I can understand the martini and laces, but why would you go a football game during a zombie apocalypse?

Cops deal with crazy things all the time. The last time I listened to a scanner there was some guy under a bridge attacking people with Nunchucks.

So for a segment of the market, data throughput is no longer a competitive advantage.

Big, established players sometimes have trouble adapting to that kind of competitive shift; they are used to optimizing on one dimension and their engineers are amazing at it, but the market goes in a different direction.

It sometimes gives newcomers with smaller capital bases and different technologies that would seem silly by high-end standards the ability to disrupt markets.

WTF?

Star Trek didn't have a problem with it; it was just rare overall in those days. Admiral Nachaeff and Commander Shelby come to mind--perfectly believable as command personnel. The captain on the other starship in Enterprise--the Columbia, was it--did a good job and might have worked well with better writing. The actress who played Dr. Polaski could probably have done it, although IIRC she didn't get a great critical reception and she might have some Scott Bacula type moralizing problems. Patrick Stewart had great command presence; Avery Brooks had okay command presence and grew a bit into the role; Kate Mulgrew had little command presence and was given terrible writing to work with.

Kate Mulgrew was terrible for the Janeway part, and Voyager, for the most part, was badly written. There *some* good stuff with the Doctor and with Seven, and a few good interactions between the others (Didn't they warn you about Ferengi at the Academy?), but the quality of most of the writing was least-common-denominator middle-school terrible. The enemies were neither believable nor interesting.

Seriously, compare the Romulans in "Balance of Terror" in TOS to *any* enemy in Voyager.

Compare any of the characters to Garek.

The borg lacked a leader in early TNG and were a very effective enemy.

Plus the atmosphere, you know, exists...

Actually, this move from another company at least would help Americans a bit. The NSA actually does limit what it does with American stuff--it sucks up EVERY bit of data outside US borders, or tries to, but in the US it just sucks up MOST bits of data.

A couple of things. If they have probable cause to believe the computer has evidence of a crime, for example, they can certainly take it (although not necessarily search it) without a warrant, at least if they're legally wherever it is. There's also a diminished expectation of privacy at the airport.

If all he said was "I could do X," he might have reasonably good grounds to sue, although as the general consensus even on *slashdot* seems to be the guy was acting like a jerk, I don't know that it's a good test case. If you like, you know, freedom.

The sovereign. In this case it's an abstraction, but sort of exists in law. You can sue for constitutional violations because the country has waived sovereign immunity in a statute (law).

Plessy v. Ferguson is widely considered a black stain on the history of the court, along with Korematsu and the Dred Scott decision. Plessy was at least overturned in the Brown v. Board of Ed decisions; Korematsu (allowing the internment of Japanese Americans during war with Japan) has technically never been overturned but nobody in their right mind would cite to it. Dred Scott was effectively overturned by the 14th Amendment. (Which is also the only reason your cops need a search warrant, for example, a result NEVER intended by the drafters of the amendment.)

Education.

The elite of the world still comes to American Universities to learn. Then they go home. They are often intelligent and influential and can have a role in shaping attitudes, policy, and social change.

You very rarely change a culture for the better with an army of soldiers. An army of ideas stands a much better chance.

Society tries to shame everyone, just for different things. It is a control mechanism, and can be a useful one, but is not an ideal one.

Segregation is a fact of life in a large portion of the country; trying to desegregate is what's hard. In DC, there are neighborhoods where the public middle schools are mixed-race and that's okay, but if a neighbor actually makes the mistake of letting a white kid go on to the local public high school the school will transfer him out to a better public school within the day. It's not that there's a written policy, it's just that everyone in the school immediately knows that if the student stays there they will be discriminated against and possibly killed. Kind of like prisons.

Condointernet in Seattle works pretty well. Maybe one connection issue for a few minutes every three months. Speed on their slower lines works out to be a bit below advertised, but pretty damn good. (Advertised service speeds are available at your DSLAM port but you might get 2/3rds of that in practice.) If 60 Mbps or so with no bandwidth cap isn't enough, you should stop downloading the library of Congress. But very good service if it's available at your location.

Comcast in Seattle, on the other hand, tends to be much slower, connection issues multiple times per month, terrible service, frustrating, etc... (but cheaper).

True. Glorified with particular technical requirements (weatherproof, able to withstand constant vibration, etc...), but yes, they charge a lot for it. Not as ridiculous as what they charge for entertainment packages and the like. :)

Normally you simply don't engage. There is a little more engagement than in NYC, but also a higher homeless population per capita, I think.