Damn! You were demoted?

I donno, the Chinese seem to be willing to actually punish corporate executive and government official types from time to time. We'll just have to see if this is one of those times.

I can't deny it's annoying, searching for something using Google and getting fifteen Alibaba entries on the list first, when it looks like thirteen of them are using identical stock photos. That kind of crap is why I won't use Alibaba at all; I'd rather pay the markup from a local distributor than worry about being fleeced through international trade from a seller that I have no recourse with.

Next you know the young whipper-snappers will take "variables" and call them "dynamic constants"

In Bluetooth (especially Bluetoothe Low Energy (BLE)) they already reanamed them. They call one a "characteristic" (when you include the metadata describing it) or a "characteristic value" (when you mean just the the current value of the variable itself).

will the bios power it up against my will?

Maybe

Like the bankers, too big to punish. Everybody should know who wears the pants in government-corporate relationships.

Success via Microsoft will not produce 'competition'. They're not getting 'free money'. It always comes with lots of strings.

Exactly. This is a government job. It's one of the things we hire it to do. We should replace it when it fails, as it is doing now. Turns out the corruption is at home.

Well gee, if you're gonna get picky...

No, the issue is pure corruption. The voters simply will not stop reelecting their favorite crooked politicians that 'bring home the bacon'. There is absolutely no technical reason for the lag.

Population density is bullshit. Damn near everyone in the US has, or had a telephone line running to their house, and every so often somebody squeezes higher bandwidth out of it. It is pure corruption that holds back progress.

government owned fiber

I still like copper. You don't need magic black boxes to use it. You can use a simple spark to get the message out.

Even 'natural' monopolies require government protection (police/military) of their exclusive claims to natural resources, like land and water and air. Those things are the 'means of production' that belong to everybody. Some cities are restricting water use to make sure there is enough for the bottling companies.

...if I absolutely HAD to have something FSF-compliant...

Such requirements are only self-imposed requirements. Even defense contractors like Boeing use stock computers from large OEMs like Dell.

I can't think of a single instance when something being FSF-compliant matters at all, except maybe if you want to work for Richard Stallman. If Wikipedia is to be believed then there are exactly twelve people in the world affected.

Sarcasm?

When I've crossed the Atlantic, the planes have been A330s or A340s. Not exactly long flights (East coast of the United States to Western Europe) but even still, not exactly 747s or A380s either.