What exactly has Obama tried to do as far as net neutrality goes? Most of the FCC commissioners, including the chairman, were appointed by him. Obama's political party still controls both houses of Congress for another month. So why this FCC ruling? The "reactionaries" didn't want this FCC ruling, they dispute the authority of the FCC to regulate the Internet at all.

Maybe, just maybe, Obama's just another politician who will tell voters what they want to hear in election years and pay the most attention to whoever has the most money the rest of the time. Just a notion.

And this FCC ruling is the worst of all possible worlds - it gives Time-Warner, Comcast, etc. the regulatory cover to turn their overpriced, inadequate "broadband" services into the same walled-gardens of fail that the mobile carriers currently inflict on their customers. And since we've gotten the FCC involved in Internet regulation, we can look forward to more meddling in the years to come to support anti-piracy and "anti-terrorism" efforts.

BTW, I can only laugh at my post being modded a troll because the questions apparently couldn't be answered. They were serious questions and I don't see anything approaching a serious answer - your content-free sneering is, on the other hand, a troll attempt.

What studies? The poster I replied to didn't cite any study - he simply claimed that "studies show...".

Could you provide some specifics from "all the studies" to back up the claims made by the poster I responded to? I mean, it would certainly be more convincing that a huffy attitude.

Why would someone in the car with you, engrossed in conversation with you and without the responsibility of driving, react to the situation faster than you? This doesn't sound at all realistic.

You can usually get a feel for a person's mood by the tone of their voice as well - I'd say a much better feel than you can get by whatever information leaks in through your peripheral vision.

While this is undoubtedly true, you still haven't made any case that people can't share a context equally as well over the phone as they can with some person sitting next to them while they drive.

I can't argue with this, since I have no study to prove otherwise. But I know that I've been involved in conversations while driving that consumed so much of my attention that afterward I couldn't recall the process of driving home. The same has occurred when I've found something interesting on the radio. I'd like to see some studies comparing how all of these activities, which aren't outlawed, impact driving and how they compare to the impact of phone usage while driving.

Voice commands. "Dial wife". How hard is that? And answering a phonecall doesn't require immediate action - if I'm shifting from first to second as I accelerate from a stop, I'm certainly not going to interrupt that to answer a call. Most people who use phones while driving do so in precisely the same situations in which they fidget with a radio - cruising along, with no anticipated interruptions.

Or are we all going to keep on pretending that this is 1960, and that the average American man is still about 5'7 and weighs around 150 lbs?

Believe it or not, most of the world's Muslims aren't robots programmed to go insane when someone happens to burn a Koran or draws a cartoon of their prophet, and are actually capable of nuance in their thinking. The kind of hyper-sensitivity you want does no one any good - Western societies jumping to condemn and vilify members who actually choose to exercise the rights those societies brag about are simply showing their lack of commitment to their own principles. The West's supposed support for free-speech and free-expression is just a silly joke if any controversial or hateful forms are immediately shouted down and repressed. And casting all Muslims as potential nut-jobs with hair-triggers who must be humored like spoiled, dangerous children is offensively patronizing and only breeds more ill-will toward Muslims. When we act like fundamentalist Muslims are all Muslims, we only harm the mainstream Muslims who despise and resist the theocratic impulses of those fundamentalists.

India actually did get hit recently by Muslim terrorists who received intelligence, coordination and orders from neighboring Pakistan over mobile phones for several days as they moved through Mumbai targeting non-Muslims and racking up a body count of 166.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE didn't suffer any recent attacks coordinated and made possible by mobile phone technology, and both have historically been far more willing to curtail free speech than India (which isn't anywhere near US standards for free speech itself).

RIM should have hung tough and refused India's request, but at least India had a legitimate reason to ask. "All about spin" - yeah, darn that annoying reality and how it gets in the way of the narrative you prefer.

Old people resisted this particular change when they were young. 3D has been showing up every 10 or 15 years for decades, realizes that no one wants it, and wanders off. Only difference this time is that Cameron used it on a film that would have been an equally huge hit without it and now we have the creative masterminds in Hollywood pushing to film all of their comic book adaptations in 3D.

This is very true. If you know how to code, you know how to code. Especially if you have some familiarity with C, it simply isn't very hard to become productive in Java, C#, Javascript, ActionScript, etc. And even if you don't have familiarity with structured programming languages, you'll find the "modern" languages much easier to learn than COBOL or FORTRAN ever were.

Just start writing code - the ability to program matters more than the language used. Same as it's always been.

Well, yeah - those new Star Wars movies he put out this decade were vaguely reminiscent of Star Wars.

My own suspicion is that George Lucas prevents George Lucas from having any other successful films for the rest of this life. I can't even begin to conceive the amount of long-term insulation from reality and the layers of yes-man sycophancy that it took to keep the man from realizing just how bad his attempts at movie-making had become. Just MHO of course.

I don't doubt that a number of people would agree with you that no attempt to prevent the consequences of aging should ever be made - for religious reasons or societal concerns such as yours.

I also don't doubt that nearly all of those people would sign up for any proven anti-aging treatment if available. Years of debility and/or senility followed by death seem acceptable in the abstract, not so much when it's happening to you. The symptoms of aging will be resolved over the course of decades or centuries (the whole point of this thread is that the rest of the world doesn't play by the FDA's rules), and society will adjust to deal with that happy development.

Here's a non-life-threatening example: in the mid-90s, fresh out of college and armed with my new developer's salary, I got my eyes operated on to fix the horrible vision I'd had since childhood. The procedure was something known as ALK, and the outcome was a hideous, star-spangled fun-house mirror perspective on the world every time I opened my eyes. The procedure known as LASIK, now common, became available in the US about a year later as an experimental procedure via a single type of laser approved for off-label use by the FDA. I was told the laser's primary use was etching circuit boards. At that time, LASIK was practiced in many other parts of the world using far more modern devices made specifically for eye surgery, operated by surgeons with much more experience than anyone in the US.

So I did a lot of research, flew to the nation of Colombia, got my eyes fixed with LASIK despite the severe complication of my FDA-approved ALK surgery, and obtained perfect vision - three years before LASIK was finally approved by the FDA. I still send the Colombian doctor a Christmas card every year. This is obviously not an example of a major health issue, but I don't know how you assign a value to three years of good vision vs. three years of near blindness. For me, it was beyond price.

The FDA serves a very necessary purpose and saves lives. But they are cautious to a fault, and their caution costs patients time and - in the worst cases - lives. In the case of experimental treatments by large, reputable pharmaceutical firms, informed adult patients should be able to sign waivers of liability and obtain treatment, FDA-approved or not.

We all could get behind the government supporting news organizations that slant the news the way we like it, and we're all opposed to the government supporting news organizations that slant the news in a way we don't like. Since the objective truth is that every single news organization out there has a slant, either government supports all of them or none of them. I strongly favor the latter.

going to lose some job opportunities as a result of getting outed. Real dick move by Gizmodo.

Well, let's be honest - they aren't being supported by the state, since the state does no work and earns no income. They're being supported by their fellow Swedes - the ones who want to work or have to work, and who pay some very high income taxes. The reason their economy is still working is because Sweden imports so many workers from Africa and the Mideast. One of every five workers in Sweden was either born in another country or is the child of immigrants. If/when social pressures force Sweden to halt immigration, or when improving economic conditions at home draw many of these immigrants back to their countries of origin, the fantasy of taking year-long sabbaticals paid for by fellow tax-payers ends.