It is not necessarily a useless deterrent just because it could be bypassed with a mod chip, some solder, and some fine motor control skills.

I am a pretty big guy and I see walking zombies holding their phone out in front of them all the time. If I were a disreputable person, I could snatch about 90% of the cell phones I see (obviously avoiding the 10% of cell phone users who actually look like they are aware of their surroundings and big and strong enough to be capable of putting up a real fight), put it in my pocket, get into a waiting car, and just drive away. I have seen this happen at least twice . One time two teenagers waited until the train stopped, grabbed a smart phone from a short (5'6") East Asian woman and took off sprinting down the hill. Another time, a young boy grabbed a phone right out of a man's hands and was halfway down the block and approaching the subway entrance before they even realized what happened.

Do you think these are the kind of people who are going to be opening the phones up and disabling the security with clever soldering skills?

The benefits of smart phone theft is that it is a one or two man operation. You can steal the phone and then resell it on the secondary market yourself. With kill switches, even if they can be bypassed, you are going to have to get someone else involved, a person who will be used by a plethora of robbers, a person whom, unlike the street roaches that pop up everywhere, will be someone "higher up" in the crime ladder whom the authorities can focus on.

So, even if the kill switches are bypassed, they could still make it much easier for the authorities to go after smart phone crimes because bypassing the kill switches will likely be a much more centralized operation than the random street thugs who steal things and resell them on craigslist or the street corner.

People really need to do a true cost/benefit analysis instead of just reacting to whatever thought first pops into there head.

1. If the government wants to kill your phone access, all they have to do is get a judge to issue a court order to the major cell phone providers to block your phone's ID.

2. While the government cannot currently "remote-brick" your phone, exactly how would that capability be more prone to abuse than current technology? Other than the data stored on your phone, there is no difference between remote-bricking of users phones and direct manipulation of current cellular phone networks. If they want to shut off communication, they can order towers shut down or even specific users communication blocked using current technology.

3. This could potentially present some room for abuse. Hackers could potentially brick people's phones. However, hackers could potentially do a lot of other nasty things even without this technology. It would increase the chances of a nasty exploit, but it would also potentially decrease the usefulness and value of a stolen phone dramatically, which seems like a fair payout.

4. Carriers and manufacturers could make this technology standard, with the ability to opt out. This would give consumers who, due to their unjustified paranoia regarding the government, do not want this technology and easy way to avoid it.

So:
+Potentially cutting down or even eliminating many robberies, which in major cities these days, primarily consist of smart phone related violence.
+Giving consumers control over their own devices and denying robbers to easily turn over stolen property to a secondary market.
-The carriers or hackers could exploit this technology to disable your phone, especially if careful steps are not put into place to avoid abuse (don't pay your bill, your phone gets bricked).

All in all, the benefits far outweigh the costs. Polls show the consumers want this. It needs to happen now. Only greedy cell phone providers and unjustifiable paranoia stand in the way.

My parents moved out to the countryside when they retired. They are a few miles from the nearest small town (population of a few hundred). The only way for them to access the internet is satellite, which is too high latency for VOIP. After a big storm, they lost cellular connectivity for several years (most likely a tower went down and was never replaced due to the small number of users) and pretty much relied on their copper (which was generally in terrible condition and had a ton of noise and crosstalk).

Is it an obsolete technology? Yes, but remember, obsolete technologies that work (IBM mainframe and dumb terminals, telegraph, et cetera) are a whole lot better than new technologies you cannot access.

So, do we really need copper telephone wires in New York or San Francisco? No, but companies should not be able to remove phone service unless they have government-regulated VOIP utilities or a net-neutral internet connection with bandwidth to support VOIP ready to replace it.

Actually, I mentioned that was why I thought the first season was worse than the second despite the fact that the second had more episodes that raised the bar for truly awful, because it did have some gems.

The first season was kind of a turd sandwich, a couple of nice, solid pieces of rye bread with something unpalatable between them.

The second season was more like the diarrheal explosions of a man who was smuggling diamonds in his stomach. There were some real gems, but you had to pick your way through dreck to locate them.

I liked the first episode and I liked the last episode. There was very little of redeeming value in between. The second season actually had even worse episodes than the first as well as my least favorite character, but it also saw the introduction of an excellent new character and as well as one of the series best episodes ("Measure of a Man"), so no competition, the first season wins hands down as the worst episodes despite not having Dr. Pulaski and "Shades of Grey".

I mean, in two of the first episodes of the first season they could not afford makeup for their aliens, so they just made one alien race all-black and the other all Scandinavian. Talk about phoning it in.

The population of the planet is predicted to peak around 10-16 billion people. Every one of them needs a toothbrush. At some point in the distant future, resources might become so abundant that most personal property can be produced using something like Star Trek's replicator; however, not in my lifetime.

3-D printing might make more sense for some products than traditional manufacturing. If you have an old car that is long out of production, producing parts in a printer might make more sense than tooling a factory to produce a limited run of a part for an old car. Anything that people need in the millions though. . . it just does not seem economically competitive to manufacture on demand.

I do think the retail landscape will change a lot. As the negative impact of personal automobiles become more of a crisis, people will do a lot less offline shopping and will simply have products delivered. I think that manufacturing centers will spring up to produce certain goods on demand, some locally, but eventually much of that will be produced centrally too (in large factories on cheap land) and shipped out to you.

And, of course, for smaller, less complicated things, 3D printers in the home might move out of the realm of hobbyist into the mainstream, the way many people have a professional quality printer (laser or inkjet) in their home these days, but I don't see most common products being produced on demand. Large factories tooled to a specific product will still be the most efficient way to produce things on a large scale.

I know, my point was that Microsoft could manufacture a Surface Pro with an "Intel framework" (your words) that was about as light as an iPad Air. Other Windows 8.1 Tablet Manufacturers do.

The weight is, to some degree, a design and marketing choice to place the Surface Pro at the high end of the market.

Actually, I don't think the Intel framework has much to do with the weight. The plastic Windows mini tablets using Intel Atom processors are often lighter and cheaper than iPads.

There is a lot of weight that the Surface Pro could shed without losing the x86 processor. They could switch to netbook processors with passive cooling. They could ditch the metal frame for a plastic one. They could ditch the internal digitizer. They could use a smaller screen with less protection. . . .

The thing is basically an ultrabook with a removable keyboard.

I disagree. Placebo effects do cure people. Just because a symptom is subjective does not mean it is not real.

If I have a subjective symptom like pain, take some placebo pills, placebo acupuncture, et cetera, and I feel better, then to some degree I have "cured" the pain. People will often dismiss it as saying, "it's all in your head", but so is all pain and many subjective symptoms. Many legitimate pain relievers work on your brain.

The whole reason the FDA demands to test medicine designed to treat subjective symptoms against placebos is not because placebos do not work; it is because most honest to goodness medical treatments carry some risk, and if they cannot demonstrate much greater efficacy than placebos, they are exposing patients to increased risk without any increased benefit. If doctors could just give someone an IV drip, tell them it was morphine, and have them experience a placebo effect as strong as a real morphine drip, there would be no need for actual morphine.

But it is important not to dismiss patients' subjective symptoms as unreal or "all in their head". Regardless of the objective evidence, the subjective symptoms are real.

Medicine is the SCIENCE of healing. When alternative "medicine" scientifically demonstrates its efficacy and safety, it is just called . . . . medicine, no scare quotation marks needed.

There is a reason that the FDA has such a stringent approval process for drugs, medical procedures, and devices. It is because doing good science is hard. Alternative "medicine", while it is practiced by people of all political persuasions, has become to the left what young earth creationism and climate change denial has become to the right. Now we are seeing outbreaks of infectious diseases in the United States that were once largely eradicated by vaccination programs.

Thank you Wikipedia for keeping the charlatans honest.

Absolutely true, and if the iPad Air could run Mathematica, MS Office Enterprise, Matlab, IDL, et cetera, I would buy one in a heartbeat.

My last tablet PC weighed in at just under 5 pounds. For me, that was about the maximum weight limit I felt comfortable holding in one hand for an extended period. The Surface Pro 2, by contrast, feels like a feather. I don't have to cradle it in my arm to hold it for hours.

And it weighs less than the lightest Macbook Air, which is also quite a featherweight in my book. Again, I realize that there are people with weak wrists, arthritis, et cetera who really do need the lightest tablet they can get. The Surface Pro probably is not for them, but it is for me.

In fact, just about the only thing I would complain about is the screen. I think the 4:3 ratio is better for business, I would prefer a 12.5" screen, and when my smartphone has a 1080p screen, that resolution on a high end tablet ultrabook seems a bit underwhelming.

The weight of the Surface Pro 2 is similar to that of the original iPad (about a third heavier), something that I don't remember too many people complaining about being heavy. I guess after getting used to using tablets that were five pounds, the Surface Pro 2 feels light as a feather to me, but I suppose some smaller people, especially women, might have trouble with the weight.

Also, remember that the Surface Pro 2 is a top of the line ultrabook in tablet form. There are much smaller, lighter Windows tablets that use the new quad core ARM processors.

I would like to see them include a 12.5" model in 4:3 format in the future, but remember, like Google's Android and unlike Apple's iOS, you can find Windows tablets in all shapes, sizes, and price points from a variety of manufacturers.

Windows OS has been on tablets since Microsoft introduced XP Tablet Edition back in 2002. It's not exactly a new phenomena. Windows RT (which is a half a decade too late getting to the market), which runs on low end ARM tablets is the new phenomena. From everything I have seen, it is at least as secure as iOS or stock Android.

It's problem is simply that it got to the market too late to beat Apple and Android to the punch and only about a year before Intel introduced low-powered Atom and Core processors that could compete with ARM processors in battery life. When an Atom mini-tablet starts at $350 and can run tens of thousands of existing desktop applications (even if most of them are not optimized for a tablet) and when the Android app store is huge while Windows RT is tiny, it just is hard to justify why anyone would want a second-generation RT tablet.

Actually, the story is about the pro line. The fact that they were talking about i5 processors and not ARM chips probably should have clued you into that.

I don't see the RT line lasting into another generation as it is. They should roll the code into Windows Phone and just kill off the tablet line. If someone wants to make a Windows Phone tablet, then more power to them, but Microsoft should focus on its x86 tablet line now that Intel has Atom and core processors that can compete with ARM in terms of battery life. I mean, when you can pick up a $350 mini tablet that runs the full version of Windows 8.1, any desktop app a netbook could handle, and is only a little bigger and with a bit less battery life than an iPad, who would want to spend $400-500 on Windows RT?

Their factory spec battery life for watching video is the same. As for real use, I suspect the iPad probably is better, but I would want to see a side-by-side comparison using multiple and identical test standards to confirm it, not tests from two different websites. There are too many variables that can affect battery life.