The railroads did exactly that in many cases when they were first laid down.

It will be made illegal. In many ways it already is. You must submit the key to encrypted material if proper law enforcement asks. Your lines are allowed to be tapped. Your locks are allowed to be broken.

The problem is not the agency, but the paranoid and ruthless people who abuse it. There are many people in law enforcement/intelligence communities who are honest law abiding citizens! There are a few who are not. The question becomes how do we watch the watchers? How do we catch the abusers? I am not sure this will ever be an easy thing to do. Knowledge is the most powerful tool one can have, and for those with an illegal or perverse agenda, the gathering of information provides opportunities to gain leverage over others, advantages in business and political dirt to get what they want. So, they will always try to use the system.

So long as the people who take power (not the elected officials, but the string pullers), have that power, and we the people allow them to, this is how it will be. There is no way at the moment to record anything and expect absolute security. I am not sure your own mind will be safe for much longer. It has always been this way. There is always someone, or a few people conspiring to control as much as possible around them through whatever means, legal, moral, ethical or not to do what they want. Some do it in the name of a god, some in the name of patriotism, some just because it is what they want.

What really needs to be figured out is how to stop these people from doing what they do. I do not think it is possible, as the people stopping them will most likely be those people.

I get the feeling it is not about the separation of grid and supply, but rather power companies and extra dollars. Maybe I am wrong, maybe not.

Opt in could be done individually for each person to each person. Similar to a google+ circle, not a facebook friend list. But the opt in would be at time of contact and be maintained on each others' local glass. No web site needed and no centralized server needed. But how do you monetize that? In the end, the money will drive it anyway. It always does. The track record of the vast majority of businesses does not make me comfortable with this technology, nor does the behavior of the average internet user. To me it seems like another bad combination in an anonymous world. The reason being the end user of the information is anonymous, and the actions they take may be anonymous and certainly nothing they do can be prevented until it is too late. Stalkers, Trolls and other criminals nirvana. It could be a really helpful technology, but it will wind up being used by bad people for bad things quite often.

Just who works for the government to make up the *government*? That would be citizens. No way around it, they spy on citizens of other countries. The private life side is where they shake loose the ones who have skeletons in their closets that can be used against them to more effectively spy on the *government*.

The real problem has nothing to do with whether coding is boring or not, it has to do with attention span and critical thinking. Most kids have a short attention span and little to no critical thinking skills anymore. Add that to the expectation of instant gratification and yeah, kids are not going to like any process without immediate feedback or required thinking. Stop dumbing down the world so the children with the least abilities can appear to compete at a younger age. Reality does not care. ALL children need to be pushed to be better.

You must not live in the USA.

Right. They run different versions of windows, many of which are incompatible with each other. Most of the versions have changes to them that make them incapable of being used and programmed on in non-generic ways as a single build. So your point was? And they (MS) still pull stuff like Metro in the search of the *single* solution.

Windows 95 -> Windows ME -> Windows XP -> Windows Vista -> Windows 7 -> Windows 8.... (not including the server versions or mobile versions of MS Windows).

For our next trick, we shall make one vehicle that runs on two and four wheels, flies, floats, submerges, is sporty, family friendly, industrial strength, cheap, luxurious, compact, roomy ... Provided missing car analogy.

Technically, not a Democracy, just a Republic. But, Dictators call themselves presidents, so who cares? As far as greatest... at what? We fail healthcare, education, crime, social division, racism, debt management. corruption, ... But for me it is the greatest. Not because of laws or anything, but my friends are all here. 8)

Hyperbole and satire only work with an educated thinking audience. Maybe there is a relationship to their lack of use? Just a thought.

I prefer electric cattle prods to words. I find the reward/punishment ratio to be much more conducive to the desired behavior.

Ok, So 1 Trillion over 10 years. 100 Billion per year. That is 20 billion per state per year.

In comparison, the average gross funding per state for education in 2011 was 16.17 billion dollars. Our number one curable cause of poverty and crime is lack of a good education. That money doubles the budget of every state's educational funds and has 25% unspent. Small change? Insignificant? I think not.

Are you kidding? I routinely run excel into the ground on an i7 with 16 gig of ram.

In other words, I will not be spending any money on these either.

Z80 is what I cut my teeth on for serious binary programming. I really like the index instructions and the relative simplicity of the overall instruction set compared to others I worked with.