He's a lawyer, his job is to lead your attention to something irrelevant so that you forget what the real issue is; barring that, he's trying to shift the blame onto the victim. Essentially, he's jiggling his keys so that we focus on the shiny instead instead of the fact that he beat his daughter.

As your comment demonstrates, it ain't working.

Although it may not apply to you, sometimes there's a reason for the nuisance you're describing. In my case, I work with Patient Health Information which is protected by HIPAA. If any of that info gets out, via a lost laptop/blackberry for example, my company can be fined up to 50k per record (imagine if you're rocking a full db worth of PHI data).

So yeah, having to unlock your device with a password, then your email with another and then wait for decryption is painful, but sometimes it's necessary.

Humm... he's complaining that the contractors are charging 170k for a given job, yet paying the actual person doing said job about 80k (less than the national average and less than a government employed equivalent). In the poster's experience, the contractor isn't actually providing anything, the government pays the utilities, the office space and provides the equipment. So that extra 90k is for... uh... to make sure that the contracted employees fill out their timesheets, and... uh... that's it.

He's not saying he wants to eliminate that 306 billion, just that a lot of fat could be trimmed if contractors that only provide employees would be eliminated and the people hired directly by the government.

Unfortunately, that won't happen because governments like to say "we've cut 50 000 government positions! yay us!" but at the same time, they hire 50 000 contractors for twice the cost (obviously, that last part is left out from their news briefs).

I believe that government SHOULD be a business. It should be run like a not-for-profit organization actually.

Think about it, those organizations can do a hell of a lot per dollar and contrary to the government, when they have a budget of x$, they spend x$, not x+gazillion$. On top of that, these organizations have the people at heart, not corporations.

It'll never happen, I know.

There's one flaw in your argument: most non-enthusiasts don't care about getting the latest version of their Phone's OS. Most probably don't even know that a phone's OS can be updated.

The phones work quite well without the latest and greatest OS version. Case and point, my cousin and I both have Nexus Ones, I updated my phone manually while he didn't, he didn't even know that he could before I told him and it never prevented him from enjoying his phone after he did know. He eventually got an over the air update of the carrier's nerfed version of the OS and again, to him the phone works just fine.