Why decommission at all? Design for refurbishment now and keep it running indefinitely to avoid that cost and politics later.

And more to your point, I (the collective manifestation of the citizenry) have leverage against a government that does as you suggest by keeping firearms in my possession, being proficient in their use, and advocating (through constitutionally protected peaceable means) for my right to do so. This is one of the functions of the second amendment: to act as a check on a government that overreaches. Tax-dodging nuts holed up in the mountains notwithstanding, governments need checks on their powers that have teeth in them. It's kind of like the British monarchy: on paper, the monarch is supreme. In practice, it's understood what would happen if he or she tried to assert that supremacy, so they don't.

I can be as obscene as I want with whomever I want that's of voting age and associates with me freely of his or her own volition. In print, online, and in person. Just not over RF broadcasts.

if there were some foundational document that codified your right to both military weapons and speech of all sorts, and prohibited the government from passing laws restricting either.

DBL_MAX+1.0

It would also help if it used GPS, INS, and/or visual odometry for the speed instead of tachometers on the wheels. More exact, verifiable, and not subject to the "we'll turn it up the gain on the speed display a little to be conservative" methodology reportedly used by all car companies to avoid liability ("I wasn't speeding, the speedometer said I was doing XX").

systemd will get an integrated text editor with emacs, vi and nano emulation modes...

My high school in the US had a single joint history/lit class for 9th and 10th graders in the late 90s. Seemed like a natural union: learn classical civilzation, read Homer; learn about the scramble for africa, read Achebe. Not sure math and physics would get an entirely fair shake this way, but at least weaving it into a story might provide some better motivation than the study of platonic ideals for their own sake does.

No, but only in the sense that bending space to travel faster than light is "overwhelmingly obvious"

Oh come on. You could have said Shroedinger's child and gotten modded way funnier.

If your government is crooked enough to order your death with a drone on a whim, not having the drone isn't going to improve the situation. Third world dictators and western despots, past and present, did and continue to do their killing and pillaging just fine without drones. The Khmer Rouge didn't need drones. Charles Taylor didn't need drones. Tech is like oxygen. It's only bad if there's already a fire burning.

Desktop share doesn't matter. Server share, supercomputer share, and embedded share matter. Why? Because that reflects the mindshare of the geeks and their bosses who pay for the stuff. That means it's not a hard sell to say a customer-facing stuff should be compatible with Mac and Linux, because it would be pretty silly to make software you can't test within its own box, even if you do need to test it with typical customer boxes and OSs before you release. Year windows dominates, but you still see billboards on the highways promising high paying tech jobs to people who can at least spell "Linux".

There's no such thing as complete freedom from lock-in. unless you're totally vertically integrated from the rare earth mines, up through the wafer fabs, all the way to the OS and the user software. Example: SpaceX, which does almost everything, including software, in house and doesn't have to march to the beat of somebody else's drum.

Back to software: you're locking yourself into something whenever you deploy anything. ActiveX makes you stuck on Microsoft. Java, though claimed to be multiplatform with compliant JVMs shipped by Oracle, IBM, and the FOSS community, really makes you stuck on whichever one you start developing on. HTML5/J5/CSS will make you stuck on whatever browser version you go with when you start. Hell, even "fully open source" systems like Linux make tweaks to the kernel API that render drivers obsolete (this has nothing to do with systemd, just normal tweaks and architecture changes that are generally a Good Thing for a healthy project). So if you ship drivers that compile with 2.6.23, you need to tweak your memory allocation for 2.6.24+, and other things for 2.6.39+, and so on and on.

Bottom line: you're "locked" to whatever you go with because when they make a change, you need to spend time and money catching up with them.

Mandatory policies of being sent to re-education camp for speaking with foreign customers and suppliers tend to put a damper on any such advantage.

So what? Almost all tech that moves you on the way to a star-trekky society free of poverty and want has its roots in war and savegery. Airplane technology really only spread its wings during the two world wars. The first electronic computer was used to compute ballistics tables. The first programmable electromechanical computer was used to crack Nazi encryption. So the robot that gets developed today to kill enemy soldiers will be used tomorrow for a half dozen peaceful applications I can't even imagine right now. True savages wouldn't bother with the last part.