Political leaders of any stripe can almost always be classified as "elites". It's practically a prerequisite for the job. Even Che Guevara, whose father was the great-grandson of one of the richest men in South America at the time, and whose fully blue-blooded mother (of Spanish nobility) was the granddaughter of a wealthy landowner, was an elite.

They do, and there's been a large amount of investment in its tech sector by companies in the US and elsewhere. A lot of the newest CPU microarchitecture has been designed in Israel, such as Sandy Bridge (which is featured in the newer Core i7s and others).

I have a similar story and situation and I couldn't agree more. No work on Christmas however; have to give the family face time every now and then.

There are multiple VPN providers that advertise their services as a way to use BitTorrent anonymously. While that may seem like a meaningless marketing gimmick, it lets you know about how the service owners intend their product to be used. There are many VPN providers that will actually block BitTorrent traffic, namely because of the subpoenas they may have received in the past in response to filesharing. Plenty of people use VPN in order to circumvent harsh government censorship and control, as opposed to downloading crappy music or movies. So, don't expect all VPN providers to tolerate your use of their services for filesharing purposes.

Depending on the service and various time-variant factors, you can expect speeds to be fairly satisfactory. I wouldn't expect speeds in the 1.0+ MB/s range or anything. Perhaps someone can offer experience contrary to that.

In regards to industry lawyers getting your info from VPN providers: sure, that's still a possibility. That's why it is important to see what country the VPN is based in, as laws regarding the matter differ from place to place. Also, these providers prominently advertise their policy in regards to logging user information. Some will say they keep no logs; a more believable pitch is that they keep logs only for one or more days. Whether you believe any of that or not is up to you, but without logs, there wouldn't be anything connecting you to what you were doing.

Informative? Hardly.

The definitive text on the topic, I'd say. Google is great for introductions on things.

Are you complaining about making money?

While that's very considerate of you, a funny post marked as 'Informative' is more than likely to get subsequently modded down; messages with comedic substance tend to come across as wholly incorrect assertions when read from sources being represented as useful information.

China has a permanent seat on the UN security council.

That being said, they have the ability to veto any substantive resolution designed to address their intrusion into Google's computer systems.

While the assistance with the bail is neat, the real story here is that Michael Moore has said he will be lending support in regards to the online availability of the WikiLeaks content.

If he follows through on that promise, then I believe that will be very beneficial for WikiLeaks, as they're starting to need help in this area (given that their service is getting cut by all these different institutions).

It only took two days since the attack occurred for the perpetrator to be tracked down and arrested? I can't say I've ever heard of such a fast response time to a computer crime. I'm quite surprised.

Is this typical these days?

The lawyers are taking home 25% of the 8.5 million (plus interest), plus reimbursement of costs and expenses, according to the class action website.

Frankly, if I had to choose between a company keeping the money it has earned versus going to a random group of lawyers, I'd go with the former. Maybe I'd be more for punishing an organization financially if they were engaging in risky behavior and refusing to stop; however, from what I can remember about the incident, Google apologized and shut the thing down quickly (I'm not 100% on that, though).