I considered this but, I also see a strong and growing stronger movement of municipalities to roll their own. Among other reasons they see it as a means of attracting businesses to their towns. A paradigm shift is going to be forced upon Crapcast and co. whether they like it or not. Cable subscribers are bleeding out of these companies as consumers adopt data only services. Municipalities are now moving in and filling that role with far more attractive offers. Municipalities won't be harmed by title II, but it certainly won't be business as usual for the legacy players under it. As the saying goes "karma's a b**ch".

Perhaps Timmy's puppeteer thought the basement dwellers needed some titillation.

Municipal roll out is more likely. Google's just playing the role of the irritating fly. They don't have any serious inclination to do a mass roll out of Google Fiber.

As a consumer, not seeing much downside in that one. Can only mean we get rates that resemble the rest of the world. The tellcos have a long history of being money grabbing douche bags--at least here in the US. They got slapped for this with the Ma Bell breakup. They didn't learn. An intervention is long overdue.

The vars. municipalities telling them to "piss off, we'll do it ourselves."

I think you might be searching for the term "nostalgia bias" otherwise known as rosy retrospection.

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Nothing annoys a young person like an old person talking about the "good old days" especially when there exists objective historical records demonstrating that they were dumber, they had a lower quality of life, their technology was inferior, their brand of politics had horrendous consequences, etc..

Initial set up of the device could certainly require setting a password to activate. However, there's nothing stopping, and many will, set an easily guessable password anyway. Fools will forever be fools.

I thought we already complained about the blue screen of death...

Pins can be read from the POS keypad with rather low tech, minimal effort, particularly the ones using metallic keys.

Japan may have had these kind of cards for a while but I'm not sure they're a good example. The over whelming majority of transactions in Japan are with cash. Cards (mostly prepaid) have only recently started gaining popularity.

I thought they already had lap belt extenders...

One can always find exceptions to rules. Rules of thumb such a pinching fat, or looking down to see whether or not you can see your toes, etc. work pretty well on the general populace.

BMI was invented as an accommodation to practitioners involved with the general populace such as dietitians and physical trainers, for whom proper evaluation is beyond their intellectual reach. For the majority of the population existing within the bell curve, BMI fits reasonably well. Athletes don't fit the bell curve and anyone running in those circles doesn't give BMI serious consideration. In other words, it was a tool invented to call fat people fat.

Not really, it a piece of Dell, err sh*t.

Actually it is because RT did so well. I can envision management types trying to find ways to get some ROI on their investment in ARM after the Windows RT flop. In traditional fashion of chasing bad investments with more bad investments, out comes Server "RT".