It creates a zone of protection from Tyranny...

Something that you guys have been known to practice. Clean up your act first, then come back and talk about encryption.

It is the year of the Linux desktop! It's just that the Linux in question uses Chrome instead of X11 as its GUI.

Might I add that reading magazines like Car and Driver, Motorcycle, or any other graphics/photo heavy reading material is much nicer on a large tablet.

If a $300 one-time fee (that you can plan for many months in advance) is a show-stopper for you, then you have a severe personal finance problem.

(And saying "I'm too poor not to live paycheck-to-paycheck" is not an excuse; plenty of people on the forums at sites like earlyretirementextreme.com and mrmoneymustache.com have figured out how to live well on $7,000 - $30,000 per year).

http://elsag.com/mobile.htm

1800 license plates per minute, monitor 4 lanes of traffic at once -- yeah, show me the man in a lawnchair who can do that.

A man in a lawn chair can record hundreds of license plates per second? Are you seriously saying such a ridiculous thing?

As for the differing states, one would at least be able to choose to live in one with good policies.

We no longer have cable TV because Comcast canâ(TM)t install a pedestal with the upstream amplifier thatâ(TM)s required after they switched from unecrypted QAM.

Nobody's forcing Comcast to encrypt QAM, you know. That's just Comcast deciding to fuck you over because it can.

I hate to break it to you, but people live in exurban wastelands (like Woodstock) because they can't afford to live somewhere like Decatur or Sandy Springs. Those Decatur bungalows you think are just "old" are actually $0.5M+. A lot of them are also actually really nice; they're just not designed to show it off from the street McMansion-style. (Bungalows are typically relatively narrow and deep and don't have front-facing attached garages, so they look smaller from the street than they actually are.) And Sandy Springs (along with Buckhead, adjacent to it) is full of actual mansions (not the "Mc" kind) and is the most expensive town in the entire metro area.

If your impression is based on just what you can see driving by at 50 mph on Scott Boulevard (or on Roswell Road, in the case of Sandy Springs) then you don't know WTF you're talking about.

(Now, bear in mind that I am talking about the City of Decatur proper... unincorporated Dekalb with a Decatur address really does suck, except maybe for the parts near Emory.)

Also, it makes more sense to bring fiber to older, closer-in cities precisely because they are closer, more dense, and don't already have (competing) good infrastructure.

And the power needed at 100 meters?
How about at 300 meters?

And WSPR is only the beginning, there are other modes coming down the pipeline that are almost magical/spooky. pulling useable information out of what seems to be background noise.

Exactly. A franchise fee is simply a legal "doing business kickback"

No it's to avoid people looking like idiots with a tablet against their head.
Problem is it seems that that is the trend lately with idiots having a tablet pressed to their head. Watched a low IQ woman driving down the road with a big ass Fad-let stuck to her head side swipe a pickup truck because she could not see past the stupidly large phone pasted against her head.

And as an owner of a Surface Pro... Microsoft failed at all of those even when they had a proper pen and proper setup.

It's not the OS or the UI available. It's the Applications. 90% of the applications I need on that Surface Pro suck to high hell in a touch environment. They are designed for keyboard+Mouse and that is how they work best. It's so overwhelming that all surface pro users typically always use the device with a keyboard and a mouse.

tablet use requires a dramatic shift in programming style and design. And almost no programmers for large productivity software suites are capable of it.

Oh fuck that. I can plug my Nexus into my Windows machine, create folders, copy files, view any video format I want. Or I can have an iDevice, have to use the evil that is iTunes, convert to formats that Apple has decreed as sacred, and basically give up all control of the device. IOS devices are good for people who never want to go beyond the parameters Apple sets.

It is far better for video consumption and document reading. Which is what he was claiming it would be better at.