I'd like to hear a good explanation why this isn't just self-reinforcing groupthink. For every 10 genuine facts, you'll see some widely quoted falsehood like "1 in 5 women on college campuses is sexually assaulted" promoted by Google as a fact. These kinds of bogus statistics are very common.

"And the municipalities are nullifying the will of private citizens."

Every time the politicians running a municipality enact something desired by less than 100% of the residents it's "nullifying the will of private citizens", but it's also enforcing the will of other private citizens. If it does something which nullifies the will of a majority of the residents, said politicians will find themselves replaced come the next election.

Almost all of the members of the NC legislature are not residents of Wilson and I daresay the ones who voted for that law were more concerned with what TWC wanted than what Wilsonites did.

I feel reasonably sure that the elected officials in Wilson who got Greenlight started were residents of Wilson and a lot more in touch with the wishes for faster broadband of their fellow residents, wishes which TWC and Embarq weren't interested in dealing with until Wilson started Greenlight, and then, as I recall hearing at the time, all of a sudden they started whining about how they were going to "real soon now".

In my neighborhood in a different NC city, where we're only about 3 blocks from a switching station, I heard "real soon now" about DSL as Carolina Telephone and Telegraph became Sprint became Embarq became CenturyLink. At some point I gave up and went with cable modem.

Isn't population growing mainly due to latency?

Not quite.

In the developed world, population growth is negative absent immigration. Currently, this applies to China, the EU, and the USA. Last I bothered to check, the projections were for continued global population growth up to the 10-15 billion range, followed be a decline to a stable population in the 5-9 billion range.

Note that that "stable population" presupposes that the entire world is "developed" by that time.

If owning robot overlords can assure you all you ever need without working, it's obvious everybody will want these, but only the most fortunate will afford it, leaving the rest of us in misery.

If we don't have robots making our shit, then we'll still be making it the old-fashioned way, which sort of implies we'll be working for a living.

At least until we can set up robot factories of our own, of course.

Look at it this way - if the robots can make enough stuff for everyone to have everything they want, then everyone will be "rich". Of course, the real problem in that case is that we'll stop measuring "wealth" in "things we own"....

Also note that even if the (currently) wealthy types make just enough stuff for themselves and leave the rest of us to rot, there's nothing actually stopping the rest of us from building our own robots to make shit for us....

He wants to believe it, therefore it must be true.

Actually the FCC is preventing states from nullifying the will of municipalities.

Make no mistake, these laws, no matter what rationales are offered, are only about protecting outfits like Comcast and Time Warner Cable from competition, and keeping certain areas reserved for them until they feel like getting around to providing service in them.

Yes, and now that the rentiers will make even more money for no labor, the displaced workers are doubly fucked.

And how, pray tell, will the rentiers make even more money if noone can afford to buy what they make because they're unemployed?

Oddly, we seem to have managed to get past the introduction of the assembly line without the sort of problems you're predicting - humanity is still here, its population is still growing, and technology is still advancing.

The Great Extinction, caused by Siberia becoming one gigantic lava bed (probably after an asteroid strike), was a bit further back in time. Geologically, Siberia is old. You might be confusing the vestiges of Ice Age dessication (which was 10,000 years ago) but which involves the organics on the surface with the geology (aka rocks).

Regardless, though, of how the craters are forming, the fact remains that an awful lot of greenhouse gas is being pumped into the air, an awful lot of information on early civilization is being blasted out of existence, and a lot of locals are finding that the land has suddenly become deadly.

That is a good question. The last time the courts ruled on this, the ruling was that the FCC had ceded power and couldn't claim it back without the will of god. Or Congress, or something.

Personally, I'm all in favour of Thor turning up to the Supreme Court, but he probably wouldn't be allowed in on account of not having a visa.

Myth: Anyone gives a damn about factually dubious rants.

As far as I know, Systemd has no capacity to think and therefore has no opinion on net neutrality.

Quit wasting my fucking tax money on your hair-brained ideas.

Harebrained.

Brains don't have hairs, but hares have brains....

Sounds bad for rich people with beach houses. Won't somebody think of the rich people with beach houses?!!

Many things may be possible at some time in the future. But I was responding to a post that specifically mentioned "50 years from now".

Exaggerating climate change to alarm people isn't working. Stop doing it. If you want people to take the threat seriously, be honest.

If you just want to troll people, divide people, and score petty political points for your side until the next issue gives you a new opportunity, then keep it up.

How could it have "passed all its tests" if it wasn't connected to the rest of the system? It's hard to do agile without continuous integration; doesn't surprise me it was a mess. But integration blowups are the norm in my experience on waterfall projects - they're the main thing that leads to "the first 90% of the project, then the second 90% of the project".

But the primary win from agile is in avoiding throw-away work. You always work next on what's the most likely to survive unchanged, you only do the design work you need to write the code that you're going to work on (which often includes the entire high-level architecture for the first line of code, but still), you only document what you've actually done, and so on. Bridge specifications are unlikely to change after the project was funded. I've done sever 18-month waterfall software projects, and never seen one where more than half of what we thought the project was at the beginning was what we delivered at the end. Make it cheap and easy to change the requirements, because the requirement are going to change, and there's no holding back the tide.