There you go. It's a Moto Droid with quadband GSM instead of CDMA innards. Put any T-Mobile SIM in there and you're good to go. If you're getting a contract anyways, you may want to get one of their $1 phones and eBay it to get some of those $600 back.

Let me know how you like it!

Around version 3 or 3.5, Firefox has become reasonably close to decent. It's still lacking any semblance of innovation, but it might get there, given enough time.

Neither Chrome nor Opera require any WGA to be run.

Troop surges concern several ten thousand people, so it's almost impossible to keep them under wraps until they actually happen. The word will get out and around early enough for the insurgents to do what they do: adapt.
If they intend to hit everyday targets, possibly focusing on civilians or military installations, moving the attack to an earlier date would help their chances. Their insights on the current security forces around will stay the same, so they can get by with minimal changes in planning. If they are going for the maximum number of military casualties, they might move the attack to hit the new troops on arrival or very shortly thereafter, taking advantage of their lack of experience. Lastly, if the target is a VIP or the attack is scheduled to coincide with some event (summit, election, holiday); they'll be forced to change strategies. The C4 intended to blow up a visiting general can just as well be used to level a hotel.

Insurgents adapt. It's the only thing that keeps them alive fighting armies with hundreds of times the manpower they have.

If I want to sign up for a 401(k), a newspaper subscription, a contract for my cell, a subscription to cable, a savings account or would like to receive weekly issues of hairy midget feet illustrated, I will indicate so on some kind of form the respective company is happy to provide. I like my non-neutral starting point. I like to be free to enter in any kind of obligation if and when I choose to; not at the whim of, well, whomever you'd like to decide for you.
Donating organs is, as far as I understand, pretty simple: If you indicate being a donor, your organs are up for grabs* on death. If you indicate not being a donor, they aren't. If you indicate neither, your closest relatives get to decide which one they think you would've wanted. If your and their opinion on the subject differ, they are required by law (at least that's what it's like in Switzerland) to offer your opinion instead of theirs. How well they'll be able to separate those is another question, but as long as you keep the donor card in your wallet, you're good to go.

Enough with the loosely-related topics, let's get back to the browser ballot. Riddle me this: Where does it end? Windows comes with Paint. Why isn't there a Graphics Program Ballot offering Photoshop, Gimp and Paint.NET? Windows comes with a Movie/DVD maker. Where's the Video Editing Ballot offering me Premiere, VirtualDub and avidemux? Windows comes with a Media Player and Media Center. Where's VLC, XBMC, MythTV and so on? Why don't I get a Ballot screen for R and Matlab instead of calc.exe? Why is there no choice between notepad.exe, Notepad++, Notepad2 or SciTe? Why don't I get the choice between WordPad, MS Office, OOo or Star Office?
What I'm trying to say: Forcing such a ballot screen is bullshit. Those who understand what they're doing would probably switch anyways. Those who don't, get confused, click at random and become painfully difficult to support. Stick to one default, cause that way those who did change it will^Ware more likely to realize support for Chrome will have to come from Google, not Microsoft.

Heh, yeah. Coming to compliance with a (megalomaniac) government's regulations within their territory screams of artificial market segmentation. Next thing you know all U.S. Windows retail boxes will come in English + French, 'cause Canada mandates it. And they'll only accept rubles as payment, 'cause Russia mandated that. Next thing you know it's going to report back to the Great Firewall of China 'cause, well, that's what it took to get it sold over there.

Privacy settings -> Profile information -> Family and relationship -> "custom" -> Hide this from: Mom.

There's some 200 to 500 people in an average friend's list. Even if you made the mistake of mentioning the SO's first name in front of whomever you're keeping h(im|er) a secret from; chances are there's more than one J(ohn|ane) amongst them. Your friends list doesn't give away who your SO is; "in a relationship with [...]" does.

According to this guy, 35mm gets you approximately 6K lines. Throw in two analog transfers (raw to intermediate, edited intermediate to actual projection material) and you're down to the equivalent of maybe 4K.

Then again, you could get one of these for slightly more than you planned to spend on actual film and enjoy perfectly lossless digital (re-)production in 4K from shoot through projection. At a measly $20k this pretty much kills the argument for 35mm film if you ask me.

70mm remains untouchable until 16K becomes popular; which I'm guessing will be around the time high-end home cinemas switch to 2K. Some time after that, somebody will have an affordable 16K cam with a 70mm or so sensor. After that, analog filming will be fair game.

Don't trust that one. A few days ago, on the day Mark Zuckerberg published a bunch of pictures, I could check out his whole friends list through http://facebook.com/friends/?id=zuck even though the list was hidden from his profile. Right now, the same query forwards to the profile page, but that might be some kind of temporary fluke or an admin perk.
What would you want to hide your friends list for, though? Being able to quickly search through A's (whom you are friends with on facebook) friends for B's (whom A introduced you to a few hours before) first name is one of my favourite aspects of facebook.

Seeing how you don't seem to mind having an openly accessible friends list on Slashdot and whatever you put into your profile picture is completely up to you, I'll stick to the other points. Hide your name by entering a fake name on registration. The name you tell facebook is your handle. Expecting a site to hide your handle is about as dumb as heading to /b/ for serious discussions. Even better, /b/ will hide your name, too, so that might be more along the lines of what you're looking for.
Moving on, what you're looking for is the Search section in your Privacy settings. Switch the facebook search results setting to "Only friends", uncheck Public search results and you're good to go. Next, head to your profile, click the pencil next to the Friends box and uncheck the check box. Lastly, head to the Profile information section of your Privacy settings and hide, well, most anything.

Most of those cards is just "spacer" plastic to get the right form factor. Add a bit of circuitry and a tiny display in one of the corners and you get the advantages of a secure log in as well as not having to broadcast your card's info every time you make a purchase or walk by a scanner.
If, for some reason, you can't fit a battery into that little depth yet, print the codes from my earlier post onto the back of the card. Not quite as perfect, but better than RFID.

Reasons why this might not happen in the near future include the fact that most banks apparently have their cards built by partners for them and/or the bureaucracies between the e-banking guys and the credit/debit folks could prove to be an issue.

How would an RFID fob (readable from tens of metres away) be any better than a card (readable on contact)? Most merchants already own a card reader. They're cheap, easy to find and quite reliable. What would anybody's incentive to switch be?

If it's just about the random numbers for e-banking: Several banks already send you an RSA SecurID fob which you can then use to sign in to their e-banking platform. The cheaper ones will send you a paper card with a list of codes, e.g. a1-j10. On logging in, you're asked for, say, d8, you enter the code at that position and you're free to bank. The best solution I've seen so far is a small calculator-like thingie with a card reader. You enter username and password for your e-banking account and get a challenge code. Then you stick your debit card into that calculator thingie, enter the challenge and your PIN and are returned the response to enter into the e-banking site.

I get cash. ;)

To pay the bills while off-line there's a pen-and-paper system around. You pack however many bills (the payment slips of said bills, actually) to a big pile, count the number of bills, figure out the total amount, write those two numbers down on a form your bank happily provides you with, sign said form, stick it all into one of the business reply envelopes your bank will also provide you with, then throw that into a mail box and you're good.
Of course, thanks to mature e-banking solutions and so on, very few people need to do it that way anymore, but the possibility remains.

Telephone banking is not instantaneous. Usually, payments go through around 0900 and 1700. If you buy at 1400, you'll probably have to wait for 0930 on the next day before the recipient gets through to his bank's hotline and has the payment confirmed. Of course, you could use the three hours between ordering the payment and it's execution to cancel it; for fun you might even do that from your brand new car's carphone.

Uh, all the banks I've worked with in the past few years have offered free or close-to-free e-banking access to my account and allowed me to transfer five-digit sums to accounts with the same bank, another bank in the same country or another bank in another country in all the major currencies. Save the savings accounts, for same-bank and same-country transfers I usually don't even pay fees.
Of course, different than what Hollywood likes to make you believe, wire transfers tend to not be instantaneous, so that might pose a bit of a problem with the car example. Even if I were to send the $50k from my e-banking interface to the car dealer's account under his watchful eyes, there'd be nothing to stop me from hopping into my car, speeding home and cancelling the transaction before it actually goes through the system (which usually happens at 0900 and 1700, depending on the bank).
Fortunately, buying a care needs a bit of extra work anyways: I need to get the car insured and (with proof of insurance) registered with the DMV to get it's license plates. So I'd stop by the dealer's, have a coffee and upon coming to an acceptable agreement, I'll pay some amount up front (e.g. whatever my debit card will allow as a single charge, so $5k to $10k) and get the car's papers and keys and a bill for $50k minus the $10k I already paid. I talk to my insurance, get a policy for the car; visit the DMV, return the old papers, get the car registered on me, get the license plates and so on. Also, I stop by at home and authorize the bank transfer for the outstanding $40k. The next day, I'll head to the dealership, plates in hand, click the plates into the already mounted plate holders, give the salesman a wave, get in my car and drive off the lot, enjoying the new car smell.
Depending on however trustworthy either side of the transaction is, the dealer could insist on waiting for the payment to clear before I drive off or I might bring a wheel clamp with me on the first day to make sure the car stays there. Usually, neither is necessary.