Courts in the US, Canada, and the UK all disagree with your statement. Operating in a country does not require you to have a physical presence anymore, just "meaningful ties".

The British disagreed with their Empire breaking up, but it did anyway. Nor was Soviet leadership capable of keeping power through force despite controlling the military. Or perhaps we should as Gaddafi how it's going?

Nations are held together by a nebulous thing called legitimacy. Totalitarianism is a system where the state's legitimacy is absolute: it can do whatever it pleases. The other end of the spectrum is constitutionalism, where the state earns legitimacy by safeguarding the interests of its citizens. Nowadays we see an emergence of a third "pole", where a state's legitimacy depends from not just how it treats its citizens but also from how it behaves as a part of the international community. We are seeing the rise of an world system, a "city of nations", so to say. Sadly, just as humans are prone to self-centered megalomania, so are our social systems. Thus we should expect jealous attempts to claim "their" people's loyalty through, for example, nationalism and censorship.

Of course the irony is that a properly working world system will be a far safer place with more opportunity than the violent chaos of ages past for nations, just like a nation is a safer place with more opportunity than a jungle for humans. But that doesn't stop people from bitterly complaining how they're robbed by taxes, even as the only reason they have any income to tax besides whatever berries they managed to grap while running from lions is the very infrastructure maintained by said taxes. And of course would-be tyrants see their window of opportunity slipping away, and have every reason to delay the inevitable as long as possible by stirring up trouble and creating resentment. They'll fail, but time will tell how long it'll take.

One does not need to be "rich and famous" to buy a $70k car

If you can afford to pay $70k for a car, you're rich. Fame isn't necessary, though.

Dams are highly destructive of the environment.

All renewables have high enviromental impact, due to requiring huge areas dedicated to gathering disperse energy. The only even theoretically low-impact one is geothermal, since the gathering area is deep beneath what's usually considered environment, but sadly we lack drilling technology needed to utilize it in non-volcanic areas.

The only low-impact way of generating energy we currently have is nuclear, and that's dead in the water, so the future looks dark, but at least it'll be warm.

because of the hoover dam.

Which is all green energy, so it's easy for Tesla to live up to their claims.

Likewise, the Canadian government is not just impotent but incompetent to think they could actually control foreign entities.

They don't want to control foreign entities, they want to control the cultural inputs their subjects are exposed to. We're going to keep seeing more and more such efforts as the Internet threatens to create non-geographic groups for people to identify with, which in the extreme would make local powers into little more than regional managers.

After all, the idea that people owe allegiance to a distant capital rather than a particular city is relatively new one. Who's to say loyalty to a web forum couldn't end up outweighting loyalty to a nation?

Since broadcasting is pretty much a Federal power in Canada, I'm not sure, whatever the other flaws in Ontario's plans, whether they even have the constitutional right to do it.

In modern operating systems, the differences are in optimizations. A desktop might want to have more ticks dedicated towards foreground GUI apps (though I'm not even sure that matters is the age of multicore processors with gigs of RAM), whereas a server might want to dedicate more resources to I/O. But in most cases, at least with any software and Linux distro I've seen in the last decade, much of that can be accomplished by altering kernel and daemon parameters.

Windows does the same thing. The base kernel for Windows 8 and Server 2012 is the same; and it's licensing-triggered settings that determine specific behaviors. In an age of cheap storage costs, cheap RAM and fast processors, why in the hell would you want to ship multiple kernels/ What possible advantage would it gain, when you can just simply determine, either as an administrator, or based on licensing, the fine tuning of kernel parameters?

So just because a bunch of really smart people who have spent their adult lives studying something say that something is so, doesn't make it so.

No, but does strongly suggest that it is so. You can always explain away all evidence you don't like because yes, it's possible that all climate scientists of the world are involved in a conspiracy aimed at destroying your standard of living, just like it's possible that Obama is a reptilian overlord from Regulus or that the Soviet Union actually never fell and media has been lying to you all these years. It's just not very likely.

People like John Oliver, trotting out a bunch of people in lab coats saying, "look how many people say your wrong" is not an argument; funny yes, but not a valid argument.

It's a perfectly valid probabilistic argument.

So many of the kernel's functions and optimizations can be altered now, there strikes me as no reason to ship entirely different kernels. Who does that any more? Even Windows kernels are largely the same, with optimizations triggered either by the registry or by the edition.

Yes, but the corporations don't come and shoot you if you don't choose to give them your money.

They don't have to. All the resources of the world and nature's bounty are claimed by them, and those claims are backed by violence, paid for by your taxes of course. So you get to choose between giving them your money, or dying in the dark.

And your understanding is based exactly on what?

Christ, your position is little better than nilihism. Accepting, for instance, that several languages spoken in Eurasia are descended from a proto-Indo European language is not an article of faith, even if I don't have the linguistics skills to evaluate every single language that sits within that grouping.

You have any citations that aren't from lunatics?

What's needed is moving away from energy produced by fossil fuels. I'm asking all you who seem to reject AGW because the solutions, in your view, are "authoritarian", how you will deal with it? So, what tools would you bring to bear?

There is a legal obligation to focus on profits.

No, there is a legal obligation to act based on another party's interests, not based solely on another party's financial interests. Shareholders have interests other than money—having clean drinking water for their kids, supporting cultural growth, improving the quality of education, not getting buried in lawsuits from the government when you cross a legal line (though this one arguably is financial, just over the longer term), and so on. That's why you don't see shareholders suing companies for giving money to charities, for example. A purely financial misinterpretation of the word "fiduciary" would make such donations illegal.