Now, I grant you that most an entire generation having grown up with the idea that it's ok to steal IP, and the toxic idiocy of the "information wants to be free" crowd additionally muddying the waters, and the proliferation of people who just can't seem to keep their word, one might have reason to be cynical about this.

You've gone off the rails here. The "information wants to be free" crowd thinks as such precisely because information naturally (i.e., without the interference of law) is in the Public Domain to begin with. Creating a strawman argument claiming that they'd somehow twist that position to justify stealing from the Public Domain is not only offensive, but patently absurd.

Write a version of pretty-printer that rerenders your code into a different style.

Have a lexicon of mipelled words for each "personality".

Another lexicon of variable names.
a vs inta vs int_a vs x.

Refactoring and unfactoring for subroutines.

Run the comments through google translate and back to english.
ukrainian
japanese
chinese

Synonym and antonym substitution in the comments.

The mind dances at the possibilities to mess with this algorithm.

Why pay half a million dollars for an 1800 sq foot 30 year old house when you can buy a brand new 3500sq ft house for the same price?

First of all, in-town bungalows are more like 70+ years old. That means they were better-built than new speculative construction and (if built before WWII) have lots of architectural detail that's too expensive to build today. If they're "the same price" (as opposed to "fixer uppers") then they've been renovated and insulated to modern standards, so utilities are cheaper. And most importantly, they're in walkable neighborhoods and close to jobs, so the commute is shorter and the lifestyle is better.

You wold fit in real good with one of my sister's friends who is spending $1400 a month for an 800 sq ft apartment in Brookhaven (just so she can say she lives in Brookhaven) while I pay $1300 a month to rent a 1700 sq ft house out in Woodstock.

Why would I do that when I'm paying about $700 a month for a mortgage (including taxes and insurance) on a 1500 ft^2 house in Atlanta (in the Atlanta city limits, near Decatur)? Granted, my neighborhood isn't as nice as Decatur, but it's a damn sight better than most parts of the suburbs.

By the way, before I bought my house (5 years ago) I lived in an 800 sq ft apartment on the south edge of Buckhead for $800 a month, and I'm sure it'd be no more than $900 or so now... unless that apartment is super-luxurious, your sister's friend is getting ripped off.

Now, I know Google is doing it on a neighborhood basis, so I doubt that most places in these cities won't get it as there are probably not enough people that can afford the $300 up front investment to make a whole neighborhood viable, so it will still be only the rich ones that get this. It just seems to me that picking areas where the income distribution isn't so large would open them up to more customers

Just under half the folks in my neighborhood are yuppies who can easily afford the $70/month gigabit service. The other half are older people who've been here for 20+ years, who would benefit from the free service. In fact, I would say that even having the yuppies create a fund to subsidize the installation fee for the others wouldn't be out of the question. In other words, Google Fiber is a great fit for my neighborhood almost because it's mixed-income. Unless it's competitive (where the rollout is limited to only the top X% of neighborhoods, rather than all that meet some threshold), I can see every neighborhood in the city qualifying except for the real slums, like English Avenue or Mechanicsville.

There are no Billion year old civilizations because the First Ones have all gone beyond the rim leading to the Third Age of mankind.

No. They cannot. Only people such as you and I can be charged with a crime. Rich people only need to have one of their minions write and publish an apology.

It is the year of the Linux desktop! It's just that the Linux in question uses Chrome instead of X11 as its GUI.

The Technical manner of Marriott's jamming is less important than the Legal fact that they are doing it.

If I used a stupid protocol trick to jam your tv signal, but without radio jamming, it would be no less a violation of the law.

Rather then try to make up the difference from loss of in-room movie sales by gouging WiFi, maybe hotels should simply ban people from bringing their own pr0n into the hotel.

Think of how well that would work out.

If a $300 one-time fee (that you can plan for many months in advance) is a show-stopper for you, then you have a severe personal finance problem.

(And saying "I'm too poor not to live paycheck-to-paycheck" is not an excuse; plenty of people on the forums at sites like earlyretirementextreme.com and mrmoneymustache.com have figured out how to live well on $7,000 - $30,000 per year).

OMG! You're right! The sky would fall.

Also imagine what would happen if someone were also giving away their free electricity! Or water from the expensive to construct indoor plumbing!

And about that jerk who refills other people's cups with a beverage! Horrors! I'm sure that next to nothing cost colored sugar water is going to break the hotel -- because the hotel charges an artificially high price for it!

Does it really matter? Some people will always be pricks. But not most people.

It's not the viewing of the picture which is offensive, but the making of the picture. Distributing it is rubbing salt in the wounds, and makes the difference between a secret, private image of Muhammad (which were quite common in Islam), and a public spectacle. The secret, private images were tolerated because the owners would know that the image was not being worshipped or being used to degrade Muhammad. When it's public and all over the place, that security is lost.

It's just a respect thing - when a religion has been pushed into the corner by the meddling of other countries, often with no regard to their sensibilities, they will fight tooth and nail to secure that which is the most important thing to them. We've seen this with other religions and cultures, too, so it's not just an Islam thing.

If someone respects the hell out of something I'll not go out of my way to show how free I am to disrespect it, or show how much I dislike people being offended by disrespect, by disrespecting it - "told you so" is not productive. That's just me, though.

It is not about security. If the hotels were concerned for security, they would make their secure WiFi free (even if it required a password) so that everyone could securely use their secure network.

It's a money grab.

Oh, but the hotels argue: it costs money to build and operate a WiFi network!

I would point out that those hotels do not charge an extra fee for other things that have a substantial cost to build and substantial operating cost:

• Indoor Plumbing
• Electric Lighting
• Electrical outlets
• Air conditioning
• Heating
• Cable / Satellite TV

Why aren't the hotels charging fees for those other things that have a substantial cost to build and operate?

Wake up dinosaurs, it's the 21st century.

We no longer have cable TV because Comcast canâ(TM)t install a pedestal with the upstream amplifier thatâ(TM)s required after they switched from unecrypted QAM.

Nobody's forcing Comcast to encrypt QAM, you know. That's just Comcast deciding to fuck you over because it can.

I hate to break it to you, but people live in exurban wastelands (like Woodstock) because they can't afford to live somewhere like Decatur or Sandy Springs. Those Decatur bungalows you think are just "old" are actually $0.5M+. A lot of them are also actually really nice; they're just not designed to show it off from the street McMansion-style. (Bungalows are typically relatively narrow and deep and don't have front-facing attached garages, so they look smaller from the street than they actually are.) And Sandy Springs (along with Buckhead, adjacent to it) is full of actual mansions (not the "Mc" kind) and is the most expensive town in the entire metro area.

If your impression is based on just what you can see driving by at 50 mph on Scott Boulevard (or on Roswell Road, in the case of Sandy Springs) then you don't know WTF you're talking about.

(Now, bear in mind that I am talking about the City of Decatur proper... unincorporated Dekalb with a Decatur address really does suck, except maybe for the parts near Emory.)

Also, it makes more sense to bring fiber to older, closer-in cities precisely because they are closer, more dense, and don't already have (competing) good infrastructure.

Everything historical would suddenly have some alien connection. Aliens led Moses and Israel through the desert and provided manna from heaven. Aliens built the pyramids. (Oh, wait, people already say that) But these aliens built the pyramids, even if the aliens expressly deny it. There would be endless talking head pundit know everything's feeding us all kinds of manure about the aliens.

There would probably be precious little talking to the aliens themselves. Except for those looking at how to take advantage of the aliens. Or how to use the aliens to take advantage of or obtain mastery over other people.