The only down side is that you would have an actual phone used for talking to other people with phones, rather than disgruntled avian simulator. Some folks consider that to be a problem.

The Yota will let you display a map, a book, or other useful stuff on its e-ink display.

The Fone apparently couldn't even display SMS messages properly.

Sorry if I missed a joke, but if you're serious, there's no comparison.

If someone made a phone like the Yota in a slider format (or some other way to get a keyboard in there), I could be all over it.

We are long past the age where women are trained from childhood to take certain jobs, accept certain careers, or forego careers.

No, in fact, we are not. The training and biasing may be more subtle, but it certainly still exists.

Agreed that simply posting links to hosted content is less of an issue than hosting it on YouTube directly, but it still amounts to facilitating rights violations

Free speech is a real right. Copy"right" is a synthetic one. Free speech trumps copyright each and every time.

If someone steals your digital coins, they may end up virtually (ha!) anywhere, with little or no chance of ever find them again.

Yes. That's the way cash works. It's a consequence of anonymity. The answer to it is, don't leave your cash where it can get stolen. If your system doesn't allow for unattended tokens to be stolen, don't call it digital cash.

Bitcoin is the most useless thing ever. It's not as good as cash for anonymity, not as good as credit cards for acceptance. It's the dot-com stock of the 2010s.

Because unless there is a physical barrier, you're already being recorded by people's smart phones, which are also HD camcorders and video phones.

If someone is using a smart phone or more traditional format camera to record me, it will be obviously pointed at me. I will approach them and we will have words. It would be a deliberate act and probably an obvious one.

If someone is covertly recording me, of course, I will not see it, but if such video is ever published, we will have words in court. And if they should fail to successfully hide their surveillance -- the camera falls out of their purse, whatever -- they run the risk of having both their property and their person damaged, a significant disincentive to engage in such recording.

However, if someone with a wearable camera has failed to have the common courtesy to remove it when entering an establishment, it is not obvious whether they are recording me, and they could be recording me without intent, merely because they (for some brain-damaged reason) record everything. It is a substantially different case, and apologies for rude use of wearables that are based on the ubiquity of camera-phones are not not valid.

it's that cameras are getting so small and integrated that such bans are pointless. In a few years, everybody will carry body-mounted cameras everywhere. You might as well get used to it now.

No, they won't. If cameras become that ubiquitous, so will camera detectors and jammers, as well as lawsuits about the publication of photographs without signed releases.

Surveillance is what governments do. You're not "the anti-surveillance crowd", you're the "anti-photography crowd". And photography in public places is perfectly OK in our society, and that includes restaurants.

First, video is not the same as photography.

Second, surveillance is not limited to government action but means only "the act of carefully watching someone or something especially in order to prevent or detect a crime". Photography or video need not be done by the state to be surveillance.

Third, restaurants are not public places. In fact the blog to which you link acknowledges to authority of business managers to ban photography on the premises.

My life is a creative work: my choice of dress, my manner of movement, my speech, everything I do is a . Photographs or videos of me in any but the most incidental manner (i.e., I happen to be walking down the street and you capture me in a street scene) are derivatives of that work. I do not grant Google any license to make or distribute such derivative works.

As Steve Mann put it, surveillance is theft.

But all in all, I suspect law won't be willing to address this, and we apparently can't rely on people doing the right thing on their own. We need ubiquitous jammers. Just cheap laser pointers could be an effective means to deal with "glassholes".

They have a history of barring or diminishing women. But engineering? Software engineering?

And you don't even see how your post diminishes women, do you? Yes, the software industry has often carried with it a culture that diminishes women, from "booth babes" to the sort of bullshit we see in this thread.

But it's not so much social inequality, so much as latent social norms and expectations.

That is social inequality. But you don't see that unequal norms and expectations are inequality, do you?

that's getting a little close to the sort of fascism that demands we think a certain way.

Fighting sexism is fascism. Combating discrimination is demanding that everyone thinks the same way. Got it.

Seriously, guy; your post is such an example of the problem that I half-believe it's some sort of sarcastic reverse troll.

Is the government supposed to care?

Yes. Absolutely. In a democratic system (which we're supposed to have but don't (and a "republic" in the Founder's sense is a subset of "democratic system)), if the people who constitute the government don't care, we're supposed to vote them out. Certainly the system as we have it now is broken, but in terms of "supposed to", abso-fraggin'-lutely the government is supposed to care.

I don't trust government officials...to properly handle individual life-or-death issues. Do you?

I'm confused as to what it is that you want. You seem to be saying that you don't want physician-assisted suicide because you don't trust the government, yet the status quo is that government officials insist that they, rather than the family and physician, have the sole authority to handle individual life-or-death issues.

(And I'll take the post office over UPS any day, thanks. Government sucks but unfettered "private industry" sucks as bad if not worse.)

No, the article proves that having a car that reeks of marijuana and has a secret compartment is enough to get you arrested.

"I smelled marijuana" is such a common cop lie that one can safely discount it as testimony -- especially since there wasn't any found. How did the car end up smelling of cannabis if there wasn't any there?

a) Have actually proven that this is not some 'cook something up to to get our ultra conservative readers their daily dose of outrage over their morning coffee' type story made up by a right wing rag.

I can't speak to the specific case, but if you think civil forfeiture is a figment of the right-wing imagination, you're dangerously ignorant about how the government operates.

It's been going on for decades, under both Democratic and Republican leadership. Basically, the state or federal government uses an obscure legal doctrine under which it accuses your property of a crime. Your property doesn't have the same due process and presumption of innocence rights you do, so it usually lose the case. You have to sue the government to get it back. You can guess how well that usually goes.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/easy-money-civil-asset-forfeiture-abuse-police

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/civil-asset-forfeiture

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2010/02/take_the_money_and_run.html

http://fear.org/victimindex.html

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_stillman

http://www.forbes.com/2011/06/08/property-civil-forfeiture.html

Just about any blogger can communicate by inserting images, audio, or video inline in a post

Just about any blogger can produce noise by inserting images, audio, or video inline in a post.

If I want the slowness of video news, or if I need to see some detail of intonation from the latest round of political bullshit, I'll go to ABCNNSNBCwhatever and look for the video there. Why would the NYT want to step on their turf?

I can read well-written text faster than a talking head can read it to me. One of the great annoyances on today's web is the proliferation of two-minute videos replacing what should be 200 word stories. I don't know if The Kids Today just don't know how to write, or if they're too lazy, or what

Of course video clips have their place in news. But they don't replace well-written text.

Christian theology seems to suggest that people who willingly reject God are going to hell by their own hands.

Psychopaths (of which the god the mainstream Christianity is a fine fictional example) love to make their victims believe that the victim is responsible for the suffering and death that the psychopath inflicts.

Someone in another story was just telling us how wonderful the FDA are.

The FDA sucks. But medical device manufactures, Big Phrama, and the manufactured food industry suck more.