No they won't. There is a certain cult that treats science as a religion and refuses to understand that there are basic laws of physics that constrain us. FTL communication causes a litany of paradoxes and trying to turn quantum entanglement into a FTL communication device shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what is going on.

+4, Insightful? Really slashdot?

In theory, sure. Except that wherever you have a pool of money, you have people clamoring after it.

How long do you suppose it would be before county schools or health departments started bribing/lobbying for increased fines if they were the direct benefactors?

I myself could be convinced that photo-radar, speed strips, red-light cameras and even "robots" are acceptable for use on public roads if money could be eliminated from the equation. It is simply not fair to expect legislators to set reasonable limits based on science and statistics when money is involved.

On that note, I've always wondered why no one has proposed destruction of ticket revenue as a clean solution to the problem.

If every last cent collected from fines was required to be destroyed, legislators would be freed from the burden of conflicted interest. They could focus clearly on policy objectives, without the question of profit clouding their judgment. Police would be freed up to do their jobs (which of course includes patrolling and traffic law enforcement, but based strictly on safety, not quotas).

As another bonus, destruction of ticket revenue would benefit everyone not fined by ever-so-slightly deflating the currency.

Android devices are outselling Windows devices 2:1.

Android devices are outselling iOS devices 2:1. Windows device sales appear as a rounding error.

If you aren't doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about

What if you are doing something illegal?

Very few citizens accept all laws they are required to follow. Privacy allows society to function, by limiting the ability law enforcement has to detect victimless crime. Virtually every time in history that this limit has been removed, the society has crumbled.

I don't mean to be a dick here... but..

I've never had any of that stuff happen, and I've been a smartphone user since before they were called smartphones.

If you don't want one, you don't want one... fine. There's no need to rationalize it.

Most governments of the world were democratically contracted by the people to imprison those responsible for the violence, and protect those who are merely exercising their freedom of speech to challenge superstition.

Protecting violent superstitious people while jailing/censoring those speaking about it would be gross violation of the social contract.

I'm the father of a 13-year-old girl, and I have several of her friends' numbers in my phone. Why? Here's a few reasons:

Thanks for taking the time to post an explanation, but throughout reading it all I could think of is:

It is precisely no one's business but your own.

The sexual-psychosis-fueled witch hunt has reached new levels when people feel they need to justify the presence of phone numbers in their contact list. Have the Western taliban really made this much progress towards paranoid dystopia?

Ah, don't let her mother's illness hurt her child.

If it happens again, when she shows up, call the police to explain that she's there, and you're caring for her until her mother returns. You're on record, and hey - there's a chance that the child will remember it, and grow up without inheriting her mother's sexual psychosis.

This is an honest question. Is there any reason to consider a Kindle Fire over the Nexus 7? Any reason at all?

I'm not intending this question as flamebait; I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy one of these devices. Locked bootloader? Android fork? Crappy interface? Ads?

Clearly people are buying them. I'd just like to know why.

Computer Science is not about coding or programming, it's about the practices behind it. If you want a coder, go hire a code monkey from your local technical college. If you want someone to design the software, make sure it's sane, and then hand it off to a code monkey, then hire a CS grad.

My friend, they are one and the same.

There is no such thing as a "code monkey." The term refers to someone who knocks out a lot of code (of varying quality). That's called programming.

A good coder understands what every line does, and how it expands to CPU instructions. They understand why unrolling loops can avoid pipeline stalls. They understand O(n) and algorithmic complexity, clean API design, and memory management.

Bad coders don't.

Don't over-complexify the issue.

The idea usually tossed around regarding CO2 emissions is a cap-and-trade system, modelled after the system created for SO2. That approach was to use market incentives rather than lots of regulations to get companies to reduce their emissions, and it's generally been a success in reducing acid rain. It was conceived of by civil servants at the EPA, but became law only in 1990 with the support of that well-known liberal George H.W. Bush. How exactly is that a "left's statist wet dream"?

Not that I disagree with the cap-and-trade system, but this is pretty contorted logic. It's isn't "not regulation" just because it uses taxes to encourage a change in behavior. It is regulation, just implemented in a roundabout way.

I want to preface this with: I love Samsung and have spent a lot of money on their products. I own a Captivate Glide, and am looking at the SGS3. I hope they triumph over Apple and cost them a lot of money in the marketplace.

But, if they roll out an update which removes this functionality from devices that have already been sold, I hope a class action lawsuit is filed against them.

Partly because removing functionality from a product that has been sold should be very illegal (criminal, not contract law), but also because it's important that every company suffers the consequences of software patents - regardless of whether or not they screw their customers by backing out functionality. I hope billions of dollars are wasted on this garbage, so that the situation ultimately becomes untenable. One day, multinational corporations will, together, take a step back and realize that this nonsense must stop.

As an example, my wife has two scars between her breasts from burning hot shells from a 50 cal machine gun while she was in Iraq. Because she's a D-cup the body armor she was wouldn't fit tight against the neck area like it does on a man.. she describes it as nearly impossible to reach down and grab the shell, sometimes there wasn't time to do anything about it.

A 50-cal machine gun? Good lord.. what was she shooting?