Small business would have to start paying to play on the internet. This would cost small businesses a lot of money to pay for internet tolls. That's money that could be creating jobs if there were net neutrality. Forcing telecoms to build out their infrastructure would actually create jobs. It wasn't until the net neutrality contractual obligation of a large telecom merger ran out that they stopped building infrastructure and fired the masses of people working on the build out.

Also crazy is the cost of anti-competitive behavior, the cost of innovative ideas being squashed because they didn't fit the business model of the telecoms, and enabling corporations to be the enforcers of freedom of speech is just plain unconstitutional and is just an abrogation of the responsibility of Congress and Whitehouse.

I'd rather pay slightly higher prices to enable innovation, freedom of speech, equality of information, and decrease the power of the oligopolies.

Call me crazy but the intangibles tip that balance for me. There is more to life than money like freedom and liberty.

Of course this report isn't going to discuss these things... it was funded by large corporations. They don't value anything but money.

... use of their time.

If you're "addicted" to PLAYING basketball (as opposed to just watching it) then you're probably in pretty good shape.

If you're "addicted" to fishing, at least it's a useful skill. As long as you like fish a lot.

If you're addicted to "the Internet" ... what do you have to show for it?

Inability to function without social links? You take anyone's friends away and they'll get lonely and anxious. For a lot of students, the internet is the only link to old friends and family that they have. Of course they're going to react badly to being isolated.

One of the first cases is stating that the Virgin Mary's body went to heaven after she died. Which is plainly a crock of shit, if you aren't one of the faithful cultists.

But continue to enjoy your little rituals, I guess. Meanwhile, the church says that condoms are a sin, and worse than AIDS, and as a result the birth rate and STDs have not gotten any better in countries faithful to the cult. With all due to respect, the catholic church can go fuck itself.

If you want to have a secure, private conversation online and you don't want it viewed by any unauthorized eyes, including the site admins, then ThreadThat.com is for you. A thread is a conversation similar to those that take place on FB, however, you decide who can see each conversation and what they can do with that conversation. All text and attached files are encrypted using strong AES encryption while in-transit and while at-rest. Couple self-generated passkeys, secret messaging and multi-factor login authentication and you have an online Fort Knox. Other than an email address that you own (used for thread activity notifications only) no personal information is required to create and account. And best of all, it is free (for life if you create an account in 2010). Check it out. ThreadThat.com. Socialize in secrecy.

What about En-Bloc clips for the M1 Garand? Holds a bunch of cartridges (and seriously, you can't be all pedantic about clip vs magazine and then get the cartridge/bullet thing wrong :) ), slides into the gun. Thoughts?

I've seen it defined (IMHO better) thus:

Clips hold rounds, but typically at least a part of each round protrudes from the clip;
Magazines encase rounds.

Ya cool, I'll just walk around with a suitcase full of money every time I need to make a big purchase. That's much safer.

Clouds cool the planet by the exact same amount as it's being warmed?

How extraordinary. Almost... implausibly extraordinary, one might say.

Also, quibble time, warming produces water vapour in the air, water vapour absorbs and re-emits infra-red radiation thus further contributing to warming, and water vapour also forms clouds that reflect infra-red radiation, thus mitigating some warming effects. The uncertainty in how much water vapour contributes to warming, and how much to the prevention of warming, is why the IPCC report has such a large range of possible temperature changes. I'm pretty sure that *is* science.

On what planet? I'm an environmentalist and I'm all in favor of nuclear power. When located appropriately (ie, a not-seismically active region) and designed and maintained properly (ie, not Soviet) they're quite safe and reliable.

Though, nuclear isn't a great option in the Pacific Northwest thanks to being covered in fault lines. What happens when you build a nuclear plant on a faultline? Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, the inspiration for Groening's Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. Despite what his publicist said, Groening drew a map of Portland with landmarks from The Simpsons... guess what represented Trojan...

Well according to that last round of climate data falsification there has already been a digital dark age. The claim is the original source data has already been digitally lost. So no one can prove their numbers wrong, we just have to take their word for it, even though these same people have been caught fudging data that can be proven and not victim of digital dark age. I wonder if the tax man will believe me if I said it was a digital dark age so please take my word for those huge tax deductible donations I made.

Google has no way to know what you want. Instead, they focus on making you want what they give you.

Seems to work well enough.

In that same tour, the French favorite was also beaten by two Spaniards, a German, an Australian and a Russian, a pattern similar to that of the past 25 years or so.

False positives, laboratory fuckups and actual cheating are all much more likely than a French conspiracy against Landis on the basis of him being an American.

I think you're confusing verification ("you did what you claimed you did") with reproduction ("I tried my own experiment and got similar results").

Put it another way, if I write a paper saying, "I have solved this [very difficult experimental problem]. The answer is seven." You have every right to ask me to show my working. If you can find an error in that then you know you don't have to move on to the much harder task of independently reproducing my result. Of course, the answer could still be seven, but not on the basis of my faulty reasoning.

If, on the other hand, I refuse to show you my working, you have to take it on faith that seven really is the answer I got. Even if you try your own experiment and also get seven, that isn't really reproduction.

at best you're just cotton-headed naive, at worst your in danger of ethnocentric and prejudicial thinking

in the revolutionary war, quakers forbid military activities, even though many quakers assisted the revolution through furnishing many needed supplies. they were not able to actually fight and still remain in their religion. the society of friends valued strong education much more than any other people in the colonial days, and still does to this day. if a member of the society of friends took up arms they were immediately cast out of the quaker groups in any colony, state, or country

one such man, who was cast out of the religion he was born into, was nathanael greene

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathanael_Greene

why? because he became one of the greatest american generals to ever live, an extremely effective man of war. he studied voraciously tracts of war on his own initiative and self-educated himself on the methods of killing other men en masse to the point that it was his brilliant tactics and strategy that defeated the british in the south, and led directly to the conditions that resulted in cornwallis's stunning surrender, and the end of the revolutionary war

how is this possible given his upbringing? because his cultural upbringing is inconsequential, as is mine, as is yours, as is anyone's, on questions of basic human psychological potential for ANY human endeavour, violent or nonviolent, moral or immoral, just or injust

human psychology is human psychology is human psychology. the only voyage that matters is your voyage as an individual in this world, and it is the only morally and logically cohesive framework in which you can judge a person: as an individual

are you american? well, all americans are warlike monsters. are you muslim? well all muslims are unthinkingly obedient fools. are any of those statements fair? absolutely not, they are prejudicial. but this kind of thinking is a direct result of YOUR way of thinking, in which you hold arbitrary, minor and utterly inconsequential tribal boundaries as the master's of destiny

the truth: human psychology is a constant across time and space, and culture is but a tiny inconsequential tweak of it. there is nothing of the amish, of the canadian, of the brazilian, of the sikh, of the polish, of whatever, that is somehow unique only to that culture, society, or people and somehow determines their fate in such a way that it overrides basic human psychology