I do wonder if these will fundamentally be different OS's or just track each other forever.

I think it's going to vary a lot by neighbourhood and type of house. A lot of houses in London now have wood burners for fashion more than necessity, go take a look at houses for sale in Walthamstow and see how long it takes you to find one proudly displaying a wood burner as a lifestyle accessory in an £800k house. If you whack wet wood in one of these you're going to be polluting the air for hundreds of people living nearby. In a dense urban area it's obvious when someone is burning poor quality fuel because it just spills straight out of the top of their home, so I can't see that enforcement would be too hard there.

Some people will have problems, canal boat dwellers are often dependent on wood burning for heat and many will probably just continue burning wet wood. Still, there are loads of middle class house dwellers with a fashionable cozy fire as well as a gas boiler. Those people should just buy decent quality fuel.

Compared to the USA the UK is super dense and most people live in towns and cities.

Aaah yes, the 20mph quantum speed. Quantum because it's simulteneously outrageously, recklessly fast (when cycled), and unbelievably, unreasonably slow (when someone tries to set or enforce a 20 limit, or a driver is stuck behind a cyclist doing 20).

Exactly. If the laptops freeze is a minor inconvenience. If the main computers of the ISS freeze the humans inside will freeze too.

Yeah, but Apple's got the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FForeign_Corrupt_Practices_Act) to worry about. They /can't/ pay bribes.

This story is exhibit A why I haven't been to the site in over a year. It's not only completely contentless, it's insulting, stupid, and not even funny.

Apple made the ref-counting choice decades ago and now has to keep supporting it to maintain compatibility with their APIs.

I think that this is a good point; it could be a nice feature to add to the offers of Apple, Google and Microsoft some of the capabilities of enterprise MDM, providing access redundancy for mobile devices; when this redundant access is used it could display a pop up alert on the devices associated to an account in the same way that when a new device is added to such account, only with the aditional info of wich external account was used to manage the device.

I don't know who's dumb enough to be surprised that any technology can singularly solve a problem as large as privacy.
Tor solves the network connection problem, moderately well. There's more to privacy than that, and it's ridiculous to expect Tor to solve that all by itself.

Big surprise! If you use tor to log into facebook, facebook knows who you are! Where's the outrage?!?!

Grandparent was being sarcastic. On reality he agrees with the great-grandparent post.

It is the problem with us that live in the reality based world. But for staunch libertarians and conservatives their ideas never are wrong, only the reality.

Many Americans have a very wide concept of freedom, almost to make it meaningless.

One of the best, or worst quotes of Anne Coulter.

Tolerant does not mean "strive to not offend". Tolerant means "don't tell people how to behave or think", with the axiomatic underpinning being "as long as those people don't try to actively harm you".

The fact that you don't understand the meaning of a simple word like "tolerant" makes your entire post rather superfluous.