Those are all reasons why it's not as bad to remove the slot, but none of them tells us why it's actually a good idea.

The grass is always greener...

I wonder how many archeologists with bad pay wish they had become an IT professional instead.

trying to make money out of every disaster that comes along. Every crisis is an opportunity is a good thing.

So Apple products become toxic: Don't touch it! Don't point even! And you haven't seen enough of that one, before it saw you.

Minecraft is a CPU hog, you don't really need a good gfx card, but a beefy CPU with a lot of single-threaded power.

Don't study EE. That's what you do about it. Aparently EE labour becomes cheaper in Asia. But not only that, more importantly IMO is that the engineering takes place where the factories are. From a market viewpoint it makes sense to integrate both design, developing, testing and manufacturing. Just let them do all the work from start to finish over there, because it will cut down on the time it takes to develop and ship out new products. The mass market industry of consumer appliances nowadays is all about increasing the frequency of new products.

China is developing a lot of stuff. If it weren't for Chinese electronic engineers, nothing around us would work. The old state of things when it was Japan/US/Europe who did the engineering and China just did the assembling has been obsolete for a long time. China has a thrieving industry of original design manufacturers (ODMs), they not only design ICs and chipsets anymore but whole products. Designed in Cupertino may well mean one day just the outer shell and the design idea.

I did nothing and it worked. It's still all on my harddrives today. Cool, huh?

Coffeine blocks adenosine receptors, and in turn their numbers multiply, reaching an equilibrium after just 2 weeks of regular coffeine intake. Stop taking coffeine, and you're going to feel pain (mostly headaches and rheumatic pain) 18 to 22 hours after your last dosage. Not to mention being sleepy, depressed and so on. The adenosine builds up as usual in your body after you wake up as a by product of normal neuronal activity, but it just keeps on binding to all those extra receptors. Ouch!

Depending on how heavy your coffein addiction was it takes weeks to months to feel like a normal human being again. If they want to mess with that system, good luck. Finding a drug that causes no withdrawal symptons, good luck.

more like a wireless microphone and the cloud is listening in.

How can the means be ethical if the goal is not? Whether the means are ethical or not is irrelevant in that case.

I doubt that all of these data collecting systems will be removed from the free to use final RTM version. Microsoft has finally heard the call and is from now on going to sell you their product in exchange for your behavior, like everyone else does nowadays.

After the Snowden leaks, every tech company that wants to be taken serious needs to improve on their security, do some crypto on the user backend and generally be more open. Or at least pretend to.

Remember that Google's goal is not to improve security but to win over more customers, in other words make you choose their service over another company's service, even over a much more secure one. This kind of campaign to improve is what might tip over many potential costumers and choose Google after all, contrary to all rational thinking. It's cheap to do for Google given their internal resources, it's simply necessary in order to keep a foot in the market and so it's nothing unexpected or generous, and therefore it's definitely nothing to get excited about as a potential customer.

The question is: Is it good enough to keep the spooks from not looking? Answer: Probably not. So move along.

We are here because you are looking for the best of the best of the best, sir!

Give your gear a proper branding. Yeehaw!