While I agree to much of your post and the reasoning behind it, there's still flight AF447. This loss of a recently made, well maintained aircraft of a major carrier is still pretty unaccounted for.

We think we know now the first officer's inputs kept the plane in a constant stall while the plane practically fell straight down, for all the three minutes the crew had left between incident and accident. But the reasons behind this are still in the dark. Pilot error may be one reason, but even the worst pilots usually aren't that crazy to keep pulling up on a stalled plane that's all but falling from the sky hard and fast. There's probably more to it and, judging from the bits we know about, it probably has an electronic background.

How much cargo do you think a 747 can hold?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Boeing_747-400#747-400ERF --> 112,760 kg

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Boeing_747-8#747-8_Freighter --> 140,000 kg

At a unit weight of 4kg, this is more than 30.000 laptop computers. Of course there's more different models shipping right now, but 30.000 different devices should be a good baseline.

There's also much "anecdotal evidence" of ghosts and associated metaphysics.

No one believes them to be true either, unless one haunted house can be scientifically and rigorously tested.

Without tests, "anecdotal evidence" of PED interference is worth nothing. Pilots are indeed usually superstitious, but airplane engineers should not be.

Please tell us more on how to differentiate between gravity and acceleration, even more inside an aluminum barrel with cloud-obstructed windows, at night.

I think a certain Mr. Albert E. would like to have a word with you.

Good point.

Plant insurance is the another thing that comes to mind: nobody, really, nobody will insure a nuclear power plant against the risk of meltdown, no matter how small.

So the plants run uninsured.

Not a big deal, since meltdowns happen quite rarely. BUT: Coal, gas and oil fired power plants have to provide private insurance. Nuclear plants don't.

But since damages will be felt by people, will destroy property, will destroy health and wipe out entire towns, an uninsured nuclear power plant is in fact still insured against meltdown - just by the taxpayer.

Therefore, a running power plant will bring profits to a private corporation, while the general population aka the Taxpayers bear the risks.

Private gains for public risks. Now why do even die-hard free-market zealots have a problem with nuclear power?

How many excuses do people make up for not using WPA2 encryption that is so totally for free built into their routers and devices?

By the time you're finished writing your post, you could've set up WPA2 and be done with it. Everyone who read your post could've been done with setting up their WPA2.

With the cost of education and training for each individual soldier and the pensions to be paid if something should happen to them, expensive ammunition is the least of financial worries to a modern army of professionals. Getting the mission done with all your men coming out unharmed is worth a lot, not only financially, but also strategically: you can influence and take part in battles you've never could before, because the risk is higher for a spectacular failure. Wounded soldiers always cause public inquiries on exactly why The Army of One needed to be there. When it's more likely that all the blue guys get home unharmed, you can take much more chances in ethically/morally/economically questionable settings. And that is worth not only the insane cost per bullet for some...

Good idea in hiding the SSID.

Bad truth is, your clients have to actively probe exactly THAT SSID every few seconds if they're not connected to it. So they're trying to connect to it every time you're away from home, ie. airport, Starbucks, the mall, all places where you least want your device to send out *anything*.

If you've got more than one hidden SSID, the active probing the clients have to do gets increasingly ridiculous.

And the signal modulated onto your powerline ethernet is protected from your neighbors how?

Did you think the modulated EM waves carrying your data are
a) traveling only to those parts of the line that are located inside your property
and/or
b) refusing to radiate off from all that definitively unshielded plain wiring inside your house?

Powerline is a security risk, if you ask me.

Some of us live in that magical land of fairytales where it's below zero every night for about half the year, every year, with temperatures during the day being not much higher.

In a climate like this, banning small electric heaters that also give off some light is pretty hilarious.

People heating their homes with electricity (very popular in France, BTW) should not use electric light bulbs because of what?

Nobody knows for sure, but judging from the evidence presented and the circumstances surrounding them, a clear verdict should be possible.

A cached database of location points is only created for a reason, especially when it's done on a mobile device, using scarce CPU cycles and even scarcer battery power to do it. The GPS receiver and CPU consume quite a bit of power, which is the most precious resource on a smartphone. Switching on the main radio for triangulating its position when GPS is unavailable is even worse, considering it is then usually triggered inside buildings, where the main radio has to ramp up transmit power to get to their cell tower.

Fine-grained tracks recorded when no application is actively requesting them?
An uncalled-for but constant drain on the most precious resource and deciding factor of a smartphone - its battery?
Neat position databases with no discernible limits in length, just for a cache?
Large amounts of data synchronized to a new phone via the owner's synced computer, by accident?
All this effort for a database that until now wasn't documented, unused and unavailable to any existing app in the entire app store, for a legitimate reason?

All cheaters usually exclaim even when caught red-handed "It's not what you think, it's not what it seems, there's a good explanation for it."

But all things considered, this is a textbook example of "if it quacks like a duck". And Apple cheated on this one. Face it and show them the door.

It's also a network effect at work here:

First, it's important how many of your friends have a BluRay drive, so you can watch your movies at their place and vice versa.

Second, it's equally important how many high-resolution movies you have watched. After several movie nights with a razor-sharp, crystal-clear image, it needs some willpower to go back to regular resolution DVD. I'm discounting pirated downloads of several GB that take ages to complete and online streaming that freeze a few times per movie as your flatmates, kids, spouses or neighbors download something else on your shared line. BluRay has none of that, but a perfect image. After a few movie nights with a high-res display or home cinema projector, going back is painful.

(But they have forced advertising on BR discs, and do I hate these bastards for that)

The BluRay burner in my Thinkpad is only 2x speed, which translates to 25GB burned in about 40 minutes. About the same time it takes to burn a DL DVD-R. I can live with that, as it is twenty-five full gigabytes of stuff. Ripping or transcoding I have not even tried, but I know it takes a literal whole day, so 40min of burn time is a joke compared to that.

But it is a godsend when you also have a high-megapixel digital camera and an itchy trigger finger. Movies go straight to portable HDDs anyway, but with each digicam picture weighing in at 5mb, a single at disc worth 25GB is golden, even more as it is at least somewhat resistant against shocks, electrical failure and totally immune to erroneous overwriting.

If the only thing that prevents the collapse of the Western World is protection of intellectual property, then be sure to have a good bug-out location.

Maybe I'm just too jaded, but relying on intellectual property that can be copied digitally, perfectly within a few seconds is probably not the most sustainable basis for an economy.

When all you have is something that can be multiplied a millionfold within a few hours, you're hosed. Sorry to break it to you, but it's true.

Of course we can make laws and enforce them, but unlike physical crimes like theft and murder, it is no real harm done, but all hypothetical musings on "potential lost sales". And it is nothing but statistics and vague guesswork. I think many people have bought real, genuine Bluray-discs of movies they already possessed pirated copies of. Actual loss of sale = 0, probably even better, since they may not ever heard of that movie before. And I think many people have seen pirated copies of movies they would have never spent a single dime on and regretted every minute of time wasted for it. Actual loss of sale = 0 as well.

You cannot make reliable assumptions on potential sales lost. Therefore, you cannot judge about a fair punishment on it. Something that cannot be punished fairly cannot not be punished without hurting tangible, actual rights. If the business model of the Western world relies on that, I'd sell my stock in them, fast.