Actually the "people" were never actually allowed to decide for themselves whether to rebel or not. The revolution was a minority position held by influential landowners and buisnessmen who had the networking and the wherewithal to override the majority who wished to remain British subjects.

It was.

The post styling seems to intimate an act of negligence or mistake by NASA on the order which doomed the Martian mission which crashed into the Red Planet because of a miscommunication measuring units. Fact of the matter is that the spacecraft's mission ended decades ago, and it's apparant life is in the form of a failure in the shutdown protocol. To think of a new mission, and program the spacecraft requires time in planning and expense in recreating technology long declared obsolete, and dedication of man-hours to operation and implementation. These are not trivial considerations. Fact of the matter is that there are quite a few active missions involving craft and rovers that have exceeded their design lifetimes and are in extended mission phase. Some, maybe many of these are going to be shutdown because NASA's budget can not accommodate the expense of keeping them running along with active programs. I would not want a cent spent on this over-romanticised anomaly.

Oh stop being dramatic. The IRS won't visit you with guns. Court ordered garnishment is the tool of the day, with seizuere of assets as needed if that does not prove sufficient. This is of course after you've refused any of various means to settle your debt to society. No matter what society you've lived in, you've always payed some form of fief to someone else.

The problem is.. a society where the workers are content, and well fed, and have the luxury to think for themselves is a society where workers won't tolerate being paid starvation wages, and may actually be in a position to make demands to management as far as working conditions, benefits, without fear of the consequences of reprisal. The key to the Party's strategy of power in Orwell's "1984" was to maximize both productivity and scarcity. The productivty supports a massive military industrial complex whose output goes into military spending which does not get recycled back into the economy. The upper classes, the Inner Party, while relatively impoverished compared to the titans of old, are living way better than the barely fed proletariat who are in total thrall to the system for their needs to the extent that even the concept of striking is no longer in play.

Star Trek pretty much exists in two periods. During Roddenberry, and After Roddenberry. After Roddenberry was safely dead, DS9 writers took off with morally ambiguous stories such as when the classic "Pale in Moonlight", Sisko engages with Garak to create a fake record of a Cardassian conference to draw the Romulans into the war, a scheme that ultimately proves successful, but not in the way he intended, and with plenty of skulduggery, intimidation, crossing of ethical guidelines and murder to go around. It's a thought provoking episode that I consider the best the series ever produced. For this reason, DS9 has never quite sit fully nicely in the Star Trek NG pantheon which was emblemised by Jon Luc Picard's seemingly endless series of moral superiority speeches whether directed at aliens or at our 20th century present. or Kirk's cocksure sense of rightness with every culture he collided with. TNG was pretty much in sync with the Roddenberry paradigm of "our ship and crew are perfect, it's those foreigners (aliens) who keep mucking up the works."

Or maybe the cypherphunks can't accept the idea that it's most likely they're being attacked by their own kind with the same lack of respect for regulation and disdain for law that they have?

Waiting for the libertarians here to demonstrate why this shows how Bitcoin is such a wonderful idea.

That's why we have HDMI switchers.... they even have some with remote controls.

Global warming is a serious enough concern that there are environmentalists who believe that nuclear power does need to be revisited as an alternative to carbon fuels. They still maintain that this does not change that long term issues with nuclear power (among them waste disposal) still need to be answered. The other really big question is that can nuclear power shoulder the burden economically when all the costs associated with it (including the long term issue of waste, which will scale with the number of nuke plants operating) are factored into the equation. It is worth noting that the only places where nuclear power is doing well is under heavy state subsidy, a model which won't fly in the U.S.

Exclusive deals don't come into play in areas the company does not cover.

Physical size of the screen in inches/cm, not it's resolution.

Apple did not leave OS/X behind. Not only has it been refreshing it's desktops, IOS shares it's ancestry and underpinnings with OS/X.

Count me as one those "no bodies" then. There are apps on the "Metro" side I find quite handy. The real problem is the execution of the desktop side of the deal. If that had been done better, I'd imagine there would be far less Metro haters about.

While Martian winds may kick up some respectable velocity as far as feet per second, remember it's blowing around an extremely tenuous close to non-existent atmosphere. A martian wind may kick up to four hundred miles an hour, but if you were standing in it it would be no more force to you than a 25 mile per hour gust on Earth.