Which is why we have much smaller and fuel-efficient cars here.

Exactly! For me the cable was the problem as well. The Nexus 7 2012 I mentioned comes with a wallsocket-to-usb charger, and a special USB cable. I managed to mislay that cable, and with most ordinary cables I had very long or even negative charging rates, even with the original charger. As far as I can tell the trick is to find a cable with low wire resistance, either because it is short, or because it has thick wires.

In any case, I think the whole discussion illustrates that some kind of measurement instrument to determine charging time or current is indeed helpful.

One example: my Nexus 7 draws so much power, even when sleeping, that it is possible to connect it to a weakly charging USB port, come back a few hours later, and it has a lower charge level. I'm sure the same is true for other tablets, and possibly even some phones.

Whereas European politics is thoroughly corrupt because party power talks in European politics. I'll take money politics over party politics any day.

So the US doesn't have party politics? Really? Seriously?

The last boring, honest, and careful president that the USA elected was Jimmy Carter, and look how popular he is. His successor was the opposite, and look how popular he is. It seems to me that the USA does not want boring, honest, and careful, it wants and gets flimflam artists.

Yes, US policy is thoroughly corrupt because money talks in US elections. But why does this work? Because the US electorate wants their flimflam. They don't want honest and careful candidates, and certainly not boring ones. They want show and glitz and scandal and outrage. And the more money you have as a politician, the more flimflam you can serve up.

To be fair, that episode never claimed to show the dangers of gasoline, it was just testing a specific myth. (Plus of course they were working to meet their contractually required number of gun/rifle shots and explosions.)

Huh? Apple is putting a lot of work in llvm (the general compiler framework), and they give that work away under the BSD license. They are most certainly not only taking, they are also giving a lot. llvm is highly portable, and is certainly not restricted to Mac OS X (or C/C++ compilation, for that matter). In fact, lots of BSD distributions (and Minix) use llvm as their compiler of choice, because they don't want GPLed software. Similarly, clang (the c/c++ compiler on top of llvm) is highly portable, under a BSD license, and Apple is putting a lot of work in it. Moreover, Apple is eating its own dog food, and using llvm/clang to compile most of Mac OS X, which is a solid guarantee for the quality of the resulting compiler, and is therefore another highly significant contribution.

It is true that Xcode (the Integrated Development Environment (IDE)) is not free, but that does not diminish the contributions that Apple is making to llvm and clang.

It was already a problem with the original USB connectors, and they are nowadays considered huge. How many human hours have been wasted in plugging in USB connectors the wrong way round? Per person it may not be much, but it does add up.

I'm not playing language games here. Exactly how do you propose to distinguish between a fact and someone just saying something? At some point you will have to trust the word of somebody or something; you cannot verify everything down to its fundamentals.

No, it means: don't use a cell phone, period. The phone radio software will be proprietary in the foreseeable future, there are plenty of opportunities to place backdoors on a cell phone no matter what OS is running on it, cell phones can be tracked no matter what OS is running on it, and even a fully open OS is so large and specialised you cannot possibly check it unless you have nothing else to do in life.

Because facts are not words?

It depends on high you shoot. Don't expect a candidate for president who is not backed by a big party to ever win. That is only common sense: how could such a candidate ever be an effective president, if he has to fight just about every other politician with power?

What can be effective is to start low and build from there. Start a local political party, show that you can run a town, and then two towns, and then an entire state. Then and only then it starts to make sense to meddle in federal politics. It will be hard work to reach that point, but people might be more ready than you expect for a bunch of non-corrupt people with some bright ideas.

In fact, I would argue that this is the best way to ever get a serious change in government. Second-amendment options are obviously a non-starter, and mass protests might work but are far harder to organise than a third-party solution.

How does this in any way address the point that the grand-parent post raised? Nobody is claiming that a government should not keep anything secret. But when a government is abusing this power, something has to be done.