And what if that outlet, with the "TSA-approved Cable(tm)" is doing more than just powering on your device?

This is why USB Condoms exist (no, this is not a joke)

http://int3.cc/collections/fro...

"Have you ever plugged your phone into a strange USB port because you really needed a charge and thought: "Gee who could be stealing my data?". We all have needs and sometimes you just need to charge your phone. "Any port in a storm." as the saying goes. Well now you can be a bit safer. "USB Condoms" prevent accidental data exchange when your device is plugged in to another device with a USB cable. USB Condoms achieve this by cutting off the data pins in the USB cable and allowing only the power pins to connect through.Thus, these "USB Condoms" prevent attacks like "juice jacking".

Exactly. It's not enough to believe in any invisible sky wizard, you must believe in a particular one. If you believe in the one ( Jehovah's Witnesses ) that doesn't like blood transfusions, you're out of luck.

My church is that of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He doesn't get involved in heathcare, it takes some "all-loving" misogynist prick to do that. Although, FSM does have a thing about ninjas. Where's the anti ninja clause?

Despite Apple and other corporate plans to move everything and everyone to "The Cloud", the masses are doing quite the opposite, moving everything away from the cloud and hosted resources.

There's already a growing exodus to use personally-controlled storage, cloud and other environments, or heavily encrypted storage platforms to hold their data, making apps that expect "iCloud(tm)" and other in-the-clear, branded solutions from being all but useless.

So as long as these "replacement" versions work primarily, and with full functionality without feature-reduction 100% locally and by default, then they'll be fine. If they require the iCloud/cloud to function, they're going to suffer from diminished adoption.

The same is happening with digital currency v. analog/paper currency, resulting from increased eroding confidence in the system (eg: Target failures, identity theft, and hundreds of other examples in the news, nearly weekly).

If these features aren't being demanded by users (and there's plenty of evidence they're not), then why the big push to store everything you have and own, off-premises?

Context would mean a lot here. More than just simple double negatives.

I see "good" and I flag a plus. You'd probably filter for "not good" easily enough. How about "it seemed very good at the time, but..."

Positive words are a long way from positive sentiment, and vice versa.

China, huh? Doesn't Mandarin have this thing where the word isn't conclusive without others. "Hao" is good. But you kind of need "hao hao" to be sure. "Bu hao" isn't good, but "hao bu hao" is rather open to interpretation.

On my side, every single packet across the wireless side of the router, goes through a local Squid instance. Not only can I inspect the logs, but I have Squid filtering out tens of thousands of sites, domains, ad spamming pages and other things, so if there were any abuses coming, I could just block those too, or turn on other block index files and filter off even more.

Easey peasey.
 

My ISP charges $0.50 per gig overage

Now THAT is impressive. Here in the Northeast US, where we have AT&T for phone and DSL, each GB over your cap, costs $15.00. It used to be $10.00, but they jumped it 50% without warning a few months ago.

Remember when we had a Debian system on the biosciences mission? They scrubbed the whole mission after they were already in space due to a fuel-cell issue that I think turned out to be a faulty sensor, and flew the entire mission a second time.

Liberals asked for it, now they got it. Welcome to Amerika

Yeah, and don't forget that "loud pipes save lives" around typical inattentive drivers. This thing is silent but deadly.

Here's the real Occum's Razor here:

Does the "kill switch" remotely disable the mobile/cellular capabilities of the phone? Or does it completely disable the device, thus bricking it?

These are smartphones, and they're used by many people for more than just a phone. I'd even argue that the function used the least on these devices, is the actual phone itself.

I rarely see someone having an actual voice conversation on a phone these, days, but people spend hours and hours doing everything else with them.

So if there's a civil uprising, martial law, and the .gov decides to shunt an entire city (Boston Bombers anyone? Greece? Turkey last year?, we've seen this many times already), then they also render these devices inert for much more than just communications devices.

- My ex-wife can no longer monitor her blood sugar (Type 1 diabetic, 100% digitally monitored via iPhone)
- Digital locks on your home no longer are able to be unlocked (keyless entry with NFS, etc.)
- Credit card information, details, photos, videos, other data is now unavailable

The chilling effect of this alone, should cause hundreds of thousands of people to step up and march on their congressperson's front door.

The potential abuses of this are so far reaching, far superseding the cost of replacing a phone handset that happens to get stolen.

I'd rather see the funding go into a user-driven device locating capability, with remote wipe/reporting on the other end instead of a remote kill switch controlled by corporations and the .gov.

Very scary stuff happening here. Verrrrry scary.

Consider yourself lucky, then, and pray that it lasts. The people around you are not made of such strong stuff, and I can't be sure that you are either.

It actually is a bit different for the Republicans, in that they are caught in an internal party schism of a scale we've not seen on either side since desegregation, if even then. It's difficult for the less right to look good to the more right, undirected pushing against the Democrats is one of the few ways they have to do it.

Do not forget that ObamaCare was rammed through without a single Republican vote in the House or Senate.

It's the unfortunate case that Republicans don't generally support Democratic bills. Witness the recent student loan bill. There is not much question that a better educated populance means a better economy and a stronger nation. It's a truism that we could just pay for college education in a number of fields and reap economic benefits of many times the spending. Indeed, we used to do more of that and the country was stronger when we did.

You meant "you wouldn't approve" rather than "you wouldn't understand".

Positioned correctly, it isn't all that socially reprehensible to state the sentiment that you don't believe you should pay for people who drive their motorcycle without helmets, people who self-administer addictive and destructive drugs, people who engage in unprotected sex with prostitutes or unprotected casual sex with strangers, and people who go climbing without using all of the safety equipment they could.

You don't really even need to get into whether you hold human life sacred, etc., to get that argument across. It's mostly just an economic argument, you believe yourself to be sensible and don't want to pay for people who aren't.

The ironic thing about this is that it translates to "I don't want to pay for the self-inflicted downfall of the people who exercise the libertarian rights I deeply believe they should have."

OK, not a bad position as far as it goes. Now, tell me how we should judge each case, once these people present themselves for medical care, and what we should do if they don't meet the standard.