Life must be difficult for you, being unable to derive meaning from context.

"things like fruits and clothes"

How many calories in a pound of cotton?

"see all the fallout style mutations"

Cue the "Total Recall" references.

1. Build cheap WiFi AP with poor output/range.
2. Market as "pregnant woman mode."
3. ???
4. Profit!

Whoosh. Oracle isn't leaving anything on your floor, unless you invite them to.

He's got a whole piece of cloth he cut it from.

Oracle can package Java any way they want, including with "opt-outs." Downloading/installing Java is a voluntary choice the user makes.

oops - conflating Java with the Flash update which just came out, that's what wants to install Chrome. Point is the same - it's not evil or permanent, the user is given a choice which is reversable.

This is not significantly different than the current behavior of asking to install Chrome. It could be much worse, and want to install some adware toolbar. Is it really so hard, if you don't uncheck the box, to reset the search provider to the one you want?

"Anything sensitive is encrypted, but it's all in Dropbox, which is synced as soon as I alter a file."

That's not proper backup. What if you change the file in an unintended way, don't realize it until a few days later, and want to retrieve an earlier revision?

" Give me $100 and I'll pray for your recovery. It might work."

Sounds like a good deal compared to paying an MD $200 and a pharmacist $100 for antibiotics when you have a viral infection.

The infrastructure is built upon right-of-way and spectrum which belongs to the public. It is not a free market, and the invisible hand cannot operate effectively. Hence the need for a regulated market.

If you want to change that so the companies must negotiate rights-of-way with every property owner whose land they cross, then you can argue that regulation isn't proper. But until then, regulation protects the public's interest in seeing that its resources are used efficiently.

People who need sub-second accurate time use TAI. Civil needs would be met just fine by a return to GMT, instead of UTC.

"my entire town only has about 2gbps of backhaul to it" - sims 2

Dear Sims 2,
Maybe you can get the player who's running your town to buy an expansion pack which allows more bandwidth.

What's nonsense is locking civil time to atomic time. There would be no need for leap seconds if civil time simply remained linked to astronomical time, as it was for millenia.

Oh, and NIST - at least the person responsible for the leap second file they distribute (Judah Levine) - really has a very poor understanding of how leap seconds work. He's actually stated that "In the legal definition of UTC, a leap second is "forgotten" once it happens." That is, of course, completely incorrect. No wonder NIST wants to drop them, they don't understand them.

The problem is systems which are poorly designed, and cannot properly handle leap seconds. That includes every POSIX system. Handling a leap second is fundamentally no different than handling a leap year. You have a minute with 61 seconds instead of 60, just like you have a month with 29 days instead of 28. But despite leap seconds existing since long before POSIX, the definers provided no means of enumerating a 61 second minute.

Counting the same second twice or changing the length of a second, both are doing it wrong.