First of all, sorry about your not closing the quoting tag you used. I do that sometimes, and it's so sad to see all your hard work obscured under an italic fog... so I thought I would at least respond in detail to help make up for it.

The charging point you make is a great one. There are some powered mounts that you can plug a phone into, but they require more work to fit... I prefer a general mount you can use with separate power so that as I change phones I can maintain the same mount.

A really excellent non powered mount is the FlexPod, if a model exists for your car... it's very sturdy and is not obtrusive when not in use.

If notifications are an issue you can usually set the phone to something like Do Not Disturb mode. But I've never had that really cause issues.

Now about the Garmin device giving great directions - that may be true, dedicated devices have had a while to build good nav systems. I personally use Apple Maps and find the navigation for that works pretty well, it also gives land guidance... (it was better than Google Maps for navigation from Day One).

But, there also exists a Garmin dedicated app with offline maps. You get all of the Garmin benefits you detailed, only it's easier to update,

And you can switch to Waze when not needing navigation (I totally agree with you about Waze navigation not working very well). As you say, nothing beats the Waze Police/Hazard alerts.

The uproar was that with computers long term storage the IRS could do things like make you pay taxes on something your parents did 60 years ago, or use the power of tagging to harass specific organizations based on political leanings. What absurd notions those people of ancient times had!

Chuckle.

What could be worse than food!?

Taco Bell

So, the more appropriate method is to ask (nicely, or send some guys with guns) the cell service providers to shut down all towers in the required area.

They are not going to do that because a cell tower covers a lot more area than any protest.

Consider the protest in Nevada recently over the Bundy Ranch cattle being taken by armed federal agents. If you shut down cell access for that group, you are shutting down cell access for a potentially very large area of I-15. That's just not going to happen.

The reason why the kill switch would be used is that it cuts off video/image feeds from newer devices, the older phones that still might work would not be as much of a concern. As long as the government can prevent video and images escaping real time they have a lot more latitude in dealing with civilians.

Even assuming that you get your million dollars forty years before you plan to retire, you would need to pull in returns of more than 18% per year to hit a billion.

No one can do that reliably. It's luck.

In San Francisco you "have to see the poor" daily as well. Hows that working out for them?

The trouble with the homeless is that they are not just poor, there are usually multiple problems at work including mental issues... so seeing them and giving them money is usually not helping much.

If you really want to help the poor I suggest going to Modest Needs, that is the best place I've found to help the truly poor directly before they fall off the bottom rung of the ladder.

So please take your "standard" USB on one

I do every day and charge iOS devices with it all the time. The cable hardly matters, and in fact it's easier to find an Apple cable in a store if you've forgotten one than the "wrong" kind of Micro-USB cable (since there are a few different types).

You are on the wrong side of standards on this one.

The fact that you can plug anything into USB is enough.

That is a big reason, but it also mattered that the device itself was not OSX shrunk to a touch-screen tablet (some people thought that's what it would be instead of using IOS). That was the mistake Microsoft made.

But it's also related, Apple had the luxury of not just plopping desktop OSX on a tablet because they knew iOS developers could produce a good range of software out of the gate. Microsoft apparently never trusted in the development community enough to take that leap of faith.

There were many tablets released before the iPad that did not sell that well.

Yes, Microsoft made them, they ran Windows, and since applications were not designed for touch they sucked compared to laptops.

What Apple did was not marketing, but make a tablet that was usage because everything from OS to software was made for a tablet, not a PC.

It also relied heavily on many IPhone developers being able to quickly write software for the tablet before it was even launched - we could only test apps on the simulator before they went into the iPad App Store on day one! Kind of insane if you think about it, but it generally worked because the devices were similar in OS. If there had not been a good base of software from day one, sales would probably not have been as good... oddly parallel to a console launch come to think of it.

Yeah, that's what they said. Now we've got a nation full of lard asses piling into SSI disability because their bodies are ruined.

Fifteen years from now we'll have all that plus they'll be profoundly nearsighted from excessive iPhone use starting at age 2.

Hard to say which "mass violence spree" involving a knife the GP has in mind.

Perhaps he is thinking of the one from 9 hours ago where five students were stabbed to death in Calgery, Canada.

But who knows.... Outlaw Guns! herp derp

You are correct in that the Republicans in the USA are not actually free market capitalists, which is what USA is supposed to be - a free market capitalist Republic.

Republicans are not different from Democrats in that they have their own constituents and those are the people that are tightly connected to the government and the Federal reserve is sponsoring them.

Unfortunately for the USA (and really for the world in general) USA Republic has degenerated into a 'democracy', which really only means that the majority of people are kept in the dark of who is truly running the show, but that is the problem with the mob, the collective, you can't have a democracy that does not degenerate into oligarchy, because the people are stupid and will vote against their self interest, however when I say that I do NOT mean what the average /.er means. I do NOT mean that voting for free market capitalism is voting against your own self interest, quite the contrary. An average (not one of the top wealthiest people) person should always vote LIBERTARIAN (or more correctly - free market capitalist, whatever that is. It can be a libertarian or it can be an anarcho capitalist or an objectivist, doesn't really matter much which one of those).

However the mob votes for the short term satisfaction that is promised by any lizard politician and the end result is always the same: the politicians end up with all the power, the individuals end up stripped of their rights and of their property, basically of their right to pursue happiness on their own terms.

The politicians end up gatekeepers for the top most connected people, the government is a mafia that uses threat of violence to destroy individual freedoms and sell them to the top bidders.

Free market capitalist republic (or even a benevolent dictatorship, like Singapore) works to improve the conditions for all people by allowing the true private property rights and self determination, people work to improve their own situation and as a result they increase the overall wealth in the system. The top wealthiest people do NOT need free market capitalism, they are just fine within a system that is corrupt, they can afford to purchase the gate keepers.

It is the middle class and the POOREST of the people that benefit from free market capitalism, they get the lowest prices and the biggest selection of all products and services that the system builds.

19th century USA was a very good example of what free market capitalist system does to improve the standard of living for all people, not for the richest people, but for everybody. The standard of living was rising faster than at any other time in history because of the freedom, private property rights, the rule of law (rule of law means applying laws equally to everybody regardless of their personal circumstance, that is true justice and morality, not what the mob thinks morality and justice are).

Today that example is found in Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland, China, but actually the Scandinavian countries have been on the correct path for the last 20 years, since the time they started moving in the right direction 20 years ago, when they finally destroyed their economies with socialism. Today they are much more capitalistic and responsible (have little to no debt) than the so called 'capitalist' nations like the USA.

Of-course currently the ECONOMIC STUPIDITY is reaching some insane local maximum, with the vast majority of the population believing in nonsense, Keynesianism, socialism, welfare state, other such equally destructive patterns of behaviour, so for example in Switzerland there will be a referendum to attempt and introduce a minimum wage and a welfare system, those are huge mistakes and the only reason the Swiss can even talk about it is the fact that they grew their economy so much in an actual free market capitalist system, so now they just may be ready to start destroying it with the socialist nonsense.

In any case, as I said, people are very very stupid, the majority have no clue about the economics and how it works and what is in fact in their best interest. The special socialist groups that benefit from the dependency state and from poverty (they thrive on the poverty votes and movements) are using so much propaganda on the general population, that at this point average economic intelligence is probably the lowest in history of human kind. The cavemen understood economics much better than the current population, at least the cavemen didn't buy into demand side nonsense, they knew that they had to produce stuff to enjoy higher standard of living.

I don't have any illusions about the people around me, they are stupid, economically illiterate, they act against their long term self interest and they will fight to keep that nonsense going, so from my perspective right now it makes complete sense to try and live outside of any established system of nations and states, to structure affairs in a way that would minimise the damage by the political systems established in the vast majority of the world today. Be smart, don't ground yourself, ensure that your assets are global, not local, ensure that your business is never tied to the place where you are supposed to pay taxes, pay attention to how it is done by the people that know what they are doing, etc. etc.

How well do the maps work when you don't have cell coverage in most cars? Just fine.

Same is true of the phone. Either you can buy any offline mapping program ranging from $10-$20, or just use what offline maps exist in Google/Apple maps (Apple maps once it starts a nav route no longer requires a network to get to where you are going).

Those are all updated automatically, for free, and I can chose the navigation I think works best for where I am.

I use the adaptor in my own car, which provides a custom cable from 30-Pin iPod to the car's USB port (but it needs that cable in order to run an app specific to the car).

I've been using the lightning adapter with the iPhone 5 every since it came out, it charges just fine.

You know those USB ports in the back of some airlines seats? You can use them to stream video from an iPad.

That was from 2006... I thought I had read recently where some airline was working on a system where you could get in-flight movies on your iPad.