But then Farcebork has been dead to me since its inception. Stillborn. Kaputski.

That millions of people can be duped into giving up their private information and be tracked and mass-marketed to death is still amazing to me. Then, I think about why we have the government we do in the US, and it all makes sense.

Funny this should come up in a topic about patent trolls.

Amazon is no stranger to patent trolls, since it also is a patent troll. One-click shopping, anyone?

I have never bought ANYthing from Amazon, and NEVER will. While I won't go all over-the-top Scott Adams on Amazon customers and wish them die a slow, painful death, I most certainly am happy to wish it on Amazon as a corporation. Though not a slow death; a quick one. The sooner, the better.

It is the epitome of irony that consumerism ultimately funds its own demise.

Go where we've been for the last 20 years before FarceBork. Community-run social sites and forums. FarceBork knows nothing about me, nor will it ever, and I am very happy with that decision.

The battle is only lost to those who throw their weapons and armor on the ground before the battle is even over. Just lay down and die already, amirite?

As for the topic, play in the Devil's sandbox, eat soiled kitty litter. Don't like it? Go pound said kitty litter.

"We overvalue the leaders and undervalue the followers to the point that we forget that leaders cannot do any good if they are not also good followers."

In my experience, the best leaders are the ones who want to lead the least. They make the tough decisions, then get the hell out of everyone's way and get back to work getting the job done.

It kind of goes back to what someone said earlier in the comments.. the best chiefs are found amongst the indians.

It probably was a honeypot of some kind. The feds more than likely put up fake sites with all kinds of anarchist information (most of it edited to be wrong or missing critical pieces to make actual working devices), get it into search engines, and investigate visitors.

Yes, now, at the peak of human civilization thus far, we have advanced to such things as waterboarding, force-feeding innocent people who have been illegally detained for years and go on a hunger strike as a humanitarian protest to their plight, and extended solitary confinement. I can see how we've risen above all that horrible barbarity.

I don't see the bulk of mainline christianity sounding condemnation of it, so I guess it must be OK, right?

As someone once said: "It's the same dance; it's just a different tune."

"I was a devout fan of Ayn Rand and a card carrying libertarian for many years of my young adulthood."

Ahh.. the folly of youth, how I loathe thee.

1) There never was any such thing as an 8081.

2) The earliest Intel math coprocessor was the 8087, for the 8086. The 80-bit float was a special temporary-precision representation which could be stored in memory, but was otherwise unique to the Intel MCP architecture.

I'd love to see engineering documentation of the anticipated failure modes for an atmospheric or sub-atmospheric 4000mph transit system.

On the plus side, it will save a bunch on funeral costs for the unlucky passengers!

The OP that was being responded to didn't distinguish like you are implying. If you want to make a different point fine, I can agree with that, but the original statement was: "It's rural areas being a drain on the nation's resources", to which the responses were largely fair and proper.

If you think that a large percentage of urban development isn't subsidized as much if not more than rural development, you're either naive or stupid.

Yes, it costs more per capita to provide fair universal service to people in rural areas, but that's true of just about everything where there is an imbalance of coverage.

People and society are not a uniform, thin film covering a perfectly flat planet surface where everything can be evenly distributed at the same cost.

"Replace your hard drive" my ass.

Seriously, who writes this shite?

That's one of the problems with so-called "writers about technology" -- when one writes a fact-backed article, one best do his research.

Not very impressive work, to say the least.

That doesn't surprise me one bit.

I am sure Cisco did everything they could to convince the idiots there that they needed to spend all the project money on THEIR equipment, and not on, you know, actual connections for citizens. I have no doubt that the decision to mis-spend the money was by some government manager asshat who was wined and dined by Cisco.

So the taxpayers get shafted again. Personally, I think Cisco should be made to eat that equipment and pay back the money. They should have known better.

Sure, there is plenty of room to add more dead wood to the bonfire.

and yes, I consider the same for cable companies, because they are involved in the same scams and behave with the same antics. More and more, the cable companies are becoming telcos anyway (and vice-versa), with their "universal service" offerings, so there's less need to consider them as a separate category.