A valid point. Though, there's something to be said for having the right tool. Give me the headline "Human with shovel outperforms human without shovel at predicting crimes" and we'll talk.
I think this is true of most endurance sports really. In my own, I wake up well before sunrise every day, bike through the city which is completely deserted and get to watch the sun come up over the water all morning.
It's become something of an addiction as while its stressful on the body, there is nothing that parallels the serenity of being completely alone out in the middle of a perfectly flat lake or river.
This strikes me as interesting because I believe the article mentioned that the state department rep didn't even know that apple was doing this.
It seems a bit above and beyond to teach all of your sales personnel to distinguish Farsi from every other Middle-Eastern sounding language out there. Call me ignorant but I couldn't distinguish Farsi from Arabic even if it was written out in front of me...
I would like to assume that the REALLY big companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc. can figure out how to effectively store passwords. While I acknowlege that Active directory is a bit different from a web service, if this can't be realized, god knows what's happening with the other 500 sites we all have accounts on (that invariably use shared passwords: http://xkcd.com/792/ ). I really love it when I get password reset emails with my original password in plain text.
Clearly this is insufficient, it needs a pound or two of HMX. At a detonation velocity of 9100m/s, it should take care of the data (and everything else) just as fast.
On a more serious note however, how hard would it be to break the encryption, especially if one were able to develop a sufficiently advanced computer in the future (ie. quantum computer)?