But how do smaller countries deal with this? Are there other region-wide registrations other than EU?)

I have a Surface 2 that I tried using for a bit (got it from work) and it sucks, badly. The mouse design is horrible, you can barely see it. A coworker has been testing the 3 Pro for a while as a desktop replacement with the ability to quickly take the tablet/laptop thing and go on the road. He likes it, but he's got a full set up, docking station, etc. I've had the Dell XPS 12 for almost two years and LOVE it for taking it to meetings and customers at work. Taking notes with OneNote is so easy and the touch screen make it really nice to use. I rarely if ever use the tablet feature. A nice thing about it vs. my iPad is that I can put it on my lap while on the couch at home and browse the web with touch with ONE HAND. iPad requires a stand or two hands and it's just uncomfortable for me. A few months ago I got just an UltraBook with a 15 inch screen so I could program and work on servers better. It's a Dell Precision M3800 meant to compete with a MacBook but it was Windows 8.1 and touch. It's the best device I've ever had, hands down. Light, beautiful in design and screen, great mouse, touch works great. It's not trying to be a tablet/hybrid thing. It's just a great UltraBook. Don't get me wrong, I love my iDevices too (we have lots of them at home), but for work UltraBooks rock.

Quote correct. Thing is someone has to pay for the upfront cost of burying the cables and it is much more expensive. Where I live stringing wires on poles costs in rough numbers something like $1 per linear foot. Burying the cable costs about $8 per linear foot. (this is semi-reliable info from family who worked in the business and would know) Getting the funds to do any sort of meaningful program of burying wires would likely involve a rate increase which tends to be as popular as a lead filled life preserver.

That isn't so clear in a lot of places. Repairs on above ground wires are more common but cheaper when they occur. Roll a truck, look up and get busy. Repairs on buried cable is just the opposite. Even finding the problem is harder and many repairs involve a lot of digging. There are places near where I live (semi-rural 20 miles from a major metro area) where it might make economic sense to bury the cable but also quite a few where it most likely doesn't. You can do a LOT of repairs before you even break even on the buried cable despite its general higher reliability. Plus you are replacing infrastructure that already exists and lots of it so any sort of economically rational replacement program would take decades. Every place that truly needs reliable power has a backup generator anyway so it's not like you are gaining much in practical terms by burying the cables for quite a few customers.

Don't get me wrong, I think a lot more cables should be buried than currently are but it's not as simple an equation as buried = more reliable = cheaper.

If you just replace coal with natural gas in the same plant to heat the water it is not significantly less CO2

Burning coal is pretty much just turning bulk carbon into carbon dioxide. Burning natural gas (methane, CH4) creates carbon dioxide, too, of course, but also releases energy from burning the hydrogen to make water. As a result, the combustion of natural gas produces less CO2 for the same energy output. From the Energy Information Agency - Pounds of CO2 emitted per million BTU of energy: Coal (anthracite): 228.6 Gasoline: 157.2 Natural Gas: 117.0 [I'll apologize for the units - I'm just quoting the result. If you must know, 1 lb / 1e6 BTU is equivalent to 0.43e-3 kg/MJ. Or, just look at the number as a figure of merit: lower is better.] more data here

That was then. Today we have settled on standardized new-generation plant designs that avoid this problem.

What's really needed is a change in our legal system to eliminate the disproportionate power that small groups of activists have to disrupt construction. Their strategy is to raise costs by imposing phony legal delays on construction after the initial approval.

I am sick of these "challenges" that effectively try get programmers to work for effectively well below market rates. As if we're like children, a "challenge" is supposed to make us set aside months or years of income to work on a really difficult problem that if we had to actually go out and do for a company in the job market, we'd be paid $100K/year or more..

Are you going to pay for it? Laying fiber is insanely expensive. Not because of the trench or even the fiber... it's the home owners that are the problem.

Imagine I show up at your house and tell you I'm going to dig an 8' deep trench across your yard for Fiber. What are you going to do? And your neighbor? And his neighbor? ... and the other thousand people whos yards get trenched? Lawsuits... and that doesn't even cover all the roads, driveways and sidewalks you have to dig up.

It's one thing to prevent game review sites from playing one-upsmanship over each other by "leaking" early reviews (that are often incomplete and based on beta versions of the game). However, once you can buy the "finished" product, the only reason to have a continuing embargo is that you know the product sucks but you don't want to share that information.

Another strategy: Have game review sites flat out say that an embargo for a certain game is NOT lifting prior to the game going on sale. I know lots of NDAs have Fight Club clauses (you do NOT talk about the NDA).. but a clever game review site could probably get around that without actually saying "The Assassin's Creed Embargo Does Not Lift Until 11PM" or something similar.

The same could be argued of the US. It just ignores agreements and treaties when it suits itself. Pretending that China is any worse is just borderline racism.

No, it isn't racist. It is hypocritical, but race has nothing to do with it.

Additionally, China has a documented and lengthy history of completely ignoring the environment, so expecting them to continue to do so is a reasonable reaction.

Thank you for giving us the Netflix perspective. Counter arguments:

1) Residential broadband networks were never engineered as video delivery systems. The advent of mainstream streaming video completely changed the engineering calculus for last mile networks. Over subscription ratios need to change to accommodate the higher peak hour bitrates; this takes time and costs money. Where should this money come from? Why should I pay the same for my connection as the household that's running three or four simultaneous HD streams during peak hours? My 95th percentile is less than 0.5mbit/s, yet I pay the same as my neighbor who regularly runs three HD streams at the same time. Hardly seems fair, does it?

Internet is a utility in developed nations. Regardless of its legal status, people in developed nations can't function without it. The cost to build it out gets spread among everyone, because that's the only fair way. I don't get to complain when the city raises rates to upgrade a water main or drill a huge tunnel for sewage storage, even though I use 1/100th the amount of water of a nearby business. The cost to run the infrastructure to the endpoint, but the backbone is shared by all and the cost must be split by all.