1. Buy a phone with a removable battery. Cheap or expensive doesn't really matter.
2. Remove battery from phone.
3. Discard battery as appropriate for the type (it's probably classified as some sort of hazardous waste).

Your cellular phone is now 100% secure from government spying.

Where do you live? Are there many trains?

That's a good point. Canadian rail systems are somewhat... different. We don't have anywhere near as much passenger traffic, and we don't have dedicated passenger tracks outside of the subway systems (which I'm not going to count as "rail lines" in this discussion).

Freight complicates things, but not having freight doesn't really simplify the problem that much. There's a lot of other issues. Weather is a major one. Breakdowns are another big difference; I've never heard of a passenger train being cancelled due to engine failure.

Basically, there's a relatively high amount of schedule variability in planes which would simply not be tolerated by the rail industry.

The definitions don't get weird unless you are confused into thinking that tablets, smartphones, pdas, game consoles, etc, are something different than a PC with a different choice of software/peripherals.

But... but... they have to be. The industry analysts say so!

Even in a best-case scenario, where everyone headed to a specific destination lives along the same train line, I don't see this working out economically.

Even if it could work economically, the scheduling would be a bitch.

Trains don't really have a lot of flexibility in their schedules, particularly if they share the track with freight and whatnot. There's already a huge problem with people sitting around on tarmacs waiting for takeoff and that's just one mode of transportation. Mix in another mode with different constraints and I don't think it'll be pretty.

In other words, airport terminals and train stations are probably still needed to act as a passenger buffer.

All we need to do is redefine what a PC is (desktops, notebooks, and tablets)!

Exactly. I was under the impression that tablets were being counted under "mobile devices", mostly because of the Android/iOS platforms, with the tablet PC's being called "slates" for some reason. Admittedly, if you have someone starting to sell Android PC's the distinctions get a bit weird. And 10" Android tablets with attachable keyboard docks versus 10" Win8 tablets with attachable keyboard docks.

Er...

Actually, I think I'm starting to understand why Microsoft seems to be so utterly confused these days.

The majority of Americans appear to be okay with rent-a-cops groping sick children flying to Disneyland. As long as it's to fight terrorists.

It's like "to fight terrorists" is some kind of magical key phrase which turns off higher brain functions.

Will the robots be able to handle their own tech support should they have an issue?

Nope. It'll be an Indian call center.

I imagine the call drop-off statistics will be quite high at the "please try rebooting" step of the script.

The firewall is an inbound HTTP filter, nothing more. It isn't designed to stop outbound traffic.

I know. And it's not even a very good HTTP filter. That's not relevant.

In the context of international relations, how (or even if) it works is irrelevant. In this context, we start from the assumption that it accomplishes the goals that the Chinese government publicly says it does, which is to control the Chinese portion of the Internet for the purposes of computer security, preventing dissemination of "illegal" information, etc.

This makes the significance of the Chinese government blaming attacks on uncontrolled criminal elements operating from the Chinese network space a bit more interesting. Rather than the flat-out denial that one would normally expect from the sort of regime that gets pissy about appearances, it's an official admission that the Great Firewall pretty much can't stop those in China that really want to get around it.

Ah, yeah, that was sarcasm. Everyone knows the GFW is crap in practice. But that fact that the government persists in using it implies that they might be a bit sensitive about being mocked by foreign governments about it...

Statistically if you get non-state sponsored hackers in every nation it makes sense that you're going to see more from China than anywhere else.

Yeah, but China has a firewall. Surely you're not suggesting that non-state sponsored Chinese hackers have figured out how to get around the national firewall?

Heh... actually, that wouldn't be a bad official response. Puts the Chinese in the position of either accepting responsibility for hacking, or admitting that their state firewall is actually pretty porous.

If retrieving your posts is that important to you, get a court order, so Facebook must give you access to download them.

If the government's archiving all digital communications, who needs a court order? Just file a FOIA for your old stuff.

That could work, but you risk having them black out the parts you're interested in.

No, it might have been in a Highlander sequel.

... only need to get ten trillion users for three days to get 0.001 BTC.

To be honest, I've heard of dumber micro-payment schemes...

I'm guessing a Micheal Bay-ified version, complete with explosions, spaceships, maybe even an all out human on replicant war, with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance.

That could actually be kind of cool.

Now, if only they can come up with a name for it that isn't Blade Runner... If they want to tie it to a well-known franchise, the "Terminator" name can't get much more debased.