I'm suffering from a sense of gluttony then. I have TMo's unlimited-unlimited option on my line (the rest are the 2.5GB / mo with throttling) and I routinely hit 30GB per month. 95% of that is Pandora, Twitch and YouTube streaming. I can't use WiFi at work (policies) and sadly, my WiFi at home doesn't reach my bedroom but I don't care - unlimited!

I got XPrivacy working one time in 5.0. Had to reinstall the ROM and was never able to recreate whatever alchemical magic got it going. Gave up and went back to KitKat. Even with XPrivacy (God's gift to Android) I still want an outbound firewall / logger so I can ensure nothing is communicating if I don't want it to.

I get remote deactivation for the examples you gave but a backdoor suggests far more capability - the ability to use the tools against their owner*, presumably without them finding out.

*Owner in the sense of the paying entity running it.

Where on earth did you find this many military quotes about logistics?

I'm curious what Hacking Team thought was worth the risk of watermarking their products to customer installations and having these alleged backdoors to backdoors. Seems like a lot of risk for no payoff unless they hoped one day to "flip the script" and hack their customer base...

You. I like you.

Very true, but I believe it's not so good on phones in portrait.

It does, but so far as I can tell, it wouldn't work well on a phone in portrait orientation.

Did you see 1992's Toys, starring Robin Williams? They teased just such an idea about 2 years before the MQ-1 Predator went operational.

Have you tried the Google Keyboard, with the "English (US) (PC)" custom input style activated? That input style is a proper 4-row keyboard where shifted characters appear where they should. The only thing it lacks is navigation keys like Tab and arrows.

Well, what about the in-store tracking that has been reported in Forbes and elsewhere which uses your cell phone's MAC address, in-store location tracking and video feeds to assemble a profile on you? And ever wonder why stores are all hot to offer free WiFi? And encourage their apps' use? Because as soon as you link your identity to that profile they have you. They don't need facial recognition (which I wouldn't be surprised about anyways).

And yes, if you're left foot braking you're doing things horribly, horribly wrong. Doubly so for heel-toe. [...] Keep the fancy foot work for the track and dance floor, drive properly on the road.

OK, I've read some of the following discussion and you're all making interesting points. But in the world of "Everyone has an anecdote" I have an anecdote: My current car, a Mazda RX-8 was bought used, and the synchros in second and third gear were knackered. Second was essentially unsynchronized and third was a 50/50 proposition. The only way to drive with any fluidity was to heel-toe. And heel-toe saves wear and tear on the remaining synchros - drove that beastly gearbox for 6 years before finally replacing the box.

Of course Xeno needs us to call the ambulance - Comcast's phone service being what it is!

I live less than 25 miles away from a large city's towers, and I get maybe 5 channels out of a total of 40. And that's WITH a powered antenna. Local channels availability is probably the last thing keeping us on a Concast Triple Pay. I'm sorry, what I meant to say was Concast Triple Pay.

Dropping the bundle boosts the internet-only portion a good bit but it would still be cheaper. Even with $18 / month for Netflix and Amazon Prime.

I'd have to look but the gist of the policy, aside from explicit bans on local PC archives (PST or other means were banned), was to prevent unintentional disclosures similar to what happened to Sony. Printouts are probably OK but since those can't be readily searched by team members, and because of the daily volume, hard copies have limited utility that way.