Well, considering the cost incurred, the ones inside were much worse.

And no, I put the police on the bill of the people "inside". It's not like the ones "outside" asked for them.

You own a cellphone? Really? Please inform me of the magical phone and carrier where this is possible!

Does the FCC know? Sometimes it seems they only have a very hazy idea where their boundaries are and when they overstep them...

No surprise there. Take someone's wallet and you get what? 20? 50? Maybe if you're really, really lucky, 100 bucks.

Take his smartphone and you got at least 100 bucks worth of loot to sell.

Oh c'mon, xkcd killed that phrase. Here's a new one for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qYbVQu7YAQ

Bookmark it. It's incredibly valuable in any kind of geek discussion. Not only does it fit nearly any time, people will for some odd reason think that you actually got something to say.

Counter question: Why should they turn down the opportunity for even more control?

There are times when you not being able to make a call is more valuable than tracking you and listening to you. If I know where you are, and if I know that you will most likely just call for support, my primary goal turns to you not being able to do that.

Well, jamming is not an option in occupy Wall Street. Just imagine the damage to the economy if the spongers inside couldn't make phone calls.

When I travel with my phone, I don't even want to turn it on before I put in a new SIM for the local system. Turn it on, it registers with the local carrier and your home carrier starts forwarding calls to it -- at international rates.

I certainly don't want "presto" reprogramming my SIM. I don't want to have to call my home carrier to tell them to move it to X, and then X to have them move it back, and have one or both of them charge me for the privilege of screwing it up so I have no working phone at all. No thanks. That's one of the benefits of having GSM versus whatever. The phone is the SIM, and I can carry more than one to be more than one thing. And I can use the second SIM in my backup phone without it costing me a second plan on both carriers.

Very uaseful for law enforcement to kill the smartphones of anyone they consider problematic, like leaders of streets protests or occupy movements.

There was a time in England when you paid fire fighters insurance. They marked the houses that had paid. Houses that didn't pay - well, picture two Mafia heavies sauntering up the driveway, making comments about how combustible things are and what a pity it would be if an accident were to.... happen. (Terry Pratchett made a reference to this in his books because it is such a sick, evil and yet utterly predictable outcome.)

The service became one of the first truly national services because organized crime syndicates, even firefighting ones, are not approved of.

By moving mills away from slicing the arms off children to being run by trained adults interested in mill work, those children got to have this thing called education. Instead of being a burden to others, they became valued members of society, including scientists and engineers.

The left was arguably a major factor in the Enlightenment, without which no science could be done except in secret from the conservatives.

A large proportion of schools and universities in Britain were founded, funded and run by the left. No left, no Faraday, no Rutherford, no Turing, no Crick or Watson - name something you can't live without and I can show those components that would not exist without left-wing establishments, left-wing idealists and left-wing philosophies.

Can you name anything, anything at all, developed because of right-wing ideology?

The really interesting science, that is, there is no guarantee of a return accountants would recognize as such. (Scientists consider no result a result.)

In space science, this is worsened by rockets failing, the harsh conditions of space wrecking probes, the hazards of space junk, the very long-term nature of the work, the fact that all costs are up-front and the commercial rewards beyond satellite relays are never tangibly linked to space research by the public, creating the illusion that space has done nothing.

Just cut back on projects. Starting with those involving spending money in districts whose politicians work to cripple NASA. Remember, we're coming up to yet another election year and there's no news like bad news to shape the outcomes.

I'm sorry, you lost the right to put on the whole "Oh poor little AMD is being abused by the big bad monopolist!" the day that AMD came out with Mantle and started leveraging it's 100% monopoly in the console market in a much much worse way than Intel ever did with its 70 - 80% "monopoly" in the desktop market.

@Castr --

Apple isn't Microsoft. The OSX 10.8 (July 2012) didn't support minis that were sold in early 2009. The specs were:
The Apple Mac mini "Core 2 Duo" 2.0 features a 2.0 GHz Intel "Core 2 Duo" (T7200) processor, a 4 MB on-chip level 2 cache, a 667 MHz frontside bus, 1 GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM (PC2-5300) memory, a 5400 RPM, 120 GB Serial ATA hard drive, a slot-loading 2.4X double-layer "SuperDrive", an "Intel GMA950 graphics processor with 64 MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory", and a bundled Apple Remote.

I guarantee you the current minis won't be supported for 5 years. Apple has never had that longevity of OS support.