Better analogy: the police suspect you have a grow op. They cordon off your house, and proceed to try to pick the lock on your front door. Having done that, and gone in and found evidence of wrongdoing, they are now asking a judge to compel you to unlock all your other properties, so the FBI may conduct a further fishing expedition to see if you have anything else they can charge you for.

My HTC Sensation was my first smartphone, so that may bias me a little. I've moved on to a Note 2 now, but I constantly find myself missing features from Sense 3.5, and bewildered by "features" of Touchwiz (MMS messages as slideshows that you can't zoom in on? WTF Samsung, WTF.)

Just because he's not forcing you doesn't mean he isn't using force. He's hacking the bank's computers; basically he's robbing the bank and trying to put the blame on you.

Here's the history, in slideshow form: http://xkcd.aubronwood.com/#

No Javascript.

"Monetarily oppressive"? What does that even mean?

Do you mean "won't take as much of your money"? If you think that, you may be surprised to know that many foreign companies use the US as a tax shelter; we have a high nominal tax rate, but since our tax system is so full of holes anyone who can employ a decent tax attorney (that is, anyone with more than a million dollars in assets who's willing to pay a few percent to said attorney) can effectively get the lowest tax rate in the industrialized world, so low that many Fortune 500 companies get money from the government, rather than the other way around.

Or maybe you mean "won't restrict you from spending your money the way you want"? Well, in one sense that's true; in China for instance if you don't want to obey the environmental laws you're just a couple of bribes away from getting a blank check, and in Bangladesh apparently you don't ever have to worry about a building inspector noticing you have an extra five stories on your three story building. On the other hand, in China a foreign company can have all its assets seized and given to a local competitor, and the government can at any time prevent any transaction it doesn't like, and in Bangladesh you're much more likely to have your assets and/or personnel seized by marauding gangs, due to the lack of security infrastructure.

No; this whole notion of "monetarily oppressive" is just empty rhetoric, spouted by people who make more money than you to distract you while they rewrite US tax law to better suit them. Outsourcing happens for one of two reasons:

1) when it can save a company money, or
2) when some pointy-haired MBA can pretend it's saving a company money, in order to rob the company blind and give himself a golden parachute.

1) happens much less often than most people think, and even in the best case it's only a short term winner, which means it's always a loser for a government that has to think about what's best for future generations.

Governments don't care about profits. Most happily spend more than they make practically every year; it's called running a budget deficit, and it's something almost all governments do. In fact it's kind of the point of modern governments; if the government were to actually make a profit, that just means that the government is sitting on a pile of money rather than using it to make the country a better place.

No, there are two scenarios where outsourcing works (for certain values of "works"):

1) You are too small to rate a full-time employee in a particular field (eg. a small business outsourcing IT to a consulting firm), or the company you are outsourcing to can benefit from economies of scale that you can't by yourself (ex. service contracts for analytical instrumentation)
2) You are pulling a scam by externalizing costs, that is, you are:
2a) Externalizing infrastructure costs, as in dodging the taxes that keep the society around you functioning,
2b) Externalizing environmental costs, as in setting up manufacturing in a country that will let you dump toxic waste all over rather than cleaning up after yourself and relying on future generations to clean up your mess,
2c) Externalizing labor costs, as in setting up manufacturing/service centers in a country where workers have fewer rights, a lower starting skillset, and lower starting wages.
2d) Externalizing future capital outlays, as in getting a 1-2 year discount on this year's service, declaring a massive profit and giving yourself a huge 4th quarter bonus/boasting to the electorate about how much you saved them, knowing full well that in 2 years you'll have your golden parachute so you don't care about how much more the company will have to pay.

Governments rarely benefit from 1), and it certainly doesn't apply to airport security. In fact the opposite is true: the TSA can benefit from a nationwide scope that private companies can't hope to match. Local governments can benefit from 1, but mostly for small analytical contracts or by partnering with large multinationals (see City of Los Angeles outsourcing email to Google).

2a-2c pretty much don't ever apply to government outsourcing; that's more of a private industry thing. 2d is the big one, the big con job the neocons pulled off in the 2000s that saw us go from forecast surpluses to trillion dollar deficits inside of ten years. That's what government outsourcing means: it's a shell game, meant to give a politician a temporary political boost, at the cost of trillions of dollars to taxpayers.

Yeah, I know people who worked as private security in the airports before the TSA; they got better reviews because they did a bad job. People got through lines quickly and weren't harassed as much because they weren't being screened; there was a honk, a wave, and zero accountability.

Again, I'm not saying the TSA doesn't have massive room for improvement, but it is undeniably more effective than the haphazard patchwork network we had before.

No, we give it to someone else because then that someone else would have to compete with the incumbents, and the resulting competition will force prices down, as opposed to our current system of two enormous rent-seekers sitting on vast piles of spectrum, doing nothing with it, and forcing us to pay extorionate amounts for terrible service.

Which is the same thing, in the private sector, as saying, "Outsource everything. The companies we send our jobs to will always have our best interests at heart."

Look, we've tried the whole government outsourcing thing. It doesn't work; the companies we outsource to just hire substandard workers and do less work while charging the government ever increasing fees to do what once was done efficiently and well. It's the reason we don't have private police or fire departments anymore. Sure, the TSA needs some serious reforms, but privatizing the whole thing will leave us with a bigger mess than we have now.

Who modified this insightful? Only one of his outrageous claims is even technically true, and that one is highly misleading (Obama tried to close Gitmo, but was blocked by Senate Republicans who filabustered the bill that would have funded the closure).

The market most smartwatches are aiming for is the market most watch-wearing millennials belong to: watch as practical fashion accessory. It's the same reason I still wear glasses rather than contacts or getting laser surgery: I like the way I look in glasses. I wear a hat--a Stetson, in fact--rather than a hoodie or a baseball cap for the same reason, and I have a nice, middle-of-the-road Seiko that I wear, not because it's impossible for me to find out the time any other way, but because I like the look of it.

A smartwatch adds a little more "practical" to the "practical fashion accessory". I like where the Pebble is going; if version 2 has a sapphire watch crystal then I'll definitely be on the preorder list; heck I might have been on this one if I had heard about the Kickstarter project before it closed.

Good thing the DMCA wasn't enforced in that instance, otherwise it would have been illegal to fix your computer after Sony broke it with their rootkit.

Given this is Slashdot... a case for something other than an iPhone? :)

Doesn't matter if they are or aren't. If they are in-house, they want this case to be over so they can go out and sue other people. If they are outside, they want to keep a decent won/loss record, so other people will hire them to pursue their cases. The US doesn't have such a deficit of lawyers that it can't afford to jetison a few who don't preform.