a) the ubiquitous availability of information is a relatively new thing. Public libraries didn't even really exist until the latter 19th/E20th centuries. The internet is less than a generation old.
b) governments and power structures have controlled such information throughout the span of human history.

I'm not even 100% convinced that the ideal of universal access to information is an unalloyed good.

Nothing is pure good. Fortunately that's not the standard for good. Unfettered access to the Internet merely has to be better than government censorship of the internet. That's the real choice, not internet vs no internet. Unfettered access to information is one the founding principles of Democracy. Western nations have embraced this idea for around 200 years. Developing nations that aren't particularly democratic or are newly democratic are having to come to grips with this fact.

A country where the Government gets to censor what we see and hear can't function as a democracy. Democracy relies on the citizens being able to freely communicate. That can't happen under censorship. In the US the founding fathers reconized this because they were subject to a government that tried to control them. That's why the created the first amendment, and why other countries equally recongized this basic fact of a functioning democracy.

FWIW, the term "snuff film" was coined to reference not just a video which merely shows death -- even intentionally -- but one which was created for the purpose of entertainment, usually for sexual gratification, and sold for profit.

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/...

If you plan to go this route, satellite is in my experience far more likely to include unmetered off-peak use than cellular.

If your computer happens not to be a laptop, which is likely for a gamer because laptop GPUs tend to be underpowered in both senses, watch people point and laugh at someone bringing in a desktop computer to download a game. That's the vibe I get from Not Always Right, Geekologie, and Paradoxoff.

"Snap an App" allows a phone-sized app to fit in a 20em-wide column of the screen on desktops, laptops, and 10" tablets. So why would it be so hard to allow the Start screen to start snapped on desktops, laptops, and landscape tablets? A snapped Start screen would at least be consistent with Windows Phone's Start screen.

I don't see how that can work in the present U.S. cellular market. Sure, Google gives 15 GB of storage, but if your cellular ISP doesn't let you upload or download more than a third of that per month, what's the use? The big reason I own a laptop is to get work done while riding the city bus, which lacks Wi-Fi.

Then the PC maker could install only Windows plus a package manager analogous to Mac App Store, Ubuntu Software Center, or Steam. Then when the user inserts a DVD-Video disc, the package manager could connect to the Internet and send the machine's serial number to the repository to present a list of "third-party crapware" that the machine's administrator is entitled to install. For a PC configured with an optical drive, this would include DVD player software. If the user knows he's going to play a DVD while away from the Internet, he could start the package manager and install it ahead of time. A copy of the qualified packages could even ship (uninstalled) on the hard drive, with an option in the package manager to purge them to reclaim the space.

It was intentionally coupled to a specific device for legal/liability reasons related to medical devices.

Having to replace the entire arm is stupid though. Ideally, the arm should be able to be "re-paired" in a doctor's office or at the patient's home by a factory-authorized person such as his doctor or a technician. For legal/liability reasons, this might require replacing a chip but that should be no big deal.

In any case, the only reason I can think of for the arm to have to be replaced is if the company has gone through bankruptcy or is no longer in business, or if the arm has already exceeded its useful life as a medical device and as a result the company no longer supports it. This should not be the case for any adult prosthetic arm new enough to be controlled by an iPod.

That's an interesting idea, at least from the accessibility perspective. I've wondered for a while what'd be the most effective way for someone who can only push one button to control a mouse-driven application.

iPhones have had the ability to be remote wiped for a long time. Yet I have not heard of a pandemic of hacker-led mass bricking of iPhones.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/27/...

Now you have.

That's because games themselves are eligible for very limited IP protections.

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/f...

I think the point was that additionally requiring "appropriate Internet connectivity" limits the market for the product too much compared to requiring only electricity and a computer. The same is true of requiring a bleeding edge computer instead of the computer one is more likely to already own.

Yes. Comcast still has the 300 GB per month limit in many markets, and cellular has a cap two orders of magnitude smaller than even that.

For someone born in a country whose home Internet pricing expectation is stuck in the past, such as the United States, Canada, or especially Australia or New Zealand, it can be expensive and a pile of red tape to relocate to a country in the present.

The problem with your analysis is that the laissez-faire folks would see points all of your stipulations as Marxist.

1. In unfettered capitalism monopolies are fine. While you don't want regulated markets. construction of monopolies through price manipulation etc. is fine. This is how we ended up with stuff like Standard Oil. Look what happened with the breakup of AT&T - gradually the companies formed by the split re-merged. Only regulation has prevented formation of a monopoly.

2, 3 and 4 are obviously restriction on free commerce and therefore Marxist.

Now after having waited a couple days for this to cool down and for the offtopic police to move on: I agree that travel is necessary. I'm just unsure about the means. Will I need to buy a car to get a job?

I decided to fact check this claim. Eusociality, according to Wikipedia and the references it cites, is defined as three aspects of the behavior of a species:

• "cooperative brood care (including brood care of offspring from other individuals)": Daycare is a thing.
• "overlapping generations within a colony of adults": Grandparents are a thing.
• "a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups": Humankind appears to be moving in the direction of breeder vs. thinker classes. More affluent classes already tend to produce fewer children, and the public has become more accepting of a gay lifestyle. Furthermore, I've seen plenty of contempt for "breeders" and other childfree-by-choice advocacy on Slashdot.

I agree that humans are not as close to the eusocial ideal as bees and mole rats, but we're closer than a lot of other species.