It isn't so much that government internet access is good. It's that a. no matter how terribly incompetent and/or bureaucratic our local governments might be, they couldn't *possibly* be any more incompetent than Verizon/Comcast/Charter/AT&T/etc., and b. having any competition at all, even incompetent competition, would more than likely force the above-listed companies to care at least a tiny bit about trying to keep their customers, once the choice wasn't between them and no internet. We have basically no competition in ISPs, and we'd be happy fixing that pretty much any way possible.

That already totally exists, in the form of private servers. Private servers are full of people who might/will cheat, and you are probably not going to get banned for cheating. (They're also generally buggy as frack, but still.)

Hodor?

Would you really want to do business with the company again at that point, anyway?

The coincidence presumably being that they're a bunch of Cox?

Indeed. Do they have ThreeEye from the Dresden Files? Spice melange from Dune? Glitterstim from Star Wars? Jet from Fallout?

I clicked on this article expecting it to be another instance of Microsoft deciding to play follow the leader, that if Google is making a Google autonomous car, then drat it all, we must have a Windows Car! Even though that makes no sense! I was going to say, frack no, robotic cars definitely do not need Windows, please god no.

The answer to the actual question posed, is of course, no they don't technically *need* windows... you don't *need* to give passengers in busses or trains or airplanes windows, either, but you do it anyway, because natural light is good, and because, yes, why *wouldn't* we want to look outside? (Also because there still needs to be a way to take manual control in case of emergency, in which case we'd need to be able to see out for that.)

From what I can tell, the Acela is kind of a ripoff. I just looked into the train from DC to NYC. Acela is 250 bucks, and takes a little under 3 hours. Or I can take the normal train for like a quarter of that, which only gets me there like 20 minutes slower. That seems like a pretty good tradeoff...

LA->SF, on the other hand, is way further away, so a high speed line would definitely be worth it at, or even perhaps a tiny bit above, the cost of an equivalent flight - trains are way more comfortable, and tend to leave out of more conveniently central locations, or at the very least, tend to leave at locations more conducive to using *existing* public transportation.

Awesome. I want to play poker with these guys... we can just draw right at the beginning, and they'll give me 700 grand, right?

Stupidly easy google search, "break bad" (because obviously "breaking bad" will just get you hits for the show): http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/...

I didn't know that either - I always assumed it was a made-up phrase for the show that just sounded cool, but apparently it's a midwestern phrase meaning, appropriately, "to turn to a life of crime". Of course, now if you say someone's breaking bad, anyone, or at least anyone outside that geographic region, will just assume it means they're cooking meth. I've heard it used that way colloquially a few times already.

That post lacked obligatory xkcd, so I have fixed that for you.

The difference is that industries like energy companies and internet providers are generally trying to ram through their business models which consist primarily of "screw you, customers, we're a monopoly and you can suck it!", while Uber is attempting to bypass regulations that are primarily designed to *protect* a monopoly (taxi companies - there might be multiple, but if they all work together, it comes to about the same thing). More competition is *always* good for consumers.

Could Uber use a bit more regulation? Maybe. But taxi companies' regulations are *not* primarily about insuring safety, unless you count the financial safety of the taxi companies.

Ok, at that point you're just describing highway robbery. What's to stop you from doing 100% exactly the same thing you just described on a truck right now? Human truck-drivers are going to stop just as much if they see a car parked in the middle of the road they're trying to drive on.

My phone is on 4.1.2 (I just checked). I haven't run into a single application I couldn't run on it. Fragmentation just means a bunch more work for app developers to support multiple environments, but they should be used to it - after all, it's still massively superior to the literally millions of different potential environments a PC application could be run under...

That said, I have a device that runs Android 1.6.x. That is basically equivalent to not even running Android, and was even when I got it several years ago. But even 2.x is sufficient for most things.

If they're really truly free speech people? Probably most of them. Long as you aren't doing it in a public space, not because of the bible, but more because of the defecation.

In any event, disregarding the difference between drawing a picture of something and taking a *dump* on it, there's an event huger difference between saying "taking a dump on something I hold dear is massively disrespectful and I will be angry if you hold a rally and encourage people to do it", and "taking a dump on something I hold dear is literally grounds for me to go up to you and shoot you to death". One is reasonable, the other is... not so much.