80k ft is around 25 km. Space (at least as agreed by most of the planet, the Karman line; including Canada or Australia) starts from 100 km. Should we begin telling people they are, say, near some destination after traveling only 1/4th to it? (and by far the easiest 1/4th, at that)

Well, at least it's better than this submission - still, again "impressive" (while some really curious efforts, from a ~decade ago, went overlooked) ...and done by dozens, possibly hundreds (mass-produced / that's where all the really hard stuff in such ~amateur attempts always came from) meteo balloons every day.

Seriously?
http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/index.html

Generally: when will this fad with balloons die out? Why now, why people ignored amateur flights made decade+ ago? (when they actually still demanded some effort in preparations; NVM such feats as dropping UAV glider at climax, a ~decade ago). And "not beyond the offical boundary of space" is and understatement, they're not anywhere near space, not even half way up (rounding it up - more on the surface; also: 24 km makes this one a rather low attempt)
Oh, and I somehow doubt "All of Canada is enthusiastic" about a video with 300 views...

Virtually all comparably large (& usually arbitrarily designated) expanses of land are stretching or... contracting. With varying speeds, some "faster" some slower, but always changing.

Would be nicer if this^ was the main focus of such reporting, maybe also pointing out this essay from Asimov (in this instance, particularly the 5th to 7th section from the end).
Instead it too often goes into & feels like "whoa, man, come here and listen to this funny thing about [...] place, that those scientists now claim"

If "Readers of the site overwhelmingly support the decision" then one might also wonder what impact this might have... (Wiki, Reddit, Wordpress, or Cheezburger otoh... and I wonder what will come out of mulling of Google, FB, Twitter, Yahoo, Amazon, or Ebay; if blackouts, then also possibly riots)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_Wrist_PDA - decade old
http://pocketcalculatorshow.com/nerdwatch/fun2.html - quarter+ of a century...

And those were even quite inexpensive. Ultimately, after initial voices of wonder, people just don't care - it's a bad form factor & bad usability for such functionality.

I fail to see the relevance of Britney Spears, Alicia Keys and Snoop Dogg when searching for "music"... (OK, perhaps sort of the middle one)

If this is any "good" - and, from the summary, it sounds like it might possibly be - it has also a real chance of trumping Wiki, E2, YT, or tvtropes effects... (hence "")

The first automated docking capability was indeed decades ago, when those who achieved it were still very firmly (& still for a few decades afterwards) Soviet.
But the second, of European ATV, was only a few years back.

And the Chinese already had crewed missions, it's unlikely this one was very much about testing of life support.

While local rates should be still* somewhat higher with mobile - the latter typically offer the same rate throughout whole country, no matter where the called number is. With people becoming more mobile in general, that could very well have the affect of lower overall charges (well, quite likely really often higher in absolute terms, as far as I can tell - but that's largely because we keep in touch much more actively)
There was a problem with international rates for some time - but that is rapidly improving for a year or two (in the one place of many smallish countries I'm familiar with...), charges now becoming not much higher than country calling - and actually, it's not terribly hard to find offers which, in many cases (for some group of neighbouring countries, typically), already offer the same rates as mobile country calling (which BTW, yes, typically means they are less expensive than long-distance country land line rates).

Is this argument, that you mention, how telecom PR tries to convince you it's a good idea, tries to justify it? (plus, the one who initiates, who desires a conversation, should pay for it... )

* Honestly, I didn't care enough to compare for a long time. The monthly contract payment for - barely used - land line trumped any expected differences over half a decade ago already.

Seems like it's at most about checking out the waters... IMHO, just get some fairly inexpensive and "good enough" compact.

It will get you going just fine; there has been a great progress over the last decade, many digicams offer tremendous value.
Even at the off-chance scenario of you getting a bit "into" photography (always a risk ;p ), it should be perfectly good enough for at least a year or two - and afterwards it would still remain a fine pocketable "always with me"* camera. Otherwise - if you won't go beyond just some random pictures - just a "decent camera, easily carried & always at hand, that didn't cost me too much" / not much waste.

*however nice results the DSLRs can give, however some people would swore by some entry-level, great-value one ...at the end of the day, they are just too bulky, too unwieldy to have them with you "just in case" ("for taking images of friends, family") very often. And while there's an emerging category which tries to bridge the two classes, this one's a) still a bit on the bulky side b) in a turmoil, with teething pains c) as every novelty, often way overpriced.

So, something like Canon SX130 or 150 should be enough, and not really fully getting into "few hundred dollars" area. Not exemplary in any way, but quite decent all around (bonus: many present Canon digicams are great at shooting video, if you know how), and even able to offer some introductory "deeper" controls.
Or its more premium (but still inexpensive), more compact (more pocketable) siblings, SX200 and up (though, small warning for the sake of accuracy: the latest 220 & 230 are, due to some technical nuance, not "great" any more at shooting video, merely good; which most likely makes no difference to typical usage)

If you have any doubts about capabilities such give, go through http://www.flickr.com/cameras/ (getting something highlighted there as fairly popular is probably a good idea in general)

Even if PRC wouldn't really do anything, they would still be perceived otherwise (especially with 1.3+ billion population, half a billion already connected; way more than enough for large "organic" phenomena, way more than enough for many thousands who are, say, both into nationalism and cyber-vigilantism), so whatever / why bother / one might as well be on fairly good terms with this asset...

First, they need to get the name right, I'd guess ;P

Most of the imagined usage scenarios seem like something which needs minuscule amounts of data - not much beyond "pinging" the network from time to time, to maintain connection. Probably in the daily range of how much one web page loading weights (yes, mostly in the other direction, but...)

If they really tried, it could perhaps even mostly piggyback on some routine control channels (kinda like SMS does, "free" to the carriers; and like WAP did). Bandwidth doesn't seem like the biggest obstacle here, seamless & sensible integration of affordable (no over-engineered) solutions might be the prime one.

Generally, Germany tries to be (with mixed results) quite cautious, vigilant about things which can negatively brand a group of people by some vague association. You see, they had a bad experience with such practices, in the first half of XX century.
For example, AFAIK, German authorities don't really follow the statistics about ethnicity, skin colour, "race" of their population, they don't really know how it's distributed (does Berlin has, say, 100k or 300k black people? Who knows; at most one can tell, I think, how many immigrated from African countries)

Also... what, are we really not satisfied from how the unnamed criminal will get, considered fair by the courts, officially sanctioned punishment? Wishing for "traditional" treatment, with simplistic views of overall effects on the world? (come to think of it, what happened during WW2 wasn't that unusual, in human history - it was mostly how new methods & technology allowed for terrifying scales and efficiencies) Would we like some groups of people to take matters in their own hands?... (vigilantism seems to be revving up on the web as is, anyway, up to libel with impunity; lets be careful not to return to extralegal punishments, mob justice, witch-hunts...)

Actually, he might just say that religions defame each other constantly, anyway :P (and "a hard-line Christian or Muslim" might not really care about other than his)

The real goal doesn't need to be, typically implied by critics, "protecting the criminal" and such. This can be also easily about protecting random others who will get caught in the debris. Kinda like what Xest points out, "in the article you linked there's a fair argument that condemning religious hate speak has the goal of preventing unnecessary violence in the world"

Opposition to such anonymity perhaps partly stems, also, from "traditional" outlooks at punishment... but remember, those were formed when words couldn't travel very far anyway, and communities were rather small.
However - in case you haven't noticed - the apes running around figured out mass-media & long-distance communication (we're probably on different continents...). And they don't waste time, they breed quite a lot - but at the same time they are very sentimental about already obsolete (given the numbers of apes involved and their reach; after only around 2 to 3 centuries, in most places - earlier, even just one name was enough) but popular means of identification and tracing "lineage" (even if it's largely just one of their myths, considering the typical levels of infidelity & just very recent appearance of genetic paternity tests)

Large part of what you're doing by publishing names, is exposing to ostracism plenty of people who share them by pure chance.
It most likely would be like that even with photos, half of humanity is similar to somebody. I've had 2 instances of clearly non-demented people being mistakenly absolutely sure I'm one of their buddies (me even looking rather uncommonly with longish hair and some beard, 600k city, random encounters in the public transport and in a swimming pool changing room). It's much worse when people kinda-think-they-remember some random face they've seen few times in the news / we are very bad at remembering such random ones, really: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistaken_identity , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_identification , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_testimony , "it has been shown that in experimental tasks, participant performance was closer to chance than actually being able to recognize faces previously presented"
Publish whole address, neighbourhood - and you expose the locals to blame and ostracism by association.

It can even jump across generations (for example: nobody even remembers, nobody really knows why the Cagots were shunted, hated, and prosecuted; "because they come from Cagot family" seemed to be the only consistant reason; rhyming songs kept the names of Cagot families known, after the first efforts of govs which tried to abolish this injustice - yeah, those evil entities, of which UN is the ~top reflection)

I've had enough of this throughout all of my youth (if not exactly the same kind - strong ostracism starting, largely, from a random name; which was just a bit too meaningful linguistically, in a somewhat unfortunate way; all in a small, provincial, "decent" city, of the kind respecting "traditional values"). It's not pretty (and you probably can't understand it if your whole early life hasn't been shaped by such) ...it was hell, actually (drop the "many have worse" - one can say that to pretty much anybody ...what matters in the end, I suspect, is the amount of shared experiences with a group / exclusion from positive ones; also, after quickly glancing over, this looks like a decent initial page)