Why can't you just buy it, and own it, and use it how you like? Or... not buy the damn thing. It's supposed to be entertainment, not work, not some sort of interactive customer experience with Microsoft.

Take a large helping of 'duh', sprinkle on some crisis mentality, garnished with a little fascism, and served up by a population programmed to trade freedom for security.

We'll nationalize the power grid in less than 20 years.

Stick a bunch of fluorescent lights in the ground nearby and get free light (and suck power from the lines, thank you induction).

Other than SMS, people still use IM? Is the Internet populated solely by 14 year old basement dwellers and 50 year old ASL pervs?

Somehow it was necessary to mention that the budget was affected by sequestration?

With population exploding, shouldn't we return to an era where the weak were culled out? With chronic unemployment as the new norm, maybe there's just too many people. It's like managing these "lifestyle" diseases - back in the day old people had the grace to die of diabetes or a heart attack, now they live until 90, but don't work the last 30 years of their lives, effectively eating the seed corn of the new generation. We're soon going to be victims of our own successes.

You fail, both for being retarded, and for signing your post.

Typical modern groupthink - if you dont match up to some artificial social standard you lose. Watch your own checkbook, don't chase some mythical metric that others self-report. You'll never win, they'll just keep moving the goalposts. Spend less money as you expand capacity, and you're doing a good job.

The Pele of Anal?

Thanks, Editor-dot, for not reviewing TFS. This was an experiment to test EM radition, its nothing to do with 'routers'. Believe it or not, there are things which are 'routers' that are not supplied by your ISP when you sign up for home broadband.

If its picking you up in Lakewood or making other stops on the way, it's not the "high speed" you're thinking of.

People don't understand how large and empty most of the US is.

The rest of the country languishes because everything is so far apart. Do you want to spend days on a train to get from Chicago to LA, or do you want to spend 4-5 hours on a plane? Even high speed rail can't beat a jet. In the Northeast the density of cities plus the ability to work/talk/move around on a train trumps the cost and hassle of air travel, elsewhere not so much.

"Hello air travel? It's train travel... you win."

Most Americans have a shaky understanding of cause and effect, courtesy of years of public education where feelings trump facts, opinions trump research, ineptitude trumps ability, and equal outcomes trump equal opportunity. As a result, other than saying "stop global warming", nobody really cares - they assume that "someone" will fix it, and that someone is probably "the government". You'll hear things like "global warming is bad, but I need a minivan to drive my 4 kids (which I _chose_ to have) to soccer" or "they should just tax rich people" or "blame China". Nobody wants to be the guy who actually sacrifies anything.

I worked at an NRC institute from 2002-2011. It was a fantastic place though it had faults. Each Institute was a mini-fiefdom in which the respective Director Generals held all the power. A lot of blue sky research was done, however in reality a lot of it would be considered "mental masturbation"; papers were published but never referenced. Or papers would be whipped up so people could attend conferences in nice locales . For too long NRC acted like an academic environment where money didn't matter: there was always a new bag of money next year.

Many Institutes had overlapping work with other Institutes but didn't collaborate. In fact the way the IT infrastructure developed was also very silo'd, it was next to impossible to work with other sites because of various local policies.

NRC has needed a good kick in the ass for a number of years. Previous presidents talked the talk but did nothing. In the end the Old Boys Club endured. The current president has been given his orders and is executing them. He's collapsing ~15 years of pain into ~3. Much of the blame for this should be put on the previous presidents.

That all said, I'm not a big fan of everything that is going on, but if you look at this as a soft reset for NRC, things will get better.

Bottom line: if anyone at NRC says things were Just Fine before, they are delusional or lying.