But just no, to the conversation mirror - most parents already don't keep their eyes on the road, we don't need to give them another excuse.

Ah, memories of my childhood. Things like my father flying down the freeway at 60 turning around in his seat and screaming "You look at me when I'm talking to you boy!" while everyone else screamed about oncoming traffic.

At the time I learned to drive, I considered my greatest achievement was being able to hold a conversation without looking at the person I'm speaking with.

If you believe that's not a scam then boy do I have a deal for you! One bridge*, slightly used!

Well, that's not entirely true. The voice quality of analog phones has steadily improved, so the amount of data did go up a little bit in that hundred years. :-D

But seriously, we hit a wall with copper, and it only took a hundred years to get there. A single pair (or even a bonded double pair) of copper just can't cut it. But a single fiber provides more than enough growth potential. The current record is 100 terabit over a single fiber, or 100,000 times what most fiber providers currently provide. I figure that's good for another hundred years. Even governments can move at that speed. :-) And unlike copper, you don't have distance limitations from electrical resistance and capacitance. Yes, there's dispersion, but that hundred terabit speed was at a distance of 100 miles (without boosters, AFAIK), so we're talking about orders of magnitude less problems than you get with copper, where a mere ten gigabit over four pairs of copper will barely go the length of your house.

Can anyone explain this situation to me?

At least in my case, you're missing the mark. I've always thought that our state and federal governments were pretty close to incompetent, and I still do. But government-funded nonprofit corporations do work, and at the local level, governments sometimes work.

Do you ever search for stuff?

82 million xBox 360 owners can't be wrong right?

And how many million people bought Kylie Minogue and Madonna records? They can't be wrong, right?

Chairman, CEO, CFO, CIO, Executive VP of Sales and Marketing and Executive VP of something to do with engaging the outsourcing suppliers with the starving peasants working 80+ hours a week for a pittance in undeveloped countries.

That's also seen in bad console ports, by the way.

I've long since overcome my motion sickness (mom's van came with multiple barf buckets), but watching the screen move like I flicked google maps and it slowly pans to a stop (especially in any kind of curved motion) tickles the part of my brain that says "stop that, it's trying to make you sick".

That long cycle worked fine for the telephone lines that serve your house. They served us well for a long time. The biggest flaw was that instead of managing the infrastructure themselves, they gave it to private companies to manage. Then, when they started abusing the monopoly, the government had to turn around and start requiring them to allow CLECs to use the lines. The phone companies, predictably, hated this, and did the absolute least that they could do to comply with the regulations, often refusing to fix problems with lines while blaming it on the CLEC (and vice versa).

All those problems would have been avoided if the government had simply maintained exclusive control over the lines and leased them out to third parties. That's how next-generation fiber networks in cities should be set up. The entire premise of letting a few companies maintain exclusive control over critical infrastructure is fundamentally flawed and can only lead to more of the same bulls**t we've had for the last two decades.

The only scheme that works is the public utility scheme, where the government owns the wires and private companies provide the service. We know this model works because it has worked with our interstate highway system and private shipping companies for decades. Is it perfect? No. The government historically hasn't charged those shippers enough money in gas taxes to cover infrastructure maintenance costs, resulting in some roads falling into disrepair. But that's mainly a problem caused by lack of a single management body that manages all of the roads in a region. Dozens of city governments working together isn't a great way to get things done except on an "It burns! It burns!" emergency basis. The solution to that problem, of course, is for all the cities in a metropolitan area to get together to form a non-profit corporation, and make that corporation responsible for the management and leasing of lines a la TVA.

With the small difference that in the Third Reich those who failed badly enough at the politics ended up with a bullet in their brain.

It sounds a lot more like career politics in most corporations. Not all, certainly, but most.

If the bad guys are installing system-level software, or -- even worse -- plugging hardware into your box, you're sunk. There's basically no defense against that. Two-factor auth helps, but only for sites that support it, and even then a real-time attack can get in.

You do realize those rights at that point in time applied only to white male land owners, right?

And they added commercial radio equipment to warships to ensure that it would never happen again. One would hope that the Russians did similar things to their anti-aircraft batteries after hearing of that incident. If they didn't, one might reasonably ask what in hell is wrong with Russia. And if they did, one might reasonably ask what in hell is wrong with the people who fired that missile today without taking the time to use the equipment.

No, it isn't particularly interesting how it ended up in the middle of a war zone. Not at all. The area in question is not closed to civil aviation, or at least it wasn't prior to this incident. The aircraft was flying about a hundred miles off its usual flight path, which is a completely reasonable deviation when avoiding inclement weather as they were. Presumably, the deviation was approved by the Ukrainian civil aviation authorities.

I should point out native americans are still largely unemployed, stuck in reservations on land white American's didn't want. One of their few rays of hope being the ubiquitous Indian Casino where they are exacting their revenge. Still they are second class citizens.

Blacks were still being massively discriminated against until the Civil Rights act which was around 180 years later. They are still second class citizens.

The poor, they are still second class citizens.

Women are the one group doing pretty well for themselves though they are still underrepresnted in government.

Look around the room at a State of the Union address. The room is still overwhelming full of affluent white men.

As for the founding fathers brilliant ideas on governence, it exploded in a bloody civil war in 80 years.

You need look no further than where the U.S. congress, courts and presidency are today. They are a smoldering ruin. They have never been the great institutions Americans are brainwashed in to thinking they are. Are they better than totalitarian dictatorships, sure. Are they models the rest of the world can aspire too, no, not really.

American governement is the best government money can buy.