You've missed the point of what I was getting at though. It's not that people who are new to driving have a higher rate of accidents, it's that you take people who are new to driving, and give them something else new to do which lowers their inhibitions and impairs their judgement. Not only are they still learning how to drive safely, they're also learning how to drink safely.

It's not that I want to raise the driving age, it's that I want people to learn to drink safely before they're allowed behind the wheel of a car.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_driver

Not only won't that cost you $15/mile, you'll spend less on alcohol, too. Don't excuse being an idiot just because there's a lack of public transportation.

Taking away driving privileges over 60? No. Requiring regular re-testing/re-certification? Absolutely... provided that you require it for *everybody*. If we *all* needed to go re-test for driving every 5 years (for example), there'd be a huge reduction in the number of accidents over-all, and people would be more likely to keep abreast of changes to the laws and safety standards.

As for raising the driving age to 22? I've been saying for years that we should raise the driving age to 21, and lower the drinking age to 14. That way you have a chance to learn to drink in a supervised setting with adults who (theoretically) know how to drink safely, and you have a chance to get all the stupid "hey guys, check this out!" stories out of your system before you're ever allowed near the wheel of a car.

Global reach... Cellular carriers pay a ton of money to pass SMS between carriers when they don't have a peering agreement, which is why a lot of cellular providers all over the world either don't offer international SMS, or charge a lot for it.

That's changing though... the carrier I'm with has peering agreements with enough carriers around the world that they give me unlimited international MMS/SMS messaging included in the base plan (even the $25/mo entry level plan).

3 years ago, BBM on my Android device would have been huge. Today? I don't see the point. None of my friends still have Blackberry, and I can already communicate with people around the world using Google Talk or SMS. Google Talk also lets me make free international long distance phone calls, while still only has the same limitations that BBM does: it's effectively insecure and only works with other people who subscribe to it.

Yes... but TFA (and TFS) says that they're threatening to tell the neighbours. Marquess of Queensberry rules. Literally.... (look up Oscar Wilde, if you don't get the reference)

I'm not ashamed of my sexuality. I don't pirate porn, largely because the majority of it is fake and really poor quality (I'm not in the target audience), but let them tell my neighbours. They'll get hit with a defamation lawsuit pretty quickly.

And my neighbours have been able to wrap their heads around the fact that I'm a tree-hugging dirt-worshipping lesbian hippie who goes to festivals where witchcraft is practiced from time to time, I think they won't have any problem understanding that I may look at porn occasionally too.

Profit may not necessarily be financial, but every single thing that has ever been produced by humans for the entire history of our species has been done for profit of some sort.

Without getting into philosophical arguments about the ethics of it, content-creators have a vested interest in wanting to preserve distribution rights for the product they are making. We can argue until we run out of breath about whether DRM is the right way for them to do it, about its technical limitations, etc., but the fact is that nobody has provided them with an alternative to DRM that they like, and we simply can't force them to adopt what we want them to do. To do so would be to run counter to the free speech argument that most people hold up as the reason they're opposed to DRM in the first place: they have a right to speak or not speak in whichever way they want.

Given that there's no way they're giving up on DRM in the current climate, we're left with another question: should that content be on the web or not? That's a question that you, the consumer, need to decide. Personally, I like Netflix, I subscribe to it, and I'm happy to pay for it, despite its being encumbered with DRM. I find i get good value from their service. To me, yes, they do belong on the web, and as long as there's consumers like me who believe that they should be allowed to pay their money for such a service, that service belongs on the web regardless of your individual ideology.

Now given the choice between an ecosystem where everybody has their proprietary apps and one where everybody uses the same app, I would happily take the second one. While the first method works fine for my Android phone, that's because Android has enough market penetration to actually be worth targetting. It's still a platform where not everybody has made the switch, but it's big enough that people are noticing it. The same cannot be said for my Linux-based laptop.

And that leaves me with a choice, as far as the laptop is concerned: I can give up on watching content like this on the laptop (not really an option), I can install Windows (which would require paying extra: the laptop came with Linux preinstalled and no license for Windows), or I can decide that allowing DRM into the web standard isn't that bad an idea, because it means a standard API for accessing the content and I don't have to worry about whether the provider will get around to building a specific client for my laptop.

I'd *like* it to be DRM-free, and some content is DRM-free (sites like youtube or blip.tv for example), I also recognize that there's content which isn't free that I want to be able to use. If you don't want it to have DRM, then I'll refer you back to my first paragraph, where you'll find the answer to how to get them to stop using it: give them something else that they like more.

The loss itself may not be, but if you beat somebody up for their phone it's still a violent crime.

I think the more interesting statistic is that 579 cell phone/tablet thefts accounts for 41% of violent crime. Even if we assume that all 579 thefts were violent in nature, that's still only 1412 violent crimes. In a city the size of San Francisco over that time period, wouldn't the "think of the children" lobby have us believe that the rate is much higher?

That's where I went. I didn't feel like paying a monthly tithe for the privilege of being called a fag. (btw, if you're going to use a slur, use the right one: it's dyke).

I like the freemium model that some games employ, especially when they don't significantly unbalance the game. It means I can decide how much the game is actually worth to me, and many of the costs incurred are one-time costs.

They've been down the grey box path before, and there's a reason they don't do it. The whole reason that 10 years ago Apple had a reputation for reliability and Windows had a reputation for being crashtastic was that Apple had control of the hardware environment and didn't have to worry about relying on 3rd parties to develop drivers.

Windows 7 is better than XP was, to say nothing of the whole 9X line, but Apple is still better in that respect. If they allow 3rd party vendors into the ecosystem again, then they lose control over the hardware.

Fine, but could you please switch to a unit of measure that scales linearly? 50MPG to 75MPG does *NOT* represent a 50% increase in fuel efficiency. Not even close to it.

That may be so, but miles per gallon is a misleading measurement on which to base the "10% better" calculation. 30MPG to 33MPG is *not* 10% better efficiency. In fact, the two are so close that it's within the margin of error for most of us, and can easily be outweighed by simply getting a bad dice roll with the traffic lights.

If they switched to a burn rate measurement, like L/100km (that the rest of the world uses), or even Gal./100mi, then you actually could do the math in your head for how much more or less efficient the vehicle is. MPG isn't a linear scale, but L/100km is. As a result, the higher the MPG, the less actual benefit you get: 50MPG to 75MPG isn't even close to a 50% improvement in fuel efficiency (it's actually only about 25%), and the disparity between reality and perception only gets worse as you get higher.

Universities have a way of normalizing that without needing to actively discriminate though: if you don't understand the language in which classes are taught, you are not likely to succeed and ultimately graduate.

Good luck effecting that...