Wow, the un-newsworthiness of this article completely escaped me until you provide a car analogy. It's all so clear now! Obviously, when dealing with a technology that sometimes features geometrically increasing capabilities, we should always remember to think in terms of internal-combustion transportation devices! DUH!

Back on topic, I think it'll be interesting to see how interfaces make selective shutoff of features more intuitive inside a program, instead of having to bump out & modify device settings. To that end, it might be useful to have programming constructs for developers to indicate that such-and-such function will need network access, or what have you, as a hint to a mobile OS that could do runtime analysis & shut down pieces as necessary.

Spare me the false-balance outrage. Reality has a well-known Liberal bias, right? Sometimes when an article claims that Republicans are behind voter intimidation issues but that Democrats are not, that's because it's the truth, not because there's "bias". Republicans have gone to jail over voter intimidation and suppression. It's their issue. If you don't like it, I suggest you bitch to them, not to the reporters who report it. Regarding the "break in", I think I'll wait until there actually is some sort of conclusive investigation before I presume that what the Republican party's self-serving narrative says happened actually did happen. Karl Rove once floated a false story about a "bug" being planted in Bush's office during an election. Turns out, Rove put it there himself. I don't know if that happened here - but I also don't know that it didn't. Again, you're wanting to paint both sides as equally dubious in these sorts of things, but it seems to me that one party has a particularly worse track record when it comes to political break-ins than the other.