump hammer". Once that has been done with gusto, no spook or criminal News International employee will get much out of your stuff!

The problem with that statement is that England does not have any armed forces. The Royal Air Force is British, The Royal Navy is British and even specifically regionally English army units are in the British army. It is uninformed statements like yours that has caused so many of my fellow Scots to want separation from the UK.
(Hopefully this will fail like their last attempt, despite the fiddling that has been done.)

I'm not from the USA so I don't understand your country but your joke? confuses me. Hussein is dead. His fellow Iraqis hung him after a lengthy trial. Also, it has not been seen as a common role of anyone from the USA to help Moslems feel good about anything. You have it in your constitution to keep church & state separate. That's why nobody would get elected president if they were an atheist or anything but a follower of a western variant of Christianity.

Whether you like it or not, the tide of history is moving from smaller to larger groups.
Once it was small groups of humans led a hunter gatherer life. Then the groups got bigger, people settled and the villages turned into towns and so on.
We have seen that progress. Most city states are now subsumed into nation states and the trend over the last 50 years has been for voluntary association of nations into larger units. The UK is in several of these units including NATO and the EU. There will always have been people harping back to the "good old days" and we certainly have some of those. Scotland has escaped too much attention from UKIP and other xenophobes because they are often seen as specifically southern English. When we want ignorant statements about people on the other side of a line on a map,or speak differently, we have our own.

I really could not care about how the UK was not created well. It can work well nowadays. 1745 was a long time ago. It is good for tourism and film makers but I do not work in either of those industries. Like many people, I benefit from being in the EU. It means that, as part of the United Kingdom, I am part of an economic grouping that is bigger than North America. Despite what the SNP tells us, if Scotland leaves the UK, it leaves every alliance the it is in. It will be able to apply for entry but this is not a fast process and meantime, we are outside.

The UK is not perfect but neither is my car. I won't make my car work better by sawing bits off. We need to fix things, not land the entire population of England perpetually under Conservative government because we have taken our MPs out of parliament.

Lets move the capital of the UK to somewhere near the middle of this island and away from the cleared swamp that is a drain on the whole country. How about York?

As a Scot, I really hope it won't happen!

We called it Friday.

A question though, how is it that for 364 days you use a backasswards date format that is set to confuse the rest of the human race but this one day you put the day number before the month like everyone else?

The thing that was seriously useful was Google Listen that took podcasts from Reader. I have found nothing that does podcasts as well as Listen did.
I currently use Pocket Casts and it is adequate.

I tried Feedly but found it very demanding. If I left it, I would be told about the number of new things and it was just too much hassle. I will probably go back from time to time and clear the huge amount of "new" items and see how it goes for a while.

Dropping Reader was not a great thing for us "users" out here but I'm sure it made sense to someone at Google. However, I have No Agenda...