They aren't going to switch their network to VoIP and not have backup power...

AT&T maintains 99.999999999% (yes, that's nine nines!) uptime on their POTS network (localized problems like poles being run down by trucks are something else; I'm speaking of their equipment). They are not stupid.

What if I'm hunting deer that happen to have body armour on?

How many people would support paying history gradschool students to work on WikiProject: Russian History?

It's perfectly possible to be unbiased and paid for your work. I don't see why they need a new policy to deal with this - their regular NPOV policies are fine.

Depending on when your house was built, you may not be _allowed_ to rip the wires out, anyway. They might belong to Ma Bell.

I think they'd be more worried about somebody cutting all of their fiber at once and knocking an office off the network when something critical was happening.

The NSA probably encrypts all their traffic over-the-wire.

...do you actually understand what job somebody given the position 'judge' does?

Caller ID is trivial to spoof. Your solution does not work.

with 6 kids from 8 different child-support paying fathers

That's a neat trick. I also believe it's possible to do in several states...

It's horribly inefficient BSD crap. Get your Drepper quotes right!

I don't think they bough Sun for MySQL. If I had to guess, they don't even _care_ they got MySQL with it. They have dinky versions of Oracle for developers and stuff anyway.

Email and calendaring are hard when you get down to the nitty-gritty.

Good job, you voted for someone who wasn't running for president.

So how does the game know nobody else is playing with that globally unique identifier?

This doesn't sound new or exciting to me...all it sounds like is Valve will handle license key generation/online authentication for third parties selling on Steam.

1.5mbps is not terribly attractive.

...uh...did you read the blurb?

In 1978, Apple Corps, the Beatles-founded holding company and owner of their record label, Apple Records, filed a lawsuit against Apple Computer for trademark infringement. The suit was settled in 1981 with an undisclosed amount being paid to Apple Corps.