True in some situations but 1) certainly not always true, 2) what is obvious to you may not be obvious to most consumers, and 3) they make it a requirement to use key features, which doesn't provide much of an option to the users.

Why all this subterfuge? Why not just include an app called "Tracking App" on every Android phone, and include it with every iPhone download?

If Google is right and the tracking is legitimate, what do they have to hide? Consumers will welcome it. If they (and all the other businesses and governments that track you) feel a need to keep it under the radar, then there must be a reason for that.

This happens in free societies, non-free societies, and everything in between. Consider Iraq, Pakistan, Russia, Algeria (during their insurgency), China just had a bomb go off near Tienanmen Square etc etc.

In fact, generally the free societies seem to safest and most prosperous. Long ago, when the Algerian government or military canceled election results because they disliked the winner, one expert I read predicted that there would be a violent insurgency. They said: Political aspirations won't go away; if they are denied at the ballot box, then people will try to achieve them through other means. The ballot box (and free expression) are peaceful outlets.

The rest of your statement backs that up well.

Every political system is dysfunctional. You can read the same complaint from every day throughout history. The current situation is a special case, where Congress can't act at all, but that's because of the 'Tea Party' fringe right which refuses to respect the democratic will of the majority or that anyone else in the country deserves a vote or input.

Can you socially engineer thousands of technically sophisticated Slashdot users into downloading an infected PDF?

Sometimes it does seem like Slashdot simply publishes the MIT newsfeed, without the slightest skepticism.

If you reduce barriers to using the technology, then more people can receive its benefits and create wonderful things from it, from which yet more people benefit. TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, SMTP, etc. worked out well in that regard.

I'm not against patents, but certainly it's better for everyone but the patent-holder if the technology is free.

Agreed, but I don't buy that it's ok to collect, store, and analyze anything that's publicly observable. With modern technology, that means that only things I do in a sealed, shielded basement room are private.

Use it in combination with other tools, such as those that can extract location information from my phone, to determine my location.

I can't opt-out. How will your solution prevent others from recording the location of my wireless router, or prevent people from misusing this database to hack my location?

Doesn't this amount to the Department of the Defense propagandizing directly to the U.S. public? What is acceptable and what is not?

I can see press conferences, announcements, and factual information, but when does it become an attempt to persuade the public?

Active or not, as you age your bones grow brittle, and other body parts become much more injury prone, and you heal much more slowly. I know someone 75, very active who recently had a simple bike accident, the tire hitting the curb at a relatively slow speed and them falling off. They injured their knee, required surgery, and will be unable to walk for months.

It's too easy to call people lazy. It's like calling poor people lazy. Life is much more complicated than that.

... if you walked in the street all day.

Could cycles be made safer, both to reduce risk and to reduce the coordination required to operate one. As I posted elsewhere, cycling currently excludes the elderly (for whom one fall could be catastrophic), the frail, and the otherwise uncoordinated (young or old, one encounter with a car can be catastrophic).

Some ideas:

1) Certainly they could be made more visible to cars, especially at night. For drivers, the tiny lights are hard to pickup visually against the background of the city, and things happen very fast at automobile speeds. Plus, one tiny light doesn't give any clue to the dimensions of the rest of the bike (in contrast, think of the yellow lights that outline trucks).

2) Separate bikes from cars. The different rates of speed seem to make combining them inherently dangerous. Some places already do this, with dedicated, and physically separate bike lanes. Look up Amsterdam to see examples.

3) Better stability? Why not tricycles, which don't fall over when stopping or turning too sharply? I suspect there must be some drawback, but it's transportation, not a race.

Cycling excludes many people, especially the elderly, the otherwise frail, and the uncoordinated. In the city, at least, they would be taking their lives in their hands.

It seems like an idea by the young and healthy, for the young and healthy. Which is fine, but devoting significant public resources to it seems questionable. Should cities invest in transportation programs (such as bikeshare) that many residents are physically unable to utilize?