The backwards system of it being cheaper to incarcerate someone for 50+ years than to quickly execute them is asinine. In some countries they would have a second jury or committee of judges watching a death penalty trial, the instant appeal would be dealt with immediately. This process of incarceration for 20 years through numerous appeals is ridiculous. So I will say this - I agree that we just do life without parole in order to save money, but my preference would be instant appeals and immediate execution, especially in cases where the perpetrator admits guilt and actually asked for the death penalty instead of solitary confinement for the rest of his life, because that's where he's going... locked in a cell for 23 hours, then an hour alone in a little exercise room. And that's it.

That's how I feel about it - some people simply do not deserve to live with the rest of humanity. There should never, ever be a chance that some people should ever have the possibility of afflicting more atrocities on society. I can can understand arguments about when it's perhaps not clear the perpetrator was guilty (and, of course, it sadly has happened before)... but of course, that didn't happen in this case.

People think it's all about punishment, but it's also about keeping those who'd violate your rights away from you.

Gmail is awesome - tons of free space, ability to combine and access all your other old email addresses you didn't want to give up (like AOL? Not me, but why not?), great filtering options, access from anywhere on just about any device...

No, what we have here is a clear case (like the music industry) of a bunch of hipsters who think that anything really popular must suck for no other reason than that it's popular.

I have my own domain, but I still access via gmail because I get so much free storage. What does that say about me? In fact, I have a bunch of addresses on my domain, and access them all through gmail and filter them into their own labels to keep it all nice and neat.

Population density in most of the U.S. is far lower than Western Europe, with much wider spans between cities. You're nuts if you think you can compare. And if people already have a phone line and don't use it much, it's really not fair to include it as part of the price - you just don't get that people have different priorities than you.

Because some people choose to live in the countryside instead of the city? Or that dial-up might be cheaper and a lot of people don't use bandwidth the way you do? I think you have weird priorities.

Yup... I work for Turner Broadcasting, which was bought shortly after I started by Time Warner, which was bought shortly after that by AOL. I was really in disbelief at the time... AOL had no appreciative assets - they had computer infrastructure, and we all know how fast computer hardware depreciates - and they had customers. And that's it. Depreciating hardware and customer numbers that were already dropping like a rock. They tried to make us all use AOL software, but there was too much push-back. After using their over-inflated stock price to buy a company with actual assets, they eventually dropped AOL from the AOL-Time Warner name, pushed it to the side, and let languish. I'm surprised they've managed to hold on this long.

Exactly - I make the car analogy. I love my car despite the fact that it's not great at anything - I love it because it's good at just about everything. So just because I can't tow a houseboat doesn't make my car bad - I don't need to tow a houseboat; very few people need to tow houseboats! Very few people need NVidia Quadro cards, and NOBODY needs them to surf the web, email, or write papers and use a spreadsheet.

Ditto - I got a small-ish GE (with turn table and everything) around 1988, and only replaced it a few years ago with a larger, newer version because my now wife was whining about it. It was still running just fine.

Agreed... an Ubuntu phone will not succeed. There will be very few apps for it... even if this convergence works (and I use Ubuntu as my desktop), it needs to function as a smart phone, which means it can't just be useful when docked as a desktop. I just don't see developers rushing to develop for it. It will only serve to be a proof of concept. At the same time, I surely don't want an MS based phone, but at least they have some app market share.

Because if you think they're describing the same OS on multiple platforms, you've completely missed the point.

Yes... exactly, just like the smartphone itself (Consumer Reports, for example, rates NONE of the current smart phones as have very good or excellent voice quality). People want this. Most people don't need high powered 3D gaming platforms, number crunching, or to be able to recompile a kernel, or do anything but the most simple video and photo editing. My current phone is so slow, I wouldn't possibly want it to act as my desktop - but in the future, new hardware, full desktop use (keyboard and mouse on a large screen), then it would make no difference.

I think that's very shortsighted. If you get what you want in a phone... all the things you want, that great, small, portable device that can do so much for you while your away from your desk... AND not have to buy a desktop or laptop, because when you dock it to something like a large screen, all the features of those applications you'd have on a desktop become available, then who wouldn't want that? I think the vast majority of users would love that - developers and games, not so much, but the rest of the world that just surfs, emails, youtubes, and does simple office apps... yes, I think they'd want that. Surely, as a parent, I'd love to be able to get my kids one thing to go to college instead of two or three.

Maybe not phones, but tablets are already doing this, and I don't think phones are that far behind. I think it'll be less than 10 years. I'm actually looking right now to replace my "portable workstation" with a dockable tablet. Some of my programming includes GUIs, so remote development hasn't really been all that feasible. If the phone can dock to something with large screen, keyboard, and mouse, and if it's still works great as a smartphone, then why not?

No, it's not that black and white. Killing terrorists, especially like this where people are deliberately setting up a situation where they draw out people with these views, is a brilliant way to make more terrorists.