I've flown a depressing amount over the last couple of years. United actually does have pretty entertaining security briefing (although they're less funny the fifth time you've seen them in a week), but they insist on showing you a couple of minutes of adverts after telling you to pay attention for the important security briefing, but before showing the security briefing. If you want people to pay attention, then ban airlines from showing ads before the briefing, because after being advertised to for a couple of minutes, you can bet that I've unplugged my noise-cancelling headphones from the jack and am reading a book until they put the screen back under my control again...

Political terminology in the US is weird. You have the liberals / progressives, who want to resurrect the worst ideas of the 20th century on one hand and the conservatives on the other who want to resurrect the worst ideas of the 19th. Judging from your post about 'leftists' (by which you seem to mean 'authoritarian state capitalists', or as the rest of the world calls them 'the right wing'), the rest of your terminology is equally confused.

My favourite one is:

#include <stdio.h>
int x;
int main(void)
{
struct x { void *a, *b; }foo;
printf("%ld\n", sizeof(x));
}

Try compiling this as both C and C++. It's completely valid in both languages, but the output will be different in each.

There is no such thing as C14. C90 isn't really a thing either (it's C89, with a few errata fixed). C89 was the first ISO standard C. K&R wasn't a standard, it was just the documentation of a specific implementation. To claim that it wasn't implemented is nonsense - it was implemented, it was never standardised.

After C89, both versions of the C standard (C99 and C11) have been backwards compatible. They are not always backwards compatible with vendor extensions. C99, for example, added an inline keyword (which was bad because inline was in the space of identifiers reserved for the user) that had different semantics to the GNU extension. Code compiled by gcc with -std=c89 would work with -std=c99, but code compiled as -std=gnu89 would break. Both gcc and clang have a -fgnu89-inline flag to work around this limitation. Every valid C99 program is also a valid C11 program.

That's the real question. And again, the NSA needs to answer the following question:

Were they sufficiently technically incompetent that they didn't discover an attack that the Russians have been using, or were they sufficiently inept in a more general intelligence sense that they didn't realise that leaving US and allied machines vulnerable might be a problem?

I was surprised that anyone would pay him. He's obviously an idiot, why would anyone think he was worth the money. I'll pay him $1 to shut up though...

Lots of people keep accusing Florian of being a shill. I don't think it passes Ockham's razor. He was consistently saying obviously wrong things long before he had enough public prominence for it to be worth anyone to pay him. It's far more likely that he's just a complete idiot. And, honestly, I don't think Microsoft or Oracle would need to pay him to change his opinions - just giving more free publicity to a drooling moron who claims to represent the people opposed to them is enough...

Average electricity consumption per capita in the USA is 1683W. For the EU, it's 688W, which makes 2kW ample for a small household. If my electricity consumption went to 1.5MWh/month, I'd start to seriously worry - my electricity bill would be about three or four times what it currently is. According to Wikipedia, electricity in the USA costs 8-17 cents per kWh. That works out at $120 to $255 for 1.5MWh. Do people seriously spend that much money on power each month?

Does it carry voice? Does it do so over IP packets? Sounds like VoIP to me. It's not SIP or an open protocol, and it can carry video as well as voice, but it definitely meets the definition of voice over IP.

The problem with all of these services is fragmentation. If I have a telephone, I can call anyone else who has a telephone, irrespective of what operators we both use. If I have a SIP account somewhere, I can generally do the same thing. If I have a Facetime account, then I can't call someone with Google Hangouts. Without federation, these services are far less useful than they could be (to users - the lack of federation is useful for encouraging lock-in, so good for the providers if they're big enough).

Eh? I was in Amsterdam a few months ago and took the train (and a tram) between my hotel and the airport. There were kiosks at both ends that would sell the tickets, taking cash or credit cards, and they were quite cheap - far less than a taxi. Buying tickets for the tram worked the same way. They contained a chip that you tapped on the readers, but aside from implementation details they were single-use tickets.

1.5MWh over 32 days, not 1.5 MW. It works out to around 2kW over the entire time. Which is still large enough that you'd probably notice a microwave beam delivering that much energy to the device, and probably enough to power a house quite comfortably...

Well, they're only paid £50K/year. That's not a lot for having to press a button not once, but twice every few minutes...

I never understood why the US manages to use quarter for the coin, but fourth in other contexts. Outside the US, fourth is used exclusively to mean the ordinal.

Mid '80s, when all of the scientists left?

And a well-functioning militia is one with a clear chain of command, regular training, and so on. So, presumably, all of the NRA members are enrolled in such an organisation...