OP Delivers ... Check out the very first article. (not like this was hard)

Studies have shown that bluetooth headsets make no difference when it comes to preventing accidents. The cause is clear, just sit in a car during an in-car conversation and simulate a near accident by stomping the breaks hard without provocation.

All talking stops instantly and stays stopped during the entire perceived danger. Granted, you may get bruises for freaking everybody out, but you'll understand the point:

Conversations in a car will never the be the same as a conversation happening with somebody outside the car. People driving with you inadvertently "help" you in a crisis by pausing in their communications during a crisis situation.

Interestingly, there's a small percentage of people (around 15% or so) for whom talking on a cell phone has no measurable effect on their driving. These are people with the ability to interrupt the conversation flow, saying "just a minute" or simply ignoring the conversation altogether during a crisis.

If you want training in how to do this, I'd recommend getting a pilot's license. While getting even a basic private license, the number of things you are expected to do precisely, concurrently during takeoff/landing boggles the mind to a newbie coming from a car. You are commonly expected to be manipulating radio controls, rudder controls, Elevator controls, and Aileron controls concurrently while watching a half dozen instruments and chatting with some guy a mile away in a tower.

You figure out quick how to ignore him when something unexpected happens!

Congratulations! You've just laid out exactly why I personally object to corporations in general! There are a million ways that corporations can be used to shield liability and hide money - it could easily be argued that's the reason for their existence in the first place.

Your high premiums have more to do with soaring costs on the care delivery end, which have more to do with ever more expensive techniques being invented and used with no cost-benefit analysis. Hell, they don't even do benefit-benefit analysis (drugs are not compared to eachother to determine if the new one is even worth prescribing).

That may appear correct on the surface. But why do so many countries with improved longevity over the United States pay so much less for their health care? We pay roughly twice as much for our health care as the rest of the first world, and yet we're practically dead last in our longevity.

Quantum mechanics are extremely deterministic. They follow extremely precise, mathematically predicted behaviors. The difference is that quantum mechanics follows mathematically predicted likelyhoods.

Does freedom of thought include the right to not bother to? That's what religion is, by and large anyway.

This oh yes this!

Death is, itself, a form of information loss: everything you are and know, your memories, conclusions, and pontifications are lost to the world forever, except those that you felt important enough to transcribe into a form that can be used by your posterity.

Important stuff is already bequeathed to various forms available to my wife on a server that's physically located inside my house, anyway. Lawyers have processes for overriding passwords and the like as needed.

I have seen it too many times... Somebody complains that their computer is worn out and getting slow. You look at their browser and its 19 toolbars and wonder how that was allowed to happen.

Since they're about to get a new computer, I offer to refresh the drive, and, frustrated, they agree. So I run the recovery position restore to factory defaults, run windows update, download chrome, install f-prot, let them marvel at it being just like new.....

I only do this for family, but I have a big family.

If anything, the reason why PC sales are down is because windows 7 is more secure and gets fewer viruses!

... which is funny since the Finnish drink time and a half as much as Swedes... I guess the Finnish use the alcohol to remove stains from their clothing?

Bluetooth keyboards for the win! I have a Dell iGo Stowaway bluetooth keyboard and it turns my Android Razr Maxx HD phone into a mini-laptop in seconds.

Your post is exactly what we should all point to when we say that Windows 8 has surely failed. The *point* of Windows 8 was to get everybody using Metro, and your whole post is about how to disable Metro and get rid of it. That's a failure in almost anybody's eyes.

I'm not so sure. I agree with the basic assumption, that the PC isn't dead, but I don't think it follows that it's "just mature". Four years ago I did the majority of my personal web browsing on my laptop. Now, I do very little (maybe 10% to 20%) on said laptop. I just bought a new phone last January (Droid Razr Maxx HD) and it's largely replaced both my laptop and my 7" tablet. It's big enough that I just don't miss the tablet, it's mobile enough to be with me everywhere. Battery life is beyond excellent (2 or 3 days is typical with this phone, but VERY rare for a smart phone and blows away my tablet) and the browsing experience is excellent.

In short, the only time I care about the laptop is when I'm going to do "content creation" (typing !@# in) and even that is starting to fade thanks to my folding bluetooth keyboard. The Razr Maxx has an HDMI port that I haven't even begun to experiment with yet... what if there was a laptop shell (keyboard and screen) that I could plug my phone into?

Wish I had mod points to MOD YOU UP but I can't because I don't. Android would be soooo much more secure if it simply offered/required an app to have a "home folder" defined on the SD card or whatever and the O/S restricted read/write capability to this home folder by default, making general read/write needs the exception rather than the rule.

Note that I'm not talking about the user "home folder" concept you see in Windows/Linux, I'm talking about an app-specific home folder, think Unix's "dot" folder. EG: ~user/.thunderbird

.. and routers, embedded servers, firewalls, mesh networks, Rasberry Pi, and too many other strange devices that lack a commonly recognizable name.

Linux (*nix) is *everywhere*.

Why the h--- not?!? It's been shown time and again that higher education pays dramatically well. Taken in whole, the money we (the people) stand to make in tax revenue on highly qualified personnel is ridiculously greater than the cost of education.

Forget the student loan. Take a look at the big picture. Highly educated people, as a whole, create more wealth than poorly educated people. Not only do people who make more pay more taxes, they do so in a disproportionate way.

People who make big bucks often dip into the 40% (or higher!) tax brackets. As a government trying to grow its own country, this is ridiculously profitable. Since that government is you and me, we're retarded for not doing everything we can to boost our own educations!