Because I already pay an Internet tax, to AT&T. I've been paying it to them for 10 years, and despite a whirlwind of technical advancement they haven't improved my service or lowered my price in a decade. In fact, my home service is more constrained and monitored than it was ten years ago.

I'm ready to try plan B.

All else being equal, I'd rather have a service provider that is legally accountable, however imperfectly, to the end users.

It's a tablet with a keyboard.

Gosh, being the most profitable company in the world sure is hard work! Why bother?

You can control wifi settings with location-aware software. At home or work? Wifi on. Anywhere else? Wifi defaults to off.

Example: http://www.twofortyfouram.com/product

California already does some of this, via microstamps on firing pins. But tracking guns doesn't fix the 300M guns in circulation. Bullet tracking does.

I have a license plate on my car. This hasn't prevented me from using it.

Gun safes might. Pair that with a 10-rounds-a-month rule for off-range ammo purchases, and it would provide a barrier. Meanwhile non-psychotic gun crime just got a lot harder to pull off.

The first is bullet IDs -- you pack the propellant with very small ID tagged glitter. Bullet fires, glitter covers the ground. Crime scene people carry equipment to find and trace the ID numbers. This has been proof-of-concepted years ago.

The second is tracking for ammo sales. You buy ammo? It gets logged, every damn bullet.

The third is liability for your ammo. If you own ammo, you are liable for the results. Regular gun owners get an ammo safe, which is cheap and sensible precaution in any case. If you're a trafficker? You now have a problem.

Important to note: ammo has a shelf life of a few years. Within a decade, culpability for gun crimes could be much more transparent.

Context matters. Having lived in a mountain town, we went to our 2-screen cinema all the time. I saw some truly unlikely movies, because there weren't that many other options to get out of the house in the evening. Now that I'm in a city, I see a movie maybe once a year.

[specific computing need] without relying on a 3rd-party app.

Do you want a computer or an appliance? If you want a computer, install some of that pesky "3rd-party" software and move on.

Feast your eyes on the rise of the pink, shopping-themed LEGO.

http://sinker.tumblr.com/post/14267087602/im-starting-to-think-lego-is-evil

Send you a message in exchange for money? That's what advertising IS.

They won't. The Dems lean Hollywood, both by voting district and campaign funding. The hope would be that the GOP could serve as a useful opposition party on this issue. Apparently not.

The position paper was vetted internally and approved along the orgs normal channels. Unless by "higher up leadership" you mean the lobbyists -- they were surprised, that's true.

He worked an institution that was supposed to inform debate. He was canned because some debates are not allowed.

Actually, it doesn't. That's a powerful incentive to start companies and build products, even if the results get incorporated (or not) into a dreadnaught like Google after four years. Venture funding banks on this, and the freely flowing spigot of VC money built most of the stuff I currently use.