They most definitely do store copies of those messages. These records can be subpoenaed and used in a trial like any other telephone records. Many, many examples exist.

Facebook and such, I feel, should be considered public if you have any common sense. Search engines are caching this stuff, it's backed up on volumes all over the place, it's transmitted to others' computers and mobile devices.

Especially if you are one of those who doesn't bother to have privacy settings locked down, I don't feel that we have any reasonable expectation of privacy on facebook and I think judges will continue to interpret things that way.

Remember, ISPs are evil traffic-throttling anti-neutrality daleks

In 2000?

They don't have enough money to pay for their bandwidth after they send me a piece of junk mail every single day.

It might be particular to my trip, but for me the gas costs about $60-70 each way, while a plane ticket typically runs $250-$300 (before all the extra fees and add-ons).

It might only be a two hour flight, but transit to and from the airport along with wait times stretch it out to not being any faster than car, or only an hour or two faster.

Depends on the factory. I know numerous people who have worked for Ford making big salaries doing things that are definitely minimally skilled.

I looked into Amtrak for a regular trip I make, which by car is 7 hours.

It would take more than 12 hours for me to go by Amtrak, and a ticket would cost more than the gas my car consumes on the same trip. That's not even including the fact that if I take a train, I won't have a car when I get there and will have to pay more for additional transport.

Long distance rail transit currently offers nothing attractive for most of us.

I agree. How about we try to employ people in emerging, leading edge industries instead of wasting time and effort propping up mature, minimally skilled ones?

We got a president out of People magazine.

tldr

The same old tired promises we've been hearing since 2007. Where's the beef?

Fragmentation on a handset is different than fragmentation on a PC.

Some people's PCs have unsupported hardware, and you can either replace the hardware, try a different distro, see if you can find drivers, or replace the PC altogether. You have options.

Most people in the mobile space are locked into a handset for at least one year, probably two, and there's no way to change the hardware in it. Plus, many if not most of these come from a carrier that locks down sideloading and customization to some degree, so it's not within the average user's ability to do a clean install.

This leaves them with what effectively is a fragmented platform, and one which will be on a moldy version of android soon because updates only come as long as the phone company feels it's worth their money (i.e., while the handset is continuing to be sold). Once the handset is discontinued it's not worth time or money to test new versions, so eventually the OS and the Apps leave you behind in dependency hell.

The level of fragmentation is what the user feels it as, not what Android is in an ideal world where everyone has a Nexus One with no contract. (which only a few thousand people do)

I think the bigger problem will the the same as we see with Android in the phone space.

Rather than the "open" platform resulting in widespread standardization, we only see more fragmentation as each vendor implements their own locked-down flavor of it.

It has plenty of use at my workplace because of the Citrix plugins.

This is the year of Linux on the tablet.