So their pilots can Rock the Casbah?

If you really, honestly, truly think that the unwashed masses had better access to their representatives in an any era, you aren't quite as old as you state.

Congress has NEVER been afraid of its constituents - largely because voters had no real idea of how laws were made. They had the idealized Civics class version which made it sound like everybody was in agreement all of the time - just one big happy family there on Capitol Hill. Disagreements? Never discussed. How money was spread about between states to ease passage of controversial bills? Not a word. People were completely isolated from it and happy to be so. Honestly, do you really think that there would have been a Moon program if the discussion was available outside of Congress? Would the Civil Rights Act have been passed if the details of how Lyndon Johnson made each Congressmen an "offer they couldn't refuse" was on the daily news? If you want to look even earlier, the graft behind the creation of Transcontinental Railroad makes Enron look like rolling a kid for their lunch money. Did the public know about that? Even if they did, do you think that they would have cared?

Between blogs, traditional media and social media, people today have an unprecedented level of information about what goes on in Congress and what their Congresspeople do. America hasn't withered - life is more complex than any time in our history and rather than discussing it, we've chosen to hide from it. People have always chosen what they do with their franchise - we now choose to sit back and whine.

The iPhone 5 received the necessary network access licenses from the regulatory groups in China at the end of November and have only recently gone on sale there. The sales restriction didn't come from Apple.

Weight is still directly related to winning, but refueling was ended in 2010 - regular pit stops are only for tire change now.

We already know. It's three.

No, the original idea behind the First Amendment was to constrain government from restricting speech. It says nothing nor has anything to say about an individual right to do so.

The one that's faster and corner's better.

It'd be more effective to call the Registrar of Voters (or whatever the agency that handles voting is called) to report it. They can actually do something - the police can't.

A photo of a ballot is in no way "proof" of how you voted - at least in any way that could be used if there was a question about the vote. Aside from ease of manipulating the picture to show anything that you wanted it to show after the fact, the chain of custody would be nonexistent.

People aren't stupid, nor are they insensitive to what they are doing. The reality is that the banks that fund new developments don't really care why there's a delay in a job - just that there is one. Contractors, for good or ill, are very aware that this job and possibly the next one depends upon getting the project done on time. It's just the way things work in construction.

Don't blame environmental regulation for the delay in HSR. The EIR is the weapon of choice used by people who either were upset that the HSR wasn't coming through their town, were uneasy that it was coming through their town or didn't want the thing built in the first place.

Common wisdom when my father was in road construction was that if you found a burial or other historical site when excavating, you quietly reburied it and told no one. Especially burial sites. Find one and you're instantaneously one year or more behind schedule.

The copy of Windows XP Tablet edition that came with my Compaq TC1100 was a full-blown OS. The TC was a tablet in the true sense as it could be used without keyboard and XP Tablet edition - like it or not - had everything the desktop version had plus handwriting recognition.

I tried them. Penske too. If you want a big, heavy, expensive commercial truck with a tow hitch, yes. If you want a small truck that can *be* towed, no problem. If you want a small or medium truck to tow a small trailer, nope. Each and every one of the rental agencies I talked to said it was because of insurance due to the amazing rate that people who had never towed before were causing damage to the rentals.

If they've changed policies recently, great. I'd love to get a vehicle with better gas mileage and rent something with a hitch the few times a year I need to tow.

Good luck with that. Most rental companies (in California, at least) will not rent cars or light trucks with tow hitches on them.