Don't forget to spoof your wifi MAC, and you are likely to be caught on camera especially if you go there more than once. Not to mention that they expect this and these open wifis are heavily monitored for such use. Not only that but open wifi is not secure and MITM attacks are likely.

Your stance on Tor isn't exactly clear. You seem to use it, sure for nothing nefarious, but you don't consider it secure. So then why use it ? Why be associated with the other nefarious people that use Tor ? You can prevent sites from tracking you in many other ways. I'm not sure how to interpret your statements, that's why I would prefer you stop quoting me and simply state your opinion clearly. My opinion is that Tor doesn't give you anonymity (which does not exist on the internet anyway), but instead it draws attention to you and associates you with the nefarious.

Privacy is different from anonymity and the former should be preferred. It is a different POV than anonymity. I can understand the nothing to hide argument with anonymity, I mean why hide ? Privacy is different, you don't want ad companies and sites tracking you and feeding you targeted ads or selling your info or giving you custom search results based on what they thing you wanna see. Privacy is a worthy goal, Anonymity is not.

This is like saying 'Why be a Muslim if you don't want to be associated with terrorists?' Tor has some benefits in certain situations and can be used for perfectly innocent activities. If the government automatically associates me with criminal activity simply for using tor (which they certainly do according to news reports), that is their problem. I had a stance similar to yours regarding ixquick/DuckDuckGo -- I figured, since they were primarily designed for people that are seeking security, they may very well be more heavily targeted (or perhaps honeypots themselves). Then PRISM happened and Google was shown to be heavily targeted, so my opinion changed -- ixquick/DuckDuckGo/etc. may be bigger targets for niche activity, but if they offer better security than Google, I may as well use them since Google is being specifically targeted as it is. Even if they lie about protecting user anonymity, I am certainly no worse off than with Google. (On an unfortunate side-note, those search engines suck so I mostly just use Google anyway, but my point stands.) Similarly, it has been shown that internet connectivity as a whole is already being monitored; if tor can be useful to mask even some of that, when I'm already being targeted just for using the internet, then at least that's something.
And I do. As I said, I use tor mainly to prevent a small selection of sites from obtaining my IP, not for hiding from the government. I can be pretty confident that those sites will not have the resources to identify me (though the government might, but I'm not hiding from them). A regular anonymous proxy would accomplish the same thing but anonymous proxies are hard to come by and a malicious anonymous proxy is much easier to design than a malicious tor network.
I quote merely to structure my arguments, not to be argumentative. See here for the long story. I don't use tor in the same way now that I did then (and I would recommend sticking to the TorBundle if you do use tor), but some of it is still relevant.
I use Ghostery, disable JavaScript, and use RequestPolicy (in addition to other things) on my regular non-tor connection. I am already pretty safe from advertisers. But ultimately, sometimes I just don't want certain sites to have my IP address if I don't trust them. And further, sometimes I just don't like the 1984 vibe.

That's actually a good thread even tho it is a few years old.

People certainly should know how Tor works and know exactly how to use it properly before using it. If I had to use it I would do so only with specific purpose, for a limited time, and I would take every precaution possible. Disable all plugins, use the bundle like the devs recommend, and most of all don't believe that you are really anonymous, so don't do anything nefarious and expect no consequences, because you may be wrong.

That's really a good thread thanks for posting link!

for me its openvpn with tor bundle through it if i really want to change things up otherwise its just openvpn.