General Electric was a big contributor to Obama's campaign.

They also essentially bankrolled Ronald Reagan's early political career.

And Warren Buffet makes a ton of money from the fact that the pipeline is blocked so the Oil Cars have to run on his railroad track.

go read "A People's History of the United States". Pretty much everything you were taught in grade school was bull shit.

Likewise, a bunch of what you read in that book was bullshit. The use of "A People's... " in the title should have been a dead giveaway. History the way China would have us interpret it.

The fact that you say such ignorant shit about The Constitution clenches it.

Or a just plain nutz sites like DailyKos, Lucianne, or the festering pit called DemocraticUnderground?

Do you shout at the radio if Rush comes on it? Good, that means Rush is good for at least something.

Check the Buckley-flavor Conservatives at places like National Review. They favor scaling back the War on Drugs too.

Who doesn't favor a scale back of the WoD? People in the pockets of 'Big Prison' among others. People who are beholden to the 'Treatment Industry'. Some of the religious zealots. The Big Businesses (tobacco and alcohol) who have perfectly good legal drugs for you to buy. The people who want to spend all the tax dollars that the legal drug businesses pay. And of course, lots of big government types in general.

Protection rackets don't work that way.

Get on board with their new stuff!

You're soaking your fingers in it.

What are the constitutional bounds of this 'empowered communications authority'? If, as you say, it could 'escalate up' to a federal investigation, you are implying it would be something with lesser authority.

We don't need 'World Cyber Police' yet. There isn't a democratic framework for it to operate within.

We will always need trucks for short haul. But long haul trucks can be eliminated quite effectively by rail transport. The warehouses and distribution depots can be located along the rail lines, and trucks can be restricted to driving no more than 100 miles from the depots. Or a formula like "trucks can only drive to the halfway point between depots".

The tax is to pay for maintenance because of road wear. Spewing 5x more pollution is bad, but it isn't the point of the tax to 'punish' anybody for anything. It's to tax everybody who uses the road equally for the wear they cause on the road.

And a heavy hybrid with the big battery might be causing more wear than, say, a VW Beetle that is in such bad shape it only gets 9 miles per gallon. So if anything the hybrid should pay more.

Wouldn't Oregon Trail be on punched paper tape? Or maybe 1200 BPI 1/2" tape?

I know there were later CD-ROM versions of Oregon Trail. For the newbs.

The aforementioned 2/3 of 'workers' probably don't need to be online to do their work. The simple fix is for their connection to the outside world to be snipped. Physical security measures can be used to ensure that the data is then 'protected' for the most part.

Obviously there are other means and ways for data to be stolen and leaked out, but the first order of business needs to be:

"You're too casual about security for any hardware you can access to be connected to the outside." Take away their connection. Several public shared kiosks can be set up in the office area they work in for essential needs.

Sorry, Facebook. Sorry Google.

The hardware producers deprecate drivers and eventually take them offline. So if you're working with an older version of hardware or need the drivers for an older version of the OS, you're out of luck.

That doesn't matter in the least for the 'shiney-new' crowd. It's 'easier' to just download the official approved drivers, and when the drivers are no longer available flash some plastic for the new hardware.

Why would anybody want 'old' stuff? Isn't it illegal to use 'old' stuff since it takes away from the producers who want you to pay them for 'new' stuff? (the boys in Washington need to get working on this issue)

If the teens DO use something, it's about to be dead. Or eventually will.

Physical distribution won't ever go away. There are entities that wish it would. But a TRS-80 Model 100 still has everything you need to write a novel. An HP-95 pocket computer still has everything you need for most mobile calculations.

Heck, an old Olivetti manual typewriter and a ream of paper is still a powerful set of tools for idea capture and creation.

Source code was distributed in interesting ways in the era when 'online' was the 7-bit ASCII stream.

I have the 'Forbidden Subjects' CD-ROM, sold by mail order out of the back of various magazines back in the 90's. It has a large collection of all the TABOO stuff from the internet back then. All the occult 'Black Magick and satanism' archives, including stuff published without permission from organizations like the OTO and TOPY.

It also has a large collect of phrack magazine and a bunch of virus newsletters and article archives. Reading it turned me off to the Virus scene because I had assumed it would have interesting discussions of exploits published as ASM source code. Instead all it featured for the most part was 'debug scripts' which were streams of characters to pipe into DEBUG to generate virus .COM files. I am sure that somewhere there were more than Script Kiddies out there, but the real hackers held their cards closer than the stuff published in the Forbidden Subjects CD.

I once encountered a floppy diskette that was part of the Microsoft Word 6.0 installation set. This was apparently a special edition, because it was on a 360K floppy diskette. I believe it was disk x of 100 something.

I still have Windows 98 on 5-1/4" floppies, because Microsoft offered to send it to you for free if you bought the edition distributed on 3-1/2" floppies. I have two sets because for some reason they shipped me two copies when I requested them.

The 5-1/4" distribution of Windows 95 is unique in that it's the only distribution of Windows 95 that doesn't require a CD key or fingerprint the diskette when you install it. For years I had a copy of that on CD that was the contents of all the diskettes copied into a single directory and burned to CD. It's the most primitive and first release of Windows 95, back when Microsoft was competing with CompuServ and AOL to be the 'Online Service', hence from before 'the Internet' had been discovered by Microsoft. It's really 'clean' and small with no Internet Anything installed. And as the first ever version of Windows 95 it has EVERY bug of the initial release (obviously)