Who is "we", because it most certainly does not include Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the petrochemical corporations

Nor anybody else, who do things, rather than try to force others to do them the way an actress or a politician said they should be done.

My local service provider is Cogeco for instance, and I switched to Teksavvy without having a single piece of coax changed in my house. Teksavvy pays Cogeco, Cogeco still maintains the wire, and I pay Teksavvy instead of Cogeco.

Does this fix all the problems? No, but it does mean that ISPs have to deal with customer service or simply be switched off by users.

Sounds like Cogeco is still being paid — even if not directly by you — and they also remain the "last mile" provider able to control, shape, and prioritize the traffic to each customer... Thus, I don't think, what you've described would be particularly useful. The US has tried that — with various DSL-providers dealing with incumbent telcos (owners of the copper wire to each house) — it was a major pain for both the ISPs and the end-users and still kept the incumbent behemoths in control. Except for the most determined customers, people chose to buy their DSL service from the same behemoth that owned the wire — if only to have to make fewer tech-support calls, when anything goes wrong.

There should, of course, be no prohibitions against ISPs sharing cables with each other, but they should be able to run their cables to any block, if they so please. Yes, it will mean duplicating efforts (and wasting cables), but in the greater scheme of things these aren't a big deal.

Here, the last-mile providers are acting like Marxists.

They certainly are — thanks to the monopoly-power once given to them by the government.

The solution to this, however, is not creating more rules for them to follow (with more boards and commissions to — ineffectively — ensure compliance) — these only make it harder for a would-be newcomers to appear — but to make this market properly competitive.

So screw the Koch Brothers and their idiot shilling.

While the public anger is (somewhat clumsily, but still effectively) once again redirected against the Koch Brothers, "Big Cable" donates to the ruling party en masse, CEOs play golf with the President and otherwise do the ruling party's bidding. Is it likely, that further monopolization will be blocked?

It's one they are granted when evidence is presented to a court for a warrant. In a public hearing.

That's not how things are spelled-out in the Constitution. And it does not make any sense. A public hearing will alert the suspect.

I'm pretty sure that the past decade has taught us that government does not respect this constitutional requirement.

No, we've known it for much longer.

So, they should get a time out from those powers until they can demonstrate that they know how to behave.

They are not children, to whom such an approach may be applicable. Nor will the criminals be willing to join the "cease-fire" you propose... Bad as government's intrusions into privacy are, they have neither killed nor raped many people.

Not even the scariest abuses — when police get a "hint" obtained with unwarranted search and perform "parallel reconstruction" — have targeted innocent people. Not yet. The time will surely arrive, but for the time being it is the IRS — not the NSA — that is used to suppress opposition. Them and the government's power to audit . But not the eavesdropping.

We have the Constitution, we just need the government to obey it. The previous President was often accused of "shredding" the document, but the current one is actually doing it.

In other words, we have the laws already — we just aren't following them. Creating new laws will not help that...

I would rather take my chances with the armies of terrorists and child molesters

How about fraudsters, thieves, rapists and murderers, embezzlers of public funds and bribe-takers? I don't think, I'm willing to have even a 10% higher rate of those things in exchange for unbeatable https.

Two and a half centuries ago we allowed the government those powers

No, actually. All governments before that have always asserted the right to search anyone and everywhere. We didn't "allow our government" to do this or that — we explicitly disallowed everything else. This may seem like hairsplitting, but it is historical truth — and you seem like you need refreshing of your perspective...

The sort of crimes the NSA catches have nothing to do with you and I in our daily lives.

NSA is not going to ask for a warrant any more than Alan Turing was asking for one, when he monitored all radio traffic he could — in an attempt to catch the enemy's transmissions. That organization's activities are beside the point, really — as long as they don't prosecute in US courts.

There are, unfortunately, a large number of other crimes, which the bad old eavesdropping helps solve/prevent — whenever the bad guys need to communicate, law enforcement has a legitimate need to be able to listen. Few of these crimes are Internet-specific — the same things we are discussing with regards to the Internet have been said back and forth decades ago about telephone.

They protect megacorps [...]

Oh, sorry, I didn't notice, you are an "anticorp" sort — I wouldn't have bothered with such an idiot. One percent much?

But now that I typed most of the answer anyway, you may as well have it. Remember to logout and, please, don't hate.

That is a discussion we should have.

We should. But, unless you are going to suggest, the government ought not to have such powers at all (as pla argues below) — ever — then this is not the place for this discussion.

Because if, in your opinion, sometimes they do legitimately need this capability, then they ought to remain able to circumvent https — without spooking the subject.

If the state can forge certs, the state can redirect your traffic to their youtube proxy and insert the malware just behind the fake thing you authenticated with.

And that is, how things ought to be — unless we want to strip the state off their power to search us (and trail us).

Yes, the state ought to need a proper warrant to exercise that power. But, without the described capabilities, police would not be able to do, what the warrant allows (and their job demands!) them to do.

Does the end justify the means?

Winning a war — especially that for your very survival — does justify risking the soldiers' well-being — and even lives.

I can't be the only one shocked, SHOCKED to discover, the government is inefficient and wastes money. I mean, after the staggering success of everything else it operates — things like US Postal Service or Amtrak — it is certainly most disappointing to encounter a government program, that fails to live-up to our high expectations.

Nay, this may even chill our collective enthusiasm for making food and shelter a government's responsibility too — you can't be healthy without nutrition and a roof above your head, can you, so it only would've seem natural to further expand the government's omniscient and benevolent control into that direction. But not any more... Not quite...

And unless social networks, media sites and governments come up with some innovative way of defeating online troublemakers, the digital world will never be free of the trolls' collective sway.

Theft, rape, and murder are still with us despite millenniums worth of efforts to get rid of them...

Why would trolling be any easier to dispense with?

There will always be another war, another enemy

Aliens are remarkably hard to find, actually. Even in that Science Fiction book there was only one race encountered.

it seems that mankind keeps track of its history this way

Possibly. But that's irrelevant — unless you are arguing, humanity should punish its war-mongering self with suicide so that "better" species can develop and take over.

Does anyone else remember when "America's Army" came out, just before the Iraq 'war'? It was a free first person shooter, and a very advanced game (for the time). Coincidence? I think not...

Well, in that case, what is the meaning of the new game, where you shoot members of the Tea Party? Celebration of tolerance? Respect for other people's opinions?

Please, don't hate.

That's only accurate if you ignore the cost incurred by the child-soldiers themselves, as elaborated even more in the subsequent books.

Compared to saving the human race that "cost" is a pebble in the Universe. For even if humanity prevailed through other means, it would have taken longer — meaning (much) higher losses and expenses. Many more children would've suffered the loss of their parents and older siblings, for example.