I use Facebook ironically.

And how exactly will turning the prison system into an adult daycare promote rehabilitation? IMO, this is why the number of repeat offenders is so high. Give them high school and college courses, or let them otherwise learn a useful life skill; do anything but make prison an extended vacation for them.

Racism implies an erroneous stereotype; its no secret that law enforcement tend to single out the lower class and minorities, simply because the police themselves observe stereotypes of their own (i.e. if you don't have a lot of money, you're more likely to steal). A lot of police use these stereotypes as justification to bend the law, as long as they think they're sticking to the spirit of it.

What's the alternative? the knowledge that is the cornerstone of modern physics, knowledge that has been tested time and time again and found true, is upturned by one experiment? Sorry, my money's on a measurement error.

This isn't a fundamental difference between macroscopic and microscopic; what it boils down to is human perception. We exist in the macroscopic world, so we perceive things thusly. Quantum "weirdness" doesn't just happen on the microscopic scale, but the odds of a quantum event being observed macroscopically would equal the odds of the same quantum event happening simultaneously to every particle of a macroscopic object (quantum tunneling is the event that comes immediately to mind). The world doesn't change just because we're in it, regardless of what new-age pseudo-scientists would have you believe.

Some people are willing to shell out more money for a faster processor, while other people are not. It costs more to produce genuinely different CPU's than to just cripple one CPU, so the idea is that they make a large profit from the people who will pay for the faster CPU, and a lower profit from those who won't.

If the connection was routed solely inside of the United States, I would say you're right; however, the connections are routed around the world, and would require the concerted efforts of several countries to even begin to trace the origin. Even if they do monitor every packet going across a backbone provider in the U.S., TOR packets are encrypted. The NSA may well have technology to crack encryption that we don't know about, but unless you've seriously pissed somebody high up off, I doubt you have anything to worry about.

While what you say about IP addresses being included in every packet is true, it's possible to mask your identity by going through proxies. If I, for example, use TOR, my connection can be routed all over the world before reaching my final destination; this makes it at the very least impractical, and most of the time outright impossible, to trace the origin. Anonymity is possible on the internet if you have the right tools and the intelligence to use them properly.

Statistics show this to be the opposite. People with lower income (and thus having a lower tax burden) tend to reproduce more than those more well off. Moreover, people with a lower income are more likely to gamble away what little they have (high rollers are a minority). Online poker has lower buy-ins than brick and mortar card rooms, making it even more likely that lower income populations will play. I am a firm believer in personal responsibility, so I don't believe that online poker should be banned for this reason; however, it should be regulated to prevent money from funneling to unsavory endeavors (terrorism, human trafficking, etc.)

We're whalers on the moon,
We carry a harpoon,
For they ain't no whales
So we tell tall tales
And sing our whaling toon

Yes, but idiots are more likely to find value in worthless things. A computer is a useful tool; the more expensive the computer, the more use a particular individual will get out of it (though idiots also buy more expensive computers than they really need).

If someone tries to put it into a bill, then you can whine about censorship; until then, it's no different than you, me, or anyone else asking for the app to be pulled. I'll concede that they might have a bigger voice than the rest of us, but the burden still falls completely on Apple to heed or dismiss the request. Perceived authority is not the same as actual authority; both you and I have been around long enough to know this, and so have the people at Apple who will ultimately decide this app's fate.

noone knows how to spell any more.

The article fails to mention whether he initiated the voice mail recording for the specific purpose of recording his interaction with the police officer. If so, then the city might have a case (NH is an all party consent state). On the other hand, any competent judge should throw out a criminal case where the sole evidence was a snippet of conversation accidentally recorded from a cellphone. Intent still matters in this country... For now, anyway. IANALBIPOTGL (I Am Not a Lawyer, But I Pretended Once To Get Laid).

I couldn't agree more. Many don't realize how much computers run our lives, mostly because of how seldom they fail. On the other hand, most peoples' direct experience with computers are PC's running badly written software. The paranoia is understandable, but people need to realize that these are two different animals. A system designed for a specialized task running on standardized hardware is more reliable than any person on the best day of their life... Which is why we have anti-lock brakes on cars and autopilot on airplanes.

I'm not suggesting that an AI be given full, unchecked reign of the road (at least not right now, anyway), but a type of "smart" cruise control with a human backup wouldn't be a bad thing.