I think most people would agree net neutrality is a great idea in theory. You could say socialism is also good in theory. I don't mean to compare the two,

Of course you mean to "compare the two". You're doing the same Cold War red-scare bullshit that the Koch Brothers' mouthpiece, "American Commitment" is trying to do. By putting two terms side-by-side you're trying to equate them in the mind of people who are as incapable of analysis as you are.

And what's to stop the government from "leveling the playing field," giving additional network resources to failing energy companies, state education systems in favor of Common Core, public companies who need to better compete against private ones etc. ?

You don't know a single thing about Net Neutrality, do you? You don't have any idea what it means or what it's for. You saw "Koch Brothers" in the title of the post and you came here to fly your Republican flag, is all. "Common Core"... When you start name-checking Common Core you know you're deep in talk radio land.

Yet you're probably ok when George Soros and Michael Bloomberg do the same thing...

Is it all some stupid game to you of racking up points? Tit for tat? Are you still capable of any moral clarity?

Do you feel it instructive to name a list of rich guys just because there's an article reacting to something David Koch said and you've been told that these are the other side's rich guys? Is everything a matter of moral equivalence to you?

No wonder the US is in trouble. People have watched so much cable TV and listened to so much talk radio that they have lost the ability to evaluate anything clearly, and can only see it through a partisan lens. You felt you had to stick up for the Koch Brothers because your talk radio favorites have told you they're "one of us" and you've got two names you can lay down whenever someone says, "Koch Brothers". As if it meant something.

Do you even know what this discussion is about or are you just in react mode?

So I switched to MacOS. If it's not going to be transparent and I have to spend time digging around and doing system-level stuff in the non-Unix way, why not do it on a system that's at least got great UX and lots of officially supported hardware and applications?

there is analysis

There's always analysis. The problem is, who's doing the analysis, what is their agenda, and who's tasked to act on said analysis.

I don't doubt that nuclear energy could be an amazing boon and used to a much greater extent, safely and profitably. If we could trust the energy industry and government regulators to do the right thing.

My analysis shows that's not the case, however.

I guess I saved you a Google search

If you can lend me $50, you can save me from going to work tomorrow.

Fossil fuels don't work in the US without huge subsidies.

What's your point?

I'm not fat, I've just got giant gut fauna.

I think there was a band at Lollapalooza this year called, "Gut Fauna". They're a Finnish folk-metal band, so there are umlaut's over the "u"s.

People are all excited about the Paleo diet because they lose weight on it.

But the fact is, if you eat a highly restricted diet of any kind, you're probably going to lose weight. People get on the Paleo diet and become zealots, making sure that nary an iota of grain goes into their mouths. If you're paying that much attention to the food you're eating, you're probably not throwing garbage down your throat like most fat people do. So yes, you'll lose weight.

You'll also lose weight if you restrict your diet to brown rice, seaweed and overcooked lentils. Of course, you'll also lose your will to live, but that's a different discussion.

I've noticed a high correlation between people on the Paleo diet and the anti-vaccination crowd. I guess crazy is a wasting disease.

Now, you'll hear people say, "Look at all the professional athletes on the Paleo diet! They must know what they're doing." But that ignores the fact that these phony "nutritionists" hang around these athletes, trying to convince them to buy into or endorse their product/book, and if you actually look at what's on a professional team's table in training camp, you'll see a well-balanced selection from all the food groups and even a few tasty things just because they're tasty. All the Paleo stuff comes from the athletes hanging around these fraudulent "health experts" in the off-season (who also tend to be the ones to get them to use performance enhancing drugs like deer antlers and human growth hormone). The guy in Florida who is facing serious federal time for running a PED-ring got started in the business with a product called (I'm not making this up) "Zap Your Zits With Zinc" where people paid outlandish sums for less than a penny's worth of zinc (which also happened to be a near-toxic dose, if I understand correctly). It didn't clear up anybody's skin, but it got the "nutritionist" started on the road to making big money giving guys in the gym stuff to make them all swole up like mesomorphic bratwursts.

Now, there are certain aspects of the Paleo diet that appeal to me, like the fact that you can eat all the spare ribs you want, the fattier the better. However, I don't see how any diet that rules out italian bread with fresh mozzarella and olive oil washed down by cold beer could possibly be good for you.

I'm pretty sure our ancestors didn't evolve to eat corn that was licensed by Monsanto. Just a thought.

But I understand GMO foods are going to totally fix world hunger, which is why they're primarily sold in the US, where judging from the girth of people I see on the street, everybody's hungry as hell.

Meanwhile, the concern is being handled through the appropriate processes.

I'm sure officials in Fukushima would have said the same thing on March 10, 2011.

People would lost their minds here if electricity prices tripled.

Energy costs make up a small part of a family's budget compared to health care, education, etc etc.

No, people would not "lose their minds" if electricity prices tripled. You just might not have as many houses decorated with extravagant Christmas displays for two months every year. There's so much energy wasted in the US it's not funny. Living in the same home, working at the same place and using the same gizmos, my family's been able to cut our energy outlay every year by more than 60% and without impacting our quality of life one bit.

Once they're installed, solar panels don't send you a bill every month.

Solar also only works well in areas with lots of sunshine and when there are no clouds which is a small part of the USA.

Germany is cloudier than Chicago.

Mainstream news outlets are a lot more guilty of clickbait headlines than Buzzfeed. Don't get me wrong, Buzzfeed is a dopey website, but the mainstream sites have taken it to a whole 'nother level.

If you use the twitter, the absolutely best follow is someone called, "@SavedYouAClick", who basically takes clickbait headlines and defuses them by reading the article and giving you the bit you actually might want to know, saving you from having to click and a barrage of ads and trackers. They're really really useful, and now whenever I see clickbait, before I even think of clicking, I go see @SavedYouAClick. I wish I knew who it was so I could thank them personally.

For example, from the other day:

No you haven’t. RT @EliteDaily: Apparently You’ve Been Tying Your Shoes The Wrong Way Your Entire Life:

or,

Nope. RT @HuffingtonPost: Is Jennifer Lawrence starring in Quentin Tarantino's next movie?

My favorite is when @SavedYouAClick really nails some sacred cow:

"Change your passwords" and "don't be stupid." RT @CNNMoney: Ok so you've been hacked. Now what? Here's what to do right now:

Yes, somebody is paying....Americans . American's are subsidizing entertainment for the rest of the planet.

So, it's about "fairness", is it? Well, that's a completely different discussion then.

As I've shown, there's plenty of profit to be made from DRM-free media. And there's no question that DRM is only a hassle for the paying customers. So you punish the ones who pay to get back at the ones who don't.

The question is, does Sony (and does Microsoft) actually need to be hassling their customers? Does their business model fail without DRM? Clearly it does not. It's just about control, not about profits, not about successful business, not about making sure the people who actually create the media get paid.

1% down time doesn't justify dropping a perfectly good working server model.

Is there something wrong with the dedicated server model? It was pretty successful for a little game called Starcraft.

Look, if it's just about DRM, then just say so. Don't pretend having private servers where you can set up your own LAN parties is a bad model for any other reason than that it takes away a tiny bit of control from Sony.