DHS has about 1000 times the budget of all the police forces in the U.S., get rid of the CIA and you could return to police the way they were depicted in Leave it to Beaver.

It'd also solve unemployment.

Yea, but it will be increasingly an American problem. The world consumes an unfortunate amount of American (pop) media, but more local content. This will be good for everyone! So happy to get to own things :)

As opposed to the current system where just to keep up with inflation you need to invest your money in a corporation you likely think is evil?

You think the banks want to open up to be DDOSed. Like having their phone lines overloaded? They need to follow some rules one would think.

I do find calling back in another language tends to work well.

Losing your bitcoins doesn't seem to be the irony you're looking for. The one you're looking for is they drop to almost no value.

Better off really? They earn less money, work more hours, women have entered and doubled the work force, they have less savings, more debt, higher cost of living... medical services and education are at a higher percentage of personal income.

Yes if you look at averages the west is only in decline since the 80s but if you look at the median you'll see a much longer and more depressing trend.

"get paid when... play songs on FM, XM, or Internet radio (BMI and ASCAP)"... um you mean the radio station?

Depends on Genre I suppose. Some things are better on consoles: driving, sports, hack and slash, in-room multi player fps (baby fps), fight the controller, and arguably adventure games seem to be better designed on consoles.

Obviously there are better stand out titles on the PC in most of those categories but since you need specialized hardware there tend to only be a few of those games (flying, driving etc).

Idea for UI designers, two more common functionality elements Mute and Always on Top. Should be up there with minimize, max, and close.

It would certainly be a fascinating element of a new city state. I imagine many brilliant minds would want to live and work in a patent free system where they have access to all technologies and the work they do was broadly shared.

3D printing hugely benefits this as having a more nodular, simple manufacturing, sales and production base would seem to fix one of the larger problems faced by more socialist governments in the past.

This is obviously examined in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age (I'd love some other texts with a similar notion).

It's unclear just how much benefit, say a car manufacturer, would gain by having access to all the technologies in every car but it would seem to be non-trivial.

The current system is so insane that the large companies simply avoid it by using broad cross licensing... which meshes pretty well into their oligopalist tendencies.

Anyone who wants to be able to open their documents in the not to distant future I'd imagine.

"which is what the paid products are based on" - You're either asleep or stupid. Commerical software is based on sales (not "licenses" though they wish)... which includes hundred or thousand seat licenses... almost all commercial software comes with a 2-3 seat "licenses" and number of sales is calculated using those seat numbers often, though mostly they are interested in $ amounts since it costs them almost nothing to produce and ship physical media.

Opera I'm going to miss you! You used to be so small fast and configurable. Now you seem big and bloated rarely using less than 700MB for only 30 or 40 tabs.

You still save my sessions automatically while the others require plugins, you lead the way again and again making browsing better not just for your users but for everyone. Now you're throwing in the towel to Google, Microsoft and Firefox(which I don't hate I just don't like), leaving yourself open to patent trolls and big business shenanigans (IE:that's a proprietary standard or custom rendering that makes no sense and causes you months of work to duplicate because it was developed by throwing tonnes of lousy developers at it, ala pdf).

This is going to bite you in the butt, you know it I know it.

I'm sure you have your reasons and once you get on your feet again your brilliant contributions will make things better again... in the meantime I may watch from the sidelines trapped inside the chrome ecosystem, which doesn't have opera:config...

All the best in the future.

One positive thing to come from this is a government which acts with a moderate view of time dilation.

I love the idea of a government doing an experiment with a limited time frame. If more government bodies embraced this notion we could have access to wilder government experiments, which might put governments in line with the increasing pace of innovation.

Everything else about this is of course horrible and ridiculous.

Just guessing from experience with Koreans, but... chances are they followed Microsoft or Intel specifications properly. Other companies probably just copied a binary and use it as a black box.