that they know is dangerous

BZZZT Wrong. Please keep your fiction off /.

incorrect patent marking stifles innovation.

How, precisely? You have to look the patent up anyway to see what exactly it covers. When you do, you will surely notice if the patent is expired. Sure, you wasted a couple minutes, but was innovation stifled? I don't think so.

Yeah, seriously. You forgot things like Netflix, which requires a live subscription AND a Netflix subscription.

At least when they had 1v100 I felt like I was getting a little value add, but now it just seems like a ripoff. I wonder how many people will actually pay $60 though. When the price was $50, the subscription cards periodically went on sale for $35 - $40. I wonder if the sale price will go up too. I think I'm good until around March, which means I'll have to renew to play Gears 3, *groan*

When live first came out it was a great thing. No one else had that level of seemless match making, game joining, friends list, etc. But now the PC has things like Steam and XFire *for free* so Live just seems like a rip off.

teabaggers

Name calling is not a form of argument. It only makes you look like an idiot.

if you consider Palin to be the start

Not even close. I watch CNBC. I clearly remember seeing the birth of the tea party movement, live.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp-Jw-5Kx8k

Palin didn't sign on until well after the fact, when all Republican politicians were signing onto the movement because it became popular.

Nope. The fear is that the government entity would be funded by tax dollars no matter how inefficient it was. The real fear is tax payer funded competition. A tax payer funded competitor could kill a private enterprise by charging little for its service and getting its real funding through tax dollars.

There are appropriate places for both government and private enterprise. Letting government and private enterprise "compete" will never tell us where to draw the line.

Personally I think the line should be drawn by things such as entry barriers and whether the industry is a natural monopoly. Of course, there is the third "hybrid" choice. Private enterprise closely regulated by government (eg utilities in many states), though this approach has dangers as well (regulatory capture).

Except everything you just said is a lie. Network neutrality has always allowed reasonable network management, including spam blocking, firewalls, etc. Why are you deliberately misrepresenting the issues involved in network neutrality? And who on /. modded you up for it?

He also explained why it can't. The SATA cables only transmit 1's and 0's. If any of those 1's and 0's were switching or degrading on the SATA cable, you would have serious computer problems and audio quality would be the least of your concerns.

I'm really curious where you got your definition of "right of way." Has a government ever been able to take back a right of way? I think that would be a problem under the Fifth Amendment. The government can regulate, of course, provided that there is no regulatory taking, but that power doesn't sprout from the fact that the right of way was granted by the government in the first place. The government's regulatory authority is independent.

Thing is, the ISP's already granted me (as a customer) an easement across their wires.

An easement is an ownership right. I don't think Internet access is analogous to an easement. An easement can't be revoked by the grantor after it is given. Your Internet access? Well, I don't know what your contract says, but I'd imagine there are a wide variety of reasons that your ISP could cut you off, and I doubt you would have any recourse.

Haven't gotten my bar exam results yet...

I'll probably be going back into computers though. The legal market is pretty messed up right now.

His conclusion is right, but for all the wrong reasons...

Government subsidies are irrelevant. Could the government take back all those subsidies and right-of-ways? Problem not without compensation under the fifth amendment. Under current jurisprudence, the fifth amendment applies even to benefits provided by the government, including certain government jobs and welfare benefits.

His other argument is that there is no 'invasion' because 'these service providers chose to connect to the open internet allowing their users to request such content.' I'm not sure this is a very strong argument compared to Lyon's paper. The paper argued that net neutrality would essentially grant an easement over the ISP's wires and that this permanent invasion would be a taking under the fifth amendment. As far as I'm aware, Lyon's theory is novel in telecom regulation. I doubt the courts will accept it, but the techdirt article doesn't really have a strong argument against it either.

Under current jurisprudence, a regulatory taking is a taking under the fifth amendment. The relevant question is whether net neutrality would be a regulatory taking, and Techdirt does not address that question. I think net neutrality leaves the ISPs with enough room for profit that it would not be a regulatory taking. Whether I'm right or not, who knows...

IANAL and this is not legal advice.

This may have been the problem I experienced. I had played in the (multiplayer only) beta with no problems. Once the game came out though, I kept crashing in single player in between levels. I cleaned the dust out of my computer and that solved the problem.

I wonder how many people experiencing this just have too much dust built up in their computers?

Furthermore, if there's any company that's going to make damn sure to unlock it's games if it goes under, it's Valve.

I love Steam, but this argument has always been bunk. If Valve goes under, Valve will be in bankruptcy. It won't be up to Valve. Valve's debtors will be in charge, represented by the bankruptcy trustee. There's no way that a bankruptcy trustee will *ever* authorize deploying the Steam kill switch, and that's assuming that there is a Steam kill switch that could be easily deployed when necessary.

You attribute a negative characteristic to every corporation, taking a blind eye to the distinct characteristics of individual corporations.

Corporations are not all the same. They vary in many ways.

There is a reason why we have corporations: we have found the corporate form to be extremely useful as a way to facilitate business. We encourage investment by shielding investors from liability. By increasing the availability of capital, we have allowed businesses to accomplish many useful things that would not have otherwise been accomplished.

It is to BP's credit that they have said since the beginning that they would not hide behind the liability cap. However, the cap does not apply if negligence was involved in the spill. The rig, quite frankly, was not up to the level of industry standards at the time of the spill. That is strong evidence of negligence. Even if BP had tried to hide behind the liability shield, they likely would have failed.

Bush 41 didn't establish the liability cap. He *raised* it to 75 Million.

As most people are now realizing, there should not be a cap at all. The problem is that Congress, in response, is going to raise the cap to $10 Billion or some other arbitrary number. When the next disaster happens in twenty years, the cap will be too low again. Hopefully Congress will realize this and abolish the cap completely, but I don't have much faith that they are that forward thinking. Or worse: maybe they realize that if they completely abolish the cap, they won't be able to score environmental points by repeatedly raising it in the future every time there's a disaster.