I'm more surprised they bothered to release this at all. The annual SEC report for investors is required, so they have to file something. A "transparency report" is not legally required.

I think a wholesale rewrite is unlikely, but I would guess that they are going to eventually do something about the GNU code they use. Apple doesn't like the GPLv3's patent clauses, so they have frozen all their imported GNU utilities at the latest GPLv2 version. Some of these are now getting quite old and not maintained upstream, so Apple has to handle even routine maintenance. They managed to transition off one big one by moving from gcc to clang/LLVM, but there is still a bunch of old GNU code shipped in the base system that I don't see them keeping forever. Now whether they rewrite it in Swift seems more questionable.

Even if you solely cared about white people, the incarceration rate among that population, too, has tripled over the past 50 years.

That's not too far from the direction Linux has been going in general, though it's usually baked on top through the use of something like Ansible or Chef that does the factory-reset bit. As the post mentions, CoreOS is also aiming for something similar.

Use a webhost that lets you pre-pay for service, and prepay for a bunch of it. Register the domains through that host too, and set them to autorenewal. This won't get you indefinite service, but it can get you quite some years, if the host remains in business. Also you might want a static HTML website rather than something that might need upgrades.

Nearlyfreespeech.net is an example of a host you can do that with. If you deposit, say, $500, they will keep hosting your website until you use up $500 worth of service, which for a modest static-HTML site with one domain should be many years.

Yep, when I was in elementary/middle school (late '80s / early '90s), there were Apple ][s everywhere. There was a big "computers in schools" push, grant money made it nearly free for a school to get them, so they all had them. I am not sure how effective it was at "improving productivity of the workforce" though.

Sounds like Ted Cruz!

And of course, if a number of large employers all suddenly congregated in Austin, of course land prices would go up, salaries go up, etc.

That's definitely happening... Austin 10 years ago was cheap, now it is merely "not as expensive", especially if you don't want a long commute from the suburbs (Austin has horrible traffic, so I don't recommend that). Central areas of the city have prices in the $400-600k range. Fancy areas, like West Austin, are pushing $1m.

They still have millions of subscribers, too. Much of the U.S. doesn't have broadband coverage, or only expensive/shitty broadband coverage.

You might be surprised...

That's more or less what West Germany has been founded on since the late '40s. Germany traded its sovereignty for an end to denazification. The deal was: 1) a bunch of ex-Nazis would be allowed to remain in the FRG government; but 2) in return, they would work for the USA.

German intelligence has been interested in a closer alliance with the "Five Eyes" group of US-led intelligence agencies, which originally consisted of the main anglophone countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). When it was expanded in 2009 to "nine eyes" with the addition of Denmark, France, Netherlands, and Norway, there was supposedly some grumbling from Germany about being left out.

Sounds like an R-rated 1990s film.

What I don't like about BC/AD is that one is English and one is Latin. Pick one, not some ugly mixture! The mixture also means that the placement of the abbreviation is either inconsistent (traditional usage) or grammatically incorrect (getting more common). The grammatically correct placement is to put BC after the date, but AD before the date:

330 BC vs. AD 1983

You could write "1983 AD", but then you are not even being correctly traditional, at which point you might as well just give up and use the newer English abbreviations, which always go at the end.

That's a new ultra-low-usage cheaper tier that you can opt into. The tier that people are getting their plans converted to by default is 300 GB/mo.