It's become clear that the federal government no longer serves the interests of the people.

Does anyone have suggestions for fixing the problem?

Whenever some "government done did wrong again" article comes up, the comments are all non-constructive: blithe unconcern, fatalism, pessimism, and so on.

What constructive actions can be taken, and how can the people be encouraged to support these actions?

My one idea: If people could band together and agree to vote out the incumbent (senator, representative, president) whenever one of these incidents crop up, there would be incentive for politicians to better serve the people in order to continue in office. This would mean giving up party loyalty and the idea of "lessor of two evils", which a lot of people won't do. Some congressional elections are quite close, so 2,000 or so petitioners might be enough to swing a future election.

(And no, replies of "you won't accomplish anything because of this reason" are not constructive.)

Not all consumer ISPs. If you buy your Internet connectivity purely on the basis of price then you deserve what you get.

There are good ISPs too though.

Now that you've made myelin, how do you get it to stick to actual damaged neurons and/or brian cells. If you inject it in there, is it naturally just going to bind to damaged cells?

I think states and cities should be rolling out their own fiber. Sort of like building roads. And then subsidize installation for last mile fiber for any homeowner that can afford $1000. They don't need to install the network equipment but they can or they can lease the lines to businesses. The state could fund a redundant backbone network that the cities could trunk into. Just design the lines to be replaced every 30 years.

Cites could then individually choose to offer "free" internet. Of course that would mean they would just subcontract out to a business to provide the network equipment and service. Cities pay for these sorts of things through property taxes.

  I may be libertarian but I classify this as necessary infrastructure that will benefit the vast majority. Everything else is just more expensive.

1 Gigabit connection for $70 a month?

I understand why we don't get this on average across the US, because population density is low. But why don't we get it in the Bay Area? We have high population density, and surely there is demand. What is wrong with California?

This is a media story engineered to generate goodwill. I would not go so far as to call it a gimmick, but it sounds and feels like one.

FTTH, as it's known, costs between $5,000 and $12,000 per home in the rural market and only exists through subsidy. By comparision, FTTH is between $1,500 and $3,000 in suburban markets which is recouped by annual customer commitments.

The only way these costs are made affordable is through government subsidies. Google is subsidizing these customers in a similar way. As with many subsidies, unless they are bonafide charity/goodwill missions, they are not sustainable. This is okay as long as Google has the goodwill of the overall financial markts, by, e.g., having such a huge P/E ratio that they enjoy enough excess money to spend on things like driverless cars, imaging satellites, and hot tub airplaines.

Speeds comparable to FTTH can be achieved for so much less money by using Fiber to the Neighborhood instead of to the home. While I'm no fan of local cable TV monopolies, they already do this today. The problem many local cable TV companies is that they still carry local channels in analog. If they were to convert to all-digital carriage their existing cable plant could compare with FTTH using DOCSIS 3.x but this dream inexplicably escapes them.

Why can't these guys just graciously accept the prize, without claiming or implying they don't deserve it?

Maybe you live somewhere backwards where wifi and the computers using it are powered by some kind of device that you have to manually power by rotating a wheel or something, but in the western world the effort involved would simply be turning a computer on which is pre-configured to simply log passively all wifi data.

Neither the pre-configuration or pressing the power button before you do your streetview drive on the morning though add any merit to your debate, the fundamental point still remains that Google were passively collecting data that was publicly available in a public space and not protected at all.

"You're just wrong. Get over it."

Well aren't you acting like an irrational little child. Rather than accept that your original argument was trivially disproven with a simple example you cover your ears, close your eyes and pretend reality isn't reality. I guess it sucks to be you. Oh well, keep telling yourself you're not wrong, the rest of us will just keep laughing at you.

"Ridiculous. You have to be actively listening for it on a given frequency."

The same applies to hearing someone's conversation as you walk past, the frequency in question is standard to Wifi.

"In short you have to expend effort to get the information."

Rubbish, all Wifi receiving equipment automatically works on the frequencies it's built for, you don't have to do any kind of magical tuning to receive wifi data - the same is true of your ears, when you overhear someone.

"This propensity to blame victims in this case is just astounding."

The same goes for my overhearing someone talking loudly in their garden example. So if they talk to loudly, you hear them, and they call you an annoying little eavesdropper and you tell them they shouldn't talk so loud then then you're blaming the victim?

The thing is I'd have sympathy and side with you if they really were expending effort - i.e. they were breaking WEP keys and bypassing security etc. but that's not the case, it was passive monitoring and the very fact it was passive explains why no effort was expended.

"Google knew they shouldn't be doing it. They told staff not to do it. And they admitted by doing it they did wrong. What more do you need?"

Right, and we've had numerous politicians have to apologise that something they said was wrong. Sometimes it genuinely was, other times not. Just because they had to to keep their job doesn't mean they really were actually wrong though, it just means they were forced into it.

It's only like a peeping Tom if said peeping Tom is peeping at someone running round in the middle of a public street naked.

It's not like they creeped into people's gardens to gather this data, it was being broadcast all over the local neighbourhood unencrypted.

What next? you're going to say that someone who overheard someone else speaking too loud in their front garden as they walked past along the pavement is a creepy little snooper too?

Assuming you're the one who wrote the submission, yes actually you are.

You're comparing sniffing passwords from open, unsecured access points (which is arguably not even 'naughty' to start with) to a directed break-in of a computer system you were told, and signed an agreement, to not enter into. But since "Down with the Evil Corporation, Up with the Lone Renegade!" stories get a lot of page hits, they went ahead and pushed it to the front page.

We need to stop the degradation of the primary schools, but we never will. No child left behind has basically ensured that all future generations of Americans will be too stupid to find their a**hole with both hands.