And us non-terrorists who encrypt every little piece of shit information ruins that work for the goons. So I'm pleased to see my random junk archived, hope it made them miss something they wanted. Then maybe they'll learn that dragnets will get them such a bad signal to noise ratio it's better to actually target suspects than everyone.

To keep the NSA away? None. I have nothing to hide.

To ruin these assholes day? Lots. I have massive amounts of meaningless data I constantly send encrypted via foreign countries. It contains absolutely nothing of interest to them, but it will make it harder for them to find whatever they're interested in, and it will force them to either store massive amounts of meaningless data or discard it all, meaning they won't catch anything interesting in the future, should I ever need to send anything I don't want them snooping.

Either way I'm screwing with them. Not much but easily enough to cover the time and money spent doing my patriotic duty to humanity.

And my supermarket, the local restaurants and none of the places I spend money day to day take pounds. So their utility... oh, wait.

Bitcoin is equivalent to foreign cash and there certainly are enough places that take them so they do not lack utility any more than any other foreign currency (that could be instantly transferred across the world) would.

One would wonder about the nature of that "conflicting information". Did they think it was a CIA rendition flight? No, right, kidnapping and torture is ok, it's transportation of asylum seekers that must be prevented.

The fall of western civilization into vile barbarism is painful to behold. These stains cannot be washed away.

Great. Just like 4 guys around here. Well, up until they got the security forces storming into their apartments and showing them, their wives and children to the floor with automatic rifles to their back, then dragged away for some time in a cell.

See, some housewife had heard a guy talking on the phone about blowing up a bomb in a mall. So the security police pulled the call records on the nearby cell towers, the housewife identified the talker off a drivers license, tracked down who he'd been talking to and stormed the apartments.

Of course, one of the less dense analysts pointed out that the housewife couldn't have heard that guy talking on the phone like she said as the records on her phone showed her elsewhere at the time that matched the cell records. Which nobody cared about. The rest couldn't wait to get themselves some of that hot terrorist action. Yay, count another terror deed averted! (Or, well, a schizophrenic hallucination indulged in, but 'terror plot foiled' sounds much better when asking for funds).

So, you have nothing to hide. Are you certain nobody anywhere near where you are has something to hide? No chance that any ip address resembling yours might access some bad place at a some time that may or may not be when you're at a computer plus minus misread time zones on the logs? Because the goons don't give a shit that you have nothing to hide and they're certainly incompetent enough to get you shot due to a clerical error. And if they ever do feel like targeting you because some neighbour was bored one day and a bit pissed off at you, you can be damn sure that none of the data they have will be used to clear you. Instead every byte will be used to dig as deep a hole as possible for you. And after a few days of water boarding they'll have your signed confession, so obviously you did have something to hide.

I assume there's no taxation without representation, so at least they don't have to pay any more taxes then, right?

Right?

Anyone thinking that Echelon was a conspiracy theory would have been deliberately ignorant to the extent that they probably wouldn't notice being subjected to a daily rectal probe. If you can find it in encyclopedias with references, if the eu parliament producing publicly available reports discussing the fact that it's used for industrial espionage, if it's written about in multiple newspapers, well, then the only way you can regard it as a conspiracy theory is by making up your own reality.

By the way, did you know that the US tortured, drugged, sexually abused and brainwashed innocent people, including children, and engaged in human experimentation on a significant scale, trying to figure out how to do mind control?

Guess what, MKULTRA is also real. If you wanted to not believe in Echelon, try that one. And ask yourself, for people engaging in the MKULTRA activities, do you believe there is anything at all that they wouldn't do if they felt like it?

Eh, no. Steps 1-2 happen, step 3 is when you note you've suddenly got 48 guys from seedy domains that sound vaguely like STD's slobbering all over over your keyboard and you slowly back away, disabling javascript from the first two again and hope you didn't catch something.

No site requires javascript from 48 other sites to show you something you want to see. That code is there to show someone else something about you, monetize you, violate your privacy, etc, and once you're past half a dozen sites it's far beyond too creepy to be worth it.

Frankly, I don't see why any type of union should have any bearing on benefits or tax. Get government out of it entirely. Provide a dozen or so template civil relationship contracts that people can use ranging from 'we intend to bear responsibility for raising a child together' to 'this is my best friend who I want to be able to make medical decisions and receive life insurance benefits'.

Harm to society? Either there is harm to specific individuals or there isn't; trying to define harm to society depends on having a strict definition of what society is and should be and that any deviation from that is considered harm. Totalitarianism lies that way.

For example, trying to argue that specific unions risk damaging the gene pool immediately opens up to eugenics; it's trivial today to do genetic screening that would identify entirely unrelated couples whose joined contribution would be much more harmful than various combinations of close relatives.

The idea that Anna Lindh was the only one with knowledge and decisive power in the case is simply not credible. And at least one person who knew the murdered foreign minister claims in writing, and claims that other confirm it, and has shown certain supporting materials, that both the minister of justice, Thomas Bodström and the prime minister Göran Persson knew about the planned rendition. In fact, them not knowing about such a decision borders on the unthinkable.

There is far more than enough to open a criminal investigation and throughly examine the roles of everyone involved, as well as a criminal investigation into the security police. No such investigation has been done, clearly demonstrating that if ministers knowingly violate the law they won't even be seriously investigated.

And no, I'm sure Swedish foreign ministers wont trust US assurances. They will, however, do as they're told.

If you've read the Swedish police report it also states that upon waking to him having sex with her, asking if it was unprotected, she also joked it off with 'you'd better not have a disease' and had no more significant objection. Swedish rape law has a requirement for either incapacitation or clearly indicating dissent. The previous evening is irrelevant, but the actions after waking up aren't. With current law if the court has only the plaintiffs story to go on it would not convict on a charge of rape (well, unless it feels like it, of course, it's not like Swedish judges are entirely apolitical).

To get convicted in unbiased court Assange would basically have to convict himself by testifying that 'yeah I knew she really didn't want it but I figured she'd be too afraid to protest', which still wouldn't fit the rest of the story about the morning (breakfast shopping, etc), but which could conceivably be argued away with some creative psychological theories.

The prosecutor is probably very happy with how the situation evolved; she's on record saying that it's good to (mis)use Swedens indefinite detention to give purported victims some extrajudicial retribution. Here she has basically handed Assange a significant prison sentance of his own making even when she knows she has no case. Makes Ortiz look like an amateur.

A more relevant example would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Ahmed_Agiza_and_Muhammad_al-Zery which details Swedens participation in illegal rendition to torturing countries, an act clearly illegal both in treaties Sweden is a signatory to and in Swedish law. Unsurprisingly, nobody has been held accountable.

Sweden cannot be trusted with human rights as it takes nothing more than the right opportunity for brownnosing for its politicians to ignore the law.

Well, Excession does touch on those subjects to a degree. The way I've understood the Culture it really lacks the cohesion to have what would be recognized as some sort of formal decision making process, so most likely SC ends up doing what SC does because a decent sized group of minds feel like it and nobody can stop them (or feels strongly enough about it to make any significant attempt).

In Excession you see the same thing happening on multiple levels. You have the Interesting Time Gang deciding on and taking action. You have the faction entraping the Affront. You have the GCU Grey Area engaging in its own brand of contact work. Apart from social pressure, when dealing in pretty much infinitely powerful entities it's very hard to enforce norms even when significant aberrations occur.

There is nothing you can possibly say that will be beneficial for you. Even if you're honest and have done nothing wrong and truthfully say you were nowhere near where a crime was committed you're just one honest but mistaken witness away from looking like you're lying about not being near the crime scene.

So shut up or even in the best case someone can claim you're lying. Which can be enough to get you in trouble.

The gp was of course joking. However, the correct action when selling more of something is indeed to raise the price or you're not maximizing your profit. (You don't raise prices because you need to, you raise them because you can).

In a free market someone else would then enter the market, undersell you and take part of the profit. In a monopoly market with copyrights that won't happen, which means you can keep raising prices, preferably combined with sinking a lot of the revenue into marketing which will be much more valuable as there is no competition.