VB6 is a very useful and underrated tool. Not only is it good for programs like that, there's countless other things it's useful for. But the big draw is despite its age, it can take advantage of modern graphical styles, and many other goodies introduced in Vista and 7. Think you need a modern language to put forward and back buttons on the taskbar preview picture? Can be done on VB6. Think you can't use the latest file operation dialogs since SHFileOperation isn't able to? That was true until last week when I brought IFileOperation support to VB6. Using COM like that, class modules, subclassing/hooking/callback support, inline assembly support... it's still extraordinarily useful, and a modernized VB6 app looks identical to any other modern app. It's a shame MS replaced it with a "VB.NET" that has almost no relation and is just like C#.

At some point, it's not "silencing a dissenting view", it's refusing to waste time and lend credibility to idiots. That homeless guy screaming on the corner has some theories about god and the government too, maybe he should also not be silenced and have universities let him use their facilities to promote his agenda? These are not people who respond to facts, logic, and argument. Pretending every factually wrong, impervious to evidence and reason nutjob theory out there is just a "dissenting view" that's worthy of being seriously discussed in an academic forum isn't even just a waste of time, it's actually harmful to give that status. There's plenty of venues where they're free to speak their message, the academic community should not be obligated to provide another.

Hey, it could be worse right? It's not like they'll forcibly rape you in the ass without evidence.

Oh, wait.

Thinking of cops as anything but thugs that view everyone else as the enemy, who they can lie to, kidnap, steal from, and beat/tase/mace with total impunity, is naivete now reserved only for the people who have not yet been unfortunate enough to catch a cops eye (which doesn't require doing anything illegal). These people think that not all cops are bad simply because they see them not abusing someone, and the fact that many targets of the police are criminals who need to be removed from society. That doesn't excuse the fact that any cop who doesn't, at least sometimes, violate peoples rights (the friendly cop who helped you out probably also civilly forfeited his department a new margarita machine/zamboni/trip to disney-all real, btw), is at a minimum covering for his buddies that do. The entire system is rotten to the core: there are no good cops, only cops that are less pure evil and closer to how cops should act (that is, they occasionally arrest someone who deserves it without violating their rights).

Or it wants them to be very good liars; to stay calm, smooth, and convincing while feeding someone a whole load of bullshit; like a judge, or a reporter asking about civil rights violations.

That site reported my downstream as 40mbps (close)... but pegged my upload at 7mbps. My downstream is advertised as 50, but I see 58 in my tests. But my upstream is also 50, and I get 50 in my tests. Why it's so grossly off I don't know; it says the server is very close to me. But a lot of speed tests are off. My testing method is the real world: either start several torrents, or open multiple downloads from file locker sites (which, btw, advertise 'uncapped speeds', but cap per-file... so I can saturate my connection but it takes 6-7 concurrent transfers from the same server). Single-connection transfers have saturated my line at 58/50, but it's fairly rare.

Technological advances solved the problem of sending poop a while ago, no need for drones. PoopSenders.com has a wide variety of poop to choose from. I really hoped this was a joke, but the internet has in fact sank to that level.

Well, actually they don't.
-You have something for your own use in your own home, that you don't talk about publicly. Except it's illegal.
-You purchase a product from a willing seller, and you're both happy with the transaction. Except the product is illegal.
Not only are these two scenarios just illegal, but society has demanded that they need to be extremely aggressively enforced. There is simply no way for the police to do that without large scale and unambiguous violations of our rights. What needs to happen first is ending this ridiculous war on (some) drugs, which was the original justification for shredding the constitution (and also the vast majority of 'anti-terrorism' powers: they say they're to prevent terrorism, but are almost always used instead for domestic drug war cases).

Oh lord, good old AOL. That was my online coming of age; I left just after leaking AOL6 Beta a couple days before it hit public beta. Most of the opssec team knew me personally. I was one of the guys who reverse engineered their FDO scripting language and did things like invoke all sorts of forms and libraries directly by resource number, hunting for staff only resources, which I frequently found. A very clever use allowed you to bypass RSA SecurID login for high level employees, and of course created banned screen names, 2 chars, fake 3 chars/indented names. But being kids, far and away most of our effort was focused on getting into or terminating other peoples accounts, which one way or another could almost certainly be accomplished. Star tool (aka Master AOL, a developer tool left accessible in the public release via a leaked trigger file) was a gift from the gods for those of us who really learned its power.

If you're referring to things like startweapons or powerups timers as cheating(as if elite players can't time it in their heads)... it's got far more to do with game pace. I can't speak to Q3, but I played the Q2 Lithium mod on the standard startrockets/fasthook servers as a top tier player. Now that mod is gone and regular old baseq2 is all that's left. It's incredibly slow, you spend 50% of your time just chasing down weapons and ammo... it's boring. It's essentially a different game I have zero interest in playing.

There's no problems at all running it on Win7 x64. And you should see the amazing custom content that's still being developed. Not just the thousands upon thousands of buildings; but an entirely new highway system with 2-10 lanes and completely custom ramps, tile-by-tile canal systems, or the incredibly detailed modular airports- can cover an entire large city tile with just an expansive airport; I released an entire plugin that's just tiles to make lines on the taxiways. Other modular sets let you construct expansive seaports, military bases, and any kind of landscape you can imagine.

It's not just a computer hardware limitation; the simulator gets very inefficient at certain things. I running a reasonably modern system with 12GB RAM, and a large amount of custom content (20-40,000 files totalling 8-12GB, common among everyone still playing) on a large city still brings my system to its knees. Switching to underground view for subways, for instance, takes at least 20 seconds.

SC4 allows region play; that's the population of a region composed of large city tiles that top out at 1.6m each.

Just like they get punished when their dashcams malfunction, right?

Even 1080p could push people over the limit. Getting everything I can in HD, 1080p if available, (e.g. all movies and maybe 2/3rds of TV) I've averaged just over 300GB/month for the last 24 months, even hitting 720GB one month. And I'm the only person on this connection. You get a whole family on the line (or god forbid 3 college kids sharing an apartment), and exceeding it is probably already common.
This is squarely targeted at those not getting their TV from Comcast NOW. No need to wait for 4K. I suspect they won't do this is areas where they have competition. I've had Optimum and now FiOS in my current home, and neither have these caps. Meanwhile my old house, where it was Comcast or 2Mbps DSL, was one of the very first places they rolled out caps to, and it was 200GB.

You're either hopelessly naive or thinking of running for office one day yourself. Do you honestly think stuffing a senators pockets with "I'm donating $x to your PAC" is any different than stuffing it with actual currency? Or any of the other dozens of ways you can legally bribe congress, from 'I'll bring tons of jobs to your district' to 'Now might be a good time to invest in a company we're going to announce a buyout on next week' (look at how quickly and quietly they gutted the STOCK Act). All of these are the same thing as outright bribes and to pretend otherwise is nonsense.
And while on the local level, and maybe the state level, sure you have lots of people that sincerely want to effect change, but those aren't the people advancing to the national level.