I have an iPhone (5c) and a Samsung Galaxy (5s) for private use in different parts of the world, and both are pretty unstable. The phone I have that "just works" is my Blackphone.
The caveat there, though, is that the two private phones have a fair amount of crap installed on them, both by myself and the carrier. The Blackphone has just the basic corporate and productivity tools.YMMV though, as a couple of colleagues with Blackphones have had problems with them.

However, my overall view from fairly recent factory resets on both private phones is that my Blackphone in its current state is still a bit more stable than either the iPhone or Galaxy in anything other than default factory config.

Once cured of your cancer though, you are no longer a revenue stream for the company. Unless you count the potential for revenue from other illnesses you might contract, but for the typical bean counter a potential revenue stream like that, which would probably be shared with other Big Pharma companies, so do little or nothing for "this" company's bottom line.
As for the whole bean counter argument, that is exactly who runs pretty much all of the Big Pharma companies - accountants and MBAs whose only concern is how to maximize profits. Admittedly I have no citation for that, other than a trawl through the Bloomberg and Reuters data on Pharmaceutical companies to see who are on the Boards of Directors and what their qualifications are. But a brief review of the Boards for Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Roche, GlaxoSmithkline, Novartis, Sanofi, AstraZeneca, Abbot, Merck, and Beyer, all show basically the same make-up - lots of "business" people, and a vanishingly small technical/medical representation.

I am fairly sure that the UK (and US, for that matter) government do not consider most of the non-IS rebels in Syria to be terrorists but as Freedom Fighters, although Bashar al-Assad (Syrian President) definitely does label them as terrorists.

As this is basically a different point of view, it is totally assinine of Mark Rowley and shows a complete lack of awareness about what technology is capable of.
Granted, Youtube, Twitter, et. al., can block or delete content and accounts that display objectionable material, but the major problems there are who decides what content is objectionable (these companies do not want to get into the censorship game - unless it is profitable, which it would not be), and the sheer volume of content being produced makes active management impossible.

The irony for me is that the US government (via DARPA) developed technology such as TOR, to help activists and freedom fighters stay anonymous on the internet, and now the people in power are surprised that such tools are not only used by people who believe in the same underying values.

Similarly, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are great for building communities around lolcat pictures, but how dare anyone who does not share my philosophy and world view use these tools!?!?

This is a plus for the consumer, definitely.
Personally, I install some kind of ad blocking software on every computer I build for friends and family. This is mainly because, while I might trust a particular web site I most certainly do not extend that trust to whatever 3rd party ad host is used, and there have been enough instances of ad servers hosting malware for me to block the whole lot on principle.
However, the next step from the advertisement-laden internet sites is going to be to refuse access to any browsers running ad blockers, so the ad blockers' most salient feature is going to be their ability to run in a stealth mode that gets around such restrictions.

I would be willing to bet that the big pharma companies will never actually produce a cure for cancer. Treatments, for sure, but not a cure.
The reason being economics - let's say that a person with cancer was willing to hand over every last dollar they own for a cancer cure. Big Pharma would make a reasonably large sum of money off that person, but it is a one-off sale. So to get more money, they need to get it from another poor sod with cancer. Now consider that there is not a cure, but a "treatment" for cancer that must be taken every day for the rest of your life. Big Pharma cannot make anywhere near as much per tablet for that, but it is an on-going source of income over the course of 5, 10, 20 years, and will almost certainly result in more money for the company.

My bad... I was thinking of the South Lawn... it's been a while since I was in D.C.
Still, this is like 1.5-2 miles from the White House, so for a typical gyrocopter this is less than 2 minutes' flying time from WH, and well within the P-56 Prohibited Flight zone covering Washington D.C. and Baltimore.

If White House security get credible intelligence warning of an impending attack on the White House 1 hour before it happens, and they do nothing to prevent the attack, then the security staff there are ragingly incompetent. There are entire sections of the Secret Service dedicated to the protection of the President, his (maybe "her" in future) family and the White House itself, so 60 minutes' warning is at least 55 minutes more than they would need to actually do something.
Hey, I know... let's ask the Russians and the Chinese to make their nukes slower, so that we can have more than 1 hour's warning of an attack, because 1 hour is just too little time and it's not fair. We need AT LEAST 2 hours to call the decision-makers out of their budget review meetings when important shit happens.

That is like saying that it is impossible to be racist if you are black.
Looking at a typical dictionary definition of sexism - "prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.", Affirmative Action (a.k.a. Positive Discrimination) is still as sexist/racist as any other kind of discrimination, because it is putting people into a position because of their gender/colour/membership of a minority.

For me, the tragedy of Affirmative Action is that many of the appointments of women or minorities made under that banner are of people whose skillset, abilities and experience justify the appointment in their own right. But because of Affirmative Action, those people are often dismissed or devalued in the eyes of their peers because "they only got that position because of Affirmative Action".

Based on my experience in the UK, where there is a very heavy advertising and awareness campaign every year in the lead-up to Christmas, and where drunk-driving is far less socially acceptable than in the 'States, making DUI a felony will have an beneficial effect on the DUI rates, in a couple of ways - those who, when sober, know that they are going out for a few drinks and while drunk might be liable to drive home or offer friends a lift home, will possibly leave their keys at home; secondly, offenders who are caught and get jail time plus a driving ban (and probably losing their job as a result as well) will probably not make the same mistake again once they get their licence back.
Having said that, there is always a hard core of DUI drivers who will continue to drive no matter the punishment (although on-the-spot execution by Police would make them one-time offenders).
Most of the "enforcement" though, comes from the community and the driver's circle of friends - someone saying to that person "you have had a few, driving will not be cool for you if you get caught or for the mother and 2 kids that you kill in an avoidable accident while DUI, so we will all take a taxi home". Also, schemes like "Designated Driver", where when your group walks into a bar one person is nominated as the driver, and he gets free soft drinks all night, have been effective in the UK.

Fundamentally, very VERY few people have the necessary self-knowledge to be able to see how much their driving skill, decision-making and reaction times are affected by alcohol. Lots of people think they are fine to drive, and many DUI journeys pass without incident, but just because the driver made it home without killing someone does not mean they are ok to drive. As long as their decision-making skills are impaired, their ability when drunk to rationalize the decision whether to drive or walk/take a taxi will also be impaired, and with most people the reaction of the community around them will be the thing that stops them, rather than the prospect of jail time for being caught.

"Thought is the arrow of time" seems to me like an appropriate quote for this, although a discussion of WHY I feel it is appropriate would turn this into a wall of text that would challenge the attention span of anyone! Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" opus was so sprawling and rambling, with so many different threads and details, that it was (a) hard to keep all the threads of the story in mind between books, and (b) outlived Jordan himself - he died before finishing it.
To a degree, I think that OP's memory is a bit rose-tinted, and he is forgetting all of those "bah, I cannot concentrate" occasions from last year. At the same time, the mental discipline to focus on a particular thing and tune out distractions is a learned skill that is easily disrupted through lack of sleep, too much caffeine (usually drunk/eaten because of the lack of sleep), hormones, and of course, the bright, shiny, buzzy phone or web browser.
As a 40-something IT guy, I have noticed the same problems in others and myself - where I used to be able to sit on a bus for 30 minutes and enjoy the scenery or people-watching, now that is a chance to catch up on the news, email or the latest lolcat pictures my daughter has posted. Actually trying to sit there and do nothing is pretty hard.
So yes, technology is giving us the chance to turn ourselves into people with the attention span of a lobotomized goldfish, but we can train our brains to deal with it, and unless you are in the late stages of some degenerative neurological disorders, there are things you can do to stop the rot.

Now... what was I doing before starting this post...

A market-based approach cannot work for cyber-security any more than a Government-led approach can, when the Government feels it has a vested interest in being able to monitor its own or other countries' citizens.
The market-based approach fails because the market-based philosophy is to maximize profit while minimizing cost, so the end result is a risk analysis of:
1. The odds of being hacked.
2. The odds of that hack being detected by someone outside the company, and that being published.
3. The odds of that hack being detected by someone inside the company who cannot be kept from releasing that information to the press.
4. The financial damage associated with the occurrence of 1 and either 2 or 3.
5. The potential damage to the company's reputation from being hacked and found out - this is the most valuable resource most companies have, but in the modern world the average person in the street has the attention span of a lobotomized goldfish, and Marketing/PR firms have had a LOT of practice at managing scandals in the political and corporate world, so while the damage to a company's reputation should be massive, in reality it will be relatively minor and very short-lived.

If the odds of being hacked and found out are 10%, and the financial damage is rated at $100 million, then the typical baseline risk analysis suggests that spending on cybersecurity should be around $10 million. Bean-counters and professional buyers will then swoop in and hire a consulting company to implement something that costs $1 million with $9 million in consulting fees, which then balloons to $29 million in fees due to project over-runs... but fundamentally you still end up with a $1 million solution to a $100 million problem, and the computer users will spend a lot of effort getting around that solution so that they can see their Facebook and lolcat websites.

That is closer to communism than capitalism, with individual owners replacing the overall State as the owner of All Things.
However, if we assume that you are operating in a capitalist environment, then "you and your friends" would have to agree on policies about the control of, and access to, the resources you own.
If "you and your friends" happens to be you and a couple of friends, it is not too hard, because then you should be able to find sufficient common ground to reach unanimous agreement - specifically in a "yes/no" vote you at most need to persuade 1 person to change their vote in order to achieve unanimity. But how do 3 people get to own absolutely everything in the first place?
If "you and your friends" is, let's say, you and your Facebook friends, and for argument's sake let's assume you have 200 Facebook friends, then it is practically impossible for you to reach a unanimous agreement about anything unless you have a system where the majority form blocs and vote as proxies for a smaller number of individuals (in which case you simplify the model so that "you and your friends" becomes you plus those proxy representatives).

Plus, how does the "owner" of a given resource maintain ownership of said resource? A real-world example, albeit not within recent living memory, is France in the 1780's under King Louis XVI. The nobility and the clergy (less than 0.1% of the population) owned 99.9% of the land, resources and wealth. Certain elements in the 99.9% then decided that they had better ideas, and started using Madame Guillotine to separate the Nobility's heads from their necks. Co-incidentally, the quality of life for the vast majority in France improved very little if at all, and in many cases all that happened was that new despots arose from the bloody masses to fill the void left by the Nobility.

In general terms, if all of the resources are owned and controlled by a very small minority, then there will at some point be a forceful redistribution of resources led by elements of the downtrodden majority. In order to prevent that happening, the small minority need a force multiplier - namely either an army or justice system to keep the majority in line, or a way to keep the majority pacified and content. As the army is usually drawn from the majority, it would not be a wise idea to expect them to uniformly enforce order over a rebelling majority (some would, but some would join the rebellion, reducing or nullifying the effectiveness of the army for keeping order).
The end result is that the most useful tool for keeping the majority in line is to use the collective inertia of a large group and the inherent laziness of the vast majority of individuals in a large group against the majority, giving them just enough of whatever they need to keep them satisfied and passive. If you deny them access to everything and therefore threaten their individual and collective survival, you will find that the majority can come up with a surprisingly inventive list of things to do with the bloody corpses of those in power.

I generally use HD Tune (www.hdtune.com) which is free unless you want to buy the Pro version with a bunch of features that are irrelevant if all you want is SMART reporting.If I was going to spend actual money on a checker though, I would tend toward the LSoft Hard Disk Monitor (www.lsoft.net).

The books (the real ones) will be independently audited; profitable divisions will be sold off with some insanely clever financial jiggery-pokery making sure that they exit the current Zalman corporate structure with a minimum of debt; probably the IP will be sold off to the highest bidder separately to those successful divisions; the remainder - the unprofitable elements and as much of the debt as possible, will be wound up in a bankruptcy proceding.

In cases like this, the component parts of the company are far more valuable when broken up, so that is what will end up happening.

Some of the more profoundly afflicted people on the ASD scale really have to work alone or in groups with similar diagnoses - as long as you keep their environment constant (even to plastic plants and unchanging canteen menus), they can be awesomely productive in monotonously repetitive tasks that require a higher degree of cognitive ability than a robot or AI can manage. Interfaces between those teams and the "outside world" (i.e. the rest of the company) is through 1 or 2 specifically trained "normals" who have been integrated into the team, usually over the course of several months. For those liaisons, sick time and vacations are almost impossible though. Change anything however, and those teams grind to a halt... I have seen productivity drop to zero and arguments break out simply because somebody ordered the wrong kind of biscuits for a break room, or because a blown light bulb was replaced with one that had a slightly warmer colour.
At the milder end of the spectrum, HFAs generally can be a useful compliment to any team - we are not the panacea that creates a perfect team... we can be jerks and idiots just as much as anyone else, and often HFAs have real problems dealing with people who do not conform to an "office norm". But typically, better communication and process documentation within the team, intended to help the HFAs find and visualize the structure in a situation, also help the other team members work together.