Fuck off, OK? Apparently this is 'No Sense of Humor Friday' and nobody told me.

When I can still say things like "HEY NSA, YOU SUCK ASS AND NEED TO BE SHUT DOWN, YOU'RE UN-AMERICAN!" and not get arrested in the middle of the night? Then it's still 'foreshadowing'.

Oh hi there, I'm in my late 40's, but since I actually go to great pains to take care of myself, I'm not obese, weak, slow, and sickly like the average person is.. so I'm in that 'pool' you speak of, the one that 'gets' to pay for everyone else, who fucked themselves up eating crap and never moving off the goddamn couch, except to go to the refrigerator. Know what your oh-so-wonderful ACA is going to eventually do to my life? Ensure that I can't AFFORD to keep doing the things that are KEEPING ME HEALTHY, that's what. Then I'll end up fat, weak, slow, sickly, and miserable. Ain't that a hoot? I resent having to pay for healthcare for people who wouldn't NEED it if they could be bothered to take care of themselves properly.

Am I the only one who sees this as foreshadowing of the possible future for the U.S., assuming the NSA isn't reined in starting now?

Yeah sure whatever you say, pal. All I want is the Internet to not be de-facto owned by Comcast, or AT&T, or Verizon, or whichever asshole corporation you care to name, because they will ruin it too, but in even worse ways, and they'll charge everyone up the ass for it while giving less and less value in return. This shit keeps up and I'll just skip the goddamn Internet completely and go back to reading more books instead.

Do we really want an Internet that, with regard to the U.S. consumer, is essentially owned and operated by Comcast/Xfinity? Screw that, I say, the more competition that can be arranged the better, and the sooner the better.

Goddamnit all to fucking hell, THEY ARE NOT TOYS. You are not the only one who keeps using that word, but: Fossil fuels are not only limited, they are killing the planet now, and we need to get away from them. It's been made way, way too easy to default back to using them, especially here in the U.S., and the only way I see we're going to get people away from using them may, in fact, I'm real goddamn sorry to say, may have to include 'unfair' tactics from federal governments (not just the the U.S. government!) to influence people's choices in what vehicles they purchase! Face the facts, people: Left to their own devices, the general public, automakers, oil companies, and anyone else with a stake in fossil fuels will just keep using them and using them until the last drop is gone, waiting for it to become a crisis and and emergency before they really do anything about changing to something else. We need to get off our collective Human asses and change what we're doing now, not later. Is it going to be painful in one way or another, especially here in the U.S.? Hell yes it will, lots of people aren't going to like it, but it must be done, and once the U.S. is on the non-fossil-fuel bandwagon, the rest of the world will begin to follow suit. Say what you will about how the U.S. has conducted itself on the world stage for quite some time now poltically-speaking, but we do still tend to set trends because we're still (for the most part) a 1st world country.

Fund R&D projects? Yes. But there will not BE cheap electric or hybrids until enough of them are sold every year to bring the manufacturing costs down enough to bring the price down enough that they are competitive, price-wise, with internal combustion vehicles. Also, face the reality: We don't have that much oil left, and we NEED to start weaning off it NOW, rather than later when it's a crisis situation. I'm not saying we should have permanent government incentives to consumers to buy electric vehicles, just long enough to kick-start the process of getting more people to buy them. Enough people buy them and have them, the more people will start thinking they need to buy them too, and so on, until it's the norm instead of just the exception. The more electric vehicles on the road, the more incentive there will be to build infrastructure to charge them, the easier it'll be to own one, the more incentive people will have to BUY one, and so on.

You want people to adopt electric cars and hybrids in greater numbers sooner? You want to wean the general populace off of fossil fuels? This is how you do it! Of all the complete wastes of money the U.S. government commits, this comparatively speaking would be a drop in the bucket and of great long-term benefit to the entire country. While we're at it how about they sink some money into electric vehicle support infrastructure like rapid charging stations, too?

THIS is one of the MANY reasons I do not EVER want there to be 100% autonomous cars on the road. Any such law-enforcement-oriented technology can and WILL be hijacked by criminals to suit their own purposes. If you are in a car by yourself, YOU should be the ultimate intellgence in control of the vehicles' speed and direction, NOT a computer, NOT a cop, and sure as fuck NOT some criminal or some script kiddie who thinks it's funny or something to hack your car.

It's the dirty little secret of cable TV: Pixel resolution and compression are two different things. You may be getting a channel in 1080, but by the time a cable company delivers it to your TV, it's be recompressed so much that it being 1080 doesn't matter anymore. You see it most when things in the picture are moving, they get blocky, and in aliasing around things like text on the screen. They do this to fit more channels into the available bandwidth of their network. Over-the-air from local stations isn't recompressed within an inch of it's life; you're getting the highest quality you can get that way short of having an actual digital copy of a program physically sent to you on some sort of storage medium. I suspect that satellite TV compresses the hell out of things, too, for the same reason: fit more channels into the available bandwidth, so they can make more money. Try paying attention to all this the next time you're watching cable or satellite, you'll notice the compression artifacts. Sorry in advance for ruining it for you, BTW. Then go watch TV where it's using an antenna for OTA broadcasts, you'll see the difference.

You don't have to 'explain' a goddamn thing to them or anyone else, and you damn well TELL them that. You are paying them, not the other way around, and if you want to cancel your service with them or anyone else for that matter, it's not their place to badger you or bully you. Being asked, once, politely, why you're unhappy enough to cancel is one thing, but if you don't wish to explain why then they MUST accept that. Arguing, bullying, badgering, or any other hard-sell tactics, is just plain bullshit. Anyone gives you that kind of guff? You tell them you want to speak to their supervisor, RIGHT NOW, and YOU don't take 'no' for an answer, either. Their supervisor is being a hardass about it, too? Go over their head. And so on. The only way you get shithead companies like Comcast to knock it off is to not sit back and take shit from them.

'Not agreeing/liking with what I'm saying' and 'being wrong' are two different things. Now please fuck off.

How long until I can get a racing bicycle frame made of this stuff?

Do you have Aspergers? Or some heretofore undiscovered textual version of Turret's Syndrome? Reading just the first screenful or two of your recent comments leads me to believe that you do. Either that or you're just some shitty troll refugee from 4chan who couldn't cut it in that particular jungle. I'm honestly surprised that you're not posting as an Anonymous Coward. Oh, and before you protest my attacking you personally? You're the one that insulted me, so go fuck yourself, OK?