No, you can't put copyrighted greek symbols on a product. You can still put any greek symbols on you want, but toucan't use the crest of ZTA or Farmhouse or whomever without licensing it.

Nah, they'll just a lean on his restaurant.

The public is going to be mercilessly taxed to provide themselves with high-speed internet, and the cost will be entirely on the people who benefit!

Your sarcasm aside, from TFA it looks like the town in question borrowed ~$1900 per person (NOT per household) to put in the system. They'll get that back with taxes eventually, but it's not clear whether the taxes will be on the locals or Statewide. Assuming a five year note, average household size of four, and the costs paid entirely by the locals, that should about double the $65/month that is the nominal cost of the system.

In addition, the Federal government (that's the rest of us in the USA) are going to cover ~$90M of the cost. Since the $90M covers multiple towns in the region, it's impossible to say how much the total cost of the system will be.

The article wonders why the Cuban government is letting this happen and then goes on to say it makes $5 million a month and no one knows who is running it. At $5 mill a month a lot of government types can make a nice tidy profit while still controlling and observing what goes int El Paquete. As long as nothing that think will cause problems is in it why not run a lucrative media empire? One that is protected from competition, because well, you and your police can easily take care of the competition; besides if you are already bringing it in their is less incentive for someone else to do so and that saves you the expense of tracking them down. If things go south you can always leave and live off your earnings. Just because you are a good socialist doesn't mean you don't appreciate what capitalism can offer you.

The problem with outing them officially is now you've validated the information. Better to pull them and possibly a few nin-agents as well to keep the other guys wondering about the accuracy of the data.

Well maybe they would still be separated if they didn't attack a union fort and start the war.

Of course, the fact that the Union fort was in the territory of the Confederacy probably helped convince the Confederacy to attack it....

A single $1 billion desalination plant near LA will provide 50 million gallons of fresh water per year.

So that would be 800 such plants. 800 is not that much greater than 1. I'm not seeing the impossibility.

800 such plants would produce 40 billion gallons of fresh water per year. Since CA uses ~40 billion per DAY, that wouldn't be enough by a couple orders of magnitude.

And here I'd assumed the result was a side-effect of the "weak encryption" that was specified as an assumption. In other words, the Third Party guy won because the system was hacked....

**sighs**

CA uses 38 billion gallons of water per day. Well, as of 2010 they did. It may be more now. Or less. But not a lot more or less. So in the vicinity of 13.9 TRILLION gallons of water per year

The EPA says that fracking accounts for somewhere between 70 and 140 BILLION gallons of water per year for the whole USA. Of that, maybe 5% is used in places where the water could be sent to CA instead. Of course, that would mean that Utah (which is a desert) would have to ship some of its water to California. Likewise Nevada (which is also a desert)....

So, if we were to stop fracking anywhere that the water could be sent to CA instead, and send the fracking water to CA, CA would get enough extra water to operate for FOUR HOURS of CA's normal use.

In summary, no, CA's problem isn't fracking, and won't be fixed by stopping fracking....

we are seeing here a case where the French are trying to do so.

Alas, while the Chinese rulers are pragmatic enough to accept things they don't really like but can't control, the French rulers are idiots who believe nothing is beyond their power, because, after all, they're French....

And everyone (in France) knows that the French, as a people, are ALWAYS right....

Corporations are also about centralized command and control and have a rigid power hierarchy that benefits the few and devalues human beings.

And corporations are most of your basic 401K (certainly they're a large majority of MY 401K(s).).

It's funny that while it is common to criticize China, I don't see them trying to give orders outside of their country. It seems they have more respect over other people's laws than the west.

It has nothing to do with respect for other people's laws. It has everything to do with practicality. It's not feasible to force people in other countries to obey your laws, so the Chinese rulers don't bother (except in places they can bully/cajole local lawmakers into making nice with China (like the USA)).

Remember the Duke LaCrosse player scandal years ago? To make a long story short, on 60 Minutes one of he geezers yasked the parents why they were fighting so hard to clear all the charges and not cut a deal.

I suppose it's completely impossible to imagine that they fought the charges because they were innocent?

That's the whole point of self reporting. If they know about it you can't be blackmailed because, well you already reported it. The real value is now you can plan how to approach and try to compromise someone. What will be important is ensuring people report attempts to use the data against them, i. e. traditional counter-intel.

"Yeah, you're just going to have to sit in the sweltering heat during summer school until ThunderfuckThor69 sends us the PSU we need for a 30 year old computer made by a company very few of you have ever heard of."

Y'know, sane people make sure they have rare spare parts on hand before the system breaks. Then you repair with the on-hand parts while ordering a new set of spares.

Which is not meant to imply that that's what's being done in this case. No clue about that. But the right thing to do is have the spares on hand, unless they're the kind of spares that you can find in any hardware store in town....