You'd be right, of course!

Obama never had executive authority over anything in Chicago. He was a state Senator from 97-04, but again, how that directly affects the state of a particular city is admittedly beyond me.

Well, he decided that *maybe* he didn't really mean what he said...

Ford Exec Retracts Statements About Tracking Drivers With The GPS In Their Cars. "The statement I made in my eyes was hypothetical and I want to clear this up."

Either he doesn't really understand what the technology his company is deploying does/how it works, OR he's a liar. Neither bode well for Ford.

Open Source TV set? All well and good, I suppose, until it comes out with a locked bootloader. Is this a TiVo situation all over again?

Facebook chat can be accessed via XMPP. So use a good IM client like Pidgin with the OTR plugin and you have nice, encrypted chats via FB. I use it daily, and it works great.

It's defined as 160 days in my state's statutes. 725 ILCS 5/103-5

I've been using Chromium as my main browser for quite some time now, and I have to say I prefer it in many aspects over Firefox.
It certainly reminds me of how Firefox *used* to be all those years ago, but it has the same fatal flaw: it can be bogged down to uselessness with poorly implemented extensions.
As far as the PDF issue goes, I use "Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer", which opens many different types of document in Google Docs. I prefer it to dedicated PDF viewer/editors myself.
Sadly, there are several packages that aren't available for the PPC branch, as I can attest, but that's the nature of using non x86 hardware in general, sad to say.
At the end of the day, the defaults can always be changed if you don't like them, and it's good to see that they're at least asking for community feedback instead of charging ahead with an ill conceived vision (I'm looking at you, Gnome 3 and Unity).

"you have nothing to fear!" so you shouldn't worry about being recorded. Where have I heard that one before?

I'm not saying that I don't believe public servants while carrying out their official duties in public shouldn't be fair game for monitoring, but the "nothing to fear" angle just strikes me in a VERY bad way.

I've used Sprint's mobile broadband (just a blackberry, tether, and sprint's software) in downtown Chicago for quite some time, and it's acceptable for web browsing and the such. I definitely would NOT use it for anything more. It's just got too much latency.

Also, I've used a Motorola T720 with a tether and a SLIP script with Verizon. It only got me basic dialup speeds, and it's been a while since I've written any kind of script for pppd, but it got the job done in a *very* rural area of Illinois.

When it's all said and done, I'd stick with wired if I have any kind of choice.