Because the speed limits *totally* wouldn't creep downward as revenue drops, when people start watching their speed closer. The motivation for governments putting up speed cameras isn't safety, it's income, pure and simple.

If they revoke my license, I still need to get to work, because my family and I like eating and living in a nice home. I'll just be driving without a license and praying not to get caught. The world isn't as simple as you're making it out to be. Imagine if we applied that same logic to programming, after all. "To write perfect software, don't introduce bugs, it's basically that simple."

A desktop's great for everything but portability. If I need desktop-like capabilities plus portability, then a laptop's the only option. A tablet's great for reading (but not writing) e-mail, web browsing (but not posting), watching Netflix, and a couple games that work on a small (10"/25cm) touchscreen. It's pretty useless to me for anything else, and only better than my phone because of the larger screen and the fact that when the battery dies, I've still got a phone+navigation system available.

The answer to "WTF would I want a laptop for?" is, in your case, that you don't. In my case, the answer is that my desktop isn't portable enough and neither my phone nor my tablet have a large enough screen or run the right software for some of the things that I like doing. For a lot of people, a desktop computer is an anachronism, and a laptop makes sense as a replacement.

You don't care about social networking, but you care about what you consider to be others' unprincipled actions. A tool is a tool...you don't care about the tool itself, you care about the results that it gets you. If starting a social network that you'd consider "principled" would fix everyone else's behavior, then that's the tool that you'd use. It doesn't matter that you "don't care" about social networking, because a great mass of other people do.

"Evil" is a very loaded word, and I wouldn't include data-mining under that label. As far as censorship goes, I think you've got to look at their motivation. Is it their intent to suppress speech? No, it's their intent to play a sophisticated game of "Cover Your Ass".

Want to make a real change? Build up a social network where all income comes through subscription fees rather than advertising and selling information. Don't be a citizen of a country that will require you to put backdoors into the network, and don't host any part of it in such a country. Build it so that it provides every functional benefit that Facebook has, without any of the drawbacks. Until you've got a workable alternative, people will continue using what works for them. You don't find the price acceptable, and neither does Stallman (no surprise there), but the herd won't follow until it's made clear to every one of them exactly what they're paying, and to whom...*and* you get a critical mass of users to move to something else.

You can rail against something that you don't like as much as you want, but it's not going to do any practical good.

Judging from the responses to your posts, your opinion isn't as popular as you might have expected. It's certainly a more extreme position than I'd take.

To which degree? Providing a fake name, birthdate, and other information, blocking image tags, and posting untagged text information? I suppose that they can extract a fair amount of info about me from information that my friends post, but if I didn't have an account, Facebook has algorithms that would infer most of those connections anyhow.

Facebook is a tool that encourages incorrect use. Kind of like a bank, or a credit card. Still, I enjoy the conveniences of direct-deposited paychecks, not carrying around the amounts of cash that would encourage the police to seize it, and paying for things that are difficult to get by cash. Facebook has less utility than a credit card, of course. Therefore, they have less information about me. Although they've done things that I consider annoying, I haven't actually been harmed in a way that I can measure. Part of that is because I haven't given them sufficient leverage to do so.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means. That's an opinion.

"Actual" principles being the principles that you hold, and no one else's principles being "actual", No True Scotsman style.

Social networking is an option for socialization. Almost no one uses it to the exclusion of more traditional social activities, although I agree that Internet socialization is a mere shadow of in-person socialization.

You've either got an oversimplified black-and-white view of the world, or you're just getting a kick out of trolling everyone. Either way, I hope it works out for you. The way I'm living my life is working out wonderfully for me, in spite of our differences of opinion.

You can continue being all "stop liking what I don't like!" I'm gonna get back to talking to my friends and spending time with my wife.

Depends on the plan. I've got unlimited texts and data, don't pay to send or receive calls from mobile devices, and have 10x more minutes for landline calls than I've ever used in a given month. I don't know about payment models for pay-as-you-go plans, because I've never used one, and almost no one that I know has ever had a plan like that.

Most plans include unlimited SMS services, but some cheaper ones charge per-message sent or received. There's no reason to insult a nationality over something as stupid as having different phone plans. There are plenty of worthier things to insult America and Americans over, after all.

I know that for most GSM calls, there are a few stream ciphers in common use, and most or all of them can be cracked in realtime. That just covers the connection between your phone and a cell tower, anyhow. It's meant to protect you from eavesdropping, and not much more.

As much as people say that, and as much as it's theoretically true, most schools will include at least some software engineering courses in their computer science degrees. They know what most of their graduates are going to use the degree for.

Doesn't it already work the other way? A seller is offering a product at a stated price. A buyer states that they will pay that price for the product. The sales contract is in effect when the seller ships the product (implicitly accepting the deal), and charges the buyer. If the buyer realizes before the product ships that they'd like to back out of the transaction, they can do so.

At least, that's the theory. In practice, a seller may not be completely honest about whether the product has already shipped or not. And in theory, a seller would check that their price was as it was intended, but in practice, they might not for every transaction.

Browsing the web often involves a fair amount of typing on the web, which isn't comfortable on a tablet. And that I'll often be chatting with one or more friends at the same time, possibly watching a video in another window, etc. If I've got a PC available, it's always going to be my machine of choice, over a tablet. Now, if I'm reading the news before bed or something, a tablet's just fine. But not for much more than the most casual of uses.

I found some information that implies that the Android version will be 4.4, and I think you can sideload Flash on Android devices, even though it's not supported by Adobe any more. (In fact, I just tried it, and it'll run on my Android 5.0 phone just fine)

For desktop Linux, I don't think that Adobe has ever released an ARM port of the plugin, so you'd be out-of-luck if you wanted to run a "real" OS, rather than a mobile one. Well, unless Gnash has gotten good enough to be usable for your purposes. It's been a number of years since I tried it, and it didn't impress me then.

Racism is a belief. Facts can't hold beliefs, although they can be used to support someone's belief. Unreasonable conclusions and unreasonable interpretations of facts can be racist. Facts cannot, and logic cannot.

Say that a bullet-proof study came out saying that blond-haired people are, on average, far less intelligent than brown-haired people (assuming some specific, concrete definition of and way of measuring "intelligence" were to be discovered). In and of itself, that would be a fact. If you add the opinion that "more intelligent is better than less intelligent", then you might come up with the prejudiced opinion that "brown-haired people are better than blond-haired people". That doesn't make the fact itself "colorist". It's only the combination of fact and preconceived opinion that makes the thought colorist.

TFS states that it's a Cortex-A5. That family of chips implements the ARMv7 instruction set. Cortex-A5 looks like it's a little less powerful per-MHz than a Cortex-A8, but the higher clock and core count should mean that it's much more powerful than the Beagleboard XM. I don't get the focus on Ubuntu, though. There's no real benefit to running that instead of Debian.