This is one of the points I was going to make.

Why don't they lower prices on their services, as OP asks? Simple. Because they haven't had to. ISPs in the U.S. do not compete. There is no market, so there are no market forces driving cost down.

The few places where Google has installed fiber are "the exception that proves the rule", as they say.

The reason we're hearing about making voting mandatory (almost exclusively from the Left), is that the poor and the minorities have tended to vote overwhelmingly for the Left... when they bother to vote, that is, which is relatively seldom compared to the rest of the population.

Making voting mandatory would pull in those votes from the poor and minorities.

Note that around the last election, there was also a lot of pushback from the Left against laws that require voters to supply identification in ordeer to vote... even though most states have required such for at least 80 years. And the reason is exactly the same.

Every state I've ever lived in requires some form of identification, in order to verify THAT you have voted... but every one of them also took great pains to make sure nobody knew HOW you voted.

I'll accept that definition of the universe, but recognizing that "all deterministic systems" might be an empty set.

You're basically trying a proof by contradiction here, I believe. However, your wording is really loose.

First, what do you mean by "predict the outcome of the experiment?" What experiment?

Then you say that you "should be able to contrive" an "experiment" that can predict the outcome of the "experiment," but that it will have the "output" that is the opposite of whatever was predicted. What does this statement even mean, since it appears self-contradictory, like saying let the set A contain the number 5 and not contain the number 5. I can't tell whether your conclusions follow from your premise as your premise seems confusing at best.

It seems like you're trying to do something like this: Let f(x) = x + 3. So, f(5) = 8. So let's redefine f(x) = x + 3 if x5, and it equals 9 if x=5. You haven't made a contradiction, you've just swapped one deterministic function out with another.

You also brought up the halting problem, and it isn't obvious to me how that relates. The halting problem has nothing to do with determinism, just predictability. The behavior of a halting machine is completely deterministic - it has a finitely definable starting state, and given that starting state will always end up executing the same series of steps. However, it is unpredictable in the sense that you can't tell what the result will be with certainty without actually running through all the steps to get there.

Certificate Patrol is worthless for anyone who uses Google services, which mints new certificates and expires old ones on a near daily basis. You're notified nearly every time you visit their site, which eliminates the value of the warning in the first place. Google has apparently decided that it's more secure to have rapidly-expiring certificates in lieu of long-term certificates that may have to be revoked, probably partially because they don't have an effective revocation system in place.

More critically, any solution that requires a third-party plugin and expecting the user to watch carefully for certificate changes is a complete non-starter for the general public.

Exactly. The vast majority of accidents and vehicular deaths are caused by impaired drivers (alcohol, drugs, medication, fatigue), distractions (phone, texting, conversations, inattention, boredom), or excessive speeding. Note how all of these are exclusively human conditions, and a self-driving car effectively eliminates them completely. Even beyond that, they'll still likely do better at avoiding accidents caused by other drivers simply because of their inhuman reflexes.

It's going to be extremely interesting to see the safety records of self-driving cars in the first few years after release and compare them to human drivers. And of course, I suppose we can expect the very first fatal accident that involves a self-driving car to be big news around the world.

Sure, I'll buy that. However, in practice if the universe contains elements that are non-deterministic, it seems extremely likely that the physical construction of a computer would not be entirely free of those elements.

Sure, but how do you specify which three have to collaborate for any particular domain, and who do you have to trust to have made that certification?

Good grief man, _stop_ making up fairy tales and read some actual history. The accreditation process for Universities was done by University bodies, not by Government. Public schools were sometimes paid for with taxes, but there was no board of education approving teachers or schools and no Government mandating that children even went to school until the Public school systems were taken over by Government. Teachers and Parents did this without any help.

Mod parent up. I get better quality from my potato.

Well, I could've had a 4 digit ID! I read Slashdot when it started. Just didn't join right away.

Because there are 380 trading days in a year.

And not, say, 260.

And don't forget there are billions of Android devices that can understand Ext* disk formats.

In regards to your statement that they have not spiked in your media, I read your media. They have.

You seem to be under the impression that such topics weren't already a regular feature. They were.

That is a matter of statistical record and not up for debate.

I like how you ignore every single point I make, invent a point I never made and then go and rebut that very firmly.

You've conflated equality between the sexes with equality between classes.

Nope. You're the one who seemed to point out that the solution to inequality was more inequality to even things up.

However, if you want to talk about equality between the sexes, then you're not going to pick and choose who gets compared in the sexes

Huh? Again with the inventing random crap. Way to go.

So only MS gets to embrace and extend; Who would have guessed? Break a single rule in Microsoft's .NET standards and they can come at us with both barrels.

The irony here is MS are using licenses that are thought to be the most libre as a cover to keep the developer community fenced-in to their platform with patent threats. Re-purpose any of the patented code and.....

Also, I'd like to remind you that MS still enforces at least two very silly patents against FOSS distributors: The FAT filename-length patent and the subpixel-rendering patent (which has prior art). And IIRC there is a raft of patents they are using to threaten Linux distributors which they still won't reveal, so they are still in the business of wielding shadowy threats which I'm told is actually illegal.

MS needs to make good on their past and current patent trolling. If they don't then we have no reason to believe they are doing "open source" in good faith.