No.

I'm screwed.

Why is this marked as flamebait?

It's the first thing I thought of. If I was in that situation, unless I could become the next Ship Who Sings, then I'd rather die with some measure of dignity than be stuck in that kind of horrible state.

All HTTP connections to US websites will be redirected to a youtube video of Putin striking manly poses while riding on top of a grizzly bear.

Perhaps they shouldn't be hosting their blog server on one of those 6 ISPs.

It doesn't much matter anymore, now does it? :)

The problem is the Dunning-Kruger effect. There's a difference between 'poor and uneducated' and 'willfully ignorant and proud of it'. Unfortunately those two groups tend to overlap somewhat, although wilful ignorance spreads itself quite widely across income levels.

When you witness a bunch of morons cause wide-spread damage because they think that their uneducated opinion is just as valid as professionals who dedicate their lives to various topcs, your tolerance for stupidity drops remarkably. It's not the uneducated people that's the problem. It's the people who wallow in that ignorance like pigs in a mud puddle, treating it as something to be treasured

My reasons for going with my purchase isn't relevant to this discussion. The point is that I had an android tablet (not a tab2) that couldn't even last more than a day even if I didn't use it at all and left it on standby.

You can call bullshit on my comments if it makes you sleep better at night, but facts don't change just because you don't like them. I didn't own a tab2, but I do have an S3, and it's a steaming pile of horse shit. It's so phenominally unreliable that I can't fathom how it even make it out of the factory. I had to install cyanogenmod on it just to get control over my battery, and even then it only helped so much.

You may be happy to carry around 5 different devices depending on what you want to do. I have no interest in giving myself back strain hauling myriad electronics on top of my day to day stuff. Now I have an iPad Air and so far I'm pretty happy with it. Maybe a Tab3 or a Note would have served me just as well, but given my experience with my phone, I'll be damned if I ever buy a Samsung product again.

The thing is, Apple doesn't sell 'product'. They sell 'experience'. How well does it work? How well does it *stay* working, over the long term?

I used to have a iphone and I had the same complaints as you. Upgrading was too expensive. Not expandable. Not enough control over the device.

So my next device was a Samsung Galaxy S3. This phone has to be the single biggest piece of shit I have ever purchased. Unstable. Burned through battery, to the point where after having owned it for only 3 months, I was getting less than half a day charge out of the thing. Sure, I got the control and upgradability I wanted, but I was forced to sacrifice stability and reliability and security.

These devices are only cheaper when you don't feel that your personal time is worth any money.

I bought a couple of landfill android tablets just so I could have something to read documentation with. Basically, my entire use case was to be an e-reader. The quality of the tablets was so bad that I couldn't even do that well. A battery life of a few hours at most. While in standby.

So now I have an iPad. It's by far the best mobile device I've owned. No, I can't plug in SD cards and expand the storage. Yes, it was expensive. But let me ask you this... how much is it worth to you to know that you can pull out an iPad out of it's sleeve and be guaranteed that it's going to still have battery life. That the screen will turn out, without fail, when you hit the power button?

Apple products are not flawless. They have problems too. There is not a single thing produced by man that doesn't have problems now and then. My iPad has crashed now and then under mysterious circumstances (rarely happens now, after the latest update...) but when you compare that to the experiences I've had with the alternatives, I'll take another Apple product hands down, because I have a life to lead and I have no interest spending my time trying to figure out why something I paid good money for doesn't want to work.

I'll volunteer the term "Casual Computing".

Tablets serve one particular market exceedingly well, better than any other device produced: Casual consumption.

Flipping through email. Browsing boredpanda.com. Reading documentation. Any task where the primary interaction is absorbing content, is excellent for tablets. Especially when you are doing so in a place other than your desk. I don't need a tablet when I'm at my desk. My tablet is utterly fantastic when I'm on the bus, the train, or when I'm in bed and I really really wanna show my spouse that new Hamsters Eating Burritos video.

Trying to shoehorn tablets into being a desktop replacement is just stupid. Sure, you can approach that level by buying a bluetooth keyboard and maybe a mouse if your tablet supports such things, but why would you do such a thing when using an honest to god computer is so much better for the task?

Turning them into a phone-replacement is a possibility, but only within a very limited range of use-cases.

Having a drop in sales was inevitable. Most people who really wanted one have now got one.

So... you buy an GOOGLE Android phone. You buy one that has GOOGLE apps preloaded, because you wanted them. But then you're upset that GOOGLE search is the default, and it requires effort to change that? .....what?

Nah, it's ok that Google is strongarming manufacturers to not include 3rd party apps that compete with Google's.

It's perfectly acceptable that Google is stripping away privacy features from their phones.

BUT DAMN IT I WANT MY CHOICE OF INTERNET SEARCH!!111eleventy!

*facepalm*

The stupid... it burns!

Considering that they already have drugs that have been properly tested and (presumably) work, I have absolutely no idea....

There's clearly something serious going on under the radar that they don't want us to know about. There's no other reason why they would try so hard to keep people away.

This is a very interesting point that I haven't seen anywhere else, and a point I hadn't considered. Unfortunately I'm out of mod points so I'll just comment instead.

I replied, but something happened to my connectivity just as I was about to hit submit.

The only reason places like East Germany didn't, is because they couldn't. They didn't have this level of technology back then. Not to mention, you didn't have an entire population of people stupid enough to vomit every intimate detail of their private lives onto the internet.

Now? Oh, they'd have a total field day. Given the way Russia has been going lately, I wouldn't be surprised if they started, assuming they haven't been doing so already and were just able to hide it better than the US.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if most countries were taking steps in this direction, just because it's so easy to do now.

But the simple fact that between US corporations and the US government, privacy abuses have been so bad (although admittedly still better than some other countries) that there is no chance people would willingly opt into any such system. Even if the current incarnation is honest, there is 0% chance that it will stay that way, for one reason or another.

Everyone older than a teenager should remember the whole Google 'do no evil' thing, and many of us honestly hoped that they would stay that way. Unfortunately, reality had a way of crushing Google's desires to be honest and innocent, and to make a long story short they now they play hard ball just like everybody else.

The idea is great. But the reality would have never worked. Just like both Communism and Democracy.