You can just funnel the salt water to a coconut palm.

Do you work for Google ? In that case here is my complaint in specific.
Well I have a "page" already because I had a youtube account which had a different name and I got grandfathered in. So now everytime I even visit youtube, I get asked "do you want to browse as RealName or this nonRealName?" ",Are you sure you did not change your mind?". And everytime I try to comment on a video (usually trying to help with peoples tech annoyances) it asks me "Do you want to post it to your Google+"? .
This is a hundred times more difficult when I try to use the new "Google Hangouts" from my mobile phone - it always gets confused what I should have as my profile pic. Why is it so difficult for Google to know that a pic I use to chat with my friends is not the one I want to have when I use gmail (because there is work related stuff there), which is different from what I want on Google+ (which has people who are more aquaintances than people I would video chat with)? Why does google keep trying to import people from my mail into my old grandcentral account (which became google voice) ? I use that account on Google voice to buy stuff on craigslist (I worry about spammers/con artists) -why would I want to mix up my family/friends with those people or vice versa ?

Wall street journal is saying that the deal is worth about $325 millio, which is about a tenth of what the lawsuit was aiming for. Assuming the lawyers take a 25% cut, each individual in the class of 64000 should get about $2500.

The effect you describe are correct, but the intermediate steps will be different in my opinion.
If I follow what you say , Customers pay more, Cable companies become more profitable and internet companies pass on the cost and remain about the same in terms of profitability.
The situation will probably be worse. All the larger companies (established ones) will be able to pay (And probably not take a serious hit). Any new entrants will find it a barrier. So will any non-US website. So, other than Netflix,Hulu and Amazon, the market will have no movie streaming business. Youtube will be free from tiny competitors. Facebook and Google+ will have no alternatives. There will be one or two streaming music companies (not 10 or 15 as today). As a result, they will be able to charge you monopoly profits. So the actual results will probably be that established internet companies become more profitable, innovative start-ups die, consumers pay more and cable companies collect more. This is a far worse outcome for US innovation than what you describe.
Actually what surprises me is that Google actually supported net neutrality. Traffic shaping would actually allow them (through these bribes) to kill all competitors. Just pay Comcast a large enough amount and they will gladly throttle anyone else to death.

Well, they'd have to fix the real name policy and allow it to be separate from youtube/gmail etc.
I don't want all my gmail contacts getting notified through Google+ that watzinaneihm liked the latest pop video on youtube.
I don't think I do that many controversial things, but after what happened to the Mozilla CEO, I realize that what is acceptable in the future has no relation to how it is perceived today. I am not saying that donation to anti-gay-marriage was ever right, but I don't think doing what the president of the country was doing at that time was a fire-able offense either.

Not just pocket assistants. The web access (which runs over cell phone lines) are the key. Maybe the camera too.

X-raying is not standard inspection criteria. It is a test for probability of failure under repeated test (automotive vibrations on a load bearing part, airplanes etc.). For most applications a single load test suffices.

The Wall Street Journal article is wrong. There is no state in the US where even the top quartile of the welders earn anywhere near $150,000. You can look it up on DoL website .
The author is using anecdotes for evidence and appealing to commonly held assumptions (like yours) for theory.

They have a "careers" page on their website and all the jobs are in Shenzhen. They have two caucasian looking guys on their employee website, but they could be from Hong Kong for all I know.

Precisely. Cropping, change of tone/color adjustments are OK. Also note that Dodging/Burning are basically blurring out areas that the photographer/editor does not want to focus on.
That said, they say blurring of backgrounds is not OK. Maybe this will require that the editor focus all visible elements of the photo and then change the color to hide the background again - this is also possible with Lytro since it does have the information available. But it is a strange way of hiding "information" to first focus and then decrease the intensity.

trained photo editor could take the raw illum files gathered by print reporters and refocus them appropriately. I'm not sure that this would end up being ethical, though.
Why? They use filters all the time and often post-process for lighting both of which changes the amount of electrical engineering "information" in the picture. Post-focusing does not remove any information, it is information-wise similar to cropping a picture.

It isn't about throwing out light or not. It probably doesn't do the art you want either.
But I would buy it if gets comparably priced (or the same order of magnitude) as regular cameras. Going to a kids football/baseball game and getting a shot of touchdown or a runner being tagged out is worth a lot. My mid level SLR does not auto focus fast enough (or I can never set it right in manual mode properly to get many of the shots).There are many more soccer moms/dads in the world than serious photographers.

If your investment growth keeps tracks with inflation, then they balance out. If you can save 15K in 401(k) a year and put in an equivalent amount into a house, that is 30K a year and by the time you retire, should make you millionaire equivalent (zero inflation adjusted growth).
Add to this the fact that the profile of a millionaire is very similar to that of a Developer .
Average millionaire is educated with atleast college degree, earns about $100 K (which according to Dept of Labor) is what developers earn, own homes,work 40-50 hours a week etc.
Add to this the fact that most millionaires are very near retirement age and it makes it highly probable that a developer is highly probable to retire a millionaire.

As usual the Slashdot summary is incomplete on the verge of being incorrect.
Reuters has a longer story that explains the background. Digrigio testified in the Senate that he did not know of the issue. Later senate dug up documents implying the opposite.Altman did something similar (but not nearly as bad) in front of a Jury.

The problem is that we have many millions of people with NO useful skills.
Having vision and hand-eye co-ordination is a skill. People have it in varying levels (sportstars are You can take a below-average-intelligence person and have him pick cotton or harvest grains. When wheat are rice used to be harvested by hand, these people were very useful. Now that those jobs have gone to harvesters, these people are cannot be employed to run these machines. It is also far cheaper to use the machines rather than use the skills they have . They worked for some time in factories making stuff and exporting them to rest of the world. Now that has gone out too. US mostly exports software,tech and services now.
So the problem is not that they have no useful skills, but that they have no skills that are valuable. Alternately, their skills have been priced out of the market by machines.