Unless he violates the terms of service.

10.1 Prohibited Uses
[...]
You agree that you will not:
[...]
(p) promote or provide instructional information about illegal activities, promote physical harm or injury against any group or individual, or promote any act of cruelty to animals.

A section of his site was instructions on how to commit suicide, which is an illegal act in many (most?) jurisdictions.

This isn't entirely true. See the graph here (the page is mostly about lead-acids, but as the author states the graph in question is valid for li-ion, just with a different scale). Look at a couple of data points towards either edge of the graph, for example, 20% and 80% depth-of-discharge. At 20%, the battery the author is describing gets 3,300 cycles whereas at 80% it gets 675. Assuming the battery has a 1Ah capacity (for simplicity of calculation) this means that with 20% DOD you get a total battery life of 660Ah but at 80% you only get 540Ah. That's nearly a 20% difference in lifespan.

"the AppleCare Protection Plan for notebook computers does not cover batteries that have failed or are exhibiting diminished capacity except when the failure or diminished capacity is the result of a manufacturing defect" (source).

But is it brain science?

Because most batteries last much longer if you don't discharge them as far. So charge them whenever you can and they're not nearly full. About 80%-90% is probably the best place to start, not 10%.

Evidence suggests that scaling quantum computing to the large number of qubits required to decrypt 2kbit RSA would be extraordinarily expensive, if possible at all. The largest quantum computer[1] built so far outside of secret institutions has, I believe, 14 qubits (I may be a little out-of-date, but not by a long way). Scaling has occurred at a fairly constant linear rate of about 1 qubit per annum since the earliest machines were produced. There's no signs of an exponential take-off the way there was with conventional computing hardware, which suggests that the expense of scaling to larger and larger quantum computers doesn't get decrease the way it does with silicon.

Some data points:

1998: 3 qubits
2000: 5 qubits
2001: 7 qubits (largest achieved to date with single atom containing all qubits in different degrees of freedom)
2005: 8 qubits
2006: 12 qubits
2011: 14 qubits

This is the best private industry can do. I'd be surprised if the NSA were doing more than a factor of 10 better. To crack 2048-bit RSA, about 3000 qubits would be required[2], or about 20 times my best guess as the limit of what the NSA could have achieved. Besides, Shor's algorithm is not instant: even if it's faster than any classical algorithm, it's still third-order polynomial on the number of bits in the input, and quantum computers don't perform individual operations particularly quickly, so even if we assume the NSA has managed to make a quantum computer that's a thousand times faster per operation than existing private systems, to factor a 2048-bit RSA key on a 3,000 qubit computer would take about 8.6 billion operations running at about 10-100us each, which is to say approximately 1 to 10 days of time on the (enormously expensive) system (of which they almost certainly only have one, which will therefore have a very long prioritized queue of jobs waiting for it).

And upgrade to 4096 bits, and they'll need a quantum computer with 6,000 qubits, and the job will take somewhere between a week and three months to complete.

[1] I'm excluding so-called quantum annealing computers from this, e.g. various systems produced by D-Wave, because they cannot be used to run Shor's algorithm, so are not a threat to RSA. This is not so much an entry into the debate as to whether or not they should be classified as quantum computers, but a practical decision based on the subject under discussion.
[2] traditionally, this would be 4096 (twice the number of bits in the input), but this arxiv paper claims 1.5 x bits in input or fewer is achievable through a method I don't really understand

Yes, they surrendered data with a court order. Pretty-much any service provider in most countries will, and when there's actual evidence of serious crimes tied to your identity it's easy to get such a court order in most countries. These were targeted, court-approved disclosures, which is a very, very different thing from massive unwarranted trawling.

Also: if you avoid their javascript-based interface and use the java applet, they still *can't* disclose your emails, as they are never available unencrypted on their server.

That should cure range anxiety completely: it is more than enough to get you home, however far you've driven on the batteries.

Yes (assuming you mean that it uses game-time based skill acquisition, where you set up a list of skills you want to acquire and your character slowly learns them whether you're playing or not). But unlike most modern MMOs which have interesting solo games, it's only really worth playing if you can get deeply involved in a guild (or corporation, to use the local terminology), which demands quite a bit of time in most cases.

I didn't realise the aliens were involved in a massive accountancy war.

I though airline pilots were paid an annual salary, not an hourly rate...?

It does however go on to suggest that some high-intensity flickering may be detectable (by cones only and not by rods) at up to 60Hz, which is somewhat closer to OP's figure.

At least here in the UK, there is no law that would require them to do so as far as I am aware. The only obligation to destroy the data rests with the data controller, who in your scenario is not even the cloud provider. The cloud provider may have undertaken to do so on behalf of the data controller, but I am uncertain if such an obligation would survive the company being declared insolvent: at such a time, recovering the maximum possible revenue for the company's creditors becomes the highest legal priority; honouring existing contracts is relegated to a distinct second place.

If this really has happened, you should be able to point to the details of the particular case. Common wisdom is that this simply does not happen any more (as the likelihood of being able to recover enough information to achieve a conviction has become much, much lower with modern disks that are much more accurate in head positioning than older disks), so I'd really like to see actual documentation of cases where such a technique has been successfully used in, say, the last 10 years.

Maybe they should consider firing the person who made the decision to pass on confidential data to an uncertificated contractor without performing any due diligence, or is that perhaps a little too radical?