I'm actually speaking from experience. I live in NYC and last year during Sandy we ran into many of the problems you describe. Business and Individuals in areas that still had power were setting out extension cords and power strips for people to recharge their phones. Mobile generators can be used for the same purpose (and growing up in Texas it was my experience that most people in isolated rural areas either already have a portable generator or know someone close by that does).

The situation you described in Rio and Sao Paulo is not unique to cell phones. POTs systems have a limit on how many calls they can support as well, the dreaded "all circuits are busy message" here in the states. The reason POTs lines are less susceptible to that now is that fewer people are using them so it doesn't happen as often. A common solution to this is to tell people just to text instead of making calls, that helps reduce the load on the cellular infrastructure.

1. If a hurricane/tornado/earthquake/what-have-you destroys your POTS infrastructure, it can take weeks or months to rebuild it. You can restore cell service in matter of hours with a mobile cell site.
2. The same applies to your house. What good is a fixed, "simple" phone if your house isn't there any more?
3. One of the biggest issues when a disaster strikes is locating people. POTS doesn't do anything to help with this.

POTS was great but it's had it's time and we need to stop supporting it and move on newer technologies.

Or any of the former satellites of the CCCP for that matter. The authoritative list is here.

They've been asked to help fix ObamaCare.

For being almost impossible to completely uninstall.

No one was ever debating the need or value of the actual devices. The OP was referring to a market for image/video capture devices that encrypt the data. My response was to that perceived market for encrypting devices, not the market for image/video capture devices as a whole. Actually, my post was arguing that people want to post images/videos of themselves so I don't see how you could even infer that I was arguing that there was no market for video cameras.

No. There's not a substantial market for it. The market is for things that make it _easier_ for people to post every last second of their lives online (Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instragram, Youtube, etc). The vast majority of the public will see encryption or anything else that interferes with instant narcissism as broken.

If you read the original study, you're comparing apples to bricks. From Recidivisim of Sex Offenders Released from Prison in 1994 (Langan, Schmitt, Durose)

Compared to non-sex offenders released from State prisons, released sex offenders were 4 times more likely to be rearrested for a sex crime. Within the first 3 years following their release from prison in 1994, 5.3% (517 of the 9,691) of released sex offenders were rearrested for a sex crime. The rate for the 262,420 released non-sex offenders was lower, 1.3% (3,328 of 262,420) So the rate of recidivism for the same crime is higher among sex offenders. The likelihood of being arrested for a different crime is lower (43% compared to 68%).

It should also be pointed out that all these stats are for the first three years after release only.

With that said, your point that recidivism is not a forgone conclusion as the stereotype suggests is correct, Wikipedia just made a hash of the stats.

The data centers are located downtown because that's where the banks and exchanges are. The banks and the exchanges originally built their data center close to them (this started in the 70's). Customers wanted to be as close to the servers as possible (and still do - high frequency trading) and it just kind of organically grew into what it is now. It also didn't hurt that AT&T and Verizon both have massive switch stations downtown and when these things were being built out high speed connections were not as easy to get as they are now.

The idea that requiring ID to vote some how disenfranchises legitimate and legal voters is asinine. The contention is that low-income and minority citizens won't have ID's and will be afraid to get them or can't afford them. You need an ID to even try to get a job, claim State or Federal benefits, cash payroll checks, open a checking account, etc.

The only legitimate complaint I can see is that they may not be able to afford an ID (currently $16 in Texas and for someone without a job that is a few meals). That's easy enough to fix... just make ID's free.

The joke here is that many of the countries that represent OSCE require voter ID's in their elections.(The article also mentions issues with gerrymandering... which is a problem but that's a problem in most states... Chicago pretty much wrote the book on this.)

What's driving all of this is the rampant fraud and abuse of the system by illegal immigrants in Texas. I recently read an article that was carrying on about how Texas was a "red"/republican state and but was taking more money from the Federal government than it was giving back. The article was implying that Texas voters were hypocritical in there beliefs. They're not. They are well aware that there is a huge drain on resources and social from illegal immigration. However, the Federal government and the "blue" states are trying their best to keep them from doing anything about it. This is where the backlash and "attitude" is coming from.

It's not enough just to "find" wind. The total sum of output across all your connected generation plants has to equal at least 100% of the demand of your serviced area at all times. Statistically you make that work out 90% of the time, 95% of the time, etc but as you close that gap to 100% output 100% of the time your costs start to climb because you have to address it by storing energy or increasing the size of your connected grid to even out the anomalies.

The overriding problem with wind power is that, for large parts of the world, it is not constant or predictable. So while your wind farm may meet your energy demands for one day, it might not the next... and there is no way to predict or plan for these boom/bust periods. The only way to address this is:
1. Build backup power sources which can meet all your energy demands (for when there is no wind)
2. Overbuild the wind farms and build massive battery backups to store and distribute excess power (expensive and still no reliable)
3. Rebuild the electric distribution infrastructure to share power across much larger regions (to do effectively require tech we haven't perfected).
No matter how you cut it, building an adequate wind power infrastructure is prohibitively expensive because you have to plan for periods of your total output being zero. No matter how much technology improves, this will always be the case (well, until we can control weather).

It's economies of scale, tape has a high cost of entry but a relatively low maintenance cost. A 1.5TB LTO 5 tape costs 40 USD. A 1.5TB drive costs 90 USD. The VM enclave I use for testing at one client has 700TB, to back up that data set with HDD would cost 23,333 USD more than tape (for just the media). That difference alone covers the cost of a tape library. And, most corporations are going to take complete backups once a week with incremental backups during the week. Which means an extra 23,333 a week (HDD vs tape). Scale this out to petabytes of data and HDD's become prohibitively expensive.

Also, one of the primary reasons to use tape is you can store them offsite for disaster recovery. You can put a box full of tapes in the back of a panel van and drive them down a bumpy gravel road without any big worries, you just can't do that with HDD's with out protective housing.

The overwhelming issues with latency aside, a 1.5TB (native not compressed) LTO drive will set you back ~1800 USD and you'll need an extra ~100-150 for a SAS controller that can drive it. For that price you can by yourself 24TB of HDD storage (12 x 2TB) with enough money left over for a decent SATA/SAS RAID controller. If you setup a RAID 10 array you'll have 12TB exponentially faster access times and better data security (unless you make copies of every tape).