Oh yeah, they are highly regulated, which leads a rational mind to believe that is why they are significantly rare in crime.

Bullshit. They're not rare in crime because they're highly regulated; they're rare in crime because they're the wrong tool for the job. After all, WTF does a criminal care if he breaks the law by carrying a "regulated" gun? He's planning to commit a bunch of other crimes anyway!

Moreover, when automatic weapons are the right tool for the job, then criminals will have them. The Mexican drug cartels, for example, recently shot down a helicopter with a goddamn RPG! I have no doubt that owning an RPG is illegal in Mexico, but do you think they gave a flying fuck?

It is for ease of use, people don't want to set up a base station or server, it's just another thing then need to have.

Exactly: "it's just another thing [they] need to have." It's an entire extra product that these companies could be selling them (and profiting from!), but aren't. The question you should be asking yourself is "why are they foregoing that profit?"

The answer, of course, is "they aren't." The violation of privacy is more valuable!

Then there's the other side of it, if you're using a thermostat connected to Google then the data about when you use and don't use energy could be used to recommend an energy company that gives you the best rate for those times. How is that a bad thing?

1. First of all, my electric company is a monopoly, so that alleged benefit is irrelevant.
2. Second, have you ever heard of the term "confusopoly"? I don't really want to have to choose between 10 different electric companies with 10-different time-of-day-varying rate plans (none of which will actually match my usage pattern, of course). I already have to choose between natural gas providers, and it's a pain in the ass!
3. Third, I don't want Google to know about my hypothetical grow-op, Bitcoin mine, particle accelerator, or whatever the fuck I'm using the electricity for, not only because it's none of their damn business as a general principle, but also because I don't want them to report me to the DEA, SEC, or Department of Energy (respectively) and I don't want them showing embarrassing ads (for drug paraphernalia or plutonium) in my browser search results at work!
4. Fourth, but not least, I don't want Google to know about my lack of electricity use, either. The last thing I need is some Googler using his "20% time" to develop "Google Burglary," a tool for criminals to find out when I'm not using electricity and thus probably on out of town.

There is too much news to cover the slow way exclusively.

No. There's too much irrelevant celebrity bullshit and unimportant fluff to do that, but that kind of "news" is designed to distract, not inform. Only cover the important issues and there's plenty of time.

As to this all being corporate media's fault... can you give me a counter non-corporate media example that is better?

Any comedian (and yes, I realize what that implies about what a fucking sad a state of affairs we're really in). In particular, John Stewart, Steven Colbert and John Oliver are infinitely more informative than any allegedly-"actual" "news." And I mean "infinitely" literally, by the way -- measuring the valuable insight of, say, Fox News is like dividing by zero.

For example, John Oliver devoted an entire half-hour to government surveillance, including an interview with Edward Snowden where he (humorously) distilled these privacy issues into terms the general public would understand. I'm fucking appalled to have to say this, but that is many orders of magnitude better journalism than I've seen from any of those pathetically worthless toadies who actually call themselves "journalists" in decades.

And that's not even all! If you look at Youtube's autoplay list for John Oliver's videos, it appears that just about every goddamn episode covers an actually-important issue (civil forfeiture, the wealth gap, crumbling infrastructure, police brutality, net neutrality, etc.) and does it better than anyone in the mainstream media has managed since Walter fucking Cronkite!

Go fuck yourself. You've proven over and over again to be a worthless authoritarian bootlicker, and I see no reason to pay attention to anything you say.

For the benefit of everyone who isn't piece-of-shit Cold Fjord, I'll point out that (a) there's a difference between exercising civil rights and rioting, but the law enforcement agencies in the St. Louis area apparently can't tell what it is, and (b) the pattern of rounding people up for no reason (as well as "mob violence," if by "mob" you mean the police) started long before Michael Brown was shot.

But it's reality in this era.

FUCK YOU and FUCK YOUR "THIS ERA" BULLSHIT!

You know what the reality of "this era" is? The reality is that we as Americans are safer (from all types of crime, including "terrorism") than at any point in history, and that DHS or other "anti-terrorism" jackbooted thugs have had NOT ONE GODDAMN THING to do with it!

The reality is that some terrorists got lucky ONCE, and shit-for-brains sheeple like you are letting the authoritarian powermongers in our government use that as an excuse to flush our civil rights down the toilet. Knock it off, dipshit!

Indeed, the police's preferred terminology is inaccurate and sensationalist. It almost makes you wonder if they have an ulterior motive (such as, say, scaring the public into accepting their increasingly totalitarian abuses of authority).

Bullshit. Pressure cookers are becoming more popular again, especially because of shows like Iron Chef (where they use pressure cookers all the time because everything has to be ready in an hour).

Let me know when they start rounding up dozens of people for no reason

Do I really have to start citing Ferguson and Baltimore, you fucking moron?!

Our country is "uninvadeable" because of geography, not people with small arms. You can bet if a large standing army were to decide to enter the US, a handful of people with 9mm pistols aren't going to stop it.

Exactly, and that's why the restrictions on so-called "assault weapons" are an unconstitutional travesty.

That almost makes it sound good (for the US): when the bubble pops, America still has all the material goods it imported, while the securities the foreigners bought simply evaporate.

1. Rule 1: put most of your money in a total stock market index fund (60-90%, depending on how risk-averse you are) with the lowest expense ratio possible.
2. Rule 2: Put the rest of it in a bond index fund (10-40%), also with the lowest expense ratio possible.
3. Rule 3: Never, ever sell, even in the worst recession imaginable, except to rebalance or (after retirement) to withdraw living expenses.

Rule 3 is the hard part (psychologically), which is why so many individual investors screw it up. The key is to understand that recessions are irrelevant because the market always eventually goes back up. (And yes, I am including Japan's market in that statement. If you had dollar-cost averaged into Japan's stock market before it crashed and then kept doing that, and did not sell, then you'd still have managed a decent return once you account for dividends.)

iot != cloud

No. "IoT" most definately == cloud. Everything that actually respects your privacy came out before "IoT" was a thing.

"IoT" is a euphemism for "home automation, except trojaned so we can steal your data."

The trouble is that just about every fucking "IoT" device is designed to communicate over the Internet to the manufacturer's servers, even when it would make more sense for it to just communicate with a base station/server over the LAN and have the data never leave your house. Allegedly it's for ease of use, but that's bullshit -- it's for data-mining.

Yeah I know code should be efficient with memory but these days there is no excuse for having less than 4Gb.

Okay, so smartphones, tablets, Chromebooks / "streambooks" and the like aren't valid devices anymore?

I'm a pack-rat and would like to archive whole tab trees for later, see them among the other pages, but not take memory+CPU now.

It's funny how the mobile (Android) versions of both Chrome and Firefox already manage to do this -- I can have 50+ tabs going on my phone and not run out of memory, although some of them will reload when I switch back to them -- but the desktop versions don't.