I pay for my college education. If I squander it surfing Facebook during your lecture, it's my perogative. However, I don't use my laptop for surfing Facebook (or porn) when in class. I use it for taking notes, researching topics as the professor talks about them, and even voice recording the lectures when I care to. Banning a tool because it could be disruptive? Remove paper. Planes, spitwads, and crumpling and ripping noises all cut more into someone's focus than the glow of a front-row laptop.

If that bothers you, just make a laptop section in the back. Problem solved.

With the reasonable expectation that a certain percentage will be returned in taxes and increased spending that will then, in turn, be utilized in some part to maintain the existing infrastructure, it is.

Dollars come from somewhere and go to somewhere, and a bit is lifted off the top every time it changes hands. That's what keeps the wheels turning.

Utilizing existing infrastructure to generate wealth with no more investment than personal time is of benefit to society. Creation, even of trivial objects, is of more benefit than blind consumption.

All of that is to say, making a shitty Facebook game is of more societal benefit than posting snarky comments on Slashdot. But just barely.

It's obvious he's posing. This is not a "caught in action" shot. Nor is it likely that someone set up a routine to capture a burglar and upload the picture to their son's facebook.

Your theory has a few holes.

The likely explanation is greed, avarice, idiocy, and theft roll in together and stupidity comes along for the ride.

Strategic default can actually turn out better for the neighborhood, market, and overall economy in some circumstances. Many people that are saddled with devalued homes fail to upkeep or improve those properties. People don't want to replace that air conditioner, fix the roof, or put up new siding on a home that has lost 60% of its value over the past two years. Once that property goes back into the market at its current appraised value, it is more likely that someone will pick up the property and begin the improvement process.

If you're home is devalued to the point that a short-sale or strategic foreclosure is a smart -- not just forced by necessity -- decision, then odds are that unloading it will work out better for the property and in turn the neighborhood than were you to hang on to it indefinitely. Not to mention, at that point, your property has likely devalued along with the rest of the neighborhood, so your impact on the street-to-street scale will be minimal and holding on to the property is likely to do little to help other nearby homes retain value.

All of that is to say, it's not always just dirtbags out trying to make a greedy move, but sometimes just the better choice of several bad options.

I disagree. If a business were in the same situation and an asset was extremely devalued, nobody would think twice if they short-sold the property or strategically defaulted on it. It's simply smart to unload properties that won't recover value on an acceptable timeframe.

The only difference between a business making that decision and an individual making the same one is that you seem to attribute a moral weight when it's not a corporate entity making an informed choice about unloading a severely depreciated asset.

That's a rather limited view. Twitter is a communication tool used by millions of people. It consumes and distributes everything from minor status updates to breaking news.

The "everything new is a waste of time" attitude just makes you sound like a dottering old fool.

I disagree. As a public employee, you are working for... the public. Hence the name. As an employee of the people, public employees should be held to a higher standard of transparency than a private sector employee. With transparency comes a loss of privacy. That's just the way it goes.

Beyond the obvious fact that he may not have a web mail account, Twitter is a pretty smart choice. He was trying to broadcast to the world that he was alive. If he quickly sent an email to one or two people, it could have been lost or overlooked in a dozen ways. By getting a tweet through he was assured that all of his followers would see it.

I'd say he may have found the one instance where tweeting is actually a really good idea.

I really hope this technology takes off. I like the idea of 3D at home, but just can't stand the shutter glasses. It's awkward enough having to wear something on your head to watch 3D in the theater. The home glasses are even larger, more expensive, and more uncomfortable.

I honestly don't think we'll see widespread home 3D television adoption until we get to a standard that doesn't require glasses to view. Once we're there, it's the next step in the talky/color/digital/HD evolution.

You really need to move out of your mom's place.

That's kind of the point. With a decent app store, there would be more desire to use the product. Also, with Microsoft's push for Live, I could see having apps that work on an xbox dashboard, mobile device, and windows desktop without the need to code three different things. Widgets is widgets, etc.

I read this as Three Ground-Breaking Minotaur Binosauruses. I didn't know what it meant, but I smiled and clicked anyway. I dunno. I expected horns and scales or something.

Then I wondered if there were a dinosaur named Binosaurus, so I googled "Binosauruses" and there was a single return. So I clicked it. After the purple burned my retina, I closed it and RTFA, "Fast, small and cheap. No, I’m not describing the latest compact sports cars..."

It started with a car analogy. I just gave up at that point.

If Microsoft ever created a mobile platform that allowed me to create .NET apps for it as easily as I can create Office Add-Ins and then distribute them in a marketplace like Android or Apple, with the same software signing as is expected for other Windows software, I'd be all over it.

As it is, I code .NET all day and when I want a cool phone widget I switch gears and go all Java on Android.

There is no dearth of capable App makers for a MS mobile platform. Microsoft just makes it really hard for us to be creative on their devices, using their languages, if we want to actually distribute the product of our work in some official way.