Regulated, sure, but, banned seems to be doing more harm than good. Not saying they're good things, they're not but, banning them is just making criminals rich and powerful rather than keeping them off the streets. Not a good policy in my book.

Than they are really out of luck as they're out double. I wanted to say doubly screwed but, it just didn't seem likely.

Plus, you have the problem such as the hacking command center in Canada, ran by the US NSA, that launches attacks on the US with the intent on pointing the finger at other countries. How can anybody be sure it isn't a false flag attack as long as the NSA runs something like this?

Oh, and I'm pretty sure an order very similar to this would have happened if we had President Romney too. I'm not forgiving Obama for it but, the name in office matters very little any more nor does the party affiliation. The same corporations pull the strings. All the party hate serves is that people are watching Republicans or Democrats when they should be watching Northrop Grumman, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Monsanto, etc.

I'd mod you funny if I had mod points today but, burned some karma on the above troll, sorry.

Preparation H, not Bengay and you're trying too hard [as well | still].

Yea, I'm glad too. It's just... sad.

You'll hear every successful U.S. politician say that they never stop campaigning. The only time that they stop campaigning is when they leave politics altogether (this includes lobbying), die or sometimes the last two years of a two-term president. It's why they almost never do their real job is because they spend their entire careers begging for money from lobbyists to get (re-)elected.

Nothing sadder than a wannabe troll that trolls with everything he has and just can't troll. My dyslexic aphasiac roommate does it better, and I'm not trolling you on this fact. Find a new hobby.

The other ones that want the job are people who want power... at any cost. Not usually the type of people you want to have power but, since anybody else would run from the job, that's what we get.

I really like that idea. Good one.

Quick and effective solution to this problem. Pass a law that if a service provider says that they offer service to an address they must do so by law. No fines, they have to install service. If that means $30,000 in new cable to be laid, then so be it. The service providers will get their service maps in order really quickly and we'd have accurate coverage numbers for the country.

I've witnessed this so many times as an IT tech that it's sickening. Even if we're standing there and try explaining it, our words just end up in "don't care" brain bin and they'll click on anything that makes the message go away the fastest. I've even had them click on "yes" then "Ok" on the install even when I was standing there and told them not to. It's like they're "listening" to their mother in law. Irritating as hell.

True, ActiveX was just one of several bad ideas that became "standards" during the web's explosive growth period. Others that came to mind were the blink tag, Flash (as you mentioned), Java (for the web, a terrible idea), and the abortion of a scripting language known as JavaScript. JavaScript is just the lesser of the evils of the technologies and no one has been able to push forward a replacement, though several have tried.

The main difference that makes HTML5/JS/CSS "open" in this case is that any person or company can use the technology free of charge in any capacity without fear of a copyright claim or demands for payment. With ActiveX, only the end users who write scripts may use it free of charge. If you want to implement it in a browser or some other capacity, you have to sign a licence agreement with Microsoft or get sued. That's what "open" means in this case though I fully understand and agree with the FOSS community that this is not what "open" should mean but, I'll take it over the alternatives we have at the moment.

What's infuriating is that USB drives used to come with hardware write switches and now you can't find them anywhere. And motherboards used to require you to move a jumper to flash the BIOS but, those are gone too. I don't know if it was cost cutting or a case of user stupidity or both but, the hardware write switch has faded into history. I'm fine with the being in a default-write setup as long as they had the option to cut it off.