You are an occupied state. The military/surveillance industry has moved beyond simply corrupting the political process via high-priced, slick and efficient think tanks/lobbyists and now effectively owns the White House. Your current crop of politicians are either terrified into submission by security Grand Guignol theater; bought off like cheap hookers; or blackmailed into compliance by dirt accidentally turned up by the "legitimate" surveillance programs. Using estimates from Dana Priest and William Arkin at WashPo, the combined membership of the military and security apparatus is now pretty close to 2% of the entire population - funnily enough, the same number Orwell gave for the Inner Party in _1984_. Democracy has ceased to be - you now live in the United Occupied States of America. Who you vote in makes fuck all difference. Get used to it. The only hope the rest of the planet has is in your imminent bankruptcy and economic implosion. Unfortunately, neither privatised prisons nor a perpetual war footing are viable long term business models. Just look at what happened to your prototype - the former Soviet Union.

What complete and utter bollocks. The hysteria mill for nonsense like this is almost exclusively driven by pudgy, pink, extremely entitled, privileged, middle-class NORTH AMERICANS. Those that have poisoned liberalism and made it look *exactly* like the parody liberalism as pushed on Fox News by the likes of Glen Beck and Ann Coulter. These are people who no longer have genuine grievances to fight the righteous fight for, so they clutch at trivia - any life destroyed is a proudly claimed as a shrunken head trophy, no trivia is to small to shriek about. Welcome to the jungle of the Social Justice Warrior. Welcome to the Colosseum. http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2013/12/because-lying-and-resenting-is-what-angels-do.html

Defund the NSA, kick them out of the Utah data center - and do something useful with it. Like giving all the lost data a permanent home.

The NSA is like cancer spreading through the lymph nodes.

AV is really a second line of defence. Basically, we're well past the point that signature scans can keep up, and heuristics can only do so much - the more you increase the sensitivity, the more false positives it generates and confusion sets in. I've found the best primary defense is a good personal firewall. At the risk of being accused of shilling, I've found Comodo free version as an excellent example for windows (caveat, haven't used it for a couple of years now) - which keeps track of all processes and files that are requesting stuff over the network. It always alerts when a new event occurs and asks for your blessing before allowing. It picked up stuff that went straight through AV - and submitting what it alerted usually returned a new malware variant when vendors looked at it. This is not a reason to not run AV - but a reason to think of firewalling as your primary protection.

Thanks. You're the only one that actually answered the question. I was working off the list at Torrentfreak. I had Ipredator short listed, but dropped them as they had limited endpoints. I tentatively chose privateinternetaccess and said so, of course got accused for spamming/shilling, but my question was more are they trustworthy? The other two were BTGuard and Torguard. Really thought this was a straightforward question. Should know better than to expect straightforward answers.

Could you imagine the nightmare if Apple patented the qwerty keyboard?

Bottom left - http://www.youhavedownloaded.com/#seriously

Don't take it seriously The privacy policy, the contact us page — it’s all a joke. We came up with the idea of building a crawler like this and keeping the maintenance price under $300 a month. There was only one way to prove our theory worked — to implement it in practice. So we did. Now, we find ourselves with a big crawler. We knew what it did but we didn’t know how to use it. So we decided to make a joke out of it. That’s the beauty of jokes — you can make them out of anything. However, if you have a better idea — don’t hesitate to contact us.

"if you happened to have attracted a stalker and want to get rid of him." Why necessarily *him*?

Chopra also wants to create a woo equivalent of the Templeton Prize for this kind of crap. As others have mentioned - this is old news and something of a personal obsession with Penrose and requires numerous leaps of faith to follow. Penrose has been taken down by Victor Stenger quite some time ago - http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/is_the_brain_a_quantum_device/

I really don't care. I still play DooM.

The Age of Aquarius meets Eternal September - marriage made in heaven. Now I can hate 2 birds with one stone. HuffPo is home to the timeless Deepak Chopra quote - "No skeptic, to my knowledge, ever made a major scientific discovery or advanced the welfare of others."