How often in the real world do you find yourself thinking. "Gee he's never really done this before in an applied, practical setting. That makes his skills fresher!" In my case that would be a big never.

Except for the fact that in some very real ways the CB radio was actually useful. Useful primarily for finding out where the police were on the interstate, so you wouldn't get a ticket for going over the new, and much hated 55 mph speed limit, useful for calling for help traveling or talking to your buddies following you in the next car. Weather and road conditions passed from truckers and motorists etc. They certainly created and highlighted a subculture many of us would like to think of as unintelligent and coarse, that is truckers, truck stop folks and the very rural, but CB communications was also very practical. No one has tweeted to me that there was a speed trap around the bend.

Amazingly, that will be my reaction as well. The ability to broadcast txt messages indiscriminately, and read the txts of others broadcast thusly. Just doesn't do anything for me.

The exhaust of automobiles is a very significant source of the terrible air quality in American cities. Americans breathe the air in those cities...... Right?

But you can, and we do all the time. The amount of effort you put into protecting them from themselves, that is the cost to all of us, should be done so as to achieve the greatest "good" to society as a whole, not to try and achieve perfection. Speed limits protect you from yourself. Seat belts. Curve signs. The ban on general ownership of machine guns and artillery etc. Building codes, electrical codes. We could just let the market take care of all that stuff as well, but it doesn't really work that way.

Simplistic. Surcharges on fuel would be a way to make the owners of bigger, heavier more polluting vehicles pay their fair share of the costs of roads and bridges, etc. The idea that all taxes should be to fund the government and that we should let the market allocate resources is a good one, but nothing is that simple.

The whole point of "the cloud" network computing, etc. Whatever we're calling it these days. Is that they want to keep charging us over and over for the same thing. They want us to rent everything from them. The computing platform, the phone, the device, the apps, as a result they can even own our data. Have fun with that if you want to a digital serf. You can opt not to use a lot of these gadgets, they're bad business models, and one can be a nerd without owning all those faddish gadgets.

Get off my lawn.

I gave it up. I realized that for the most part my life was better before I had a cell phone. So I got rid of the thing. Occasionally I miss it, far more often I am reminded of how great it is not to be constantly plugged into everything meaningless in life. Most of the people who ever lived, never had one.

Without a doubt a great many /.ers have gotten more than on user ID over the years. The current population of /. is also likely so much larger than it was in say 94/95 that I wouldn't really expect to see much correlation between UID and actual user age, plus it's the internet so people lie like dogs when it comes to things like age. Further muddying up the data.

Look, I'm old. For the /. crowd anyway. I still have the built in old people hatred of youth culture and constant cell phone use. Of course I'm a geek, so I'd trade a kidney for my unlimited smartphone, but hey that's not important here.
My employer gives me an unlimited cell phone. They pay for it, that's the deal. They can call me on it whenever they want. I can call Swaziland eleven times a day if I feel like doing so. That cost them X amount of dollars, both of us feel like I'm just getting paid X amount of dollars more every month. If my employer stops paying for my cell phone. It save them a few bucks, but over thousands of employees, it's absolutely no different than cutting pay by that much a month. It will cost them workers, reduce their ability to retain employees, it's a small cut in pay. Not really much of a story. Certainly not some big win for the taxpayers, more than likely not some big hit for the employees, but probably a stupid grandstanding play by the Governor.

I'm willing to bet that paying for these employees cell phones was seen as more valuable to the employees than it actually cost the state, therefore it was cheaper than paying however much more cash they would see as the same benefit, over time, and large enough numbers the quality of the workforce in question will decrease by the fifty-some dollars a month per person the state is saving. So basically the whole story is a big fat "yawn" hidden pay cut. Not your rights online, not a sea change, just dumb grandstanding by an aging dork.

One of the really amusing things here. In most of the business world, I would assume being the next Steve Case would be an awesome thing. I don't know much he ended up with, but if he's rolling around on a pile of millions of dollars it's due to terribly money management, not lack of income. Also what has Facebook ever done for me? Do you know how many times I had to say thank you Steve Case for the free floppy disk? (Those things were not cheap, once upon a time.)

Are you trying to suggest that there's nothing at all special about the brilliant, almost groundbreaking, even better than Geo-Cities, or AOL, or powow uhm... It's like IRC on steroids!
So, what you're saying is there's nothing at all terribly innovative that Facebook is selling? That the only thing driving it's success is that finally, a generation or so into this, the "average" non-geeky consumer has come to understand a bit about the potential of the information age? And instead they all chose to play farmville and post ugly baby pictures?
Check. The thing that drives facebook is simply that "everyone and their grandmother" all decided to use it suddenly. That makes it briefly very useful. Sure they can extend that, or maintain it for a long time. But as soon as a better networking tool comes along. With no doubt an automagical way to import your profile information, photos and friends, all while winning five megabannanas for jungleville 3D. Then Facebook will be... Friendster/myspace/geocities/whatever other icon of forgotten internet community you'd like to bring up.

1: Duh.
2: The whole notion of gambling is basically an exploit of the defective software that many people seem to be carrying in their brain. Maybe wecan start a class action lawsuit on behalf of all those who've lost their life's savings in casinos?

No. Those regimes were oppressive, evil, utterly without merit or redeeming features. However they were also run by people more competent than the TSA. See, our own version of the secret police is not only built to be without regard for you essential constitutional liberties. The agency is built to be so absolutely incompetent, without any potential useful benefit to society it can cause brain damage if you just try and understand how useless the entire apparatus is. The department of homeland security was seen commenting on the (Really really tiny.) 4.2 or so Earthquake in central Indiana the other day. Wait, go back, read that last sentence for comprehension. Done yet? Yes the Indiana Department of Homeland Security can officially comment on, and protect us from Earthquakes. So.. Why ask the USGS, or anyone who might have had some kinda clue about what's actually going on?