Well, probably the same "technical superiority" also played a role in "killing" it. The same type of micromanagement that "killed" PGP/GPG (key management chains, hierarchical trust). Less feel of seamless integration / no-hassle usage. I never felt Google+ was an easy to use extension to my behavior. I always felt too involved when using the service. Somehow the Facebook's exceptions just worked better for me.

Official reclassification would probably change the legal status of all currently active legislations dependent on the 1934 act and possibly other obsolete definitions for information interchange. Changing those phrasings would open a "can of worms", requiring investigation of all those cases dependent on such obsolete definitions. Thus nobody directly related to clean the mess wants to change anything, creating a stand-off situation. Just a guess why nothing has been done and why people are just arguing about individual legal acts.

The are other oddities other oddities as well, for example "Foreign communication" not necessarily adaptable to modern-day world. Those definitions were created in the era of landline phones, phone tapping, espionage, domestic and foreign communications.

What you argue here is true but what we have in the news now is not about measuring old stuff by old definitions but new stuff by old definitions. And because of this mismatch between old vs. new definitions the definitions should be changed. The definitions are so old that they do not apply even in the modem/BBS era.

From the Communications Act of 1934:

(43) TELECOMMUNICATIONS.--The term "telecommunications" means the transmission,
between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user's choosing, without
change in the form or content of the information as sent and received.

Sounds familiar? Thus these are not telecommunications:

- Has communication between or among points NOT specified by the user (i.e. a switch, unknown routers)
- Sent information doesn't match received, for example added OSI layer headers needing "decoding" in the receiving end. That needs "microprocessors" and decoding is complex.

Anything NOT defined as "telecommunications" will be categorized to something else instead. It will be "higher layer service" instead but today we think TCP/IP is "common knowledge". The "common" of TCP/IP is fairly new concept. Time to renew your definitions, citizens of the U.S.?

The definitions are from "47 U.S. Code 153 - Definitions" where:

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(50) Telecommunications
The term “telecommunications” means the transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received.

(24) Information service
The term “information service” means the offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications, and includes electronic publishing, but does not include any use of any such capability for the management, control, or operation of a telecommunications system or the management of a telecommunications service.

---

So it means strict definitions will be strict and any deviation from them will have no effect. Badly defined terms to begin with, in my opinion, even this one is strange: "without change in the form or content". Strictly speaking any framing or analog to digital conversion will make it non-telecommunication even if the "point to point" requirement doesn't apply.

I don't understand many things. One is why do people buy expensive cars when they have will never get the real benefit. They have (or should) obey the speed limits. In some cases the cars might be faster but less reliable. Owning an expensive car gives the feel of power and muscle. Owning expensive audio rig gives the feel of golden ears. Just owning "personal" gear gives the warm and fuzzy feeling of being different in the era of perfect sound in the pocket. "Audiophoolery" is popular because of the many variables and personal tastes. It will never go away.

Audiophile basically means freedom of choice: you can pick whatever you want. Other than that, now it also seems to be about "warm sound" or just being different. For example: you get bored of CD/SACD/etc. sound and you want something different. People buy C cassette decks from the 70s and claim they are "a lot better than CD" just because they sound different. Even boomboxes give that retro feeling or bring up memories. Rarely is this about "having the correct sound": placing the same speakers in different position will create different sound. It's not about science either. It's a spiritual experience.

Personally, it would be nice to see graphs of different products where X axis is the price and Y axis is the "measured quality". Somehow I think the graph will look inverse U: costing "too less" won't have the essential parts in them and "costing too much" include the actual scam products.

"Something you are" = Somebody can verify the fingerprints came from you. It is an authentication process in case of fingerprints. If not, they are just a password, i.e. something you know.

So someone can be sued when having conjectural evidence at best against that person and fingerprints "are highly unlikely" to be planted by somebody else. Let's say somebody walked near the crime scene and that persons's fingerprints were found from the murder weapon. They just found the killer.

The problem is not the fingerprints but missing evidence and false claims.

Scroll lock is good when the text scrolling is a little bit too fast to be readable (you know the timing when to press it but do not have time to read the actual text). Pressing it usually also pauses the program execution. Some old terminals, old computers or "fast" modem connections would be some examples.

Caps Lock is for the cases where you have to type more uppercase letters while still being able to type lower case letters: having caps lock reduces the amount of typing in this case. Shift is for the cases where you have to type more lowercase letters while still being able to type upper case letters: having shift reduces the amount of typing in this case.

So the question about "do we need caps lock at all?" requires that we have to think how common are those use cases where caps lock is beneficial. Some people use it for headlines when no other effects are possible. I've seen caps used in SQL commands and some companies even have "coding standard" to make the caps mandatory.

I don't think there are many "effects" in Linux by default, at least in Ubuntu (and I don't count those 3D task switchers or wobbly windows). The windows "pop up" with some sort of animation you barely notice with a relatively new hardware. Dragging windows up the "snap to border" limits also creates some sort of orange animation for the window placeholder effect. What the Acer Aspire One can't do are those compiz compositing effects requiring 3D acceleration. Some of those regular effects probably use 3D effects as well. You can make the Linux "flat", for example in Ubuntu Mate (Marco, no compositing). But so does Windows 8/10 also look "flat" in quite the same way as Mate. The number of effects looks minimal.

The Acer Aspire One seems to be relatively fast with an SSD and Ubuntu Mate. It boots up fast and with Mate there are no real UI delays as with many other Ubuntu flavors. You have wait a little bit longer in the browser for the page to be rendered so don't expect to just start scrolling immediately after entering the URL. The bottleneck is of course the lack of real graphics rendering capabilities, even those effects of the regular Ubuntu seemed slow (plus the fact that the Ubuntu Launcher takes big part of the screen real estate).

Choice as is poverty. However, it's easier to get rich than choose your own religion, in some cases.

The "gamers" are probably the only group driving traditional PC desktop part costs down. They need memory: at least 32..64 GB should be enough? They need multi core CPUs because they game while doing other productive tasks at the same time (multiple screens, SLI etc.) And first of all, they need powerful graphics cards and 500..1000 watt PSUs. Most of the PC desktop parts seem to be "branded" for gamers, from Intel and from AMD. The point is to differ as much as possible from the integrated solutions, otherwise there would be no point in running a traditional desktop. Intel has concentrated on process technologies: 10..14nm will make the integrated solutions smaller, not necessarily better for desktop, especially if you don't need the integrated GPU, while AMD has concentrated on HSA and APU and keeping the costs down. It will be nice to see what the future of desktop PC gaming will look in the future as the trend now is power saving, integration and miniaturization, not necessarily raw computing power for the consumer.