Might be very effective, however.

Hey! That is rude! Gasoline was 20 cents a gallon when I was a teen.

Driving is not much "fun" any more for me.

Since NZ has no written constitution, or supreme law, those freedoms that make NZ one of the freest countries are established by legislation. Parliament can eliminate them at will if they wanted to.

When I first looked at the infographic on the referenced blog, I misread the label for California to be "Socialistan", thinking it to be a comment on the liberalism of the place. Later I realized it said "Socalistan", referring to the locale of the center of influence. I wonder if anyone else did the same.

I am surprised that "Socalistan" showed such localized connections on the map. Since so very many people in California are from outside California originally I would have thought there would be really strong connections to "back home".

I think you got that right! BART has been in the works since the 1970s, and still has not reached San Jose. Santa Clara Valley has a light-rail system that was all implemented within the time that BART was "underway". I used to ride it from San Jose to Mountain View when my car had to go into the shop or something. It worked OK, but took an hour and a half for that ride, which is kind of a long time.

Not working in the city does not make them "part-time residents". Their property taxes are levied the same as their neighbor who works downtown.

I used to live and work in Silicon Valley, and I don't recall ever hearing of the local governments getting payroll taxes. But, in California, cities and counties can and do levy their own sales taxes which are tacked on top of the state-mandated tax rate. Typically the local sales tax would be 0.5 %. Often (maybe always), the local taxes are targeted to fund some long-term expenses like transportation. Santa Clara County had a half percent tax that was targeted for transportation, and funded the building of a couple of new freeways to relieve congestion. Another good thing about those taxes in California is that the residents of the local area have to approve the tax by ballot.

As someone who was working in the computing milieu back in those days, let me tell you that you have THAT comment completely wrong! Back in the old days nobody gave anything away, unless you might share something with the guy at the next desk working in the same shop. You might share something with a colleague at another university, say, but realized that you did not know how to set it up to run on his particular computing system.

Back then, every manufacturer of hardware tended to create their own OS and compilers. It was very hard to share software of any kind because unless you had a machine from the big guys (IBM) there was just not enough of a common market to make the headaches worthwhile. Remember it took people to take the orders, pack the product, and ship it out. There were no online servers where one could make an online request and download the result. Delivery of software was often done in the form of punchcard decks, or maybe on a tape that turned out to not quite work on your tape drive. Typically, if one could find software available (I am talking about libraries and tools here, not big accounting packages.) and make it available on your machine, it would be maybe "almost" useful, but require you to go in and tweak it somehow.

By contrast, today I can sit at my home computer half a world away from much of the software is and select and easily acquire massive useful packages of free high quality software that can help me create amazing things sitting in my home office. That is something I could never have done 50 years ago.

Who is Tom Hopkins? What has he done?

Never heard of him.

You may be too young to know much about this topic. 50 years ago, when I turned voting age, the rules about residency were far more stringent. To register to vote one typically had to demonstrate residence in a location for 6 months prior to registering. Often a poll tax payment was also due. And the age was 21, not 18!

After I graduated from university I did a couple of postgraduate fellowships which caused me to move around a bit. The gist was I missed voting in several elections, including the presidential elections of both 1964 and 1968, simply because I was not in one place long enough to ever register.

The situation is very different today -- for the better.

I wonder how I would be affected today if the same rules were in effect. I now live outside the USA, and I can vote by mail after registering by mail in my former place of residence. I don't know what the rules about foreign residency would have been 50 years ago.

I cannot understand why this entire set of comments is devoted to the question of the feds monitoring traffic. To me, what happened does not appear to be any different from me searching for X on Google and then receiving targeted ads for X for days after when I use a Google service.

The advertisers make a simple commercial deal with Google to tell them about searches for their products. The Feds can make the same kind of deal with Google to tell them about searches for what they are interested in. (and I suppose they would not have to reveal that they are the Feds).

ITAR information is NOT classified information. ITAR is a lower-level categorization than classified. Not only does ITAR information need to remain inside the US, it also must not be accessible by foreign nationals who happen to be in the US.

About 30 years ago my job encompassed ITAR information and classified information. We would never have thought about data storage anywhere outside the company, and likely not outside the building. Of course, not so much information back then was digital, and cloud solutions were nonexistent.

The OP surprised me, indeed.

I have done exactly that. I have pretty much eliminated all the spam which had an "unsubscribe" link. I am left with a fair amount of traffic that does not have an "unsubscribe" link in the body of the message. The from addresses seem to morph daily, so setting a "whitelist" or "blacklist" is kind of hard. I quickly peruse my spam folder every day and take out the messages that are not spam, then empty the folder once a day. Now what is bothering me is the messages that get into the spam folder which are not spam. I use Thunderbird, and with POP3 mail I used its spam-detection capability and I could tell it that a piece of mail was "not junk". Now, I get mail via Google Apps using IMAP protocol and Google does the spam detection and the ability to say "not junk" has disappeared in Thunderbird. Does Google Mail have a "whitelist" capability? I did a little bit of searching for an answer, but did not find such a capability.

The OP talks about getting a system that he can easily get his "old" grandparents up and using, because they are too "old" to grasp systems that are relatively cutting edge.

Just how old is "old" in everybody's mind? I know this is /. so I expect the answer to be an embarrassingly small number.

I am 70, and I am the technical guru for my family and friends, who are mostly younger.

Right on!

I spent most of my career in Silicon Valley. Lived in San Jose most of the time, Sunnyvale for a short while. Worked in different places in Sunnyvale and Mountain View with a short (very) stint in Redwood City. None of the jobs I had were customer-facing, and I always had flexible hours. Carpool hours on the freeway ended at 9am in the morning and at 7pm in the evening, so I arranged my commute to be at the office by 930 or 1000, and I left after 1900. That gave me a 20-mile commute in about 25 minutes. On the rare day I needed to be there earlier, the commute time went up to 60 - 90 minutes.

In those days, the car got refueled once or twice a week, and I drove 20000+ miles a year. Since retiring I moved to a much smaller place. Now I refuel the car about once a month and drive less than 15000 km a year. That is a huge difference!

Perhaps I should also chime in that, for me, cities have never been the answer. I do not like to even be in them, much less live in one. One thing I really, really liked about Silicon Valley, and that I have not seen otherwise mentioned in these comments, is that from all those towns in Silicon Valley a short drive of less than an hour can take you out into some pretty empty and very beautiful countryside. I liked to go out and walk the trails, and that is how I recharged. Try Grant Ranch County Park outside San Jose.