Untrue. From someone who's taken a look at a few dozen devices with the same issue, it's not the spring that's the problem. Each usb female socket is basically a sheet metal shell that's locked together by overlapping metal. There is no reinforcement of that shell. Every single time after a year of constantly plugging in the cable, the force of doing so bends the metal shell allowing the cable to have some wiggle room. That wiggle room allows all cables regardless of the springs to slip and not connect properly.

Take a look at any older smartphone. Plug in the newest, shiniest usb cable. Any slightly bent female shells will cause you to have an intermittent connection for both power and data.

With constantly plugging a cable in and out of a device you will eventually wear it down and break it (becomes loose, etc).

You cannot wear out a wireless charger.

That is the distinction.

EVERY system is open to abuse, that's human nature.

Is it really abuse if that's what was intended all along? Do you really think GPS on cars is really about finding a car if it was stolen? Or tracking your every movement? No matter what the reason is, adding a real time location based device on any vehicle has but one motive, to track that vehicle's location history for the entire time that device is installed.

That's to be expected. Security of data is critically important to all businesses, even the American ones who are also affected by the NSA scandals. I would expect politicians to be in an uproar and call for the dismantling of the NSA and for all their secret projects to be disclosed and security holes patched up so America can once again be trusted.

Lol, who am i kidding. I expect people to be silenced, jailed, tortured and publicly humiliated if they dare speak the truth again, and for the NSA's budget to be quadrupled and even more data to be fed directly to them under the guise of stopping the leaks.

Simple:

Lack of long term planning.

Global warming doesn't happen overnight. There will be no event that will trigger thousands of lives being lost overnight. Water levels will rise very slowly, more and more flooding will occur after years and infrastructure will be destroyed or submerged after years. The results will be more devastating because it will affect livelihood, food supplies, population centers, etc. There will be famine, wars for resources, dwindling power, cost of living increases and even more poverty. To most people they would consider those things as imaginary, like it won't happen to them or there will be a way to mitigate it.

Terrorism on the other hand is the boogieman. The threat of being blown up or being shot is a lot more "real" to people than the threat of being slowly starved to death. We pump billions into that because it's useless. It makes people feel more safe, and the illusion of safety is a) an easy sell and b) apparently people want this and are willing to spend money on it. Society as a whole craves this a lot more than it craves a future for humanity and our children. Simple human conditions allow political will to focus on useless, frivolous things with no way of knowing if it's effective because it's less risky and it's what people want.

What if for example the sun decided to go into a mini ice age state and cooling actually occurred? This has happened in the past and the current trends of solar activity is pointing to something quite different than experienced in the past 50 years. Would you want to be the politician who pushed a anti-greenhouse, eco friendly laws that would be used against you when they claim billions were wasted and economic growth was stalled thanks to your incorrect predictions of the future? Show me the risk in that or just pretending to be stupid and allowing the status quo to continue and just blame it on your predecessor's lack of planning if in fact the reverse is true?

Do i think a kid can unpack a markerbot, download a design for Eiffel towers and start printing them immediately? yes.
I would expect kids to do this and see how easy and powerful a tool it will be. Then ease them into making modifications and then designing their own inventions from scratch.

It would be like woodshop 2.0, with less buzz saws.

So hey just a question:
Isn't the entire internet a massive P2P network?

sorry, i should of said cheap oem side with mid 3d graphics. The market doesn't exist for that. The typical non gaming user wouldn't care if it was the 3d graphics capability was from 3 years ago. If it can play video and run business apps that's all they care about

Old sandy bridge/ivy core chips already fit that market perfectly and the price will/have come down for those chips already. Or throw an old richland/trinity and they wouldn't know the difference.

What market is amd shooting for?
Haswell with iris pro will probably beat out amd for integrated graphics performance and will have better battery life.
On the top end, desktop users will always go for a dedicated graphics card.
On the mobile end, these things will eat up battery and have no reason to be on a tablet.
All that's left is the cheap oem side of things. Haswell is still fairly expensive on the low end. If intel can bring down the price a bit and make it competitive they will beat out amd in every category.

Try VisualWget. Might save you some time in general.
Then again that's for windows. Fairly sure there are a few apps that do the same thing though.

Just for clarifications sake, please tell me what is a basic human right? Is freedom of movement a basic human right? In some places of this country (the US) there is no public transit, there are no local airports in walking distance. The nearest store can be miles away. In many places such as rural areas there is a necessity of mobility to survive and cars are the only choice that makes sense in that matter.

Before you say biking, lets use the case of a wheelchair bound paraplegic who relies on their automobile to get from point a to point b as a necessity to live. Does it not then become a right? At what point exactly does a privilege, which by definition is not necessary to live, become a basic human right? And if you agree that in certain circumstances what most people consider a privilege would become a right when it starts infringing on a person's ability to live, then what about your notions about taking away that privilege? Do you deny a person's right to life freely?

The second part of my argument is in the false notion that somehow having a phone in the car, whether near or being held or strapped to someone's head somehow, according to you, and in-arguably affects a person's ability to drive. I personally believe that being distracted is the main cause of issues, cellphone or not. This list of distractions includes the radio, climate control, children in the car, being late, obtuse traffic signs, unfamiliarity with the surroundings, being sleepy, driving for too long, reading, applying makeup, accidents on the side of the road, flashing lights, advertisements, good looking women, etc. How many laws have been passed for those things? Before cellphones penetrated the general public, you're saying accidents didn't exist or were way down statistically? I find nothing of the sort. The same people who are easily distracted and bad drivers are the ones using their cellphones and making bad decisions. Yet all this talk about licenses for drivers and regulating it does not take into account how bad of a driver a person is. Everyone is treated the same whether or not someone has a perfectly clean driving record or has totaled 18 cars in their lifetime.

Given this unwritten social contract of driving (considering when i started to drive there weren't anything of the sort such as breathalyzers, but apparently in my lifetime failing to take one is the same as being guilty), i find it highly unlikely that anyone has silently agreed to give up their rights when driving.

Fairly sure that glass doesn't come standard with tv reception. Sort of a stretch to apply it.

So let me ask you this. In the state of california, is the garmin hud also illegal to have in your car? If so, why? It's safer than any other alternative to navigation displays.

I'm sort of conflicted. First off they're supposed to be friendly countries. Second, do you want other countries spying on you? And what's to stop other countries to resell that information back to the US or other interests? Third, wasn't the US trying to establish how hacking into the US is an act of war? Now it turns they've been doing it to everyone else?

Lastly you're undermining the internet in general. Less trust in an open network will turn people into making fragmented segments for their own countries due to spying. It will hurt business, it will hurt freedom. It's ridiculously short sighted to do any of this.

He means the kind that pollutes the environment the least. Your solar panels are dirty to create, ditto on battery technology. Coal is one of the worst polluters because they just throw everything into the atmosphere. There is no clean up costs yet everyone pays for it.
Nuclear is the most viable. Even with ever nuclear disaster that has ever occurred including testing and bombing, it has harmed less people than coal. You're literally burning millions of tons of crap into the atmosphere. Also coal is partially radioactive. Since it's so hard to correlate as a causation, it's hard to put a number on direct linkages to lung cancer, but i'm sure it doesn't help.