The fun in having a distribution automatically do the right thing is that you get to a working system faster, so that you can get to your other fun faster, whether you prefer casual, hardcore, or Dwarf Fortress.

In other words, it leaves them stuck with what happens to be playing at the moment, not a large back catalog of videos on demand.

Where does that leave rural customers who can't get cable, fiber, or even the higher tiers of DSL?

You can always download the 1080p version and transcode it to 720p. Transcoding while scaling down doesn't give quite as much generation loss.

You can still try the high-motion (60 fps) render at 1080p 2D.

There are plenty of public domain plots. If techies can get to work adapting familiar stories by the Grimms, H.C. Andersen, Carlo Collodi, and other famous pre-1900 fairy tale authors, that might start to eat away at Disney's position in the marketplace.

And it's not just big cities either... the same has happened here in the Kitsap County are twice. Once when they built the new sub base at Bangor in the 70's, and again from the late 80's when Seattle grew big on the tech boom.

Folks that bought a house and a little land in what were then fairly remote areas intending to retire there... suddenly found themselves taxed out of them when subdivisions started sprouting up next door.

The police are there to write reports and do light investigation. They are not, and never were, a rapid response force, ready at a moment's notice to alleviate your panic.

Your focus on a single edge case has lead you to an erroneous conclusion.

You seem to forget, there are other services that are reached via 9-1-1... like the fire department and EMS, which *are* rapid response forces. You also seem to forget that there *are* times when the polices and sheriffs are a rapid response force, such as a major traffic accident, to support fire and EMS in the event of a large incident, responding to major robberies, etc... etc...

There is a really small but similar sentiment in Illinois too. The people who live in rural Illinois feel like the people who live in Chicago and the suburban areas surrounding Chicago disproportionately affect Illinois politics. They feel that the state would be better without Chicago.

While there's no separatist sentiment, Washington has the same problem - the largely rural are east of the Cascades feels disenfranchised because of the influence of the much more populous and more urban Puget Sound area. But even within the Puget Sound region, there are splits... over here in west sound, we're far more rural than the Eastside.

If it were something heavy (like the locomotive some are speculating about) it wouldn't be necessary to dig a hole. That's old mud flats, the water table is very high, and there is a LOT of underground water movement. Something heavy enough would gradually sink through the muck until it hit a denser strata.

It's not weight that makes something float or sink, it's the displacement and weight and how they compare to the density of the media the object is in. For instance, a ship floats deeper in fresh water than salt, because fresh water is less dense. And that kinda counts against your theory because mud is very dense and heavy indeed.

Which still leaves unanswered the question - how did that heavy thing get there in the first place? There were railroad tracks and piers running out across those flats, if one collapsed and dropped a locomotive into the mud you'd think it would make the papers and/or be known to local rail fans. (Railfans excel at trivia like that.)

A column of text can't get bigger than a specific width without becoming hard to read. What should the web site put in the rest of the space? A pile of ad banners? It's like maximizing a file browser window showing a folder with three files in it. What should be shown in the rest of the window?

So why don't 51 percent of people vote in a different "central planning sky fairy"?

So what place is both A. more affordable and B. hiring in one's field? Or should one have to retrain and move?

Anybody who wants to run an Android application whose publisher has chosen not to make it available through Amazon or as an APK on the publisher's own web site.

To minimize line transition errors (skipping or rereading a line), it's best to make body text columns no wider than about 80 characters. In CSS, that's about 30em to 40em, and with the default 16px font, 500px is about 31em.

Try unmaximizing your browser window and resizing it to half the width of your screen. There's a reason that Windows is plural (except for Window 8). If you let us know what desktop operating system you're using (and, in the case of X11/Linux, what window manager), I can give detailed instructions.