There are like 4 towns in the USA doing this. Figure it out :-P

But I think we all know it's going to turn out like this.

That pretty well covers it. I also don't like the screen off to the side like that. I want to be able to overlay an augmented-reality HUD over what I'm looking at. That would actually be potentially useful. Having to take my eyes off what I'm looking at and glance at a screen, not so much. Hell I'd be OK with a single color pixels, if the entire lens was the screen.

But we could forbid the laws preventing cities from running their own. My city ran fiber back in the '90's but before they were able to act on it, the state passed a law that cities couldn't be internet providers. The law specified that individual cities could opt out of the law by passing a ballot referendum in which residents of the city vote to opt out of the law. We did that a couple years ago by a solid margin (Something like 80% I forget exactly.) The work crews were just going through marking power lines and stuff last week in preparation to start laying fiber to houses. Already Comcast and Centurylink seem to be scrambling to try to keep customers here. Other cities in the area are also scurrying to jump on that bandwagon as they're concerned they're going to use businesses and residents to mine. The benefits in the few cities around the USA that have done this are clear enough that it's obvious the anti-competitive laws are holding the market back.

*Ahem* Fuck you, David Cameron! We kicked your ass off this continent once over this issue and we'll do it again! And also Avatar was nothing both soft core furry porn! So there!

Otherwise known as the "voting machine company was too stupid to implement SSL" attack?

Or, for email, the "what idiot thinks email is secure without local S/MIME or PGP signatures" attack. Seriously, on-wire tampering is the least if your worries if you're *emailing* ballots around.

Google thought my entire office was located in Mexico a couple months ago, so all my Google services were in Spanish. The situation seemed to resolve itself just as mysteriously as it started. I was speculating that someone was doing a BGP attack to reroute our usual traffic through Mexico so they could phish all our passwords or something.

You forgot to mention that he has an embarrassingly small sample size and doesn't do any sample correction. He doesn't publish any significance values, so we have no way of knowing if 70% is the same or different than 77%, to the accuracy of the methodology (as well or as poorly thought out as it may be). Then he considers 86% and 67% to be about the same, and subsequently 63% and 79% to be about the same.

I am not a professional statistician -- I hire people to do that sort of work for me when I need definitive answers because I don't know the details. But I know enough to recognize handwaving, and that's all the long-winded original posting is.

That I can't quite put my finger on. I'm pretty sure it means our society is broken.

*points to the next story* Stupid virus

When the walls fell

How big a deal is it, really, if they are? If they were and you actually wanted people to use your API, you'd just need to publish it under a permissive license. Otherwise it'd be unlikely to ever gain any traction. Also, if an API can be copyrighted, would that make everything implemented with that API a derivative work? If that were the case, I'm pretty sure AT&T would own the copyright on all computer code for the past 4 decades. Even Windows has some UNIX heritage. The idea of Bell Labs trying to actually assert that copyright is amusing enough that I kind of hope the Supreme Court rules that way.

Might make it to mid 60's (mid 40s now) given the shape I'm in and health history of my family. I do plan to have increasingly hazardous hobbies between now and then. Significantly increasingly hazardous hobbies. But yanno, something's gonna kill you sooner or later anyway, so you may as well be having some fun on the way out.

I think the guesstimates that some sort of immortality might be within our reach within 3-5 decades are overly optimistic. I'm also fairly pessimistic that they'd be available to everyone when they finally do come around. The top 1 to 5 percent might be able to afford to extend their lives. The other 10+ billion people will be on the planet by then will probably resent that. Should make for some interesting times that I really don't expect to be around to witness.

If you put them in geosynchronous, you're stuck trying to pull head shots off with 2 second ping times. Doesn't matter how good your auto-aim is, that's just not going to work. If you put them lower, you'd need a satellite-tracking antenna. Actually you'd probably want at least TWO satellite-tracking antennas and you'd have to dick around with the protocol so that acquiring a new bird when the old one goes behind the horizon doesn't screw up that head shot you're lining up. Long story short, satellite internet is going to screw up your head shots, and that's why Google is laying fiber instead of launching satellites. OK, they're launching satellites TOO, just not for that.

I bet you could put together a software satellite simulator to test your design for significantly less than what it'd cost to launch one satellite. The math to describe an orbit isn't particularly hard -- it's basically just trig. Put a couple dozen fake birds in fake orbit, set up your fake antennas on the ground and start pushing fake packets between them. No sense in building a rocket if that tells you it's not going to work.

To solve this problem we should be more accepting of solutions we don't like? Nah, I don't buy it!