Specifically, they want to keep people from using too much Internet video as this competes with their cable TV service. If you could watch as much Internet video as you wanted, you might be able to get all of your video entertainment needs online and thus would be able to cut the cord. With caps... oops, "thresholds", you have a choice of either limiting your Internet video usage and possibly needing to keep cable TV, or using Internet video and paying extra. (Bonus for Comcast: That "extra" goes to them instead of to Netflix, Amazon, Google, or any other Internet Video provider.)

congresscritters receive compensation from corporations in the form of "after public service" appointments

Some of those "after public service" appointments are for lobbying firms, lobbying for the very corporations that the politician so effectively represented in Congress. They then lobby the current Congressfolk, including promises of "after public service" appointments. Thus completes the circle is complete.

Obligatory Pearls Before Swine.

Money doesn't influence anyone! Also the gumdrop trees in Candy Land are great! ;-)

Well, yes and no. The aliens did build it, but they used cheap human labor for the grunt work. Sure, they could have just moved the giant blocks with their minds, but aliens are so lazy.

And let's not forget Google's habit of suddenly canceling projects. "I'm sorry, but starting next week the GoogleCar will be shutting down and your automobile will no longer be functional. We apologize for any inconvenience. By the way, have you heard of our new and completely unrelated AndroidMobile service? Perhaps you'd like to purchase a car from us that uses this service."

I know that was a joke, but at the time the cheap labor and no worker safety was right there. Why outsource when slaves will do anything you tell them to do? (Or else!) As for worker safety? Who cares if a few dozen slaves get worked to death? They're cheap enough to replace.

Obviously, they had their slaves roll for initiative. The ones who didn't have good initiative were stationed in FRONT of the giant stone dice.

"Completely unsafe?" How many humans drive every day with no incident vs. how many accidents occur? I drive to work every day and don't wind up crashing into a car each time. In my entire driving career (about 20 years), I've been in 4 accidents. (Only 1 of those my fault - though the insurance company disputed the fault of a second one.) I couldn't tell you how many miles I've logged that resulted in me getting to my destination without any harm to me or my passengers. Going by days driven vs. accidents, though, I have about a 0.05% chance of getting into an accident when I set out on the road. Put another way, I'm a 99.95% safe driver.

What's the track record for a theoretical Consumer GoogleCar? It hasn't been released yet, so it's completely unproven. It might be 100% safe. It might only be 75% safe. If it is 90% safe, it will be less safe than me. If it is 99.99% safe, it will be a safer driver than me. The point is that I don't know. Why should I put complete trust in something, eliminating any backup system, when that thing has no track record? Because the company assures me it is safe?

Keep the manual controls so people have that manual backup. If the automated cars are as good as they say, people won't use the steering wheels and the need for them will go away. However, ripping out all backup systems and putting your trust in something with little to no real world experience is short sighted. I'm all for embracing new technology, but bleeding edge shouldn't be referring to possible automated car glitches.

You can have self-driving cars with licensed drivers behind the wheel ready to take over just in case. Trust, but verify. Glitches are bound to occur with any new technology. Saying that you shouldn't have a backup system ready (in this case, a human driver), isn't hobbling the technology, it's verifying it. As the technology proves itself, it will be freed up to do more and more without a driver.

Eventually, we might get to the point where you put your baby in a car seat and tell GoogleCar to drive the baby to Grandma's house. However, I wouldn't trust Version 1.0 of a technology with a task like that right off the bat.

(Before someone points out that Google's been testing these cars; they have, but I'd still consider a consumer release version to be "Version 1.0.")

I come from the future. Just look at my posting date/time. See? Future!

The scammers wanted my father to run a remote access tool. My assumption at the time was that they were then going to load some trojan or something to take control of the PC (likely silently to harvest as much data as possible). Going by the TechCentral article, they have you enter Paypal and/or Credit card information on a page (while watching what you are typing) to pay them a "PC cleaning fee." If you don't pay them, they start rooting through your PC for valuable documents and/or delete any documents they don't care about. The scam is definitely slick enough that the elderly (or anyone who doesn't know a lot about computers) would get hit hard by it.

I agree that an automated car will need a steering wheel in the immediate future. Once their track record has been proven and people are comfortable with them, however, cars will gradually lose manual controls. We'll likely be telling our grandkids with stories of hundreds of non-automated cars screaming down the highway piloted by fallible humans. Of course, they'll just roll their eyes at us, make an "uphill both ways in the snow" comment, and tell their RobotCar to take them to the mall.

I was taking my boys out bowling last summer when I got a call from my father telling me that "Windows" had called him and told him his computer was infected with a virus. I immediately told him it was a scam and to just hang up. At first, he didn't want to "just in case they were telling the truth", but he eventually hung up on them. They had gotten him to go to a website but not run a program. I told him that even opening a website could infect him and to treat his computer as if it was infected. Later, when I examined the website and his computer, I concluded that the website was a simple page that linked to remote access tools. These were perfectly valid tools (e.g. TeamViewer) from the company's own servers, but obviously being used for nefarious purposes. Running these tools themselves wouldn't have been a problem - except for the scammer on the other end of the connection. The fact that he stopped short of running their tool saved him.

The same scammers (or others running the same scam) called him back a few times since. My dad might not be the most computer savvy, but he does learn. He's not going to fall for the same thing twice and now that he knows it's a scam he berates the person for a few seconds before hanging up on them.

You might want to look up what 'socialism' means ... it refers to "a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."

The problem of course is that slightly more socialist countries like Canada or some of northern Europe are just *barely* socialist, having socialized medicine, schooling, care for the poor, etc. but not nearly so much as advised by Marx. Unfortunately the American anti-socialist view sees these very useful values as being a slippery slope into 1970s communism and reject all of it.

Throwing out the baby with the bath water, so to speak.

cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

I agree, watching from north of the border here in Canada, I find all these rants more disturbing than amusing.

i'm also frequently confused as a Christian how it is that American Christianity has aligned itself with the selfish "don't help others" ethos rather than the more socialist "lets get together and help each other" view of the world.

Religion aside, the whole thing is just silly -- no country can be great when is nothing but individuals.