Windows phones are no simpler than iPhones or Android phones.

Good to know.

Well said. I tried to make similar points, but you explained them much more thoroughly and clearly.

In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis analyzes this at length: that in most of the world, the rich live in urban centers, and the poor have great difficulty affording housing in urban centers. The trouble is, of course, the urban centers are where all the jobs are. So, there are all sorts of messy, quasi-legal and illegal housing arrangements. It's quite common for people to have to pay rent to sleep on sidewalks, for example.

It's relatively recently that housing patterns in the US have started shifting to match those of the rest of the world.

Of course, many forms of work can be performed from anywhere, provided there's access to high-bandwidth communication, which would significantly ease the burden on many people to find affordable housing. But that rather brings us back to the problem illustrated in the original article.

Then you don't understand poverty.

Conservatives used to occasionally kick up a fuss about "unfunded mandates". Poor people have to deal with those all the time. One unfunded mandate is that Internet access is a practical requirement for participation in contemporary society. If you don't have Web access, you can't search for jobs or apply for them, or fill out legally mandatory paperwork, or do your homework.

As we all know, web-enabled devices are bargains, because they enable access to many different forms of communication and entertainment. I remember a furor erupting when a local newspaper, for an article about long-term unemployment showed a photo of a family in a one-room apartment. There was a table, with a smartphone on it. There were a few chairs, and some blankets and pillows on the floor, and no other furniture; no television, no other telephone, nothing. Yet people complained they couldn't really be poor, because they had a smartphone.

And yes, McDonalds is bad food, and overpriced. Try visiting a poor urban neighborhood sometime. It's a major problem that low-income neighborhoods frequently lack grocery stores, that the only food sources within a few miles are corner stores with overpriced convenience foods and fast food restaurants.

The ASUS RT-N66U's stock firmware prominently features this as an option (though I'd recommend replacing the stock firmware with RMerlin's customized version that includes OpenVPN).

I have a router that allows for setting multiple SSIDs and for setting the access rules, so I set up an SSID of openwireless.org a few months ago, with no access to my LAN but otherwise unrestricted access. I live in a dense urban area, near a heavily-trafficked shopping and dining area. I get a dozen or so unique MACs connecting to the open WiFi a day. They usually just connect for a minute or two. The increase in bandwidth usage has been negligible: less than 1%.

I haven't checked exactly what they're connecting to, but it looks a lot to me like they're just checking Google Maps, and no one is downloading porn.

Hear, hear.

The degree of cowardice in this thread is astonishing.

What is it with these anti-science hippies, quoting scientists, instead of trusting in corporations? We only produce about twice the amount of food needed to feed everyone in the world, so, clearly, we need to bring food production more tightly under the control of a tiny number of gigantic agribusinesses, in order to eliminate hunger.

That's my last line of psychological defense.

Science has fed the world with an unbelievable array of giant, hearty and delicious foods. It's called agriculture, and it was invented 10,000 years ago.

Hunger and poverty are political weapons.

I was beginning to think that the Democrats maybe weren't so bad, and maybe I should reconsider my stance of refusing to vote for them. Then I was in a bookstore, and saw Madeline Albrights lich-like grimace on a book cover, and I remembered.

Look at a globe that shows elevations, and notice how there's a nearly continuous belt of plains around the northern hemisphere, that generally coincides with the range of latitudes with a range of temperatures optimal for growing grains. That's where the large-scale industrialized agriculture that feeds most of the human race occurs.

A global warming trend would shift that range of latitudes with optimal temperatures northward, where there is significantly less terrain suitable for industrialized agriculture. This would mean a significant reduction in agricultural production, and thus to famine and violent conflicts for control of food supplies. Humans probably wouldn't go extinct, but it would certainly be a tremendous disaster.

It depends upon how you define AI, I suppose. If you look at armed robots, Predator drones, and the interest in increasing the automation of these machines, I think you can see something that could become increasingly dangerous.

I only saw a few episodes. I believe the series, in a nutshell, was summed up when the chief of staff of a ministry is discussing the new minister's ostensible policies with another career civil servant.

"Open government? That's a contradiction in terms!"