There's no evidence to suggest that the FCC wouldn't have helped the other side if they'd had a strong groundswell of support. The problem is that there really were very few comments against net neutrality, and a huge number for it. So there was no other side that the FCC needed to work with.

You are utterly missing the point. I agree with you that when there are two people arguing two sides of an issue, it is possible (indeed likely) that one is mostly wrong and the other mostly right. But what we are talking about here is a political technique that both sides use in exactly the same way. So if you think it's okay when one side uses it, and bad when the other side uses it, you are indeed blinded by partisanship. I say this as someone who has deep antipathy toward the position the Koch Brothers are pushing.

When we argue nonsense, we can't have discourse. It's like the caucus race in Alice in Wonderland.

814,000 is just over a third of 2.4 million (2,400,000). That's a damned good return rate on a mass spamming. It's kind of pathetic that so many people would support the Koch brothers in their efforts to make sure that internet dissent finally stops screwing with their business model, but I don't see why this is interesting news. As for the petition being sent to the senators, again, how is this news? Every PAC does this. You get people to sign a petition, and you send a letter in each person's name to each of their representatives. Sometimes they send one to the POTUS as well. The summary seems to be implying that there's something dishonest about this; if true, it's dishonest whether it's the Koch brothers or Earth Defense Alliance. I'm personally rooting for Earth Defense Alliance, but let's not get carried away looking for malfeasance in common practice.

You're seriously worried that a drone is going to somehow fly up to 30k feet and hit a jet? Do you know how hard it is to get a non-jet-powered airplane up that high? How hard it would be to get that airplane with a maximum speed of 100mph to collide with a jet moving at ~500mph? When did we Americans turn into such lily-livered cowards? You are jumping at shadows.

After all, TV shows are way more important than structural evaluations, aerial photography for site planning, roof inspections, and the myriad other commercial applications that are actually useful and safer than the way we currently do it. Sigh.

I was waiting for someone to say this...

The gold standard would have prevented the economy from growing as it did over the course of the past 40+ years. Inflation was indeed the result of failed monetary policy, but not that monetary policy.

Free market capitalism gives us Viagra. Which is a dramatic way of saying that it encourages short-term thinking, because human beings have a well-documented cognitive bias toward near-term results, and tend to heavily discount the benefit of long-term results. And so we get cattle ranchers abusing antibiotics even though in the long run many people will die as a result of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria this practice breeds. And we get pharma companies developing Viagra analogues instead of antibiotics.

I say this not for your benefit, since you are not interested in being contradicted, but because it's possible that someone else reading your diatribe might believe you if nobody points out the problem with what you've said.

No, actually the government was very dynamic at one time and got a lot of really impressive research done. Then people like you who think "government bad" started to complain about taxes and regulation, and over the course of the past 40 years or so, you've managed to suck a lot of life out of the government. It's the whole Gordon Gecko philosophy: greed is good. No, actually, it isn't. What's good is working together.

No, you need impulse drive technology to make this work.

Negative energy costs ought to stimulate the market for storage.

Oh come on! Someone mod this funny!

Yes, all plants produce chemicals that repel or kill pests. Some of them are deadly neurotoxins. Some do not exist in any foods. Caffeine is actually a good insect killer, but you wouldn't want caffeine in your corn, would you?

Your arguments about glyphosate sound great, but don't actually contradict what I said.

I don't work for free, but patents are a huge detriment to my work. They are simply the wrong way to pay for research: they slow down research, increase uncertainty for people who are actually doing productive work, and most of the cash they throw off goes to lawyers rather than to people who are actually doing the work. Of course people (even lawyers!) have to eat, but farmers have to eat too. Monsanto's practices have put many farmers out of business (more in India than here in the U.S.).

Right, that's my point. I oppose Monsanto's practices with respect to GMO. I don't oppose GMO in general.

The pest people are worried about is rust, which is killing off a lot of coffee trees and driving up the price of coffee.