What kind of computer system were they using in 1991? By 1991 it wasn't very common anymore for users of email, Usenet, or FidoNet to do everything in all caps.

Newest Generation of Consumer Electronics Item Uses More Energy Than Previous Generation Did

They are indeed extremely lame-looking patents, even by the usual standards of patent lameness. Several of them are an attempt to patent early-20th-century button/knob technology, and several others are an attempt to patent standard 1930s-50s control theory. Oh, except with the phrase "used in a thermostat" or "in an HVAC system" added, which makes it totally novel.

One of the patents is for this earthshattering invention: a system that can change from an initial temperature to a second temperature, while indicating on a display an ETA for reaching the target temperature.

Another one is for this: a display with a circular housing over it, where rotating the housing, by means of a potentiometer to which it is attached, changes an HVAC system parameter.

And yet another one is this: a display that asks a user questions in natural language, displays a menu of possible responses (such as "yes" and "no") among which the user may select, and then adjusts an HVAC system's configuration as a result of the user's response.

If your leg runs Kubuntu, you might have other problems.

That's not the distinguishing feature; companies that provide for-pay internet services, unlike the phone company, can snoop on and resell your data as well, because the various telecommunication laws that prevent AT&T from doing so don't apply to online services. There's no real distinction between free and for-pay online services in terms of what the law allows them to do with your data.

I do think it's a widespread ethical view that these utility-like services shouldn't use the information for their own gain. In the phone era, that was formalized with fairly detailed rules; AT&T couldn't just randomly listen in on your phone calls and use it to sell advertising profiles to mail-order catalogues. In the internet era technology is moving faster than people/law can keep up with.

Oddly enough, he's less famous for some things about politics he did actually say, which are widely used, but less widely remembered as originating with Bismarck:

"Politics is not an exact science."

"Politics is the art of the possible."

He's also the source of the prediction: "If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans."

There was another minor opportunity to stem the tide with some federalist arguments about medical marijuana: people growing their own marijuana, legal under state law, noncommercially, for private use on the premises, argued that this could not possibly be "interstate commerce", but Antonin Scalia of all people wrote an opinion arguing that it was. So you can add "the drug war" as the 3rd wave of things...

Some models do have some kind of nuclear-reactor thing going on at the very center, but it's indeed not right to present it as some kind of fact, when it's greatly disputed what might be there (and our evidence is very circumstantial). As far as I can trace it, the proposal for a "nuclear georeactor" in a sub-core of the inner core is due to J.M. Herndon, who proposed it in 1996, and has since developed the idea in various other papers. I don't think it's anywhere near consensus, though.

I'd say it's closer to 1880s-1890s American "company towns", like mining encampments where the mining company owned all the housing and the local store. I agree it's not good, but there are not-good historical parallels that don't require hyperbole.