Thanks, wish I had some mod points. I will look into this and see if they can be used in my Garmins.

This is sorta peripheral, butt I have been having fits with my Garmin updates. The maps are definitely not up to date. the last trip I took, the speed limits were wrong more than they were right. With the insulting requirement to buy the same map over and over for the devices I own, and their arrogance, I am considering ditching all my Garmin devices. My better and I spent three months in Chile and we tried using OpenStreet maps. They were unusable. We bought the Garmin S. America set and it was marginal at best. We used Google maps and Waze when we had cell service and the Google maps are much much better. And free... as long as you have cellular service. Question: How is it that Google maps are head and shoulders better than Garmin maps and Garmin charges out the wazoo???

Number one: I detest the word "consumer". We are customers just like the .gov and .biz bulletheads. Number two: The retail customers are a drop in the bucket. The real money is in servicing the aforementioned bulletheads who buy their licenses with our money... 'just sayin,,,

It's more than the big investors... It's also some of the "17" security agencies that have a vested interest in the doings of FB. Facebbok is the dream of the STASI.

There was an excellent article in National Geographic called, "The Drying of the West". In it, the author conducted a ring study of the Bristlecone Pines in southern California. These are some of the oldest trees in the world. What was discovered was that the 20th century was the wettest in the last 2000 years. The author(s) argue that conditions in the western United States are returning back to more normal levels of dryness and this could very well be a very very long trend. GOOD LUCK Billy, I know 80 million is peanuts to you, butt I suggest you should look long and hard at "exactly where" your filthy money comes from...

Ubuntu peaked at 10.04 LTS. It's been pretty much downhill since then... I too flipped to Mint for my daily use machine and have been mostly happy. Caja sometimes sucks and Mint develops idiosyncrasies after a few months of constant use. Mostly though, I like it.

I'm guessing that they are talking about other MS software such as Office and other MS produced software other than Windows OS...

I think you make the point quite well that government is not well equipped to offer innovation and efficiency. The best things happen when .gov just gets out of the way and let's people create. It is truly the age of miracles...

Tanks for the Firefly reference. UDABES! Clearly /. understands what is happening as we move into dystopia, butt the hoi polloi just keep their noses to the grindstone and do their wage slave, tax mule bit as if everything is just fine and dandy. The only way out is through, so gird yourselves and get away from urbanity iff you can...

There is an awful lot of talk on this thread about the necessity of some gargantuan "app store". I don't think this is all that big a deal. I'm guessing many if not most of the users of these phones are not going to be all that interested in playing angry birds or for that matter most of the other spy/crap ware floating around in the Apple and Google ecosystems. I don't see the lack of 5 million crappy apps to be that big a problem.

Not twice... We want to rob you repeatedly and often more than once a day. Apple is a central figure in the development of the "Digital Panopticon". The hordes of brain dead zombies that march to their siren song are going to put out the lights for the lot of us.

You know, the funny thing is that most people with these "premium" headphones are listening to crappy mp3s with them... go figure. ;-)

I think "consumers" is the operative term. Lumped with bacteria, how disrespectful can you get? ;-)

I'm doing some work down here in Chile for some time and guess what: All the desired social networks are compeltely free (eat all you want) on this stupidly over complicated cellular system...and as we all know, nothing is free in this hyper-financialized world.

WhatsApp is FB... LIst of mergers and acquisitions by FB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...