My completely subjective experience over a decade of broadband use is that when things are working normally I expect less than 50ms for ADSL, less than 40ms for Cable and less than 20ms for Fiber, within national borders in a European country.

Govts are restricting the internet with salami tactics. In Turkey you can find several levels of censhorship. Some you can circumvent with OpenDNS, others you need proxies/vpn. Then there is the opt-in censhorship of "internet profiles" such as "family internet" or "children's internet".
Every time they up the ante techies realized they could circumvent the effects rather easily, but many many more do not have the know-how.
So the most active knowledgeable users like us develop apathy because we are not really affected, therefore we stay passive, while for the vast majority of users the internet gets more and more restricted. Let's not fall for this complicity strategy.

I'm surprised no one brought it up but the comfort level of a west european train ride is amazing. You get leg room, you get a tabletop in front of you that is nothing like the plastic pos on a plane. You can walk about, visit the toilet and go get a meal whenever you feel like it. You get plugs and often internet for your laptops. If it's an overnight ride you can get a sleeper. A well organized train ride basically means the travel time is not wasted at all, in some sense rendering the journey free as in time. You actually can continue living on the train, with rest, food and work available. How does that compare to being stuffed in economy class or wasting away behind a wheel?

I think the best FOSS candidate for the task of replacing Skype is Jitsi (ex- SIP Communicator).
http://jitsi.org/index.php/Main/HomePage

It supports SIP and XMPP (Jabber) fully, including GTalk. Has built-in zero-config ZRTP. Also supports the proprietary IM networks like MSN and Yahoo to various extents, Skype being the only exception with no support (as expected). Been using it for a few months and the nightlies are getting better and better. The 1.0 release could make a good splash on the internet.

Sounds more like "shared source" design to me, a collaboration between 50 companies. Nothing seems to be open to the public.
Unlike for example the Global Village Construction Set. http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set/
"Open Source - we freely publish our 3d designs, schematics, instructional videos, budgets, and product manuals on our open source wiki and we harness open collaboration with technical contributors."

The rapid release system was brought into effect to compete with Chrome's meteoric rise in usage share and stem the decline of FF. The stalling and loss of usage share of FF started way before this, especially during the long FF3 to FF4 transition, when Chrome was spitting out rapid updates. So no, FF is not losing users because of the new release system. The new release system is a response to the loss of users.
I especially find it hilarious when people complain about the rapid releases.. and then declare they will switch to.. Chrome!.. which has.. rapid releases !

Partisan? Ofcourse, it's a politicised issue! Do you cry "partisan!" if i link to Dawkins in a creationism vs. evolution debate? No? Obviously what matters is if the arguments are valid not that some people are "partisan" to the arguments.
Hammer and sickle and the proletariat? please grow up beyond the mind of a cold war victim. ("overthrowing of the proletariat" made me laugh though, next time try "the proletariat overthrowing capitalism" or similar to avoid embarassment)
If you had spent half the time writing this drivel to actually research this issue, you would know that fossil and nuclear have been subsidized through the roof for half a decade now, right from R&D to purchasing guarantees to insurance. Subsidized renewables? On an absolute scale sure (and we should have more of that), on a scale relative to non-renewable energy, renewable subsidies are a joke.

This is a groundbreaking turn from the country already leading the world in renewable energy.
The question is now, what combination of sources will replace the nuclear piece of the energy pie.
Currently nuclear stands at 22% and renewables at 17% in Germany. I reccomend the literature here for anyone who doubts renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, small hydro, biomass) are up to the task of displacing fossil and nuclear. Especially check out Hermann Scheer's "Energy Autonomy".
As a bonus, this will be a chance to dispel illusions regarding the technical viability of thorium, fast breeder reactors, fusion and other nuclear chymeras.

What kind of calculation did you use to get at that 1000 miles of shoreline figure? Why quote 2MW turbines when we have 7.5MW turbines online and 10MW turbines in development? Furthermore, you assume turbines can only be lined up on the coast single file? Seriously?

Opposing solar on "desert habitat" or wind power on "the birds may die" arguments are indeed embarassingly idiotic. And there is indeed such foolishness displayed by some people who see themselves as environmentalists. However, the source of such bs can often be traced back to fossile-nuclear interests that are deliberately trying to derail renewables by ultra-environmentalist arguments like these. Many a naive environmentalist with no perspective simply buys into this stuff.

I recommend you read the book Energy Autonomy by recently deceased German MP and head of EuroSolar Hermann Scheer. It dispelled any doubts I held about the possibility that renewables -solar, wind, hydro and biomass- can deliver the world's energy needs.
It answers frequent misguided critiques of renewables, as well as laying out the dim prospect for any future for fossile and nuclear power.
Most revealingly, it argues that a decentralized renewables future, by coupling production sites with consumption sites, saves enormously on grid and fuel transportation costs. Such an economy would also break electricity network and fossil-nuclear monopolies (enjoying enormous subsidies in many, many forms) in favor of energy independence at the building, municipal and national levels. That is the most important political aspect one needs to grasp in the renewables issue.

Let me point out that the protest was against existing arbitrary censorship as much as it was about the new 4 "filter packages" (child, family, .tr only, standard - you have to pick 1) that are to be introduced in August.
Already there are estimates of 80000 websites censored - estimated because the list is not made public, nor the reason for censoring. Typically, the targetted sites are around : porn (ALL porn, though they like to wave around child porn as an excuse), atheism (dawkins banned), communism, homosexuality (gay dating sites banned), kurdish nationalism, streaming sites (especially if live streams of a large pay tv channel are infringed), gambling-betting (the state sanctioned sport betting service runs full force ofcourse) and many others. One offending blog or clip can get entire domains banned (wordpress, youtube, etc. were at some point banned too).