The story never ends. Innovators try to create something new and help their fellow human beings, then the state tries to stamp it out. Fortunately, innovators move faster than government. In the long run humanity wins and bureaucracy loses.

You're taking for granted that the FCC's new rules are antynomous with "protecting commercial interests." The ISPs will be fine either way, they already had government-granted monopolies. The rules were added at the behest of companies like Netflix, who felt they needed a regulatory cudgel to strengthen their position in price negotiations. Except what the FCC has also done is drop a lot of uncertainty and fear onto the ISP industry. That alone will stifle expansion. Far better would have been to end the idiotic local laws and regs that made monopolies of whichever broadband provider was first to a given market. Google Fiber only rolled out in places where city governments could be coaxed into liberalizing, and behold, Comcast is upgrading speed in those areas for free. Competition works. The market has not failed. The FCC "fixed" the wrong problem.

Maybe the EULA will be called The Covenant.

Not if the asteroid hit between 300 and 600 million years old, and the Permian-Triassic boundary is at 252. The other issue is that people have already looked for signals of impact at the P-Tr boundary- iridium, shocked quartz, spherules like you get with the Chicxulub impact that wiped out the dinosaurs- and found nothing. The leading hypothesis right now is that massive volcanic eruption drove the P-Tr extinction.

I think your explanation falls very short when you refer to municipal limitations on the number of competitors as a "natural" monopoly. There's nothing natural about it if it's a situation directly caused by limits imposed by government. Prospective ISPs should have been able to negotiate with property owners at all levels to build lines of any sort wherever it made sense. Capping local markets at one or two providers is where the Internet got off track, not when the beneficiaries of this corporate welfare started doing the only thing that made sense given their unassailable, government-granted position. So now we pile the FCC on top of a problem that never needed to exist. Like Harry Browne used to say: government will break your knees, then hand you a pair of crutches and say "See? Without us you couldn't walk!"

People seem to be conflating licenses and training, which is cute considering y'all just got done beating up on tech certifications in another thread. Should you need government permission to travel in your automated car? Hell no. Should you know what you are doing when climbing into one? Ideally, yes.

There is another reason to do so: The sincere belief that the alarmists are a threat to human survival. Their unconditional animosity against much-needed energy sources, if acted out in the political sphere to the degree that they wish, would doom billions to poverty and death. There is no doubt some risk in continuing to use fossil fuels the way we do, but governments are not who I would trust to quantify and hedge against that risk. They are much more likely to overreact or underreact for political reasons, costing the world countless lives. This is an unpopular opinion I'm sure. The technocratic idealists here who align with the alarmists are positive they know better how the world should run than those SUV-driving rubes out there, but such paternalistic hubris has gotten mankind into huge trouble before.

And now we see character assassination visited upon the person protesting character assassination. Classy.

Whenever scientists publish a controversial new cosmological theory there is no gossiping over who paid them. Because it doesn't matter. If their interpretation of the data is wrong, or if their model is wrong, all someone has to do is correct their work. Yet when it comes to "climate science" much ink is spilled disparaging the motives and character of anyone who challenges the orthodoxy. If he's wrong, show how he's wrong. I don't give a rat's behind who paid for what. The work either contributes to our understanding or it doesn't.

I don't see how anyone except John Oliver could fill in for John Stewart. Oliver is funny, he's enjoyable to watch, he's political, and the key thing is, he's earnest. Jessica Williams is a name that comes up a lot, and as great as she is, she doesn't have that earnestness that Oliver does, and she doesn't seem to get fired up about issues the same way that Oliver does, or Stewart did. I'd watch a comedy show with Jessica Williams but I don't think she's quite right to head up the Daily Show. She's one of the newer members as well; that may be why Comedy Central didn't give her the Colbert slot. Samantha Bee and Jason Jones? No way in hell that will happen. Samantha's OK but Jason has a grating presence- he pretends to be a dick but when he does, he comes across as actually being a dick. He's got that small, mean laughing-at-you-not-with-you thing that kept Craig Kilbourne from ever going anywhere with the show. Comedy Central clearly feels the same way: he was passed over to fill in for Stewart, and for Colbert's slot. I don't see Larry Wilmore happening either, he seems more annoying than funny and there's just a limit to how much humor about race a largely white audience can handle.

Everybody saw what happened when Oliver took over the Daily Show. Stewart was clearly looking to do other things. Even before this he's seemed worn out and ground-down, he joked a lot about how old he felt, at times he seemed to be going through the motions to manufacture his indignance- I think that's why he bonded with O'Reilly, John Stewart had become a lot like O'Reilly, someone who was paid to go on and pretend to be upset when he'd gotten to the point that he didn't really care that much anymore. And then John Oliver came on and for the first time in years, I actually thought that Daily Show actually was a fun show to watch. And everybody clearly saw that Oliver had that rare talent where you can get him up in front of millions of people, talk about the news, and people laugh and enjoy themselves. HBO saw it and gave him a show and he's proven he's able to headline a show, hell he can even turn net neutrality into comedy.

That's what you want. You want a guy who's funny, who's enjoyable to watch, and can make something as dull as net neutrality funny, and can get fired up about the politics: he actually cares. He's proven that he's all of those things, and none of the other names have. Oliver has the HBO thing, but my guess is that Oliver's agent negotiated some kind of a loophole with HBO so that he could go back to Comedy Central if asked. And the Daily Show is Comedy Central's flagship program. There's no way that they will replace Stewart with an unproven or unknown talent; they have too much at stake to take a chance and gamble with an unknown when they've got a proven talent who can not only do the job that Stewart does, but do it better than Stewart himself. The fact that they haven't named a replacement suggests to me that the deal isn't final, but I'm guessing that Comedy Central is currently in negotiations with Oliver.

How exactly is risking capital to produce products people willfully buy "leaching off society"? Which government service exactly are they skipping out on paying for? Why not send them a bill for that instead of stabbing in the dark at arbitrary sums? When did it become "greedy" to keep your own money, and "justice" to take someone else's?