This is the airplane speech about automotive safety devices from Fight Club, right?

Telecom companies are famous for *making* promises.

Making good on them, not so much.

They'd have probably gotten around to your area about the same time as your first Social Security check.

He won't be too old to sit on some corporate Boards of Directors.

What are these multiple providers of which you speak?

Where I live we have the choice of Time-Warner cable or no cable, and there's no sign of that changing in my lifetime.

That's about as likely as slashdot posters starting to read the articles that are posted.

duckduckgo ?

Invitations were a mistake in the first place.

It works for email because any email provider interoperates with any other. Having an account on gmail when nobody else does doesn't create any problems for the user.

On the other hand the very point of social media is that everybody you know is there. Being alone on something like Google+ is completely pointless. Such a service should be grown in the completely opposite way of the "have people invite each other" idea, using any excuse possible to get people to sign up.

24kWh/day = 24kWh/24h = 1kW. Which is a completely ridiculous amount of electricity.

If you are using 48kWh a day on heating, a heat pump is going to pay itself back in months or even weeks.

A home server can easily get by on 20W instead of 200W. My house uses around 4kWh a day on everything, and that includes among other things a server running 24x7.

Because sometimes it rains and not all houses are built at the top of a hill. My car's hubs got f*cked due to being parked in front of a storm drain during a big rain storm. This is in a fairly well planned suburban neighborhood. There are regions that experience flooding (New Orleans, the entire Mississippi River region, really) on a somewhat frequent basis. Since flooding is a common and very-non-zero event, you need to plan for it and that means putting in requirements like "don't put it on the floor, you'll shock everyone taking a shower in a 3 mile radius if this thing gets wet, idiot" on it.

Those were the days......

The 'normal' level of vitamin D has also crept upwards over the years.

No. The fuckers "running" the US damaged the US's image. The NSA has all kinds of support in looking at the OTHER GUY's citizens.

The toolbags in charge turned all that around and used the government AGAINST the citizens, 99.995% of whom were doing nothing wrong and who's rights were absolutely violated.

If Snowden didn't do what he did, somewhere, someone else, would have. And the thing is, if you aren't doing anything wrong when your shit gets revealed then you don't have a lot to worry about.