In many jurisdictions, emergency response is required to dispatch responders for all 911 calls, regardless of the reported incident. The possibility exists that the party calling is under duress, and even failing that, there is just too much potential liability to not send a couple of uniforms in squad cars.

Source: My then two-year-old son snuck into the office at my mom's house on Christmas Day, and used the emergency speed dial button on the phone to call 911. After babbling a bit to the dispatcher, he said "Bye bye!" and hung up. We got a call a couple minutes later from the dispatcher confirming the address, and a couple of squad cars with uniform officers showed up a few minutes after that, rang the doorbell and poked their heads around to see we were just eating dessert, and to be introduced to the offending little rug-rat.

Even though CFL's contain mercury, they result in a net reduction in environmental mercury emissions due to their much lower power consumption, since tatistically, half of your power comes from coal, which emits mercury as it is burned. Furthermore, $120 for LED bulbs is ridiculously unrealistic in 2013. I've seen them recently at IKEA for under $10 (albeit in low wattage flavors). Home Depot gets $13, before rebates. $78 gets you a six-pack of them.

http://www2.epa.gov/cfl/what-are-connections-between-mercury-and-cfls
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/40222476/
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Cree-60W-Equivalent-Soft-White-2700K-A19-Dimmable-LED-Light-Bulb-BA19-08027OMF-12DE26-2U100/204592770#

Lead paint provided excellent coverage (of stains and such) and a durable finish that was impervious to water. Tetraethyl lead was similarly a great fuel additive that increased octane rating while increasing engine reliability. Asbestos was used in numerous products for its heat and fire resistance. In particular it made for quiet, long-lasting brake pads on cars. Drop-side cribs made it easier to place babies in their beds. DDT, Ni-CD batteries, Bisphenol-A (BPA). The list goes on and on... We'll just throw incandescent light bulbs on top of the heap of products that performed well in their intended purpose, but had unacceptable environmental or health effects.

CFL's aren't perfect. They have service life issues with enclosed light fixtures, and when they're turned on and off frequently. But they use a quarter the power, and the mercury in them, combined with the mercury in the coal burned to power them, is less than that emitted powering an incandescent bulb. LED bulbs are even longer lasting, and more efficient, and without the hazardous materials. Altogether, there's no reason to continue using incandescents, and in a decade or so, no one will have a hankering for bulbs that use 400% more energy while having 5% of the service life...

At my work, the security guards found a Chevy Volt plugged into an outlet in the parking garage during the work-day. Back of the envelope calculation is the car sucked up about $1.50 in electricity. Security did an email blast (including a photo of the verboten electrical hook-up) to the site's entire workforce, chastening us to not do this, with warnings about violations of federal law and such. Based on the rate at which my time gets billed, they were already well in the red just from me reading the email, to say nothing of the time someone spent taking the photo, composing the email, or the several thousand of my contractor co-workers who undoubtedly also read it. If the local district attorney has even two active brain cells, he's not going to actually pursue this case. Ignoring the PR nightmare, the costs to pursue the case, relative to the financial loss incurred, aren't even close.

Bottom line: You want random people to not use the electricity you pay for? Don't fucking put outlets outside where random people can access them.

Corollary to my previous comment:

The back-haul internet backbone connections that connect "last mile" ISP's to the greater Internet are massively oversubscribed. The bandwidth they've deployed to their subscribers is similarly oversubscribed. Their entire business model is predicated on customers using only a tiny fraction of their advertised bandwidth, when averaged over time. Worked fine when people just used the Internet for email and web browsing; these apps consumed bandwidth only in brief, infrequent bursts. Netflix, Hulu et al blows a gaping hole in the ISP's cost structure, as customers are now using a much greater percentage of their advertised bandwidth.

The TELCO's went through a similar phase in the 90's. Prior to dial-up Internet, the average residential phone was in use for perhaps 20 minutes per day, spread across multiple calls, a decent percentage of which were of the extra-cost, long-distance variety. AOL came along, and all of a sudden people were making local phone calls that lasted 2 or 3 hours at a stretch, and they weren't making any lucrative long distance calls because the PC was tying up the phone line.

I have every confidence that Netflix is paying for all the bandwidth they're using, as are Netflix's subscribers. If there's congestion In-between then it's the backbone providers to upgrade, and build that into their cost structure.

The internet already provides the viable infrastructure for on-demand video delivery, as demonstrated by the litany of devices that support Netflix playback.

The Great Recession already saw many people belt-tighten by canceling their cable TV. Subscriber numbers are in slow decline. Netflix, YouTube and Hulu are just a few content deals away from completely destroying the value proposition of cable TV for remaining subscribers. Cable companies believe their only hope of keeping that revenue from disappearing is to make sure their internet service isn't viable for video delivery. Net neutrality means they can't manage their network traffic and make netflix et al unusable for their subscribers.

Cue the new FCC chief.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by Clinton, muddied the waters by simultaneously allowing cable companies to sell local phone service in competition against the Baby Bells, and allowing the Baby Bells to branch out into long distance phone, as well as Internet and TV service. Local phone had previously been a sacred cow exclusively reserved for the legacy RBOC's (Regional Bell Operating Companies, Verizon and AT&T). The legacy POTS could not effectively compete with the voice/video/data "Triple Play" the cable operators have been offering since the late 90's. At this point, the RBOC's are having to build out totally new fiber networks (which naturally also provide phone service via VoIP). Additionally maintaining POTS represents a redundancy that is unjustifiable, business-wise, especially when RBOC's and Cable operators directly compete across all services, and thus service only a fraction of (as opposed to all of) the homes passed.

The market conditions that gave rise to POTS no longer exist, and such a network will likely never be built in the US, as it will be impossible to close the business case in the modern business and regulatory climate. The American POTS network was built out when Bell Telephone was a nationwide monopoly that serviced virtually every potential customer. Ma Bell further subsidized this local (and rural) service by charging astronomical rates for long distance calls, as well as equipment rentals. The landmark US vs. AT&T anti-trust case put an end to that, leading to the divestiture of Bell into AT&T and the various Regional Bell Operating Companies. Ma Bell didn't even pay for most of the rural telephone network, which was built out from the 1930's to 1950's via the Rural Electrification Administration (now known as the Rural Utility Service) which was part of FDR's New Deal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System_divestiture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT&T
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

With the 4S, Apple actually managed to eliminate carrier-specific SKU's of the phone. The MDM6610 used in the phone did CDMA and GSM/UTMS, and they put in a penta-band RF chip. Carrier lock is actually applied during the activation. The only reason there was more than one SKU was the color, storage, and localized pack-in chargers. The iPhone 5/S/C have carrier-specific SKU's because no one (read: Qualcomm) makes a single RF chip that supports all the myriad bands carriers are using to support LTE alongside their legacy 2G/3G bands.

Hmmm... I did an Applecare+ warranty replacement of my iPhone after it went for a swim. The process took all of three hours, including the drive out to the mall, eating lunch at the mall, the Genius doing a last-minute iCloud backup of the old phone before wiping it, swapping my iPhone out for a new-to-me iPhone he got from the stock-room out back, and waiting around until the iCloud restore of the new iPhone to completed via the in-store wifi.

So they lure a gazillion people in with 25 different doorbusters, that they have, like, 12 of, each. The rest of the shit in the store is marked down barely, if at all, from the "normal" price. No thanks. Now Walmart is doing the doorbusters in phases... No thanks, I don't need a 32" Funai TV that bad, even if it is $98...

Microsoft has had a long history of (poorly) knocking off Apple's products. The Surface is no different. Apple's genius, which Microsoft utterly failed to appreciate, was in making the iPad run iOS instead of MacOS. Steve's reality distortion bullshit notwithstanding, this design decision invited comparison with the cheaper and less capable iPhone. Apple was able to frame the iPad, in customers' minds, as a super-size iPhone, rather than as a miniaturized version of anything that they would call a "computer".

By running software called "Windows" the Surface naturally inviting comparison to "conventional" Windows PC's. It faired poorly; PC-makers' razor thin margins meant potential buyers could buy nearly any Windows laptop for the same or less money, get a bigger screen, better keyboard, more storage, and be better able to do "real work". Surface RT added insult to injury by not even being a "real computer" in the sense that it didn't even run legacy Windows software.

The US learned quite a bit from WWII. By accounting for 50% of the world's defense spending since that war, the US has been able to permanently forward-deploy a significant fraction of its military, while maintaining a materiel edge sufficient to insure no adversary, or potential alliance of adversaries, has any remotely realistic probability of prevailing militarily against the US. In the case of the Senkaku Islands, we will fly B-52's in through the front door, advertising to God and everybody that we're openly ignoring China's "Air Identification Defense Zone" and daring the Chinese to shoot them down. The Air Force keeps the B-52 around because sometimes, there is military utility in announcing to the enemy that you don't even need your top-of-the-line shit-kickers to inflict massive butt-hurt. 51 year old Big Ugly Fat Fuckers are more than enough to get the job done.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/27/world/asia/china-japan-us-tensions/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

They're not railroaded into doing business in China, but entering into joint-ventures with domestic companies is the price of admission to the Chinese market. And yes it's short-sighted. The best part is that the Chinese halves of these joint ventures continue to simultaneously do business independently.

For example, GM is partnered with the Chinese auto manufacturer, SAIC. The joint venture manufactures the entirety of GM's product line for the domestic Chinese market. Meanwhile, SAIC simultaneously manufactures and sells cars under their own brand names.

The current US enduring stockpile consists entirely of weapons designed, and physically manufactured, prior to the end of the Cold War. Many of the delivery systems (the Minuteman III and Trident II come to mind) are similarly antique. Virtually all of China's domestic "R&D" has been the product of reverse-engineering. Today they're able to rip off western manufacturers who've been railroaded into setting up shop in "joint ventures" with domestic concerns. Back during the Cold War the best they were able to do was rip off the Soviets, who were themselves ripping us off...