and clueless/idiot TOR users with javascript enabled and other unsafe TOR habits.

Is what they're telling us, but if you combine the watch-every-packet-in-the-internet features of PRISM with a I-have-the-webservers-logs server attack, you'd think they'd just track all the traffic through all the hops with or without javascript and cookies. The server logs would tell you what the user requested, and the metadata they collect would link the packets through the internet to wherever they're going.

I wish I could believe, but given their record, far more likely they are putting up a strawman to outlaw TOR and similar services.

If there was such a thing as justice, I'd make a killing selling rope and pitchforks... literally.

Considering how much the NSA costs the US taxpayer and how much revenue the Russian companies rake in, I'd guess it's clear.

It's capitalism, baby. They learned well and fast.

C'mon, don't waste that gem. If there was ever an "in Soviet Russia" joke begging to be made:

In Soviet Russia, mobile phone owns YOU!

The content industry in a natural alliance with congress is already prepping the suits over prior art.

Of all the people who wasted and squandered the money of thousands, if not millions, nobody did time in prison, the only person who did was actually not stealing from decent people but from the thieves, and for THAT he goes to jail?

Well, price is always a factor. I have a Sharp TV too :)

The things you are listing: detention camps, torture, mass spying had strong support from the bulk of the population. If anything they had weaker support than average from monied interests. Certainly war has weaker support from most moneyed interests.

Fuck with the timing.

Huh? What do you mean, "that would require today's programmers to at least know OF Assembler"...

You believe? What is this, faith based science? :)

No need to replace SMTP. Just add "more" stuff on to it. Not necessarily on top of other extensions, feel free to supersede them. But you need to support SMTP for the foreseeable future, and it's kind of nifty to have such a dirt-simple interface to mail for those cases in which it is useful, such as inside your organization for alerts and whatnot. I don't automate anything based on email these days, but it's still not useless.

PHP is not the problem with rcmail or squirrelmail or any of the other freely available web-based email systems, most of which run on PHP or even better, ASP or ASP.NET. They are their own problems. None of them are half as usable as gmail. Some of them are almost half as usable as a typically bad desktop email client. But PHP is not even a slight impediment, because you don't need anything out of PEAR or what have you in order to run any of these. You just need typical modules dealing with mail, e.g. imap.