The reasoning is sound, but I don't think the numbers work out. A $60,000 internet connection (which is probably more than the price of the house) - even if amortized over 10 years - is going to be around $600/month. That's roughly $500 more than the most expensive city plans... are salaries really going to increase by $6000 per household? I mean, it is possible, but I find it more likely that people would just move somewhere that already has internet, phone, and electricity.

You can absolutely work to change the market manipulations to those more in line with your own theories - that is not what I meant.

I'm asserting that those in power will - in aggregate - always look out for their interests. If your interests don't align with the powerful, then you really only have the choice of removing the power or trying to sway them. Good luck with the latter.

What? Starvation is a historical fact, and in fact still continues today. It is not fear mongering, it is what happens when you do not have enough food.

I'm not talking about famine, a la Irish potato or Ethiopia. I'm talking about broad starvation. Dust bowl, Great Depression, that sort of thing. You don't need famine to destabilize the country.

Drought? Flood? Pests? Disease?

They still exist, but the interplay is much more complicated and harder to predict. What would a fuel crisis do to overseas shipping? What about a war? You mention food storage... just who is storing excess food without some subsidy to do so? Where is this excess food shipping capacity that you will tap when domestic production hits a snag?

And what happens when prices are high? You sell out your stocks and there is nothing left in inventory should something go wrong.

I'm not suggesting central planning or anything of the sort. I'm suggesting subsidizing food production. You are absolutely right - it will ruin the efficiency of the markets. However, I contend that paying a little extra is worth the insurance.

Let's say that you're argument has won the day and that a pure market approach will keep us all fed and happy. Is it not fair for me to point out that it is impossible to achieve a pure market approach? That corruption and crime will always exist? Couldn't corruption or fraud undermine the market system when a stressful event occurs? Why shouldn't we accept that as fact and build in some safeguards, even if it spoils the efficiency a bit?

Indeed. And quite often even dead FOSS projects can be cannibalized. The difference between dead open source and dead closed source projects is that the bones of one sit in an open pit that anyone can pick at, and the other sits in a concrete bunker twenty miles underground.

That works great until you are hit with a flood, drought, disease, etc. Then it's back to the store for you.

Food security is simply having enough food to feed the population. You have to grow excess food 99.9% of the time so that you have a very low chance of ever falling short.

With most things I would agree with you. Food is different. We absolutely, positively cannot be subject to the sharp rise and fall of capital markets where it concerns food. A stock market crash causes a lot of trouble, but no one seriously suggests abandoning it. If there was a shortage of food, things would be very different. All of our libertarian ideals go by the wayside when starving is involved.

Food markets can't be very efficient anyway. The lag between an uptick in demand and, well, a whole growing season is simply too long. People can't wait 6 months to eat. The solution is to always produce more than you need and then throw away or store the extra. The private market can't do this because the extra would appear on the market and depress prices below the cost of production.

For Pete's sake, read and comprehend before being incorrectly righteously indignant!

September 2013 comes before December 2013 by any reasonable reckoning. If the last post on the blog was December 2013 and the one from September 2013 is referred to as the penultimate post it's a fairly safe assumption that the author is correctly stating that the September 2013 post was the second to last post made.

Maybe it's wishful thinking but, if the ISPs are unwilling to upgrade rural areas they already serve to 10Mbit/s, perhaps they would be inclined to sell that infrastructure to local companies/municipalities instead. The logic being that they can then claim closer to 100% of their customers are receiving the FCC definition of broadband. Or maybe they don't care about that particular statistic. I dunno.

I live in a rural area and write software from home on a 5Mbit/s ADSL line and it's not terrible but, having talked with the technicians that have been out, I know that there is fiber running within two miles of my house (admittedly two miles up a mountain). The ISP will never, ever build that out. However, the community I live in has all the heavy machinery (owned by the community, not county/city/state) to maintain the roads and things like that. If the ISP would sell the infrastructure to the community (or a company founded by the community), I have little doubt that we'd have fiber running under all the roads within a summer with a moderate cost to run it to your home from there.

In salt water boating, we replace those regularly :)

So is starvation, and I know which one I choose.

Ban ban ban. Two sides of the same coin. You can't complain about other people's choice of market manipulation and then suggest substituting for your own. It doesn't work that way. If you are pro regulation and you don't like the regulation that results - well, tough shit... that's what happens when you give the powerful more power.

You're massively overreacting to a biased headline. What is meant by "Apple locks NFC to Apple Pay" is simply "Apple have only provided APIs for Apple Pay so far".

This is pretty standard practice with new Apple hardware features.

Bluetooth? Originally developers couldn't access that at all, only the higher-level gaming APIs used it.

Touch ID? Again, developers couldn't access that at all to begin with, but iOS was released yesterday and that introduced an API for developers to use it.

The camera? Originally developers could only tell the system that they wanted a photo. Now we've got fine-grained control over shutter speed, etc.

Apple have a habit of introducing hardware features then providing a third-party API after they've had a chance to see it deployed at a large scale. If you are a long-time iPhone user, you've seen them do this time and time again. The fact that there isn't an API for it on day one doesn't mean that they are trying to lock it away.

I'm not disputing that. But these farms do not exist in a vacuum. They need to have infrastructure and skilled (as well as the unskilled that you mentioned) labor. Farms need to have mechanics, electricians, plumbers, doctors, lawyers, roads, etc. Rural life sucks in a lot of ways - take away electricity and telecommunications and you've made it really suck. As you insinuate, most sane people won't live like that. And some people will stay and live like mountain people. If you think it is good for our democracy to have vast swaths of the country controlled by mountain people, well - we're going to have to disagree.

It's both a pity and a blessing that Orwell didn't live long enough to see the geek in full flight.

The organization and planning of a crime, the recruitment of others to assist you, is more than thought, it is action.

The problem is that the Slashdot geek seems increasingly resistant to any story outside his comfort zone.

You see this most clearly when a story cuts close to the bone on issues of race and class and gender in tech --- but it comes through elsewhere as well.