Yea, like, couldn't they, like, just stick an iPhone on that thing, LOL?!?

The significant differences would be:

1) it's open source, and
2) it's self hosted, so you don't have to trust Google with your data (but at the same time, you probably wont have the reliability that comes with trusting Google with your data).

As a Canadian, I want to prepare for my online shopping discounts, but I can never remember when it is...

Didn't The Animated Series finish off the last two years of the five year mission? With the original cast and everything.

Does netflix work when you have dev mode on? This is the main hesitation I have to setting crouton up on my wife's C7.

No, it's that he feels he hasn't finished beating the horse. It's not quite dead yet.

Many modern games are pretty enormous to install; often taking 5-10 gigs or more of hard drive space. In comparison, my entire / partition, including all* the software I have installed on my laptop (kernel, X, KDE, productivity software, web browsers, SQL servers, and thousands of other things), weighs in at 8.8gigs. In cases where a game absolutely requires a certain version of a library, it would be much more sensible to just statically complie them for distribution via steam. Maybe it would increase download sizes by 1%. Even if it cost an extra 10% (it wouldn't), making a consistently functional experience would be well worth it for Valve.

*except steam games, which are installed on a different partition

Sounds like the UI on the Cylon ships in the new BSG series

Really? I'd love to read more about that.

Try KDE? Or LXDE? Or E17? Or OpenBox? Or xmonad? Or the command line? Or any of the myriad other UI options you have available to you in any Linux distribution?

The "It hasn't actually caught any terrorists!" argument (also applied to the TSA), while tempting, is an error on the part of anti-spying advocates. This is a mistake for two reasons:

1. It puts the emphasis on the incidental situation, and not the actual violation of rights. So it makes it easy for the opposition to straw-man the civil liberties point of view, for example, that they're arguing based on a waste of money.
2. The technology may well advance to the point where it does work. If our argument is frequently presented as "it doesn't work," when that changes, the civil liberties cause will take a massive hit to its credibility.

So, it's better to stick to the real issue, which is that these programs are a violation of peoples rights.

While this looks to be a great phone, the crowdfunding campaign is about a lot more than getting a cool phone; it's about proving an idea: that there is a market for special-run, innovative devices. If they succeed, they could seriously change the way phones are produced, and we could see an influx of really cool hardware projects in the future. This is important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the opin hardware movement. While using open hardware is not a goal of this project, if they manage to succeed, we could see something similar for fully open smartphones not too far down the road. Shuttleworth said in his Reddit AMA that this might be an idea for the next iteration (though I wouldn't put too much stock in that). However, if the concept is proven, others could follow suit pretty quick. So, it's not so much $800 for a cool phone, but an $800 investment in the future of computing.

It frustrates me that a company that relies so heavily on open source technologies on the server totally snubs users of those same open source technologies on the Desktop.

Every time I've tried that thing, my signature has been unique. I'd love a Firefox extension to homogenise those data...

Don't go into politics...