Weeelll....
Actually you should say "...because somebody's great-grandkids...". A lot of the original luddites died as the result of their jobs being eliminated...and so did their kids. (True, some of them took up other jobs, like thief, but they were only trained as weavers, so they weren't reall very good at them.) The same period gave us the french word "sabotage" which meant throwing your wooden shoes (sabots) into the machinery.

Most history isn't exactly bunk, it's more a massive white-wash job on the history of the wealthy and powerful.

It's all well and good to talk about supporting STEM education, but that doesn't do much good if everyone who considers investing their time and effort in that direction realizes that they'll be burdening themselves with intolerable debt, and that there's a very good chance they won't be able to get a job which will even let them keep up with accumulating interest.

This smells to me like a pure PR move.

Sorry, I was talking about the US income tax. I've no idea what the motivations behind British income tax were.

The GGGP post in the thread mentions *both* the US and the British governments, and I focused on the US, though either, or even both, are consistent with most of the intermediate posts.

I'm not even sure of that, unless the broadcast crosses state lines at a power which might reasonably impact transmissions originating in another state.

OTOH, it is definitely useful to have a standards agency that specifies encoding standards for, e.g., FM. But specifying standards shouldn't necessarily equate to enforcing compliance. Perhaps that should be separate, and only be enforceable on those claiming to adhere to the standard and not doing so.

This, however, is an argument about "should" and not about "historicly applied powers". Regulating ISPs as common carriers is within the FCCs hostoricly applied powers, in as much as they are interstate companies and there's the precedent of AT&T. (Not that the feds have been showing themselves shy about extending their powers beyond all reason without such a legal cloak, but in this case I think that they're on relatively reasonable [for them] footing.)

No. Withholding tax law may have been written for that purpose, but the purpose of the Income Tax was to weaken the power of the states relative to the federal government.

They may be in the UK, but I'm not, and if they do it here it's illegal. I will grant that this won't stop them, but British law isn't the only relevant law. And if they do it here the proper description is "illegal spying". I'd presume most other countries have similar laws (though they might exhempt their own "Intelligence Agencies").

Well.....
1: Monsanto is evil.
Yep.

2: Their herbicide is cancer causing.
If you have heavy exposure, as an agricultural worker is likely to do.

3: Monsanto denies it.
See 1, above.

4: And they probably think smoking cigarettes is beneficial to your health.
citation needed.

5: Or maybe they are just greedy assholes who want money at the destruction of nature and everyone's health.
I doubt that they would go out of they way to destroy nature and everyone's health., otherwise Yep.

When was ISIS ever about maintaining the moral high ground? (OTOH, the US doesn't have any grounds for complaint, as it has been at least equally vile.)

It's sad, but that was my original thought on this.

OTOH, I haven't checked, so I don't know that the people DOXed are remote killers. For all I know they could be the regimental cooks.

I wish that it weren't a fair criticism to call the US a terrorist state. Unfortunately...very unfortunately...I feel that's a justifiable criticism. But I doubt that this will do anything to improve matters. And while low level soldiers are easy targets, they aren't the ones making the decisions. (I can't say that they are without guilt, but they are also easily replaceable.)

"The Old Man of the Mountain" had a system that was effective for quite awhile, but it depended upon being able to insinuate his followers into close proximity to their targets. That's probably not possible anymore, and in any case his system eventually failed when he was attacked by those he was unprepared against.

Yes-No. "Will you cheat?" isn't a black and white thing, and expectation of not getting caught isn't the only modifier. Also involved are how important it is, and what the expected consequences of getting caught are.

Would you cheat on a math test to save your life? Your parents life? Your children's lives? If you said "No" to all of those you're lying. But if you would cheat for a penny, then you're totally without morals...unless there are exceptional circumstances that I haven't thought of.

What about if you had to pay a lot for the opportunity to take the test, and if you passed you would have a good career, and if you failed you wouldn't? I'd wager that would strongly increase the amount of cheating. (And unless you answered no to all the above questions, you can't be sure that you wouldn't, because I purposely left a lot of the motivators vague.)

People not only have differing amounts of "honor", they also disagree about what the term means.

FWIW, I'm a native English speaker, and I still get rules about capitalization mixed up. (I suppose taking German didn't help things, though...)

Enacting Title II is within the FCCs historic powers. And it was suggested by a judge as the appropriate response to his invalidation of their prior attempt at rule making.

If you want to be asserting that it shouldn't be within the FCCs power, you may have a point, and I'd need to think about it for awhile.

Others have denied that the government is " deciding whether something is illegal retroactively.", and have pointed out reasons why the various different rulings are consistent with published rules. So I have trouble taking your assertion that is is as truth.

P.S.: I find most of the content rules silly, but then I see nothing wrong with nudity on city streets, so I'm clearly in a minority. Were I to allow content rules I would have them forbidding the glorification of violence, but I deem free speech even more important than that.

Well, actually I wasn't happy with the decision to allow commercial traffic on the internet...and I'm still not. Resigned is a more accurate description. I did appreciate the decision to allow non-governmental/non-academic on the net, but that happend a bit before the decision to allow commercial use. And allowing commercial ISPs was a good decision. What wasn't a good idea was the decision to allow financial transactions over the internet. I'll agree that a network that allows financial transactions is reasonable, but the internet should not be that network. It was never designed to the kind of secure transmissions that that makes necessary, and this has lead to constant problems...and continual downgrading of the service.

That said, if financial transactions had not be permitted, the internet would be considerably smaller, and the secondary network that had financial transactions enabled would probably eventually swallow it. I'm sorry, buy this is still better, because the internet's basic design is wrong for secure transmission of tokens. That was not among the original design goals, and has had to be kludged onto it...and that was the wrong way to do things.

It's also true that the phone companies wanted to rent a DAA for such a high price that acoustic couplers were developed as a more reasonable answer. And a DAA was little more that a hardwired connection to the phone system.

There are very good reason to be dissatisfied with the service the pre-breakup phone company provided to those areas of the market it wasn't interested in serving. (I'll agree, though, that the hyperbolic arguments of incompetence are unjustified. If Ma Bell was interested in providing a service they did quite a good job of it.)