Just like they did with water, sewage, and the other utilities...

If only we had corporate monopolies for those too! I'm looking forward to my monthly sewage cap.

I have no idea, which is why I have no interest in owning one. For reading and notetaking, what does the SP3 give you that a cheap ARM tablet wouldn't give you with better battery life and less mass?

If tablet tasks are what people use it for, then now I'm stumped as to why anyone would pay that much for one...

Huh. Looking back, every Surface Pro I've seen was always being used with a mouse and keyboard. I never really thought about it at the time.

To be fair though, the Surface Pro is really a laptop without an integrated keyboard and mouse. Its niche seems to be that of a laptop that you can use like a tablet (like those weird old Thinkpads with the rotatable screen, but not as thick and heavy). Metro crappiness aside, it's easier to do real work on a laptop than a tablet/phone and real work almost always requires a keyboard and mouse.

Obama veto a bill... yeah right.

The current president has used the veto less than any president in over 100 years. He's used it twice in eight years and has happily signed into law bills that directly countered the platform he ran for office on. If this managed to make it to his desk, he'd probably sign it just the same.

Whoosh? Mac OS X is BSD.

If the trendy new flat grey-on-grey visuals annoy you, try the "Increase contrast" option in the Accessibility System Preference. It doesn't restore the visual scheme to what it was (which had its own problems), but it's different enough that it may appeal to you. My eyes are fine, but I'm not a big fan of the war on contrast.

An air rifle would be fine for city use. A BB has next to no kinetic energy by the time it returns to the ground. Air resistance is a real energy sapper for things that small.

A thrown rock or a slung projectile will be larger and more massive and so retain more of its kinetic energy on return. The attacked drone falling from the sky will do more potential damage than any of the projectiles you'd use to bring it down.

A lottery for representatives would be the ideal. Even a hereditary monarchy (with a constitution and veto, perhaps in the form of a guillotine) would beat what we have now.

The problem isn't so much that people are too dumb as that our system selects for corrupt, greedy, and power hungry sociopaths. The only way to become a "representative" is to want to be one. But anyone who wants that job should be denied it on that basis alone. The people may vote sub-optimally, but every single choice available to them is a bad choice. Our system is designed to distill out anyone who is remotely suitable for public office.

Replacing the system that self-selects the most horrible people with one that operates on complete chance would be an improvement.

I've found that many of the telemarketers either use a random number with the same area code as the number they're calling or an 800/866 number for the caller id. I've had the same phone number since college and don't know anybody at all with that area code. So any call coming from my area code is a drunk misdial or a telemarketer. Very handy for filtering two classes of annoying calls.

Once we've lost the ability to fix the problem, people will begin to care again. Apathy is caused by life being easy; fixing the problem of people not caring is going to be very painful.

It's hard to understand how disconnected they are from us and our daily concerns. They're representing their interests and the interests of everyone they know and meet. Senators, and the people who hang out with senators, don't have to worry about being outsourced. "Outsourcing" is something that makes people's business more successful and their bank accounts bigger. Why would you oppose it?

Or, if you're feeling cynical:
They're connected now, if they weren't already before. When the US turns into a third world shithole because of their actions, they'll be the feudal lords or safely relocate to a less distasteful locale. (Or at least they hope that's the case. Or they know they'll be dead before any sort of collapse and don't care what their lifestyle costs the chattel.) If they aren't so pampered and surrounded by sycophants to see the outcomes of their actions, they're just-world believers and think the displaced workers probably deserved being laid off.

So let the communities manage the natural monopoly part, which is the cable/fiber and networking hardware, and allow the private companies to sell internet access on it. The currency of interest to the municipality is votes, so they can't afford to cherry pick the neighborhoods where they roll out service.

Larger customer base for the ISPs, actual competition between players, uniform network access across the entire municipality. Everybody wins and nobody's delicate ideology is offended.

Because it's clearly a tongue-in-cheek reference to the tyrannical rule of the womenfolk over us men archetype. At the same time, it pokes fun at the terrorists by comparing their actions to prudish housewives being offended by dick jokes. I don't think he was actually afraid of being bludgeoned by heavy cookware for making dirty jokes.

In other words, "whoosh".

The "Right Not To Be Offended" stifling media censorship is really more of a UK thing. In the US, the media censors itself in the name of maximizing profits (or minimizing any threat to profits). This may seem like an insignificant difference, but the motivations behind the censorship are vastly different. There is no moral imperative to avoid offending people in the US, only the pragmatic desire to avoid losing customers or provoking boycotts and the like. There are plenty of media outlets in the US that cater to the offensive speech seeking crowd and there's no popular movement to silence them.

Here's a gem from Poettering, where he dismisses basic security (why would you not implicitly trust unauthenticated packets from some random internet server?), as well as displays his total lack of awareness of the capabilities of the existing software he's bent on replacing (super-NIH syndrome... writing a simplistic replacement to ntpd and chronyd without even knowing what they currently do).

Yikes.