Look into? Yes. Arrest for a felony and hold on $1 million bail? You have got to be kidding me.

Yet another case of the "terrorism blank check" being used to screw people over. These days all you have to do is speak the word "terrorism" and the public will cower in fear as various government bodies shit all over the Constitution.

And it can be pretty damn accurate, too. Older iPhones didn't have GPS and relied on trilateration to navigate in map applications, and I remember it being surprisingly accurate.

Macrobrews, maybe. But the USA has an unbelievable variety of extremely high quality microbrews and craft beers. Might be hard to find them abroad, but if you look at beer contest winners the world over, you will see USA brews in the top spots constantly.

I'm self-employed, and the work I do requires that I be online pretty much all the time. I definitely understand what the OP is talking about – the combination of the multitudes of distractions available online and a job that requires you to always be a single click away from those distractions can be tough. I've tried a ton of different strategies, but the ones I found that seem to work the best are:

1. Switch to a standing desk. I find that when I'm standing up, the fact that I will end up physically fatigued by farting around on the Internet tends to keep me focused. Combine this with
2. Workrave. It's a basic timer program (free), designed with ergonomics in mind, that lets you set time limits for work, micro-breaks, and longer rest breaks. What I do is set it up for 10 minutes of work followed by a 1 minute micro-break, and then a 10 minute rest break after 50 minutes of work. I stand up and work for 10 minutes, then the computer tells me to go walk around and stretch out for a minute, and I repeat that until 50 minutes have gone by; then I take my 10 minute rest break, check my email and whatnot, make a cup of coffee, etc. etc. and then get back to work.

If you don't have a lot of natural self-discipline (like me), it's really about consciously establishing a positive routine, rather than trying to punish yourself by locking your computer down or whatever. Worktime needs to be worktime, and Internet time/break time needs to have its own timeslot too. Just my $.02 – good luck! After being self-employed for 6 or 7 years, and struggling to maintain consistent self-discipline during that time, I understand how difficult it can be.

I have this with breakfast now and then. When all is said and done, it's probably a lot healthier for you than most of the commercially-available breakfast options out there.

Just drink some tea or something, for God's sake. Or just have a healthier diet overall, and then you won't need a "kick" in the morning. Sometimes I can't fathom the kind of crap people gleefully dump down their gullets.

I get the feeling that these companies with their DRM are trying to find that sweet spot where they can screw their customers over to the maximum degree while still ensuring profits rise. Graph a negative curve and label it "profits", graph a positive curve and label it "how badly customers are fucked by DRM", and find the point where the two graphs intersect. Then they pull back when there is enough backlash to actually hurt profitability... and then wait a few years and try again.

Steam is basically bullshit too (my brother lent me his copy of Skyrim and I couldn't even install it on my computer) -- but maybe that's because I'm old enough to remember the days (not too long ago) when you bought a game on a physical medium and you actually owned the fucking thing.

In my town, Home Depot moved in and people boycotted the mofo. It's now a massive, empty eyesore of a building (it only lasted 8 months). That's a rarity, though, and the fact that such stores can basically carpet bomb the countryside and just shut down and say "meh" when they encounter such an (extremely rare) instance of community solidarity points to even deeper systemic flaws.

Our country is theoretically "at war"
theoretically "at war"
theoretically
"at war"

Remind me again when Congress declared war on Al-Qaeda?

I lived in Japan during the heyday of the MD, and it was a pretty cool set up. I had a stereo that could make copies from CDs at 4x speed, and a playback-only portable player whose battery lasted for ages. As far as I can remember, DRM was not initially a problem. In fact, at all the video/CD rental shops in Japan, they had huge bins of blank MDs which people would buy when they rented CDs – basically they were being encouraged to just take them home and copy them. (Since CDs at that time in Japan cost upwards of US$30, it made a lot more sense to spend $2 to rent the CD and another dollar on the MD.) It was just what you did. It's pretty much unthinkable these days, when you consider the direction Japan has gone in terms of digital rights management and so on, but even just 5 years ago, it was the norm.

I remember the first issue I had with DRM – I had bought Air's "Talkie Walkie" and tried to copy it, and the stereo showed an error. (I then tried to play it back in my computer, and it wouldn't work, which is when I threw the CD in the trash and downloaded a pirated copy.) That said, I actually rarely used my MD system to pirate things – at that point in time, it was the most convenient way to have portable music. And now that I am more conscious of the audio limitations of MP3s, I would actually use that MD set up quite a bit if I still had it.

OK, so let's say it is "just a matter of keeping the schools open later". How much later? Is it going to be a computer lab, or some other part of the school? Who is going to stay and supervise the kids? How much extra is it going to cost to keep everything open and running? Are all the school hours going to be extended, or just a small number of the schools? How are the kids who stay later going to be transported (assuming they ride the bus or something like that)? What about kids who have extracurricular activities? And so on and so forth. The point being is that "just keeping the schools open later" is a lot more of a complicated process that you seem to think. You talk about arrogance, but I've done a lot of work in education – and a lot of work with the logistics thereof – and there's nothing more arrogant than someone making those kind of simplistic suggestions without the slightest consideration as to what is actually involved.

As for the rest of it, you and I seem to live in very different versions of the same country. Where I live, people live out in the countryside because property taxes in the more "urban" areas are cripplingly high, and town meetings/school board meetings tend to be monopolized by the same old yuppie morons who don't have the slightest clue about what it's like to be really, truly poor. But anyway.

That's a pretty simplistic view. We're talking here about the people who are disadvantaged in the 1st place – they tend not to get too much representation in the public sphere as it is. The people who tend to pull water at school board meetings, Townhall meetings, and so on also tend to be the people who have enough money to afford their own private Internet -- not the kind of people the article is talking about. So I guess my question to you is, when you say it's "their choice", who, exactly, are you referring to? The phrase "tyranny of the majority" exists for a reason.

And if you can't see why rural Internet access initiatives are necessary, then I have to wonder if you have ever experienced what it is like to try to get high-speed Internet in rural areas. My mother and stepfather live in a somewhat rural area and are stuck on dial-up because there is one company that offers high-speed Internet and the overhead for the equipment, installation, and so on reaches into the thousands of dollars. I'm not making this up – I was actually planning on buying them high-speed Internet access for a present a couple of years ago, but gave up pretty quickly when I saw how much it would cost. If balking at thousands of dollars makes me cheap, though, I would definitely be curious to see your paycheck.

Because that would cost money, and getting people to add costs to a public school budget these days is nigh impossible.

The petitions are *insidious*. They divert people away from doing what really matters and helps -- writing your elected representatives (and for that matter, staying on top of legislation enough to know what your representatives are getting up to) -- and refocus it onto something that will have no practical policy effect whatsoever. So what if the White House responds -- what do you think "they" are going to say, "oh yeah, you're totally right, Mr. Obama is going to single-handedly kill this new law right now"? It's going to be some cookie-cutter response about how important the voice of the American people is, blah blah blah, and then right back to business as usual. Fuck me, posting a rant on Facebook has more potential to effect political change than those petitions.

The problem is that people either don't care about what our lawmakers are doing in Washington, or they do care but are too busy working two jobs to try to make ends meet, or are too distracted by the infotainment industry telling them about everything *except* what matters. The only time people really mobilize is when something they really, really hold dear is threatened (a la SOPA, when people thought the government was going to take away their Internets) and there is actually enough media coverage that a critical mass of people know about it.

...is that Microsoft has tried to cram two operating systems, which are used for very different applications, into a single OS. If they had just made Windows Metro or something for touchscreen devices and left Windows 7 alone, we would not be having this conversation right now. If Apple has done one thing right, it's that they have for the most part kept iOS and OS X separate.

My wife has a Windows RT tablet made by Asus, and if you stay within the Metro interface, it really is a pleasure to use. As soon as you go to make some changes to settings, or try to use Microsoft Word, you go into the traditional desktop and with a touchscreen that's a nightmare. Likewise if you try to navigate Metro with a pointing device – it just feels weird.

Everybody heralding the death of the desktop and the takeover of tablets has definitely jumped the gun, and Microsoft's attempt to shoehorn us all into their one-size-fits-all view of computing has without a doubt been a failure. They should have made a dedicated touchscreen operating system and forgotten about Surface or at least kept it simple.