I love the idea of folks with money to burn subsidizing my subscription. Even if my rates are not directly lowered, extra income would allow Netflix to purchase better catalog and build out infrastructure. Would gladly go 720p only for further rate cut.

With your own spam filtering, you decide what is the acceptable false positive rates, which spam-high country domains you never get legit e-mails from and so on. With public services, same filter has to work for millions of users. If you are diligent about reporting rather than ignoring spam, you will probably get better results. But still not as optimized for you personally as filtering that you setup yourself.

So, do you typically develop your apps directly on an iPad, Android Phone or Playstation, or do you have a nice developer laptop for coding and devices for testing?

For the first time in ages there is a computer that comes bundled with Mathematica and has shortcuts to programming IDEs on desktop. Contrast this with what modern mainstream OSes and even Linux distros like Ubuntu come bundled with. Even being 40 years old, I am tempted to learn how to make these cools 3D graphs and drive some from some simple sensors attached to GPIO pins. Say graph of daylight and its changes over seasons. For kids I think it makes a huge difference what you put in front of them and iPads fail pathetically in promoting actual learning.

If you answer this question, you will be in better shape to evaluate importance of ext4 support on flash cards. If it's for web browsing and flash card is just for uploading photos from a camera, I don't see any reason to care.

If you are a developer/power user, I don't see why you want Chrome OS. I would think a choice of web browsers and support for running local development IDEs would be a far bigger issue than ext4 external drives.

Or if you are a hobbyist and like to tinker, you can boot to chrubuntu or a modified version of chromium OS. So what exactly is the problem?

Forever? Just round up people based on nationality, participation in a protest or a house of worship. Then carry out waterboarding in public view, giving each person in line a choice to spill the beans or experience waterboarding and then spill the beans. Should take no time at all. Regimes far less wealthy than US have been doing great job keeping tabs on their citizens with good old secret police work rather then tech. Weather we allow that, or Prism, or consequences of no secret surveillance at all is really up to us.

"Something has to be done. This is something. Therefore it needs to be done"

Of course government can read my e-mail. All they have to be is waterboard me. Or install enough camera in public places to capture my unlock pattern. The question is what we allow the government to do, and in democracy we deserve what we get. No amount of encryption is going to solve this problem. We should have a direct popular vote for a commission of constitutional enforcement and then if majority of them rule that some secret agency is in violation, they will be able to disclose it legally.

It's not ethical to administer treatment until we have reason to believe it's more likely to do good than harm. With top of the line supportive care, ebola patients seem to have about even odds to pull through. Giving them something toxic or using limited money on unproven medication rather than access to good supportive care could well jeopardize those odds. Initial trials should be done on just big enough groups to establish necessary statistical confidence.

Now if side effects are few and financing is not at the expense of proven medicine, it's a different story. But too often, ethics is violated for experimental cancer drugs. People are given toxic drugs that increase suffering without solid evidence that they will increase remaining quality or even quantity of life.

When Linux was first introduced, multiple VTs were revolutionary compared to MS-DOS. They have hardly changed since then. Now with move to user space, it would be much easier for anyone, including myself, to innovate. Multiple selection? Support for graphics embedded in command line stream? This has just become much more practical to implement.

If birth control (of which condoms is the least practical form) is available, people have a choice to use it or not. At first, only the most wealthy and forward looking will do so. After some time, folks will notice that users are ahead of non-users in terms of having food on the table and other practical things. Then we have hope that others will follow.

If it's not widely available, or if your priest tells you that you will go to hell by putting in Nuvaring, they we have a problem. Practical benefits do not matter if you believe you will spend eternity in burning sulphur. Or if they actually burn you right away.

Little places like India, and Africa and Philippines. Yup! Absolutely nothing to worry about.

Ever worked in a big company? It's always incompetence. Anything deemed the slightest bit controversial is avoided like fire. They just couldn't think of a way to solve whatever problem they were thinking of more elegantly, or forsee that anyone would analyze how their app works.

Real use: get the best 802.11ac router and count your blessings. It's very unlikely that any of internet services you actually use is able to saturate 433 mbps or whatever you get our of WiFi in practical use.

Hobby: Get contractor recommendations from friends and compare prices. They don't have to be electricians let alone network specialists, just people who know how to tinker with walls a bit. You'll probably be able to get a couple of outlets for under $1K, especially if you are Ok with wires running around floor/walls. I guess if you were interested in doing such things yourself, you wouldn't ask the question?

Avoid: Powerline anything. Very flaky and dependent on wiring layout and noise from other electrical stuff. You will never get anything like 802.11ac.

Want to read the same book on your tablet and your phone? Think about how Kindle or other reading location sync is implemented. With free epubs one can developed somewhat more privacy-friendly algorithms. If publishers want a (somewhat reasonable) assurance that a given purchase is not being read on 500 devices at the same time, this is much harder task. I would say that this is likely part incompetence part technical necessity rather than malicious intent. They certainly shouldn't be sending data as plain text over plain HTTP.