That slippery slope looks like great fun, lets go slide! I'm sure we can find our way back up later.

Different feedback mechanisms. Mobsters who don't encrypt go to jail, politicians who don't encrypt still get reelected.

If it was just built for advertising I'm sure Microsoft could make it evil enough in it's own right to make people feel uncomfortable. But if we consider the bigger picture and throw in some NSA interests, then it becomes scary.

So we have a device in the living room that is always on, always connected and can recognize who is in the room. This means you have to assume there will be a record in some NSA database not only of your playing habits, but also of all people who ever sat there in the couch with you.

Add to this the possibility to join data from several sources. Like some friend visiting, no problem, just match his face against what people tagged on Facebook, match against people you emailed or skyped with. Verify with location data from your smartphones and why not run an automated fingerprint check while they are at it and your phone anyway has a fingerprint sensor. Or add in some voice recognition..

Automatically identifying people with high accuracy and keeping a permanent database of who associated with who at what periods of their lives seemed like science fiction just a couple of years ago. So do we live in the future now? Yes we do, unfortunately it's the one described in 1984.

Depends on how and by who they were replaced I would say. If things get too bad a name change and a some $$$ into a propaganda campaign about the "new NSA" could probably get them by on trustworthiness in the eyes of the general public. At least until the next whistleblower.

This, and add to it that whatever is 'bad' doesn't have to be 'bad' today since the data will be kept practically forever for any future government to analyze. If you still don't have anything to hide you must have a confidence in both the current and all future governments that is so unshakeable I'd almost call it stupidity.

This is so much more accurate than you may think when every click done online is being logged. Except it's not only done in Russia.

any in flesh searches that is not approved by the government would be as successful as the one to hunt down the moderate Tibet journalist.

Sure, they are not required to. But there are a lot of third party manufacturers that would produce replacement parts, sometimes even better parts than the originals if there was a demand for it. This is simply not an option for Win XP no matter how high the demand is.

This should not be news to anyone making themselves dependent on Microsoft products, but lots of companies are doing it anyway. Guess it would be a bit different if the market was not monopolized.

And we who are the equivalent of amoebas compared to them would know that how?

We can't just assume that advanced civilizations will be nice just because we want it to be like that, there is simply too many unknown factors for us to assume anything. They could just as well have the attitude that there's another little developing planet, blast them quickly before they too invent the Xyz rays and can start to compete with us

The default bootup option should of course be your dummy OS that is passwordless with no personal information in it and a backup job to transmit photos, keylogs etc. to your server.

Protects your real data from getting wiped by tech-challenged thiefs and will also help you getting your laptop back if stolen.

No, they are just ordinary ISP:s and offer no such service as far as I know, but there are of course others who does like http://ipredator.se/