I'm guessing you do your own taxes? ;)

TANSTAAFL

Spare me; I have friends scattered all about the world. There's a reason why social networking supplanted e-mail as the medium of choice for keeping tabs on friends and family. Facebook's crappy user interface (my chief complaint) is not a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Nor is the attention whore that posts 50+ things a day.

You've just put down 35% - 50% (depending on definition of 'Conservative') of your fellow countrymen. Good job.

She's been on the Select Committee for quite some time. No news there. She was actually the voice of moderation on a few issues regarding Pakistan back during the 2012 primary debates. No one was more surprised than I; I guess it's sobering when you get the sort of briefings that she's getting as a member of that committee.

If you don't want politics in science don't take Government money. Government money always comes with strings attached, doesn't matter which political party happens to be calling the shots.

Every carrier has SIM cards now that Verizon and Sprint have moved to LTE. There is nothing stopping device manufacturers from selling devices directly to consumers who can then activate them without any interaction whatsoever with their carriers. Even Verizon has caved to reality on this one with devices like the Nexus 6. They don't advertise this fact of course but they don't stop you from doing it either.

Well yeah. If you breathe it you'll DIE! Only a Teabagger would be against Government regulation of a chemical that's so dangerous as to cause DEATH when inhaled. Why do you hate the children? How much did Big DHMO pay you for this astroturfing?

I despise Facebook but it's something of a necessary evil when you have friends scattered all over the world. That's why I was rooting for G+ to displace it, or at least become big enough that I could plausibly use it as my sole social networking account, but neither of those things happened. :(

Google was quite annoying for awhile there in trying to convince you to sign up and/or linking G+ into everything but they've backed away from that of late.

Which is why political parties love these voters. Because they'll vote straight party line ticket every single time. They make an effort to identify these people and physically drag them to the polls if necessary.

Back in the day before New York got rid of our battleship gray lever machines it was easy as pie to identify these voters. "*click* *click* *click* *click* *click*" as they pulled the levers across their party line without even bothering to read the names of the candidates they were voting for. In and out in 5 seconds flat with 15+ offices on the ballot.

There is no way that you can conduct online voting and ensure that the voter is not being intimidated. Offsite voting is a necessary evil for certain people (the handicapped and those who are unavoidably out of town on election day) but it does not need to be expanded to cover everyone. Here in New York we very specifically keep those most likely to intimidate you out of the voting booth, i.e., your employer and union official. The people that can hold a financial gun to your head if you don't vote the way they want. With online voting (or offsite voting on paper, i.e., absentee ballots) there is no way to actually ensure that the voter doesn't have a gun (real or proverbial) aimed at their head when they click 'submit.' For this reason alone I will always oppose it and other measures (vote by mail) that take people out of the polling place.

The summary also makes the assumption that low voter turnout is a big problem. This is an oft-repeated claim but there's zero evidence to suggest that increased participation rates equate to better results. People choose not to vote for many reasons; apathy likely being the biggest one, followed closely by a generalized disgust with the available options. "None of the above" is a perfectly valid option in an election, whether exercised via the write-in for "Mickey Mouse" or by staying home on Election Day.

Why? I love G+ when compared against the competition; better software, a slicker interface, higher signal to noise ratio, it's better than Facebook in every metric except for the minor little detail that hardly anybody uses it. I was hoping that they would mount a serious challenge to FB but it seems unlikely that is going to happen, barring some huge mistake on FB that alienates a critical mass of people.

Wouldn't it be better to treat them like PCs and remove the OEMs from the equation entirely? Why should I have to rely on Motorola/Samsung/LG/Nokia (or worse, Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile/Sprint) to get patches for my Android operating system? I don't have to wait for Dell to push out Microsoft's latest round of security patches, I download them directly from Microsoft and install them myself.

There's no reason phones need to work any differently than PCs have worked for the last two decades except a desire by the carriers and handset manufacturers for planned obsolescence. If Google had any backbone whatsoever they would push the ecosystem in this direction, they've certainly got enough of a user base now to throw their weight around as Apple has done since the very beginning.

That's because the unwritten "Right Not To Be Offended" trumps the written "Right To Free Speech" in the United States. I particularly love the irony of seeing college kids chanting "Je suis Charlie" while they simultaneously shout down speakers that they don't agree with and do their utmost to get them banned from speaking at their universities.