Since when did the government take over recycling? At least any more than they "took over" waste management in general? If there's money to be made in recycling (or anything else), the government providing an inferior service doesn't stop others from doing it better. Usually the government is interested in different objectives than profit though, such as recycling being widely available and easy to do.

The three bite rule was not my idea, but it didn't come from the internet and I can't seem to find any references. Maybe it's just an old bit of parenting folklore.

That's what I remember being the original complaint: higher FPS looks like daytime TV (or home video). That's an understandable prejudice, but one that I think we can get over by watching more normal TV in higher FPS. For some reason though, after the initial wave of honest people like you there's been hack after hack trying to explain why low FPS is actually better for smarter sounding reasons. It hasn't exactly been great for the TV industry; real 120 hz isn't as available in mid-range TVs as it was a couple of years ago. The hack reviewers convinced us that better technology is not worth paying for, and now instead the upper part of the market is about "Smart" TVs. How exactly is it "smart" to pay several hundred dollars more for your TV to have a built-in Roku/Apple TV/Chromecast/Fire Stick that you now have to choose in a package with the picture quality instead of being able to choose a good (or cheap) TV and separately choose the interface you like best? Especially since most external options also have additional content networks you can buy into?

That sounds plausible. Much like everybody else's made up explanation.

For the same reason children are picky eaters. They say that people have to take three bites of a new flavor to really know if they like or dislike it. I have personally experienced that, going from "wtf this is so wrong" to "ok it's not so bad and I might actually like this" between bite 1 and bite 3. Well, we all grew up consuming 24 fps movies, and anything higher is new and different. Rather than "take three bites", though, so many of us recoil from the different experience and immediately start talking to all our friends about how it looks wrong, concluding that high FPS just looks bad. Try. Three. Bites.

I see no reason to disbelieve an AC claiming to have fixed the problem. The second paragraph doesn't show he's wrong; by explaining in detail why it's so hard to fix (without explaining in any detail how to fix it), it shows that he likes being the only person he knows who can fix it.

Spies will spy. It is preferable for the spies to have private backdoors rather than for them to research (or create) and utilize hacks that could then be used by criminals. In this case the system design also requires human interaction and a court order, making it less likely for a hacker to gain the same access. The real question is whether we should have spies at all, because if we don't want them to be able to actually spy on people why pay for them? And I am including law enforcement agencies under the term "spy" because that's what they are doing when they are investigating a case. But if we decide (as others have in the past) that it's OK to spy on suspected criminals (with oversight to ensure that the definition of "suspected criminals" does not expand), this is the right way to do it.

Your idea to fix what's wrong with American ISPs by bringing in a European level of competition sounds very interesting. How did Europe get that kind of competition in a market with such high initial capital costs? Do you have a plan for how we could do the same in America?

I've used Windows 8. Metro is pretty. And useless and annoying. But that's not because it was a bad idea. It's because like pretty much everything else Microsoft f***ed it up. Metro doesn't work the way it's supposed to, and Microsoft made it hard to avoid.

The goal is for Unity to be easy to avoid on a desktop computer. But even if that doesn't work out, you can always use Mint instead. Ubuntu doesn't belong to you; it belongs to Canonical. As long as they want Unity to work, they have a right to try and make that happen. And unlike Windows, if it doesn't work out you can replace Unity with whatever else. Or use any number of other distributions where somebody else has done exactly that.

(more importantly, why should the new grocery store across town have to pay the toll?)

Grocery stores are an even less appropriate analogy than water. Internet service providers do not provide an endpoint service (usually). They provide the highways. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video and YouTube are the grocery stores, and nobody is proposing that they be regulated as utilities. But it would be madness to put our roads to the grocery stores in the hands of for-profit corporations, especially if one of those corporations happens to also be NBC. Net neutrality is about telling that corporation that no, you cannot arbitrarily put up road blocks to Netflix to drive traffic to NBC. You cannot only maintain the roads to NBC. And if somebody builds a grocery store across town over and pays someone else for a highway into your residential neighborhood, you are not allowed to put up a toll booth. The residential customers are already paying for your roads in their neighborhood. Why should Netflix have to pay a toll for you to get from the residential network onto the roads they already paid for to get to their servers? Especially when NBC doesn't?

You mean fascism?

ISPs are forcing Netflix to only use saturated links. Although to be less cynical, it's possible that Netflix is forced there not by explicit policy but because the links haven't been upgraded in ten years.

If 1mbps always meant 1mbps, that would be a solid connection to nearly anything on the internet. The only reason it isn't is because the networks are shitty, so you get somewhere between the advertised speed and a 56K dialup speed at random, usually with awful latency. The maximum bandwidth is a terrible metric by which to sell internet, because there are any number of reasons the network won't live up to it. Of course when I buy internet I've got some idiot customer service person trying to tell me that 15mbps is needed for gaming and 7mbps won't cut it when as a programmer with experience in networking and gaming I know that the bandwidth needs are usually quite small and it's the latency (which they don't advertise) that really matters.

I wonder if the light bulb market can ever get away from "60W equivalent" marketing. How that turns out should give us an indication of how to get away from the peak bandwidth marketing for internet connections.

What a thoughtful argument you make! Perhaps what we really do need in our schools is philosophy classes where the purposes and boundaries of science - and religion - can be explored outside of the body of useful theories that result. Unfortunately philosophy is pretty squishy and is exactly the sort of thing that is being cut from existing curricula.