If you want to take a trip between San Francisco and Los Angeles you take a plane, not a train.

Well, duh. That's because the train currently takes all day.

I'll bite. When does Apple support open standards but only with products from their partners?

One of the things I like about Apple products is that when they say they support open standards, they actually do.

It can be difficult to do such things due to legal constraints. Put broadly, you can't set up something that other people can't change after you die. See: Rule against perpetuities.

Yes, but still significantly less evil than the crew that replaced him.

That seems to have been true in the long run, for the most part.

However, the important thing is that he was evil enough to set up the conditions for what followed. The brutal oppression under his regime primed the population for a radical shift, and that's what allowed the Islamists to build up support for their movement.

Of course, the Islamists pulled a huge bait-and-switch, and dealt with all parties in bad faith, but it's extremely unlikely they would ever have been anything but a political footnote if the US and UK hadn't engineered the ouster of the previous democratic government to make room for the Shah.

Then don't let people know that you're rich. There are plenty of towns you could move to that probably wouldn't recognize Bill Gates and definitely not recognize the creator of Minecraft. I know I wouldn't recognize him.

If you are Bill Gates, or even Notch, the cat's going to get out of the bag sooner or later.

Now maybe if you managed to lay low long enough, people would be okay at pretending to ignore the "new" circumstances once your identity were eventually revealed, but it's never going to be the same.

My previous Android phone, a Motorola, never had a single update available since the day I bought it way back in 2011. There were crucial bugs and they were never fixed. I am sure I'm far from the only Android customer in that position.

AFAIK IANAL dual citizenships aren't legal(or maybe not legally recognized would be more correct?) in the US to begin with.

The US position on dual citizenships is generally to ignore them. So as far as the US government was concerned these kids would be solely American. They wouldn't get in trouble or anything.

while our son was born in Canada and I signed to forms to allow him to get a US passport. In hindsight I wish I had never done this.

If you were married at the time of your son's birth, then he was a US citizen regardless of what forms you did or did not fill out. There was nothing you could do about it. So don't feel too badly.

The dollar is not an especially strong currency.

While I agree with the gist of your posting, the dollar is in fact the strongest major currency in the world at the moment, with the possible exception of the Swiss franc.

US consular assistance is pretty worthless. They do the bare minimum and charge up the ass for everything else.

As a dual US-EU citizen, I never travel on my US passport or deal with the US overseas when I can help it, because it's a waste of time.

Also, as a EU citizen, I have the benefit of recourse to consular services from any other EU nation if mine isn't available.

The US isn't the only country that evacuates its citizens, but as far as I know it's the only one that will send you a bill afterwards. I'd much rather be evacuated by the French, for example, who have a far stronger record in overseas citizen protection.

In fact, the USA is the only significant country that taxes based on citizenship rather than residence.

Pretty much no other country taxes its citizens when they are living outside that country in the long term. Only the USA does.

For this reason American dual citizens and expats are at a serious disadvantage in the international job and investment market.

You can rant all you like, but the US can easily seize your assets by putting pressure on the foreign bank where you have them stored.

Any bank of any size will have international operations in the US which are much more valuable to them than you are.

US government threatens bank, bank caves. Every time.

the Chinese do not use QWERTY, either.

Uh, yes they do. Most people type in pinyin on QWERTY keyboards.

As an aside, I just had to correct myself after misspelling QWERTY.

in modern-day Poland, when you ride the train, there are multi-lingual signs instructing on how do do things like open the windows or operate the toilet. The signs appear in Polish (it's Poland, after all), German (much of Poland was Germany and vice versa), Russian (it was under the Soviet sphere of influence), and French (the international language). No English.

That's because they assume English speakers already know how to use a toilet.

I'll see myself out.

In large swaths of Africa, German or French is the dominant non-local language

You can't be serious. Like 85 people in Namibia speak it, that's pretty much it.