Gravity bends space, although always in the same basic way. (I think)

So lets imagine there may be some other way of bending space...

Realistically you are already subject to an endless litany of laws as a citizen of the United States circa 2014. So many rules, in fact, that you don't even know what most of them are. Society is necessarily built on "re-education" from our theoretical natural state, because these rules are not all inherent to our behavior.

The idea in the story was that an efficient enforcement mechanism can minimize the number of necessary rules and maximize their fairness. While you may prefer our current system to the one in the story, it's not hard to imagine that the current system of rules is non-optimal.

The inability to act out many "bad" behavior in the Australia Project was negated by the disconnect between brain and body in the plugged-in citizens. You were free to do what you wanted in your own personal Matrix where there were no ill effects to either you or others.

Americans are individuality obsessed, perhaps moreso than any other human culture throughout history. The story is written specifically to force us to think about this subject.

There were lots of benefits to the plug-in setup. The primary social justification for the setup was to prevent bad behavior/crime.

Having an perfect AI referee watching everyone through their own senses is far-fetched, but I took it to be more of a thought experiment than some attempt at non-fiction.

Just increasing the fuel capacity seems to be a lot easier.

Finland's average speed still beats the average service offered in the US's densest cities. How to you square your point with this reality?

The endless apologies for the shitty state of our Internet service is pathetic.

Finland has a population density of 41 people per square mile. If it were a US state, it would rank 40th in density.

Yet it also has an average internet speed around 5 times faster than the US average.

You're stretching the meaning of bribery too far to take seriously. A better usage of that term would be to describe interactions between lobbyists and Congress.

Your comment is also rather clueless in light of the wage-fixing collusion amongst tech companies.

He downloaded the video so he could look at its technical data. I watch many YT videos, but I never stream them.

Streaming seems aimed at the impatient, but I think it takes more patience to sit through buffering than to download the whole thing and then watch.

Eh? The Masamune in that game (won in the Golden Saucer) is a useless trophy with zero use.

It also bears mentioning that Opera inexplicably deleted everything on their forums during the November 2013 makeover, removing lots of useful information in the process. I supposed they thought all the spam on the new forum would adequately fill the void.

A literal scorched policy with regards to everything they had done before.

What the fuck do you use for your definition of the left? The writing of Joan Walsh?

Even worse... I believe all international airports are defined to be part of the border.

They've fixed that now AFAICT. You are right that they were Chrome-only for quite a while.

All movies playback programs I am familiar with have a "no screensaver while content is playing" setting, which is turned on by default.

Screensaver problems on Linux haven't been an issue I've seen in the last 5 years or so...

Wrong, male babies are more common than female ones. 107 to 100 ---> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

More than 50% of living humans are female because of other factors as sibling poster mentioned.