Typically the homeowners and business owners own the land, the government demands a right of way through it or above it (for pole-hung services), then leases that right-of-way to too few companies.

Giving away basic cable, which for buildings already wired has a marginal per-unit cost approximating zero, in exchange for a quid-pro-quo from a political entity sounds like public corruption to me.

What the fuck part of " A pat-down of someone who's being detained for probable cause is okay" did you manage to misread?

A firefighter has a reason to be there if there is a fire to fight. As the SCOTUS already said, police using this sort of thing without a warrant is an illegal search.

If you're talking about "stop and frisk" then the courts are certainly not okay with that. A pat-down of someone who's being detained for probable cause is okay. Being black, young, or poor is not probable cause.

Not every computing task needs 10 TB of common RAM. Mainframes have their place, but it's not in doing every task.

How about some of that transparency we were promised? Where's the American people's backdoor into Obama's communications?

Oh, that's right... All people are created equally until one of them is working for the government.

Fuck Obama and his spooks.

Scotland should have seceded with the UK willing to have such a daft demagogue in charge. Now he's trying to turn the UK and the rest of the world into even more of a surveillance nightmare than the street cameras London already has.

He can piss up a rope and then hang himself from it.

Nobody expects a single desktop PC to do the job of a mainframe. It's true, too, that mainframes have their place for certain types of work. Don't claim, though, that a rack full of blades can't be clustered to do a similar job. It happens all the time.

Maybe I'm old, but when I was in grade school kindergarteners on up had to walk to and from school if they lived less than a mile away unless there was some major road in between or they had a parent or babysitter ready to drive them.

I think "prevailed" is a bit overstating things. Mainframes have more "held on" despite the march of the killer micros.

If by celebrity we mean that good scientists get famous for actual research and get patronage to run their labs free of government funding, then hell yes.

If by celebrity we mean that their career as a "Scientist" means to be an advocate for one bit of research over others even well outside their own work, then probably not.

It's not shocking, as it seems a good portion of every profession is incompetent.

Indeed. The equivalent argument to mine when applied to firearms would be to ban stupid firearms users. See what I did there?