Appeal to authority, argumentum ad populum and poisoning the well. Classy. The science is actually more interesting than you believe:

"First, twenty-four rhesus macaques were infected with the Lyme bacteria in the laboratory. After four to six months, half the macaques received aggressive antibiotic therapy, which, in theory, should have cured them, but the bacteria persisted in some of the animals. Then the scientists used a method called xenodiagnosis to determine if treatment worked in three other monkeys. They planted ticks that had been reared in the lab under sterile conditions on macaques that had received antibiotics, and let them feed for four days. When the ticks were removed and examined, the scientists found small numbers of intact, functioning spirochetes in two of them, which could have come only from the blood of the macaques."
( http://www.newyorker.com/repor... )

It is a fact that a significant amount of people chronically suffer from symptoms that are perfectly in line with the symptoms of Lyme, after having definitely had Lyme. So, that is 'a thing'. Whether the cause is indeed recurring Lyme, a yeast infection or damage to the body doesn't really matter all that much to those with the symptoms. Being dismissed as 'kooky' or being told to 'get over it' by assholes as yourself does matter.

Quote, please.
Also, this is a tu quoque. You seem to be implying that the article mentioned in TFA is somehow not misinformation. Which it is. And I quote: 'Yes, it's "disingenuous"'

Nope. I was talking about you deriding an article that tries to make people a little bit more aware of how corporate interests are being 'masked' as messages from consumer advocacy groups.

Your premise doesn't even remotely support your conclusions here. But I am pretty interested in how you propose achieving net neutrality, if not via the FCC or 'telecoms regulation'.

Nobody was implying that in this instance free speech should have been curtailed.

Again, this is about you saying this about TFA: "I don't see why people get their panties in a knot about companies presenting their point of view publicly; you can listen to their arguments and either agree with them or disagree with them."

By (mostly incorrectly) deriding TFA, the people writing it and its readers, you are actively aiding the misinformation that Vice is trying to combat in TFA. That is a definite step beyond defending free speech, my friend.

It never says that anywhere. Unless they changed the article, the only accusation I find is in the headline: "CABLE COMPANIES ARE ASTROTURFING FAKE CONSUMER SUPPORT TO END NET NEUTRALITY".
Anyway, if you really want to get into this: the writers of the article in SFgate are probably also very much responsible for (or at least very influential in) the characterization of the BfA below that article.

No, you don't. You want to sit back, allow the public to be misinformed (and lulled into inaction) due to word trickery from people that have financial interests in certain corporations and bitch about articles that try to shine a light on such word trickery. Don't get me wrong, I do agree with you that using the word 'astroturfing' is debatable here, but knocking the article and the people upset about the word trickery (and their panties) is just counterproductive. And that is what this thread is about.

Don't make this about who's to blame. This is about public misinformation actively promoted by corporate interests and how and whether to counter it. Whether that SFGate, BfA or a combination of those two drives the misinformation is irrelevant.

That says enough about you. But thanks for answering the question honestly.

How about defending an article exposing said misinformation? (Yes, The Fucking Article)

As opposed to implying that what's going on is just "companies presenting their point of view publicly" and people "[getting] their panties in a knot about [it]".

Well, the story here is that things like "Broadband for America, a coalition of 300 Internet consumer advocates, content providers and engineers" don't sound like "Broadband of America, an organization sponsored mostly by Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and the likes."

Attaching the former is disingenuous, as it mischaracterizes the organisation as being some kind of collective of consumer-oriented institutes. Of course, technically it doesn't say that, but most people are too oblivious to read between the lines of such a statement. So clearly, people become misinformed due to tactics such as these. What do you suggest we do to fix this misinformation?

You're right. Clearly we need Brain-HDCP! It would solve everything!
Kind regards, the MPAA.

P.S. HNCP would be more apt, I guess.

I'm going to plug a free alternative here (not affiliated):
https://play.google.com/store/...

Free OSM-based map downloads for pretty much everywhere OSM are available - with update notifications. The interface is not quite up to the level of paid apps when it comes to polish, but it definitely holds its own. I think they make their money off people that use TomTom map data within the app (it supports that too).

Although, yes, this one can be easily predicted, it does seem fairly unique: https://www.google.com/search?...

Which brings up the point where the implementation gets tricky. When it comes to structure and the words used it is very unoriginal, but as a whole it is very original. Perhaps naive approaches to detecting the originality of a piece of text would do more harm then good. I guess it all comes down to waiting for AI that can sufficiently understand text to determine a useful originality score.

There's a wiki here: http://spacexlanding.wikispace...

Hate to turn something funny into a serious note, but I'm pretty sure a lot (if not most) of the comments on the internet can already be predicted just by looking at the headline.

I suggest calculating an originality score for all comments based on their similarity to all previous comments. If it could be based on all the comments you've personally encountered before, it would drastically cut down on the 'Oh god, not this bullshit again'-feeling we all have when perusing comment sections.

On the other hand, sometimes you predict that a certain comment will have been made and feel satisfaction upon reading it.
Maybe that's a bad thing, too.

1. Sharm-el-sheik isn't really the center of protests (certainly not when I was there). I'm going to have to doubt your assertion "it's common there now".
2. Helicopters have this unique feature of being able to hover in the air and move in all directions at very low speeds. Landing airplanes don't have that luxury.
3. I'm pretty sure the instruments in a military chopper are a lot more capable to deal with loss of visual capabilities than civilian aircraft. Infra-red vision may well have been available to the pilots and, if I'm not mistaken, would not be bothered by the green lasers.
4. Article concerning the incident: http://theaviationist.com/2013... - No information as to whether this type of flying went on for months every night.
5. Again, like I said: most flying is done on instruments anyway. That it is usually possible to work around or even not really a problem at all, doesn't mean that it is okay to do it. Does a lased plane with broken instruments need to crash before something is done about the lasing? I think being proactive is a better idea than waiting for the calf to drown.

QFT, last year I sat in the cockpit during an evening landing in Egypt (Sharm-el-sheik) and where I had previously dismissed the whole pointing lasers thing, that landing quickly brought me around. Granted, pilots generally land on the instruments anyway, but looking out the windows was certainly not an option anymore because of the effect the laser pointers had on the canopy.

One of the things I had always wondered (and asked the pilots) was 'Who would do such a thing? What do they gain from it?' until we were walking around in the (touristic) city centre at night. Tons of shops that sold massively overpowered laser pointers and more importantly: lots of small kids waving those things around.

Oh, come on. Only if it's one person standing out from the crowd. If everybody had multicolored flashing lights as tail lights, it wouldn't be distracting at all.

IANAP, but I've hypothesized that you could also say that the slits influence the individual particle at the same time. I.e. the particle isn't interfering with itself, but is rather 'interfered' (I know) with by both slits.

If the particles that comprise the edges of the slits (or lack of those particles in the slits) have an influence on the trajectory of the fired particle that varies in a wave-like manner, the notion of 'interferes with itself' wouldn't be required to explain the resulting patterns. Again, IANAP; I'm just visualizing the elements of the slits as having some varying attraction/repulsion on the particle and am looking for reasons (preferably experimental results) why that visualization should be dismissed.