No, you're thinking of Anna Ardin, Assange's (former?) press secretary.

you mean like how people aren't forced to now?

You're not forced to work. Homelessness is always an option. You can get your meals from a soup kitchen, camp out in Walmart's parking lot and beg people who shop there for cash until the police tell you to leave, etc.

There's no guarantee you'll like that option, but you don't seem to like the option of working, either, so I guess it's worth a shot, huh?

Yeah, that reply was entirely stream of consciousness, just brain dumping what I know in case it helps. :)

That doesn't really alter my original point at all. For example, in the rankings of GDP purchasing power parity, the EU ranks ahead overall, but the U.S. ranks way ahead of the EU in terms per capita GDP PPP, at #11 and #42, respectively.

The 10 countries ahead of the U.S. in per capita GDP PPP don't really count because these are all tiny countries with small populations that support big industries that are propped up mostly by the US and the EU. For example, Luxembourg benefits much from its proximity to France, Belgium and Germany, with whom it does most of its trade.

I don't know really know enough about how DOSBox works to really say if it would be faster or not. It seems like DOSEmu runs a real DOS, while DOSBox has some internal thing that acts enough like DOS to get by. I think DOSBox is a full-blown x86 emulator, while DOSEmu actually needs an x86 CPU. I suspect that since DOS gamers report that DOSBox works rather better for DOS games, and given that most of the later DOS games make use of DOS extender, that the DOS32 program might be faster under DOSBox, but I don't really know for sure.

Windows has to do backflips to get DOS extender apps to run. Try the DOS32 application on actual DOS and you'll find the performance is very, very different.

Same thing.

No, but we're #2 in GDP purchasing power parity (just barely behind the EU), #4 in stock of money (behind the EU, Japan and China, respectively), #4 in the size of labor force, #4 in terms of exports.

And we're still #1 by a big margin in terms of airports, roadways, and railways. Only China beats us for the number of phone lines, and only China and India beat us in terms of total number of cellphones. Nobody even comes close in terms of the number of Internet hosts. So I'm not sure what you mean by we're "not #1 in terms of infrastructure," but I'm pretty sure you're dead flat wrong there.

So, yes, in some ways the U.S. does hold the world together, or at least help to do so economically and militarily, and no, military is not the only the thing the U.S. is #1, not by a long shot.

You can run the Windows version of Skype 3.5 in Wine, though I'm not sure if you'd actually want to.

No, HTC is Taiwanese. And before you go attacking Taiwanese companies, you should probably realize that if you have a smartphone or a computer of any kind, it's probably a Taiwanese-produced product or contains a lot of Taiwanese components. That's true even for most of Apple's products.

What POTS? In the next 5 years, you won't be able to get POTS.

Yep. Quick "back of the napkin" math works out to 99.9988266%. That might not be 5 nines, but it's damn close!

So any bets on how long before the Steve gets word of this and Skype gets pulled from the App Store?

I am so getting off Trip6's lawn. You should, too.

But what I'm saying is that residential Internet was available prior to unlimited. It's just that it wasn't on the radar of the average household.