They haven't gone far enough! I'm looking forward to when my government stops asking me very personal and intrusive questions about who I work for and how much money I earn. From a freedom point of view this is exactly the right thing to do, too.

</kook>

The abolition of the long form census (and it was abolished-- the National Household Survey takes it place, but is no substitute) is wonderfully meta. It robs us of a valuable tool for sound, evidence-based decision making, and it was done by a government hell-bent on avoiding making a sound, evidence-based decision when world+dog showed them how awful an idea it was.

... the firefighters did exactly the right thing.

You can talk about what kind of crackmonkey 19th century scheme it is to have a subscription fire service in the first place, but that's another discussion.

If you have a subscription fire service and you want it to survive you have to protect it from freeloaders. One saved house here will mean a whole lot of lost subscriptions from people who realize you don't have to pay to get your home saved. Then, the service collapses and what do you say when a responsible former subscriber's place goes up in flames as a result?

It's not like these services just let you forget to pay, either. They do everything they can to make sure you know what it means if you haven't and don't pony up your equivalent-of-a-cup-of-coffee-a-week.

That was funny in a sense, but also very very sad. There is a growing population that would have a very hard time using a pen and paper. I know you were joking, but I see this as a problem. The more one grows to rely (as opposed to just using) technology the more one is incapable of taking care of oneself when deprived of said technology.

Translation: Get off my lawn.

I'm all for tech obviously or I wouldn't be in IT and wouldn't post here, but your 'joke' just underlines how weak and soft people are growing as they increasingly rely on tech that could go away in a heartbeat.

Translation: Those dratted kids.

One big EMP and there would be a bunch of geeks milling around not quite knowing what to do as they slowly starve to death staring at their smartphones waiting for them to turn back on.

Translation: I've fallen, and I can't get up.

Let's bear in mind, please, that geeks will have no monopoly on starvation and privation if someone starts lobbing EMPs around. There will be bigger problems than kids' unfamiliarity with pen and paper if the pillars of our society are tumbling down around our ears. If your bunker isn't fully stocked and you aren't practicing subsistence agriculture right now, then your post is the height of hypocrisy.

Well, first you have to get a system in place. So you get to pay $BIGNUM for something you need to hack anyway.

(As a side note... unless your post is tongue in cheek... does it constitute a breach of DMCA or similar? Should we be horrified that each system has the same root password as you're implying?)

Of course, if you just generate a patch file with the source changes, and zip that up, it will be even tinier.

Except for that upgrade of the underlying FooLib from 2.1 to 2.2 that's part of your hotfix. Well, all you need then is to just get a patch file for that too, and include that.

And then compile the whole sucker on the other end.

Everyone's got plenty of CPU, right? And we're just about all using trivially decompilable bytecode anyway, so if you make your patchfile based on the source changes after compilation and decompilation, you've got all the right transforms in place to come up with a pretty effectively minimal changeset.

Of course, we have plenty of bandwidth anyway, and programs are small. Media files are not, but I'm not going to get any space savings trying to disassemble that picture of your mom.

Oh noes! Communication networks allow people to communicate with other people!