dj2stein9

Water pipes, phone lines, and electrical lines are built into your house too and you're not usually forced to sign up for the monthly services if you don't want them. Fiber would be the same way, the lines would be in the ground before the buildings are erected, and you'd be able to sign up for service if you want it.

You don't typically call publicly owned infrastructure a monopoly. Public utility companies are created to prevent exactly what's going in broadband internet service.

If the city owned the lines, it would put all ISP's on a level playing field and enable broadband competition for the first time. They wouldn't be able overcharge you 10,000% mark up for the price of bandwidth anymore, and they'd have to compete based on the quality of their service.

> leap frog to mars rather than sending a shuttle through earths atmosphere.

But you still have to get the human through Earth's atmosphere and out of orbit anyways. Once you're out of Earth's orbit you might as well coast all the way to Mars because landing on the Moon doesn't gain you anything.

> People need jobs to provide for themselves and their family.

No, these people were seduced by promises of a big payday for copying other people's work -- plain and simple. There are so many tech and gaming companies to work for in Silicon Valley that I just don't believe it's possible to pick the most egregious one simply by accident.

I really don't feel sorry for anyone who work(s)(ed) for Zynga. This company milked the whole "social gaming" bubble for every drop it was worth. Every game they made was a clone of this or that, and they used every spam trick in the book to get more clicks, and every single employee at that company knew 100% full well that they were part of a modern day ponzi scheme that would blow up once Facebook become uncool.

I would've been tempted to modify the lift such that the entire desk could retract into the floor, leaving an open area when it's needed.

You just described every member of the Baby Boomer generation that I've ever worked with.

    you are guaranteed nothing important is only stored locally.

That's what scares me the most. Unless I have the option of not using Google's infrastructure, and can run my own "ChromeOS Storage/Auth Server" on a computer of my choice, then I'd never trust the OS. Google is expecting a surreal amount of trust that no single corporation should be given.

Why stop at Obamacare? It's much, much smaller than Medicare, Social Security, the US armed forces, DHS (+ all the related bureaus), the Federal Reserve, IRS, US Treasury... essentially the entire US government is a collection of dysfunctional bureaucracies that extract wealth from citizens in the form of taxes, give it back to corporations in the form of subsidies and tax refunds, and give citizens next to nothing in return.

This is what bureaucracies do, they grow, more complex, more political, more expensive, and exponentially harder to dismantle. Everyone knew that once Homeland Security was created it would become a sprawling, pervasive, and never-ending drain on the country. Eliminating it now is probably out of the question because it would be substantially more costly (politically and economically) than keeping it running.

Basically they've taken the script of the TV series "24" and used it to turn the entire government into a giant anti-terrorism organization that cannot locate or defend the country against any terrorists. But year after year the programs are always "underfunded" and so the bureaucracy grows and gets worse at doing its job... It's a perfect storm of stupidity and ignorance that has no benefits other than keeping the system going for no reason whatsoever.

I think if your intention is to encrypt your video content then you really have no business being on the web in the first place. Just build a native app and do whatever you want, and stop trying to bend open standards to be compatible with your business.