That's what I remember as well - and I seem to remember another study suggesting that humans had a much more difficult time adapting to day lengths outside the range of about 22-26 hours (+/- 2 hours), or was it +/- 1 hour? I forget.

You're talking catch, not quantity of available fish - catch naturally increases with better technology, but as available fish reserves are depleted that only makes the problem worse. Both total mass of fish, and individual specimen size have been declining for a *very* long time. But hey, maybe we can learn to eat jellyfish, they seem to be thriving in the warmer, less predator-rich waters.

Now.... just extend that a LITTLE further...

Companies always go toward Monopoly. Something needs to reign them in. Free Market doesn't work in the case of monopolies. Comcast is the most hated company in America, but still exists....

Greedy bastards ALWAYS push it.

If you have criminals, and corrupt cops, the solution is not to get rid of cops. It's to get rid of the corruption!

The problem with black-box programming is that it's a trap. Far more often than anyone cares to admit, the black box implements functionality in an unreliable or inefficient manner. When you're dealing with code that you wrote yourself, you can correct that behaviour of the "grey" box. But with a third-party black box, all you can do is file a bug report and hope that someone can not only replicate the problem, but that they'll give it high enough priority to fix it before you retire or your project is cancelled.

The worst culprit for black box problems are frameworks of all kinds. Some say you're not a "real programmer" until you've written your own framework. I firmly believe that's true, because what is a reusable code base on a large project except a custom framework?

The difference between a custom framework and an off-the-shelf one is that your custom framework is designed and coded with your project in mind, to service the bulk of your project's needs while maintaining enough flexibility to deal with the exceptional cases of your project. A third party black box framework is pretty much never designed that way. It was designed to serve the needs of someone else's conceptual or real project, then tweaked and adapted to serve needs it wasn't originally designed for, and finally unleashed on an unsuspecting world as "the next big thing."

A pox upon frameworks, I say. Design a solid object model, code to it, use it, and get over the fact that you're going to have to write some code.

At least if you wrote the code, you can fix it. Without worrying about whether some upstream integrator will deign to consider your "fix" worthy of integration to the mainstream code. Without having to wait for someone else to replicate, analyze, prioritize, schedule, implement, and test a fix for your problem.

Realistically, any half decent custom framework isn't going to be more than 10% of your total code base anyhow. "Framework" is just a fancy term for what was called for decades "application library."

I knew a lot of people who had the controllers for those types of games over the years, which they'd either bought along with their consoles in bundles, or been given by relatives. But not once in my life did I ever see anyone actually play games like "Guitar Hero." Not once.

Yet I knew over a dozen people who had the controllers.

I wonder what percentage of those overpriced components sat gathering dust, never to be used after the novelty wore off in the first couple of weeks?

Wow if that's how you use QED or define "usefulness" then you should probably re-do highschool maths and english.

You may want to read that in more detail, also the AC above you should read this too.

TPM is required if boot device encryption is used and supported by the UEFI bootloader.
TPM is also required if the device supports ConnectedStandby (a funny new power management method that makes Windows devices behave like mobile phones with a sleep button that keeps it connected in the background but mostly powered down).

It is not a requirement of Windows 8.1 generically.

That being said:
Most vendors will ship all but their cheapest machines with TPM chips.
Most vendors of convertible tablets are supporting connected standby and thus have to ship with TPM chips.
All of Microsoft's reference machines ship with TPM and even better ship with bitlocker enabled on the system drive out of the box, and setting it up with a boot password is trivial 3 button presses in the Bitlocker Drive Encryption tool in the control panel.

TPM is here to stay and it's only being value engineered out on the cheapest and nastiest of devices.

Because the OS provides only a very limited subset of functionality which most vendors include in their equipment.

Driver updates would require working with the OS vendor and Windows Update (actually this is one part I wish would happen).
Display management is frankly poor on the OS. Windows does not provide for strange resolutions, forced outputs, separate colour controls for hardware overlays, or any 3D settings at all.
Power Controls is another thing where every vendor has their own idea of how to improve power consumption. The OS has no native understanding of dynamic brightness adjustment, and selecting which devices can go to sleep is a windows 2000 era dig through the device manager which no users would undertake.

Basically they write the tools because they have to.

Conversely I bought guitar hero and 2 guitars. I only had to put in 10 minutes setting up the profile but that was all it took to start two of us playing pop songs and sounding good in the process. Not to mention the competition kept things very fun and entertaining and we didn't annoy the neighbours with the "learner player" sound because even if you don't play the music doesn't sound bad.

As for your experience there's two likely explanations:
1. You are a musical freak of nature. Some people are. My girlfriend's sister is the type who can pick up an instrument and start sounding good within hours, but she's also at a musicians college and has been playing since she was big enough to hold an instrument.
2. You're no where near as good as you think you are and have a really over inflated opinion of what is considered "good". I know people who have been playing for years who don't sound good and would have trouble playing in a band or playing any song that isn't in an entry level learners book.

I would go recommending your path to anyone based on your experience. It's not the normal experience.

The alternative is asking for bankruptcy. Running communications lines is about the most expensive part of any telecommunications / power infrastructure. This is one area where doing the minimum possible is the only financially sound move.

People will complain no end about service interruptions, but will complain even more when their bills or taxes go up as a result of mitigating the disruptions.

The FCC? :D

I kid. I kid. I see your point. Regulatory capture is a bad thing. The solution is NOT to get rid of regulation. That leads to monopolies. The solution is to get rid of the corruption.

Frankly, America barely votes and a large swath of the voters are fucking lemming morons. We have the corrupt government we deserve. Congress has a 14% approval rating. Most of them get reelected over and over. This isn't the government's fault. This is OUR god damned fault.