If Ireland charged 5%, then Bermuda would charge 4%, so Ireland would lower theirs to 3%
OR: Bermuda and Ireland would both stick with 5%, getting more money than if they lowered the rate, and having no need to compete with each other.
This is NOT a free market! Ireland and Bermuda are free to collude with each other, and pick a rate just barely lower than other countries, and they'll still make obscene amounts of cash. As each loop-hole closes, the next-best gets more expensive, and there's more profit to be made by closing that one, too.
The previous "firestorm of controversy and discussion" was the strange and unexplained phenomenon! The fact that US government has been violating the constitution and becoming more police-state like has been painfully obvious since 9/11/2001.
The discussion and outrage was back when things like the Patriot Act were passed. Or congress voted to give telcos retroactive immunity for their violations of laws and constitutional protections. Or when the NYT reported on the wide-spread warrant-less wire-taping. Or when the EFF filed a lawsuit in federal court about the NSA's widespread tapping of all US internet traffic, and got stopped on grounds of state secrets.
All those things, which happened several years ago, got fervent opposition by most intelligent folks here on/. and elsewhere. But the vast majority of the public and lawmakers went sheepishly along with those police-state programs, no questions asked. The fact that Snowden's leaks (that only served to provide further confirmation of what we all knew) had a big impact, is the one and only deviation from this pattern, and one that could never have been anticipated by anyone.
As charging stations become available, range will be a less worrisome issue.
That's true of other, cheaper EVs, just as much as it is true of a Tesla. It'll help, a lot. But the much shorter distance between needing a recharge, the much longer refueling times, and the risk of getting stranded somewhere is a major issue... It'll take a LONG time before there are EV charging stations in any direction you go, way out in the middle of nowhere where you're going to run out of juice.
Moreover, range is really only an issue for people with long commutes or in rural areas.
Range is only an issue for people who drive far... It's true in the city, country, suburbs, etc. Back when I had a 15 mile drive to work, and only did about 60 miles on the weekend, a Nissan Leaf would have worked out pretty well for me (unless there was a road closed or detour, then I would have gotten stuck. But then when I moved and only drove 3 miles to work, but 100 miles on the weekend, I would have had to sell the Leaf, and buy a different car.
Range anxiety will continue to be an issue for quite a while. You just can't anticipate your needs that far into the future, including one-off emergencies and whatnot. Charging stations EVERYWHERE will help, but capacities will have to improve significantly, and charging times will still need to be faster.
I rarely drive more than 30 miles a day, and when I do take LONG drives, many times rent a car
Yes, but most people don't, and it's more expensive to do so. You can't knock the big problem out of consideration because there's an expensive and unappealing workaround available.
Why are the big cell service providers so dumb? Coverage sucks everywhere, yet it takes tiny Republic Wireless in North Carolina to figure out that cell phones should switch to VoIP when WiFi is available?
T-Mobile also has VoIP built-in to many / most of their phones, and Republic Wireless isn't exactly the model of a good idea done well... many RW customers complain that calls get dropped when they go past the range of WiFi, exactly what RW claims doesn't happen, and exactly the problem with the idea in the first place.
I'm not aware of any other production long-range battery car? The Model S is the only all electric car with a 200+ mile range that does not include an ICE, luxury or not.
Doesn't matter... That's not a market segment! Nobody goes around shopping for cars demanding it have the exact range of the Tesla (but not MORE) and it must NOT have an ICE for a range booster. That would be completely nonsensical.
In the real world (Hello!) the Tesla must very much compete with shorter-range EVs, and hybrids like the Volt and Lexus (ie. expensive Prius).
it seems so impossibly hard for every other manufacturer in the world to even get to half of the Model S range on batteries alone.
Very few people want to pay as much as a Tesla. And if they do, they might not want to be stuck with just 200mi range. The Volt provides a pretty good trade off and is very much a direct competitor to the Tesla. If you're willing to pay for more luxury, not only is this Cadillac a competitor, it might be a far superior alternative that the Tesla can't touch. The Tesla is seriously hobbled by not having a range-boosting ICE for those long drives, and trying to claim that disability as an advantage is completely foolish.
Other EV manufacturers don't want to just compete for that extremely expensive segment of the market Tesla has gone after. So instead they go for MUCH cheaper EVs, that can still fulfill the driving range needs of nearly as many people, and who aren't multi-millionaires with "Tesla-money" to just throw away on a toy.
Tesla holds the majority of useful patents for the ability to produce a decent electric car.
Uh, no. Toyota and GM got in there long before Tesla. Other EVs exist, and they would be competitors with the Tesla if they cranked up the price to pay for the larger battery bank. Instead they're making range compromises in order to target a much lower-cost segment of the market.
Besides, like Toyota, Tesla would be happy to license all their patents for a few bucks... It's free money for them, and if they don't, car markers will just come up with minor work-arounds that are just as good and don't result in Tesla getting ANY money out of the deal.
In the meantime I'll be worrying more about the extremist trend in Islam which - surprise surprise - tends to come from the arab countries and their patsies in the backwards *stan nations.
There it far more of an "extremist trend" in Judaism... It wasn't Arabs or Muslims that assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, it was Jews. And Jews are lucky on the "terrorism" angle because they have a powerful state military to do their bidding rather than needing to resort to terrorist tactics.
The US support of the Jewish state of Israel is a very significant reason why there are Muslim attacks on the US. If the US supported Arabs instead of Jews, things would be going in the opposite direction and you would see Jewish terrorist attacks on the US. After all, you don't attack your allies... you attack your enemy's allies.
Such anti-Muslim propaganda is quite useful, though... Throughout history, people have always tried to portray their current enemies as detestable and inhuman. Though the problem is that those same efforts makes it harder to re-establish peaceful relations once hostilities have ended.
Actually, I would say that socially people are much warmer in the Middle-East [...] you lose out by moving to North America.
"North America" is an awfully big place... Certainly bigger than all of the "Middle-East". Are you suggesting that ALL of the Middle-East is a warm and friendly place, and that ALL of North-America is not?
Certainly Canada, and most of the northern US is known for being pretty warm and friendly, while New York is... not.
I once read that some of the top Indian publicly funded institutions had 90%+ emigration rates a few years after graduation.
India has serious cultural problems contributing to this. "Doctor" is just about the only respected & successful title there, so an inordinate portion of the population becomes MDs... FAR more doctors than could ever be needed in India. So instead they spread out all over the world, looking for work. That's the cause of the predominance of Indian doctors in the US and parts of Europe.
I'm not so sure it's a bad thing, even with the "publicly funded" angle. It's likely that most of those emigrants earn FAR more than they could at home, and send back to family in India a significant chunk of money. Whatever the result, the cultural issues are the problem that need to be addressed.
In this case, the "DRM" in question a tiny bit of metadata saying "please don't do X with this".
Sure, your data is encrypted, but as with all DRM, you're giving out the decryption key along with it. It was always a stupid idea that can NEVER work.
If you want to see the end result of well-implemented DRM, see Blu-rays... Everybody can play and copy any Blu-ray disc they want, but somebody has to go through the small hassle to do so. If the official player programs weren't closed-source and heavily obfuscated, it wouldn't even take any effort at all. That is really why Microsoft likes to push DRM... It's a back-door way to eliminate open source software from consideration.
So the crux of his point is: âoeYou want to say that there are substantial legal penalties for anyone that defies the rules in the metadata. I would make it a felony to subvert those mechanisms.â
Without the laws in place to enforce that, DRM doesn't help you AT ALL. With the laws in place to restrict what can be done with your private information, YOU DON'T NEED THE DRM.
are you really saying that having panels on your neighbors roof is aesthically pleasing and enhances the value of your (and other) nearby homes?
I have never heard anyone complain about the aesthetics of roof-top solar panels. They don't improve the view, but they don't make it any worse either.
Solar panels don't have any special look about them, but neither do black asphalt shingles. Maybe you wouldn't want some historical building to be covered, but average home roofs are pretty ugly to begin with, so PV panels are at least a wash, if not a slight improvement.
Finally, solar panels increase the value of the house they're installed on. Having individual houses being more valuable certainly does increase your whole neighborhood's property values.
Hydro during the day is generally used as a kind of buffer. [...] Adding solar isn't going to displace hydro at all.
No, hydro is very much used as a power source during the day. Why wouldn't they? You make it sound like hydro power practically isn't used at all.
They have to run anyway (you can't completely bottle the river up).
That's somewhat true, but it doesn't support your point in the slightest. That's the reason hydro makes up such a large percentage of nighttime power, but you're completely wrong about it being a stable and constant power supply... Hoover Dam has 17 electricity-generating turbines. With high demand they can run all of them, or with low demand they can drop down to just one of the small ones, and can even run it at lower water volume. Though hydroelectric operators do generally keep some water going through at all times, they have a HUGE amount of control over just how much power is generated, and when.
Is there any solar power that is not a blight on the land? Nothing quite like enhancing the scenery with 20 huge panels at roadside.
No matter what the power plant... No matter how clean and low-impact it is, some moron ALWAYS has to find something stupid to bitch about.
Are you suggesting that a nuclear power plant would be a scenic tourist attraction, right at home inside Yellowstone? How about a coal power plant, along with the huge open-pit mine where the coal comes from? Or maybe some nice tar sands right outside your back yard?
If you don't like the fact that electricity generation is going to use some land, then cut the power lines coming into your house and live in the nice, scenic, non-blighted dark and cold.
You never build a Solar plant because you need more electricity. Because if you build one you also have to build a traditional plant in order for cloudy days and night
Except for the fact that, in the southwestern US, peak power demand tracks sunlight pretty well. And that peaking plants (run on coal) are fairly expensive. And that all that solar power can simply displace daytime use of hydro, which can fill-in the shortfall on cloudy days of high demand.
So, you're just *completely* wrong... That's not too bad here on/.
Not really... USB3 ports are only 900mAh. High power is only possible for dedicated "charging" ports that can't really do any actual USB things.
And the USB3 charging-only scheme is technically "standard" only in that the company that writes the specs endorsed one of the incompatible methods... So if companies don't adopt it, then it may be an official/de-jury standard, but it will still be de-facto non-standard.
768 dots may be OK for a phone. For a laptop, anything less than a 1000 is just sad news.
Meh. The resolution is on-par with my EeePC... For a CHEAP laptop, I'm reasonably happy with that resolution, and can wrangle my software into working pretty well with it.
Why bother making Chromebooks, the market doesn't much seem to care for them. Instead they should be putting Android onto laptops since the market is already very familiar with Android and the marketplace is already well stocked with apps.
If you've ever used a dirt-cheap tablet, you know the answer to that...
Android and its apps make numerous assumptions. Things like almost-always connected internet access... GPS hardware... Accelerometers... Touch screens. Small screen sizes that limit multitasking... etc. Running Android apps on devices that LACK any of those features VERY quickly becomes frustrating and utterly pointless.
Similarly, you would be DISGUSTED if you ever ran a "mobile" program on your desktop computer... For a simple example, change your browser's user-agent string to match some common mobile browser. After about 5 minutes of having a tiny phone-sized patch of text in the upper-left hand corner of your screen, you'll hate it and switch back. Here's a quick one... Try browsing Wikipedia's mobile site for an hour or so without throwing your computer out the window:
The same is true for using mobile apps, where things like the title bar, scroll bars, etc., are all hidden to save screen space. It makes no sense, it's time consuming, and becomes incredibly frustrating when used on a large screen that doesn't strictly NEED those particular workarounds. That's why you'll find so many "HD" apps for Android/IOS in the market, because 10" tablets are near the cut-off point where you want something more similar to desktop apps.
The different form factors are so tremendously far apart that they're just not interchangeable at all. If Google came out with an Android desktop or laptop, you'd be laughing at their foolishness in short order, and swearing you *never* thought it would be a good idea...
One thing this machine lacks is the most intriguing feature of the new ARM-based (and lower-power) Chromebook 11 from HP: charging via Micro-USB.
To hell with your freaky mutually-incompatible and non-standard ways to get 3amps over USB! Give me a 12V DC, positive-center barrel plug any day... Vastly more durable than MicroUSB junk, and far cheaper.
Car adapters cost $3, since they're just a cord... Wall adapters are also dirt-cheap, and I can use any of the dozen I have lying around... Everything from my Netbook, to my GbE switch, to my computer speakers, to my NiMH battery charger, to my portable fan, to my UPSes, to my old video game consoles, ALL run on 12V DC. They can all swap adapters, because there's no crazy non-standard resistor levels on other pins that make half of them incompatible with the other half... And unlike MicroUSB jacks with the tiny reed in the center, barrel plugs are practically bullet-proof, can be inserted easily in any orientation, etc.
I tolerate MicroUSB as a middle-of-the-road standard, that is better than a complete mis-mash of incompatible charging connectors, and varying voltages (3? 7.5? 9? WTF?), but only for small devices. Tablets should NEVER have started using it, and larger phones that can't fully charge with 5V should be jumping to 12V DC barrel-plugs ASAP, and getting everyone on a compatible, higher-power standard.
All the criminal activity the NSA has done and continues to do has done nothing but made the entire hardware and software structure of the Internet vulnerable
The NSA didn't make the world vulnerable. They just jumped-in and said "ME TOO!".
The wage gap is larger than ever -- poverty is at an all time high
Neither is true in the slightest. There has recently been a slight regression, but it's pure IDIOCY to claim an "ALL TIME HIGH". Just look back to the great depression, when these programs were formed, to see VASTLY WORSE.
So you can selectively pretend words you don't like were never said by whomever you're defending... It's called "selective memory". I guess that's a convenient disability to have.
They have it across the street from my house, but my house is on a dead end circuit with only 8 or 10 other homes, so no love here.
Buy a DD-WRT compatible WiFi AP/router, and make friends with your neighbors across the street. I bet they'd like to get a free $5/mo to power your AP and terminate your FIOS connection in their home. You could even set-up a sub-interface for them to piggyback on the FIOS you're paying for, with a different passphrase and aggressive throttling/QoS so their freeloading usage never slows you down.
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OR: Bermuda and Ireland would both stick with 5%, getting more money than if they lowered the rate, and having no need to compete with each other.
This is NOT a free market! Ireland and Bermuda are free to collude with each other, and pick a rate just barely lower than other countries, and they'll still make obscene amounts of cash. As each loop-hole closes, the next-best gets more expensive, and there's more profit to be made by closing that one, too.
The previous "firestorm of controversy and discussion" was the strange and unexplained phenomenon! The fact that US government has been violating the constitution and becoming more police-state like has been painfully obvious since 9/11/2001.
The discussion and outrage was back when things like the Patriot Act were passed. Or congress voted to give telcos retroactive immunity for their violations of laws and constitutional protections. Or when the NYT reported on the wide-spread warrant-less wire-taping. Or when the EFF filed a lawsuit in federal court about the NSA's widespread tapping of all US internet traffic, and got stopped on grounds of state secrets.
All those things, which happened several years ago, got fervent opposition by most intelligent folks here on /. and elsewhere. But the vast majority of the public and lawmakers went sheepishly along with those police-state programs, no questions asked. The fact that Snowden's leaks (that only served to provide further confirmation of what we all knew) had a big impact, is the one and only deviation from this pattern, and one that could never have been anticipated by anyone.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4296175&cid=45028863
That's true of other, cheaper EVs, just as much as it is true of a Tesla. It'll help, a lot. But the much shorter distance between needing a recharge, the much longer refueling times, and the risk of getting stranded somewhere is a major issue... It'll take a LONG time before there are EV charging stations in any direction you go, way out in the middle of nowhere where you're going to run out of juice.
Range is only an issue for people who drive far... It's true in the city, country, suburbs, etc. Back when I had a 15 mile drive to work, and only did about 60 miles on the weekend, a Nissan Leaf would have worked out pretty well for me (unless there was a road closed or detour, then I would have gotten stuck. But then when I moved and only drove 3 miles to work, but 100 miles on the weekend, I would have had to sell the Leaf, and buy a different car.
Range anxiety will continue to be an issue for quite a while. You just can't anticipate your needs that far into the future, including one-off emergencies and whatnot. Charging stations EVERYWHERE will help, but capacities will have to improve significantly, and charging times will still need to be faster.
Yes, but most people don't, and it's more expensive to do so. You can't knock the big problem out of consideration because there's an expensive and unappealing workaround available.
T-Mobile also has VoIP built-in to many / most of their phones, and Republic Wireless isn't exactly the model of a good idea done well... many RW customers complain that calls get dropped when they go past the range of WiFi, exactly what RW claims doesn't happen, and exactly the problem with the idea in the first place.
Doesn't matter... That's not a market segment! Nobody goes around shopping for cars demanding it have the exact range of the Tesla (but not MORE) and it must NOT have an ICE for a range booster. That would be completely nonsensical.
In the real world (Hello!) the Tesla must very much compete with shorter-range EVs, and hybrids like the Volt and Lexus (ie. expensive Prius).
Very few people want to pay as much as a Tesla. And if they do, they might not want to be stuck with just 200mi range. The Volt provides a pretty good trade off and is very much a direct competitor to the Tesla. If you're willing to pay for more luxury, not only is this Cadillac a competitor, it might be a far superior alternative that the Tesla can't touch. The Tesla is seriously hobbled by not having a range-boosting ICE for those long drives, and trying to claim that disability as an advantage is completely foolish.
Other EV manufacturers don't want to just compete for that extremely expensive segment of the market Tesla has gone after. So instead they go for MUCH cheaper EVs, that can still fulfill the driving range needs of nearly as many people, and who aren't multi-millionaires with "Tesla-money" to just throw away on a toy.
Uh, no. Toyota and GM got in there long before Tesla. Other EVs exist, and they would be competitors with the Tesla if they cranked up the price to pay for the larger battery bank. Instead they're making range compromises in order to target a much lower-cost segment of the market.
Besides, like Toyota, Tesla would be happy to license all their patents for a few bucks... It's free money for them, and if they don't, car markers will just come up with minor work-arounds that are just as good and don't result in Tesla getting ANY money out of the deal.
There it far more of an "extremist trend" in Judaism... It wasn't Arabs or Muslims that assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, it was Jews. And Jews are lucky on the "terrorism" angle because they have a powerful state military to do their bidding rather than needing to resort to terrorist tactics.
The US support of the Jewish state of Israel is a very significant reason why there are Muslim attacks on the US. If the US supported Arabs instead of Jews, things would be going in the opposite direction and you would see Jewish terrorist attacks on the US. After all, you don't attack your allies... you attack your enemy's allies.
Such anti-Muslim propaganda is quite useful, though... Throughout history, people have always tried to portray their current enemies as detestable and inhuman. Though the problem is that those same efforts makes it harder to re-establish peaceful relations once hostilities have ended.
"North America" is an awfully big place... Certainly bigger than all of the "Middle-East". Are you suggesting that ALL of the Middle-East is a warm and friendly place, and that ALL of North-America is not?
Certainly Canada, and most of the northern US is known for being pretty warm and friendly, while New York is... not.
India has serious cultural problems contributing to this. "Doctor" is just about the only respected & successful title there, so an inordinate portion of the population becomes MDs... FAR more doctors than could ever be needed in India. So instead they spread out all over the world, looking for work. That's the cause of the predominance of Indian doctors in the US and parts of Europe.
I'm not so sure it's a bad thing, even with the "publicly funded" angle. It's likely that most of those emigrants earn FAR more than they could at home, and send back to family in India a significant chunk of money. Whatever the result, the cultural issues are the problem that need to be addressed.
See subject...
Nope. I can honestly say I don't. Not a single word.
In this case, the "DRM" in question a tiny bit of metadata saying "please don't do X with this".
Sure, your data is encrypted, but as with all DRM, you're giving out the decryption key along with it. It was always a stupid idea that can NEVER work.
If you want to see the end result of well-implemented DRM, see Blu-rays... Everybody can play and copy any Blu-ray disc they want, but somebody has to go through the small hassle to do so. If the official player programs weren't closed-source and heavily obfuscated, it wouldn't even take any effort at all. That is really why Microsoft likes to push DRM... It's a back-door way to eliminate open source software from consideration.
So the crux of his point is: âoeYou want to say that there are substantial legal penalties for anyone that defies the rules in the metadata. I would make it a felony to subvert those mechanisms.â
Without the laws in place to enforce that, DRM doesn't help you AT ALL. With the laws in place to restrict what can be done with your private information, YOU DON'T NEED THE DRM.
I have never heard anyone complain about the aesthetics of roof-top solar panels. They don't improve the view, but they don't make it any worse either.
Solar panels don't have any special look about them, but neither do black asphalt shingles. Maybe you wouldn't want some historical building to be covered, but average home roofs are pretty ugly to begin with, so PV panels are at least a wash, if not a slight improvement.
Finally, solar panels increase the value of the house they're installed on. Having individual houses being more valuable certainly does increase your whole neighborhood's property values.
No, hydro is very much used as a power source during the day. Why wouldn't they? You make it sound like hydro power practically isn't used at all.
That's somewhat true, but it doesn't support your point in the slightest. That's the reason hydro makes up such a large percentage of nighttime power, but you're completely wrong about it being a stable and constant power supply... Hoover Dam has 17 electricity-generating turbines. With high demand they can run all of them, or with low demand they can drop down to just one of the small ones, and can even run it at lower water volume. Though hydroelectric operators do generally keep some water going through at all times, they have a HUGE amount of control over just how much power is generated, and when.
No matter what the power plant... No matter how clean and low-impact it is, some moron ALWAYS has to find something stupid to bitch about.
Are you suggesting that a nuclear power plant would be a scenic tourist attraction, right at home inside Yellowstone? How about a coal power plant, along with the huge open-pit mine where the coal comes from? Or maybe some nice tar sands right outside your back yard?
If you don't like the fact that electricity generation is going to use some land, then cut the power lines coming into your house and live in the nice, scenic, non-blighted dark and cold.
So he's saying it takes a good long 10 years to break even, and you're saying it only takes a nice short 10 years to break even?
I see the difficulty. I say we lock you both in a cage and let you fight to the death...
Except for the fact that, in the southwestern US, peak power demand tracks sunlight pretty well. And that peaking plants (run on coal) are fairly expensive. And that all that solar power can simply displace daytime use of hydro, which can fill-in the shortfall on cloudy days of high demand.
So, you're just *completely* wrong... That's not too bad here on /.
Not really... USB3 ports are only 900mAh. High power is only possible for dedicated "charging" ports that can't really do any actual USB things.
And the USB3 charging-only scheme is technically "standard" only in that the company that writes the specs endorsed one of the incompatible methods... So if companies don't adopt it, then it may be an official/de-jury standard, but it will still be de-facto non-standard.
Meh. The resolution is on-par with my EeePC... For a CHEAP laptop, I'm reasonably happy with that resolution, and can wrangle my software into working pretty well with it.
If you've ever used a dirt-cheap tablet, you know the answer to that...
Android and its apps make numerous assumptions. Things like almost-always connected internet access... GPS hardware... Accelerometers... Touch screens. Small screen sizes that limit multitasking... etc. Running Android apps on devices that LACK any of those features VERY quickly becomes frustrating and utterly pointless.
Similarly, you would be DISGUSTED if you ever ran a "mobile" program on your desktop computer... For a simple example, change your browser's user-agent string to match some common mobile browser. After about 5 minutes of having a tiny phone-sized patch of text in the upper-left hand corner of your screen, you'll hate it and switch back. Here's a quick one... Try browsing Wikipedia's mobile site for an hour or so without throwing your computer out the window:
http://en.mobile.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
The same is true for using mobile apps, where things like the title bar, scroll bars, etc., are all hidden to save screen space. It makes no sense, it's time consuming, and becomes incredibly frustrating when used on a large screen that doesn't strictly NEED those particular workarounds. That's why you'll find so many "HD" apps for Android/IOS in the market, because 10" tablets are near the cut-off point where you want something more similar to desktop apps.
The different form factors are so tremendously far apart that they're just not interchangeable at all. If Google came out with an Android desktop or laptop, you'd be laughing at their foolishness in short order, and swearing you *never* thought it would be a good idea...
To hell with your freaky mutually-incompatible and non-standard ways to get 3amps over USB! Give me a 12V DC, positive-center barrel plug any day... Vastly more durable than MicroUSB junk, and far cheaper.
Car adapters cost $3, since they're just a cord... Wall adapters are also dirt-cheap, and I can use any of the dozen I have lying around... Everything from my Netbook, to my GbE switch, to my computer speakers, to my NiMH battery charger, to my portable fan, to my UPSes, to my old video game consoles, ALL run on 12V DC. They can all swap adapters, because there's no crazy non-standard resistor levels on other pins that make half of them incompatible with the other half... And unlike MicroUSB jacks with the tiny reed in the center, barrel plugs are practically bullet-proof, can be inserted easily in any orientation, etc.
I tolerate MicroUSB as a middle-of-the-road standard, that is better than a complete mis-mash of incompatible charging connectors, and varying voltages (3? 7.5? 9? WTF?), but only for small devices. Tablets should NEVER have started using it, and larger phones that can't fully charge with 5V should be jumping to 12V DC barrel-plugs ASAP, and getting everyone on a compatible, higher-power standard.
The NSA didn't make the world vulnerable. They just jumped-in and said "ME TOO!".
Neither is true in the slightest. There has recently been a slight regression, but it's pure IDIOCY to claim an "ALL TIME HIGH". Just look back to the great depression, when these programs were formed, to see VASTLY WORSE.
So you can selectively pretend words you don't like were never said by whomever you're defending... It's called "selective memory". I guess that's a convenient disability to have.
Buy a DD-WRT compatible WiFi AP/router, and make friends with your neighbors across the street. I bet they'd like to get a free $5/mo to power your AP and terminate your FIOS connection in their home. You could even set-up a sub-interface for them to piggyback on the FIOS you're paying for, with a different passphrase and aggressive throttling/QoS so their freeloading usage never slows you down.