Then, one day you get distracted and don't see or hear the car backing out and CRUNCH! You become the one with the handicap.

The sabotage here was more intense and without consequence. Also, any ticket involving a competing DSL service went to the very bottom priority every time. It could literally take a month to get a plug inserted into an adjacent jack. It would, of course get 'accidentally' unplugged a week later and take another month to get plugged back in.

Then, as you said, they got rid of it.

Actually, many businesses had a credit surcharge for a while. Then the credit cards added a no surcharge clause to the merchant contracts. So they hiked their prices and offered a cash discount. Then the credit cards added a no cash discount clause.

Yes, services cost money. That's no excuse for hiding how much it costs and forcing it to be paid for by people not using the service (for example, everyone that pays cash).

Many merchants prefer cash because cash can't be charged back after the fact. For example, if the card turns out to be stolen but not yet reported or the customer files a false claim.

Please don't trot that old nag out again. Major metro areas with much greater population density also have crappy service.

Careful. We want them kept south of the border longer than Americans want... :P

WITH a warrant, a pentrace is still available. That is, who did this phone call and where was it at the time. But note they're not complaining about phones that encrypt voice communication. Neither Google nor Apple are proposing to do that. They're complaining that they can't read your address book or paw through your email and photos. They're complaining that your papers might be secured nearly as well as Capone's (but not quite as well unless you have a tommy gun).

The thing is, most crimes eventually come down to some sort of physical activity somewhere that can be observed or to money moving from one place to another which can be traced (yes, including bitcoin).

It's not truly "high speed internet" until it can pass this test:

http://messagebase.net/Home/Re...

Someone didn't read TFA

We're "getting there" in the same sense that the Wright brother's airplane was "getting there" compared to a modern passenger jet or fighter plane.

Modern pacemakers are exactly that. They can detect when they need to pace and how much and can also act as internal defibrillators.

Apple pays out 67%. That's on Gross.

If they were to perhaps, talk about the expense of promotion, servers, and the fact that all the toys for Whack-A-Mole ended up in lawsuits, they could use Hollywood accounting. It would still be 67%, but of the net -- which means cab fair instead of money to buy the Limo.

I don't except that Programming is "Bigger than Hollywood" until we have people saying they are programmers while the bulk of their income comes from waiting tables, and I have to sleep with my Employer to get a job interview.

I WISH the process were that simple.

The part you're missing is selection. The harmful mutations either fail to reproduce altogether or they reproduce at a lower rate than the good ones. Actual experiments show that you can actually randomly mutate a program and if you have a good selection function, you can actually evolve new functionality.

The catch is that the evolution tends to 'find' really odd solutions.