Some of what you proposed was the law in the United States (specifically limits on what unions and corporations could donate). It was stricken down by the Supreme Court of the United States as a violation of free speech: NYTimes Article, no registration required

The case itself is Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205, if you would like to look it up.

Guess you didn't bother to research that claim.

Pentagon Papers was the first thing that came to mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers. Watergate was the second: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal. Plenty others exist if you want more examples.

I recommend any T-Mobile phone that is UMA (Wifi calling) enabled. UMA phones essentially do GSM-over-IP, so when the phone has a wifi signal, your normal phone number encoded on the SIM card will ring, and you can send and receive calls and texts normally. Most T-Mobile BlackBerries, and a few other phones can do this, its listed as Wifi Calling on the spec sheets. You can also take your phone and use it as normal on T-Mobile network, and then have it hop on wifi when you move into range seemlessly.

(UMA is not SIP, it works very well over low bandwidth links, and I've had little trouble with it)

If T-Mobile doesn't work for you, a Symbian or Android phone with a VoIP client using something like sipgate might be a good choice.

Having recently driven cross-country, I find claims of T-Mobile's coverage sucking are generally overblown. T-Mobile has roaming agreements with most of the major GSM regionals and with AT&T (in places), so most of the time, the phone will roam onto another network. T-Mobile has full data roaming, and doesn't charge for domestic roaming, so coverage is usually better than what the coverage maps suggest it will be.

The release behind shipping the LTS with Firefox 3.0b4 was simply that Firefox 2 would not have been maintainable for the next five years. It was decided that as soon as firefox 3.0 final was released, it would be placed both in the updates and security tree. If your running an up to date Hardy system, you have the latest version of firefox 3.

That depends on your airline. American, Delta, and JetBlue still provide them.

Just because some airlines want to screw you for ever cent doesn't mean they all do. My passport fell out of my jacket while flying once and i didn't notice it, and a few days later, I got a package from Delta with a letter about it, and my passport safely returned. I've flown with them whenever possible since.

I dunno, the more I keep seeing the LHC fail and fail is that we may be experiencing quantum suicide. In each reality that the LHC properly starts up and smashs atoms, the world ends as we know it. We keep experiencing a version of reality where cirmstance is preventing the Hiigs Boson from being created. For those unfamiliar with the concept, here's the thought experiment behind the theory straight from Wikiepdia:

One example of the thought experiment is: a man sits down before a gun, which is pointed at his head. The gun is rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. Each time the trigger is pulled, the spin of the quantum particle is measured. Depending on the measurement, the gun will either fire, or it won't. If the quantum particle is measured as spinning in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire. If the particle is spinning counterclockwise, the gun won't discharge; there will only be a click.

The man now pulls the trigger. The gun clicks. He pulls the trigger again, with the same result. And again; the gun does not fire. The man will continue to pull the trigger again and again with the same result: The gun won't fire. Although it's functioning properly and loaded with bullets, no matter how many times he pulls the trigger, the gun will never seem to fire.

Go back in time to the beginning of the experiment. The man pulls the trigger for the very first time, and the particle is now measured as spinning clockwise. The gun fires. The man is dead.

But the problem arises; the man already pulled the trigger the first time — and an infinite amount of times following that — and we already know the gun didn't fire. How can the man be dead? The man is unaware, but he's both alive and dead. Each time he pulls the trigger, the universe is split in two. It will continue to split, again and again, each time the trigger is pulled. This thought experiment is called 'quantum suicide'. It was first posed by theorist Max Tegmark in 1997. However, science fiction author Larry Niven originally proposed a fictional variant of quantum suicide in his short story All the Myriad Ways in which the protagonist's final action in the story kills/fails to kill him in myriad alternate realities.

With each run of the experiment there is a 50-50 chance that the gun will be triggered and the experimenter will die. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, the gun will (in all likelihood) eventually be triggered and the experimenter will die (assuming the experimenter allows the wavefunction/spinor of the particle to evolve back to its original state after each attempt). If the many-worlds interpretation is correct then at each run of the experiment, the experimenter will be split into one world in which he survives and another world in which he dies. After many runs of the experiment, there will be many worlds. In the worlds where the experimenter dies, he will cease to be a conscious entity.

However, from the point of view of the non-dead copies of the experimenter, the experiment will continue running without his ceasing to exist, because at each branch, he will only be able to observe the result in the world in which he survives, and if many-worlds is correct, the surviving copies of the experimenter will notice that he never seems to die, therefore "proving" himself to be invulnerable to the gun mechanism in question, from his own point of view.

If the many-worlds interpretation is true, the measure (given in M.W.I. by the squared norm of the wavefunction) of the surviving copies of the experimenter will decrease by 50% with each run of the experiment, but will remain non-zero. So, if the surviving copies become experimenters, those copies will either die in the first shot, or survive creating duplicates of themselves (copies of copies, that will survive finitely or die).

There is an API available on Mac OS X for third-party devices that you have to be licensed by Apple to use. I can't find the link but its somewere within the Knowledge Base on their website.

Maybe in your state, but in NYS, the process for getting a drivers license is still pretty involved. You need to get a permit, take a written test, then either wait six months with 20 hours of logged drive time, or take and pass a drivers ed class (my class was in NYC itself, which made it THAT much more difficult). Then you have to pass a road test here which involved all your usual driving maneuvers (which wasn't TOO difficult, but I saw a ton of people complete the course and still fail).

If you have an Android Development Phone (ADP) or a rooted G1, you can wipe the stock Android install and go down to a base installation which is mostly free (the only closed bits are some drivers required for the camera, phone baseboard, and one or two other things.

If looking at the N810 and the large amount of closed bits it has, then the resulting Android installation will be tons cleaner than the N900.

Windows Mobile phones CAN be locked down to that extent and be setup to required signed cabs and reject unapproved applications (including those exe's that haven't been digitally signed. Most carriers do not enforce this, although the Motorola i930 for Nextel is a notable exception.

The difference here is that you could sell a program that could cause a phone self-destruct (for instance, damaging the /Windows folder which will cause the phone to fail to boot) and require a manual reflash (which while is not a difficult process, would still probably require most users to bring the phone to a store to do it).

Since in all cases, Microsoft can only examine binaries, and can't see if such a Trojan horse exists, and even if they could see the source, it is still possible to obscure the behavior. If such a self-destruct feature is found, Microsoft can remotely delete the application, the Android Marketplace has the same sorta kill switch for the same reason.

If the program is just delisted, Microsoft won't remotely delete it (at least according to their press release). If you believe them is an entirely different problem.

I recently redid the routing on my network to add support for IPv6 through a tunnel broker. In all actuality, if your hardware supports IPv6, its VERY trivial to setup with autoconfiguration as long as you don't have a network configuration that requires DHCPv6 (such if you want ipv6 DDNS to work).

On the flip side though, getting it setup across a tunnel broker is extremely tedious, and difficult. That being said, being able to route into the machines on my network directly is an absolute blast. Makes me wish I had a real IPv6 from my ISP.

I'm no Apple lover (nor do I have any great love of Microsoft), but I can at least say Microsoft was never THIS bad with Windows Mobile nor did they lock you down into this kind of ecosystem of control. At least you could write your own programs from Windows Mobile and extend it all you want without Microsoft trying to break you (or being obsessively married to the carrier). Apple-fanboi's take note: I can take control of any other smartphone (Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Android*, etc and get it to do what I want) * - Android phones DO lock out root on non-developer devices, which is unfortunate, and T-Mobile has brought down the hammer on tethering apps in the marketplace (although you can still install them manually).

You do know that you can use C/C++ code right? JNI is fully supported you know. At most you'd have to rewrite the GUI code in Java and you need to do that with most mobile devices anyway (and here's a hint, Windows CE is different enough from mainstream Windows that it usually requires significant reworking unless your app uses a subset of the MFC libraries or a subset of .NET).