2. Some contaminants do bad things to people, even at levels we can't measure today.

That's certainly true — whether the contaminants are genetically modified, or not...

Do you honestly believe that someone would be allowed to run for president of the USA who wasn't in big media's pocket?

I honestly believe, that if your (cynical) point of view was connected to reality, we wouldn't have seen the sort of media bias on display in the last two elections.

One method is to implant spider genes into silkworms, which then act as spider-silk factories.

There are people out there, who are sincerely concerned about whether vitamin-C they are offered was "genetically modified"... How are you going to sell such GMO silk to them?

The rest of us believe that telecom is, was, and (for the foreseeable future) always will be a *natural* monopoly

Natural monopoly is a myth. A myth very convenient for and thus perpetuated by the government officials of various levels as it gives them undue power, but a myth nonetheless.

You can't have meaningful competition for building roads and sewers and power grids

Yes, you can. Tokyo has competing subway lines — why can't New York City? Your GPS is likely to show you several options for any route of appreciable lengths — why can't those different roads be privately-owned and compete?

For example, to leave New York you have many options (most of them requiring payment on top of the taxes) — why can't those bridges and tunnels be privately owned and compete with each other? Maybe, their new owners will consider high traffic a profit opportunity, rather than a burdensome nuisance — and seek to attract more drivers by innovation of both toll-collection and road-maintenance... I dunno, it works for supermarkets... Heck, some private (and disgustingly profit-driven) concern may even undertake building a new tunnel (or a bridge)...

it will always be vastly more efficient for a single entity to install and manage that physical data network, at least at the local level

Really? Why not? In the 20ie we had competing telephone companies — each running its own wires to buildings. Today Google is laying down its own fiber — to much rejoicing on this very site — and AT&T is planning its own alternative, despite your claims of it being "inefficient". Various markets have competing coax-cable providers already. The actual cable-laying is just a (small) part of providing Internet service... Though in theory a monopoly ought to be easier — and thus cheaper — to operate (in any market), in practice any benefit is quickly consumed by the inevitable arrogance of such providers and the concomitant drop of quality and rising end-user prices (any wins in the monopoly provider's costs are compensated for by their fattening up the profit-margins).

We should have made this transition decades ago, but for a variety of reasons didn't

Oh, it is not a "variety" of reasons — but a single one: our government followed that myth of "natural monopolies" and granted cable-TV providers monopoly rights in their respective markets. That law was rescinded in the mid-1990ies, but the damage was done...

Once they have competition, they'll just form a cartel to collectively screw us all over.

Does not happen with restaurateurs, car-makers, nor even the cellular-service providers. Why would it happen with the ISPs?

I don't believe for a moment they're ever going to be anything except for self serving douchebags. Competition won't change that.

People will be looking out for themselves, that much is true. Competition, however, will make providing better service the most profitable course of action.

You guys who think the free market solves problems are pretty fucking deluded.

For all the problems with the free market, nothing humanity has tried works better...

"I wandered off or a while and when I came back they'd added the STL,which provided some badly-needed data structures and language capabilities"

Most of the common STL containers would be a few hours work to write something reasonably functional. Binary tree maps perhaps a day to get working properly but nonetheless, nothing a competetant programmer couldn't do. In fact this was done in C for years without the STL so your complaint is a bit weak.

You gotta vote for people who will make it so

Oh, I am voting for such people alright. But the last couple of elections I was overruled by the inane majority, who consider the color of a candidate's skin more important, than his qualifications.

Our "affirmative action" President plays golf with big cable CEO(s), and the rest of his party is in the big media's pocket as well.

Meanwhile, the rank-and-file partisans are encouraged to hate the Kochs brothers...

As long as the ISPs retain monopoly positions, they will be able to do as they please (or as the NSA pleases to make them do).

And once there is healthy competition among them, there will be no need for the rest of us to legislate every minutiae of their behavior.

Back in the day. The clue is in the name. If it wasn't compatible but simply similar then it would have been called something else. Java perhaps.

The report demonstrates that if you were to take into account mining, pollution, and adverse health impacts of coal and gas, wind power would be the cheapest source of energy, period.

Just how do you do the emphasized part? Are we supposed to trust someone to make an honest, unbiased, and also correct estimate of those costs?

The right "to be forgotten" does not exist — you have no right to affect the contents of other people's brains, notebooks, and databases.

Sure, Google is a "KKKorporation", but you have no more right to demand, they forget about you, than you can you force your ex to forget the good times you've once had together. And, yes, wiping out individual's memories — selectively — is already possible.

the prohibition on using the same dish for meat and dairy

The point was, there is no such prohibition.

The only thing the scripture actually proscribes is what I quoted: "cooking lamb in the milk of its mother". That's all — all other rules are derived from that. That they have been expanded to cover all dairy and all meat — even those derived from different species — is the phenomenon I used as an illustration.