Yes, Microsoft should be legally required to provide specifications to third party vendors wishing to keep supporting Windows XP. In retrospect, I don't know why Microsoft did not see this as a potential vertical market and additional revenue stream. They could make additional money off of an obsolete operating system that has more than covered the research and development costs associated with it by charging potential vendors for access to certain amounts of XP code and specs. Meanwhile, they can continue to push the importance of upgrades and it's not like modern software will really run on XP anyways. Shortsightedness abounds!

There may be a way for small, rural WISP operators to do this on part-time basis. How much daily attention does a small town WISP's infrastructure really need? It might make a nice supplementary income and you could offer it relatively inexpensively in return for a lesser service guarantee.

They went extinct because the cost of building the infrastructure to provide the broadband internet access that consumers now demanded. It fell on king telecom to build that out. Even with the number of ISPs that you pull out of the air, I doubt they could collectively come up with the 100s of millions necessary to make this happen. Government helped the big boys make it happen and also created regulatory nightmares to ensure that the telecom industry is an oligarchy.

To become a small town ISP by providing longer range WiFi and deploying it in the 5GHZ or 24GHZ spectrums. Ubiquity makes very reliable equipment to make this happen and if the area is terrain-friendly, it certainly is possible. To build out a high speed, broadband wired infrastructure is nearly impossible with the government and regulatory issues alone. Ever notice how the large telecom corporations wine about free markets when bills are introduced that don't favor them but when the legal winds are in their favor, it is "fuck free markets, we want to own it!"

Living on earth is enough to drive me crazy, let alone Mars.

So much for free market economics and competition. I hate it when government goes to lengths like these as competition is good all around.

Agreed, these ideas are very stupid! Steel towers within line of sight of each other are much more practical.

Yes, I said it. GM should have been left to die in bankruptcy. Bringing GM back from the dead at tax payer's expense absolutely changed nothing in the quality. I always said there is a reason why Ford never went bankrupt.

How will the UN enforce this? This is nothing more than a symbolic gesture as I don't think sanctions are likely to hurt Japan all that much.

Drop Box is nothing more than a gussied up repackaging of a SFTP or FTPS and a nice fancy ol' GUI. Drop Box does not do anything radically different or innovative. If you don't like the way drop box works, it's trivial to roll your own solution or have someone do it for you. You set up a server for SFTP or FTPS and download a nice, friendly little program called FileZilla. Viola! Your own secure solution without being totally at the whim of a corporation. You can even get a virtual server for basically peanuts per month to facilitate this through providers like VPSCheap.net.

The entire political system is broken! We need smaller government across the board - not just where it is politically inconvenient. I say start by getting rid of most of the bloated executive branch. Do we really need so many law enforcement agencies? Let's also get rid of the spying agencies. Then let's start by axing the judicial branch. No more Supreme Court appointments - justices must be elected every 6 years with a two term limit.

I think it's worse that we preach innocent until proven guilty while behaving just the opposite. As an American citizen, we are ripe for another revolution or civil war. The reset button desperately needs to be pressed as we are basically at society's blue screen of death.

Well, maybe more work could be done to develop hydrogen as a fuel cell vehicle. Then, you would really and truly have a much cleaner solution.

I'm glad to hear Carter's stance on NSA and spying but I'm deeply disappointed that he stopped short of exoneration for Snowden. In my mind, Snowden is a patriot. No country should sacrifice liberty for security. When this happens, the terrorists win. Yes, they win and win big.

So, I wonder if there are some sort of kickbacks and incentives shared between the credit bureaus and big data ....