Sweden has few effective laws for private citizens. It's explicitly codified into law that the authorities are allowed to snoop on your communications. It's a bit better than England ( where you can be jailed for not giving police your encryption keys ) , but there's really no good way to defend against a hostile government. If you truly want to avoid government meddling with your communication your best bet is probably hiding in plain sight. I.e, make sure you and your communication appear dull enough that your government can't be bothered to look at it.

5. Local regulatory agencies have treated doctors like drug dealers, making them reluctant to prescribe medicine to people who need it, forcing patients to turn to the black market simply because doctors are forced to care more about covering their own ass than treating the sick.

Oh yes I'm bitter. If you had been left to suffer and forced to buy medicines from shady sources you'd be pissed too. No, I'm not a hypocondriac, I eventually found a doctor with some spine, and now I can get help legally. No, she didn't just give me a prescription because I demanded it, she did so because offical guidelines say that is how people with condition should be treated.

I can go buy hundreds of cigarettes whenever I want and smoke my lungs to ash, but a comparably safe and non-adictive medicine is treated as if I were doing heroine.

Transsexual here.

I was denied treatment for years due to the psych community having quite a few medieval-minded assholes in it ( no, I'm not just refusing to listen to them, we're talking about the kind of people who think there's something wrong with a girl who doesn't liek mascara ). As a consequence I basically had the choice between spending every night wishing I was dead or obtaining estrogen in alternative ways. Four years afterwards I finally managed to find a psych with a somewhat more sane attitude towards gender, and now I can get the medicines legally, but frankly I have a hard time blaming these people for filling a void that authorities have created with very little regard for those who get fucked over because of it.

Clue: No one was putting forth the theory that the Earth was warming due to mankind's actions 120 years ago, so unless you can post a paper stating otherwise, trot that troll elsewhere.

That's wrong. Arrhenius himself noted that human activities would likely prevent another ice-age from ever happening. He figured this was a positive thing, but did not considered the consequences of excessive warming.

DNA evidence ought to be admissable, but it should not be presented as conclusive proof.

Basically people watch too much CSI where the whole case comes down to one amazing
science trick. In the real world cases frequently rest on several pieces of evidence, each
one of which may not be enough on its own to secure a conviction, but when taken together
make up damning amounts of evidence.

Here's a final question - name a single network neutrality bill that would prevent Comcast from doing what they are doing, and why.

Strenghten antitrust legislation adn start to actually enforce it with some teeth.

My personal favourite is to translate some of the words into random languages after I have made the passphrase. It's not difficult to learn a few foreign words, but since the attacker doesn't know which languages you used he gets the fun task of trying ALL languages that use the latin script. Since there is more than 100 languages using latin characters in the world, even a moderate dictionary size of 10000 or so would give you a total of more than a million words, resulting in the generated passphrase having in excess of 10^24 possible combinations. If the attacker can try a billion passphrases per second, it would take 31.7 million years to try them all.

Just generate pass phrases for your users. That way they can't use the same shitty password on every site.

There are 95 ASCII characters, which makes 95**8 = 6,634,204,312,890,625 possible 8 character passwords

Or you can use 6 random words from the oxford english dictionary, which gives you more combinations that the number of nanoseconds in the estimated lifetime of the universe, while still producing a passphrase that is feasible for a human being to remember.

You do if you are a gamer.

Never stopped me: http://i.imgur.com/qG2qw.jpg

Mass Effect 3, World of Warcraft and Heroes of Newerth also run just fine.

There are, certainly, some unambiguously 'strategic' weapons, of the 'bloody huge thermonuclear warhead on an ICBM'

Many of the ICBM's have selective yield, and even with the max yield they are not particularly powerful for nukes to be. The most powerful weapons are the ones dropped by aeroplanes, and they typically have megaton yields.

My PRNG yielded:
74019,69542,70792,42388,32916,63978,55632

which maps to:
purchasing persecute platitudes escalations consummation mum intoned

Your pass-phrase is quite tricky to remember and type reliably. A better approach is to use different languages in order to increase the dictionary size. If you pick at random among the languages that use latin script, you can easily get a dictionary size above a million words. Just 4 such words would give a number of combinations exceeding 10^24. Even if you could try a thousand trillion combinations per second, it would still take in excess of thirty years to try them all.

Sometimes things that are harmful in one way can help in other ways.

Taking coffee as an example, it is known that heavy coffee consumptions
stunts breast development in women. As it happens, the same effect also
reduces her risk of developing breast cancer.

If you RTFA, for every 100 actual cases, it misses 7. That's 7 people who will think that they're HIV-free, and possibly spread it to others.

7% false negatives is a *terrible* number.

No it isn't. If everybody used this test, and the people who tested positive seek treatment, then you just reduced the transmission rate among the people who would not otherwise get tested by 93%.

I often run in to arguments like this when it comes to vaccinations as well. Many vaccines don't offer perfect protection. They just reduce the probability that a disease will spread in the population by a sufficient amount that you don't get major outbreaks, and thus the illness eventually dies out since it cannot spread effectively. More specifically, if new infections occur at a rate that is lower than the rate at which infected people are discovered and treated, the the total number of infections decrease. Since untreated HIV will eventually start showing symptoms, people will eventually get diagnosed, so the trick is to bring the overall infection rate down enough that you're more likely to be diagnosed and treated than you are to spread it to others.

Thus while highly preferable, it need not be perfect. If your measures to combat the illness cause a persistent decrease in the number of people infected, then the disease will eventually die out simply because it cannot spread.

As it happens that is also one of the reasons why you want everybody to have access to healthcare.

It's been found through studies of cases like yours that 'vanilla' couples sex, where the partners are otherwise healthy apart from one being HIV+ have well under a percent (.3% IIRC) rate per act of transmitting HIV.
For anal, this rises to 30%.

Your numbers are WAY off. The figures are closer to 0.1% and 1% respectively. See this study for details:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1881672/?tool=pmcentrez

Other studies have been done for Gay couples and various groups, and the numbers come off similar. They may be off by a a small factor depending on exactly how the study was done, but that 30% figure you quote is nonsense.