They've invested billions if not trillions in the surveillance networks and infrastructure.

Is anyone going to really believe it's all been mothballed at the stroke of a pen?

I won't.

Of course you never read about enraged scientists hacking religious zealots apart...

...but it will also replace C...

Why would you worry about someone "stealing" something you didn't create or pay for in the first place?

You don't get it, do you? Apple lives on open source code that they didn't write.

It is highly unlikely that Apple is going to rewrite all that GPL and BSD code at the heart of iOS with Swift. As long as those core projects are based on 'C', they'll stay in 'C'.

No. '90s. As in 1990. Ten YEARS before the Y2K "bubble".

I was making $85,000/yr in the '90s in IT. Bumping that by only $15,000 in 25 years seems kind of insulting.

A more accurate name would be "Windows Marketing Edition".

Could we wire up the web developers to a dynamo and electrocute them? :P

Web applications chug like a sloth on qualudes compared to local applications. They consume more CPU, they take forever to load/store data, and their interfaces are clunky as hell (Google Office apps included.)

Personally I think it's the web developers that keep asking this question every year, hoping to get praise for their shitty efforts over the past year to catch up to 1990's desktop applications.

No-fault is about taking money away from lawyers, who used to litigate each and every auto accident as a lawsuit in court before the insurers would pay. Eventually the insurers decided that they spent more on lawyers than accident payments, and they had no reason to do so.

If you want to go back to the way things were, you are welcome to spend lots of time and money in court for trivial things, and see how you like it. I will provide you with expert witness testimony for $7.50/minute plus expenses. The lawyers charge more.

In general your insurer can figure out for themselves if you were at fault or not, and AAA insurance usually tells me when they think I was, or wasn't, when they set rates.

It's time to hold the players big and small accountable for their oppressive actions. They should be providing a data pipe, period. No "priority" internally hosted services, no "doesn't count towards your cap" services, no throttling of competing services.

Perhaps more importantly, classifying broadband as telecommunications opens up the possibility of monopoly breakups in some of the markets where there is a serious lack of competition.

If we don't have more than two children per couple, the human race would've died out a long time ago.

I think the proper way to state that is "If we didn't in the past", not "If we don't". If we were to have 2 children per couple (approximately, the real value is enough children to replace each individual but not more) from this day on, it would not be necessary to adjust the number upward to avoid a population bottleneck for tens of thousands of years.

The Northern California Amtrak is actually pretty good for commuting from Sacramento to the Bay Area and back because the right of way is 4 tracks wide in critical places and it has priority over other trains for much of the time.

Acela in the Boston/NY/DC corridor is also good, because the right of way is 4 tracks or more for most of the way, and it has a track to itself along a lot of the route. Other railroads run on parallel tracks.

For the most part, though, Amtrak suffers from not having exclusive track. It runs on freight lines that host cars so heavy that the rail bends an inch when the wheels are on top of it (I've seen this first hand).