I really don't see it, in the city any point-to-point beam is going to be a lot slower, unreliable and probably more costly than just running a fiber. Wireless for consumers is a different story, people expect their cell phones and tablets and wifi laptops and whatnot to run at higher and higher speeds but this will be useless for that since it can't penetrate buildings.

Near my cabin in Norway they're planning a fiber rollout now, population density of county is about 35 people/km^2 (92/square mile) or a little higher than the US average. The planned build-out cost is $4500/house, of which they want $1000 up front and the rest over the lifetime of the fiber. While it hasn't been made explicit in the subscription cost you can estimate that the fiber will last 30 years = 360 months = $10/month. The rest of the monthly fee is paying for maintenance, data traffic, support and other overhead. That's a pretty rural community in a high-cost country and I actually expected it to be higher.

Distribution of classified information?

Not sure what the former is, shouting "fire" in a crowded theater?

Threats? Fraud? False advertising?

Obscenity? Showing porn to minors?

Libel and slander? Copyright?

Doctor-patient privilege, attorney-client privilege?

Judges can't bias the jury? I don't know.

Seems to me most these loopholes are alive and well in the US too, despite the constitution not having any exceptions whatsoever. Yes, it's really hard to come up with a constitution that properly captures all the small details that "speech" is not simply "opinion".

But not on your internal speakers, at worst you have to install an exterior speaker to deliver "engine" noises. In fact, you can probably do active noise cancellation of it internally so you barely hear your own engine. The turn signal on the other hand serves an actual purpose, to remind you that you're still signaling to other people that you're turning as in some curves it won't turn itself off. For driving a manual car the engine noise serves a purpose too, but it's getting more and more rare even here in Europe.

You talk like Firefox could implement it, which they can't. They need keys, those keys need to stay secret and the content needs to stay protected until you can hand it over to the OS/graphics driver and probably all sorts of other nasty liabilities and penalties if you don't. The music industry had to abandon DRM, but the movie industry is still going full steam with HDCP 2.2 for 4K and when they finally make 4K BluRay this year it'll be choking full of AACS 2.0, BD+ 2.0, Cinavia 2.0 and whatever else they can throw at it.

I think they know this is their really last chance, BluRay looks pretty damn good (1080p, uncompressed sound) and 4K BluRay adds all the last bells and whistles like resolution on par with DCI 4K, high frame rate, 10 bit color, extremely wide color space Rec.2020, bigger dynamic range ,>HDTV 3D even if you only get half per eye, HEVC encoding... if you can rip one of those discs the source is likely to be better than anything you can play it with, so far there's not even a reference monitor at any price that can deliver 100% Rec.2020 coverage.

I'd be all for a meritocracy, but just because you make laws against discrimination doesn't prevent it. For example I quite recently saw a study where they sent out 500 CVs with the same content, only one "Norwegian" name and one foreign name, there was a significant different in how many got called for an interview. "Freakonomics" showed the same between typical "black" and "white" names in the US. A quick Google search indicates that this year in Australia "Simon" had significantly better chances than "Susan" at getting hired. Sure, we've gotten part the point where we'd like to enshrine it in law but in practice we're not giving the same opportunities to everybody.

I think I won the buzzword bingo on this section alone:

Not exactly what I see replacing Outlook at work.

Well in that case it also happened 5.5 billion years ago, so your warning may be a little late. Then again they did say it happened long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away...

We forgot Vista, we forgot ME... okay you didn't but the market did. I'm good until 2020, in consumer time that's ages. If Win10 lets me just not use the Metro crap I'm good for another 10 years (5 years normal + 5 years extended support). For example recently I and some friends have been playing COH2, what's the WINE rating? Garbage. Mac support? None. I can't not have a Windows desktop around, there's no equally compelling social reason to have a Linux desktop.

I know I can use it (had it as my primary desktop for 3.5 years) but in the end Win7 won me back. One of the great advantages of all the idiots running Windows is that you can't expect an idiot to fix things, so they fix it for you. On Linux there's often some kind of workaround or tweak or override or obscure configuration setting somewhere and that half-way solution is good enough that nobody will go through the effort to really fix it. Of course the downside is that on Windows when it really is broken, you can't do shit about it.

But here's the lazy slob in me, for most problems that aren't critical my first thought is how can avoid triggering this so I can just get on with my day. Even when I run into broken software it doesn't automatically mean I have much of an itch to scratch, more like a dog poop I stepped in and will circle around next time. Polish lets you not waste time on all those tiny problems that wouldn't really be worth your time to fix, but each one takes a nibble out of your productive or leisure time.

Exercising makes you fit, but unless you're an athlete it doesn't burn enough calories to make up for excessive calorie intake. I can usually burn 5-700 calories in an hour, but a Big Mac and 0.5 liter coke will undo that very easily and that's not counting the fries. You can subititute the burger with about 100 grams of potato chips or about three 0.5 liter beers. And if it's not excesses in sugar and fat you can easily overeat on quite ordinary food by simply eating too much.

You can easily overeat by 1000+ calories a day, in fact your body is built to quickly store fat in times of plenty since before refridgerators and preservatives that was the primary means of surviving harsh winters, draughts, bad luck hunting and so. The body is sending you all these wrong messages that you did great to secure all these reserves Except these days we only go up and never down.

Sure, it's just a matter of not eating but that's easier said than done, a nagging hunger is very very annoying. It's like I've grown up in a fairly cold climate, send a person from the tropical regions here and have him dress like me and I swear he'll think it's cold, damn cold. I doubt our bodies are that differntly build physically, but it's not as easy as to say it's all in your head. Maybe it is, but he's still freezing where I'm not. And I'm still hungry even though you're not. It's not fun. Being fat as fuck is also not fun, so I try balancing it out. But it's not easy.

And a bunch of rebel fighters shouldn't be able to blow up the death star, right? Or one man in a blue box against the Daleks or four SG-1 members against the Goa'uld System Lords. Yes, it's ridiculously improbable like most sci-fi, we constantly run into beings vastly more powerful than ourselves and none of them simply blow the Enterprise out of the sky and it's always a redshirt taking the bullet.

Orbits are many, valuable orbits not so much. The first few hundred kms are unusable due to atmospheric drag. Then comes LEO and the optimal solution is usually as close as possible, greater bandwidth/resolution, lower latency, shorter orbital period and more payload, less fuel. Then a lot of empty space before GEO, which is obviously quite narrow because otherwise it wouldn't be geo-synchronous and everyone who wants to receive signals need a much more expensive and complicated tracking antenna and multiple satellites to keep 24x7 coverage. True there's certain differences with frequency bands as well, but not anything like in space.

I'd rather just invest in cell phone towers (you can daisy chain these with point-to-point beams if cables are unfeasible/too expensive) and smartphones. Some 92% of the world's population is already covered by a cell phone signal, more people in India have cell phones than running water. They just don't use it for the Internet, yet. Because I really doubt the world's poor is going to have satellite reception equipment, this will be a fixed thing for schools and such. But then you'd probably do just as well using the cell phone network as the "last mile" and have a few big Internet gateways to the sky.

More like there's a ton of markets that Apple choose not to compete in and if you want to force a square peg into a round hole it gets real expensive. Like not offering a machine with drive bays, if you want more than one drive you should buy some wildly expensive Thunderbolt 2 enclosure. Or offering any cheap solutions, no cheap HDDs, no cheap screens, it's all high end or not at all. But their laptops are pretty much the same as everybody else's, the form factor hasn't allowed them to turn it into an art project. If I was in the market for a $1000+ laptop I'd consider a MacBook no matter what OS I was going to run on it. Not least because I could change my mind, even though dual booting (or even triple booting) is a hassle.

Why? In many markets where meaningful competition is hard to achieve you see that in Europe where it's more regulated consumers have it better and in the US where it's less regulated consumers have it worse. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary you have a very vocal libertarian crowd who claim the answer is more deregulation. "It doesn't work, lets do more of it" is what happens when you're blinded by ideology. To continue Lisa's story:

*Bear shows up*
Homer: The rock is not working.
Lisa: I told you that it didn't?
Homer: We need more rocks!
Lisa: Have you listened to anything I said?
Homer: Please Lisa, we need those rocks.
Lisa (picks up rocks): But they're just ordinary rocks.
Homer: Shut up and take my money!
[Lisa shrugs, then takes the exchange]

Depends on your perspective. In my country about 2% of the population is employed in agriculture. While we do need productive land, fertilizer, machinery and so on I'm pretty sure we could do better with 3%. So does anyone need to starve? I fail to see the big principal and moral difference between propping up a disabled person at home and a foreigner who for some reason also can't support himself.

Well, we also know that people who do get the "modern conveniences" are also more likely to pop out 1-3 children than 4-10 in order to support their old age. So we might be reducing the burden on ourselves long term, assuming we want to give everyone the basic needs. It might not be earned, but it might still be logical for us to do so. Basically, it comes down to Africa as on six continents population growth is fairly well in hand. It might be better to just bring them up to speed ASAP rather than turning millions into billions needing help.

And this is where it all starts to break down, it's better applied to close allies. Does the EU want the US listening in on all their phone calls? Does the US want the EU listening in on all their phone calls? We probably don't and an intercept-free solution is probably a download away with open source.