That's easy enough to say until someone declares your home a war zone.

I agree with your general point, but non-smartphones do not have overall longer talk times than smartphones. They do have long standby times though.

Wireless signals travel extremely well over water. Getting a signal 6 miles out is not too surprising.

Then you've missed the point. The value in an SD card is not just doubling the storage on the phone. It's the ability to swap out the card. With micro SD cards being so small, someone could keep a virtually unlimited amount of storage in their bag, purse, etc. It also allows easy sharing of large amounts of data across devices. I don't know whether many people really take advantage of that, but it's a good reason someone might not be satisfied with more storage instead of an SD card slot.

In the world of opensource any user can also be a developer, so when the GPL favors freedom for the user, that means it favors freedom for downstream developers. Think of it this way. BSD gives the initial developer that extends your code more freedom but does not guarantee that developers wanting to extend that developer's code will have any freedom to do so at all. The GPL gives less "maximum" freedom in order to ensure that downstream developers have the same freedom. Since BSD guarantees freedom for only one level of extension and the GPL guarantees freedom for unlimited levels of extension, it can be argued that the GPL gives more freedom. That is also why many free software advocates favor the GPL. They are looking at the long term.

However, the requirements of the GPL do make it messy to use in conjunction with some other licenses or proprietary software, so there may be good practical reasons to use something like BSD licensing. I just wouldn't list "more freedom" as one of those reasons-- at least not in the big picture.

I suppose that's a possible interpretation of freedom, but in a more practical sense I think your confusing freedom with anarchy. Anarchy says "do what you want, no matter what harm it causes others." Freedom means "your right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins." In a world of shared resources, freedom is a balance, not an extreme. GPL and BSD just take different stances on that balance. BSD gives those that extend the code more freedom to limit their users. GPL limits the extender's freedom and instead gives more freedom to users down the line.

Cons and scams don't require brute force, but that still doesn't make them right.

Or just maybe it's possible that pushing political/personal agendas under the guise of charity is bad in both cases.

When someone is donating just their own time or money, they should have a lot of freedom in how they spend it. When they start influencing other charities or governments, then it is not longer just their own time and money, and we need to be more critical of their actions.

Bill Gates welcomes you to his New World Order.

Seriously though, this is not just Bill Gate's money. It is other people's donations (to other charities) too. If Gates pushes for a project that costs a billion dollars and his foundation funds $700 million of it, then where does the other $300 million come from? That's other people's money. Of course, this is a simplified example. In reality, the way he influences the investment of world-wide government and charitable funds is much more subtle and varied. I'm not saying he does not do good. My point is that if he is not kept in check, then the harm could greatly outweigh the benefit. Look at the examples in the article.

No, that's one of the main issues raised by the article. You should go read it-- it's quite interesting. Gates uses his foundation's leverage to direct other charitable funds into projects that support his personal world view. Instead of being chosen by their public merits, the projects are determined by the influence of Gates, and those projects get money from more than just the Gates foundation.

That's interesting. I have not signed up for Google Plus, and I was not aware of the "real name" thing. However, it seems like you can still choose not to register for Google Plus and nothing much changes then. It's more an issue with Google Plus than Google's new unified policy.

Can someone explain exactly what changed in Google's user agreement that gives them some new horrible power that they (and pretty much every other online account holder) did not already give themselves? What can Google do now that they couldn't already? I've seen so much concern about Google's new policy but very little to explain why. I briefly looked over the new policy when it came out and did not see anything that unusual. Maybe there's some more information sharing across their services, but I don't think there was much stopping that even before.

While I'm open to the idea of the system taxing activities for the extra cost/burden those activities put on the system, sodas fall into a pretty big grey area. Should high-sugar fruit juices get taxed the same as soda? Many of those (even some that are real juice) are not much more than sugar water. What about high fat foods? If sodas incur extra tax, surely those should too. What about watching TV? Does that kind of sedentary activity cost society enough to justify an extra tax?

At least smoking is a severe and clear case of a high-risk activity. It's relatively easy to draw a line there. If we start taxing the "grey area", then we'd better have a clear statement of where we draw the line. Otherwise we'll just end up with a mess of invasive government policies and industries buying politicians to keep their products off the high-tax list.

.Net has plenty of potential to become a good cross-platform system. It's too bad Microsoft shows no interest in having it achieve that goal.

The difference with the other projects you mention is that they have already accepted that MS has no interest in them succeeding, and they have found ways to operate successfully under those conditions. I'm not sure that's possible with .Net. An ecosystem needs developers, and how many cross-platforn developers want to use a system controlled by a company that does not value cross-platform support. For the most part, developers targeting .Net won't bother making sure their code works on Mono, and developers wanting real cross-platform support will look elsewhere. This leaves Mono in a very tough position.

Note that none of this implies I agree with hduff. I'm ignoring his comment an carrying on a meaningful conversation instead.

Most of the links that come up are in the "technical" sections of the site (help, wiki, etc) where references to Linux are difficult to avoid. I clicked through the eleven main pages in ubuntu.com's top menu and did a page search for "linux" on each one. Two matches came up, one on the "devices" page and one on the "community" page. I'm not saying whether that is good or bad. It's just clear that Ubuntu does not reference Linux a lot in how it promotes itself.