I've always though that plastics were a by-product of petroleum fuel - all this cheap plastic furniture is basically cast-off from the fractioning process, sure it could be used as fuel, but why not just sell it cheap to Little Tykes to make disposable backyard junk?

Ummmm.... the ocean is big, really big, and whatever water a major city needs is a small consideration compared to evaporation. You could tap a supply for all of south Florida from a single point and still dilute it to harmless levels just by mixing your 200% brine solution with 10 parts of straight seawater before discharge. I suspect industrial scale desalination would discharge much more dilute brine than 200%, unless they were attempting to also harvest sea salts, anyway...

zactly! They probably forgot the lessons of excessive gold plating and just relearned them.

Your pocket isn't that big? Sounds like a personal problem. I can fit a 7" tablet in my pockets.

When phones do cook and make your bed, you'll definitely want that too...

All I want is a decent smartphone with a battery life comparable to my "dumbphones" that I have been carrying for the last 7 years - I can charge on Sunday and go until Thursday with heavy (3 hours a day talktime) usage without needing a charge - they will go over a week with light talktime - and these "dumbphones" have video recorders, voice recognition, bluetooth, etc.

Planet: I want to make more than $16 per hour.

I did interview for a $60/hr work from home gig, but the competition is outrageous, and I see signs on the job boards that whoever they hired didn't last even a month.

It only makes sense that those with face-time with management would get preferential treatment and promotions.

However, if you've achieved a comfortable level in your career and just want to maintain that level for the next decade or two, who cares about promotions?

Normally, I would agree with the one good device trumps four pieces of junk approach, but in the case of 7" tablets, there's a great deal of power in junk. There are a lot of dedicated use scenarios (such as OP's music station) where a junker tablet will do that job quite well, and with the cash you saved from buying a "great" tablet, you can get a Kindle Fire HD for handheld media consumption - still not the ultimate tablet, but great at what it does, and I thought it was a pretty good buy at $249...

I have a couple of these, they make great security camera monitors.

Totally concur with this... when you freelance, you're not just coding, you're the whole business, including marketing, sales, accounting, collections, spec capture, coding, testing, customer service, etc.

If you make $x/hr coding at your day job, you'll probably need to make $2x/hr for your coding time to cover all the other stuff doing little freelance jobs - if you're looking to make a similar overall hourly rate.

It can be a lot of fun, it can also help you appreciate all the stuff your day job does for you.

I thought I was going to hate the OS and want to cyanogen my KFHD, but I'm actually learning to accept and enjoy it - depends on what you use it for. For me, it's an alarm clock and web browser, with special focus on Gmail usage, sometimes to view security camera feeds, and occasionally play Angry Birds Rio.... I suppose if I were trying to make my tablet be all it can be, I'd be upset about the Amazon stranglehold on the OS, but it's not an issue for my use cases.

I have a 10" tablet (iPad) and I actually prefer the 8.9" form factor, it's easier to handle - 7" is even more convenient to carry, but around the house, 8.9" is my personal sweet spot - so, no bonus assigned for a bigger screen that makes the device unwieldy to use.

Resolution: do I really care if my tablet has more pixels than my 42" TV? Personally, 1920x1080 is good enough for me - and well worth having as compared to the first generation iPad, it is much easier to read.

$85 more? Well, let's just say I don't care about ads on my lock screen and compare $399 to the $249 I paid for my Kindle Fire HD on pre-Christmas sale. That's a 60% premium you're paying to get your software ecosystem of choice, and I'm willing to bet the Nexus device also has waiting list / delivery time issues that the Kindle does not.

Choice is the key here - I'm learning to love the Amazon ecosystem model, they're much better about auto-configuring the device than Apple has been: all my previously purchased apps were installed "out of the box," MP3s of my CD purchases instantly available for free. Yes, it ticks me off that they're always trying to sell me a TV show or movie for $3, or a book for $9 (where does that pricing model come from?), but mostly I find it easier to use than the iPad/iTunes model - does what I want without me burning a lot of time configuring it all.

Seems to me, if you want to spend a lot of your time to configure it all, you should be paying less for your device, not more, but that's just an opinion.

I unplugged from Cable TV 22 years ago, dropped the antenna 12 years ago, no ill effects. Similarly, cut the land-line phone about 5 years back.

Some people drop electricity, it's all a lifestyle choice, none of these things are truly necessities - your Great-great-great-grandparents and all of their ancestors for the 10,000 years before them didn't have any of these things, and yet they still managed to procreate.

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What if the hoky-poky really is what it's all about?

Check the source, of course it's twisted to be laughable.

Some local police departments pay for drone services as needed, like during big SWAT raids... they don't just have them on hand to play with, yet.