The most important job they have is spectrum management.

And that role could not be taken over by another organization why again? The existing rules in place would hold for a while.

Just because the FCC is defunded doesn't mean another temporary org to manage truly important things could not be formed... It would be a great way to eliminate the vast overreach that many federal agencies are involved in. Personally, if I were doing this I would mandate that the new organizations not be headquartered in DC to help reduce the influence of politics on operations...

I don't think Congress could zero out the FCC's budget without severe repercussions.

The Republicans held steadfast against a massive budget overrun attempt by shutting down the government for a few weeks and had record wins in the recent elections.

Shutting down the FCC? Who in the real world cares about the FCC? The only ones I could possibly think of would be religious fundamentalists that still agree with the obscenity regulations the FCC mandates.

"Many politicians seem to be of the opinion "we will oppose the other party's efforts even if it means destroying the government"

See: Democrats denying any votes on bills the House passes, refusing to create a budget for years, voting 98-100% of the time time along party lines...

The Republicans are not MUCH better. But they are better about some things, and not worse at the others.

And private semi-monopolies such as AT&T would never cooperate with government wiretapping,

Of course they do - and they can get my SSL traffic, which they may or may not be able to unravel.

What will happen after regulation, is that AT&T will no longer need to cooperate as such because cooperation will be mandated and technically inserted into telco equipment. Then later on all consumer encryption must use the ClipperChipMarkVIIX, which lets government agencies with any possible interest in you decrypt anything you've ever sent (thanks to the mandated infinite logging of traffic).

If you don't think any of that is possible, much less likely, you don't know technology or governments.

Unless I'm misunderstand, Obama is advocating what a lot of us have been wanting for years

You fucking idiot.

He's advocating that, what will actually happen instead is what I am telling you what will happen.

After the exact same thing happening from solicitations for the last few hundreds years, get your head out of your ass and realize what government control over the internet means and WHY they so desperately want it.

I mean, every time someone tells you you should hand over control of something to the government because of some big scary malevolent evil that actually has never really been a problem, it ends badly for all involved.

Sorry to be blunt but when someone is being a fucking idiot, it's my sworn duty not to sugarcoat their idiocy.

Government regulation of the internet means the certain death of any form of privacy on the internet, not to mention almost certain government mandated backdoors in any encryption used.

Which I am fine with, since as a technologist I'll be able to exploit and work around it all as it suits me. I just feel a little sorry for all of the non technical people it will screw over, but whatever...

These will not be high latency. If you have 700 satellites more-or-less evenly distributed around the globe (say from 60S to 60N latitude) and you want a minimum of 45 degree elevation to the nearest satellite, they can be lower than 400 miles altitude, or 600 miles away. Assuming that the system will bounce signals from the satellites to a distributed network of fiber connected ground stations, latency should only be 10ms more than a pure cable transmissions.

Previous satellite internet to geosynchronous satellites are nothing like this.

I agree with other commenters that this is pretty unlikely, but SpaceX and Tesla were quite unlikely to succeed as well.

Wikipedia mentions that the grains are "booming" which means they are 0.3mm. Beaches are 0.2m to 2mm.

So since the stated problem with using desert sand is that it is "too fine", and the Death Valley sand is in fact the opposite (coarser grains), in what way does it not work again?

The real problem is that Death Valley is a national park and even fairly barren wilderness deserves some level of protection... you wouldn't want to mine the whole valley for sand.

If you don't want people putting other things over your product, don't name it Surface.

claims he was using both tablets

Of course he didn't just use it to hold up an iPad!

Later on he put down the stand and put a cup of coffee on it too. Totally no rings on the table.

That;s what you define it as. That's what technical people everywhere define it as... but it's not at all what regulations are being written around, yet you continue to support them as if they were.

Meanwhile without regulations nothing has actually needed fixing long-term (Netflix is doing just fine now), certainly nothing that would have been fixed by any proposed legislation. But you want to break it, you want to fuck over the internet because you think your technical definition matches the words coming out of a pro-business FCC chair in Washington.

His definition for example has exactly nothing to do with any so-called Net-Neutrality regulations.

Sometimes you want to open another application's database to see what information it's storing about you

At which point it has an API to do so or GTFO.

Not "oh just poke through the DB and take what you like, even if I don't know who or what you are".

Are you really this fucking stupid? Is that really possible or are you just playing devils advocate? The attitude you are promoting led to a world of malware/spyware and identity fraud across the PC industry. Please don't tell me you want to promote that world going forward, not on purpose.

You can't autoexecute stuff off an SD under Android.

So the databases form every app on your phone have no value? No reason to keep every app in the system out of the SQLLite file from your banking app?

Jesus H Christ in a Fish Bucket. It's hopeless I guess I give up when even the technical people can't figure out it out.

ower users will no longer have to deal with crippled file managers, media apps will have convenient access to everything they should regardless of storage location, and developers won't have to rely on messy hacks to work around the restrictions.

Translation, the already shitty security around files on SD cards on Android has now gotten fantastically worse - look for "media managers" that can also handle opening databases from other applications stored on an SD card...

There's a reason Google stopped including SD slots in flagship devices.

Why are we insisting we repeat all of the security sins of the PC era in regard to mobile? Doesn't the 99% of the population who cannot properly manage this level of access deserve better from technology?

One of the definitions I found was:

One who makes great sacrifices or suffers much in order to further a belief, cause, or principle.

I am sure that fits. While SpaceShip II is mainly intended for a non-exploration purpose, the program has resulted in some significant advances in rocketry and White Knight II has significant non-tourism use. These pilots have been involved in other space efforts, I remember the one who was injured from the Rotary Rocket test flights. There are lots of safer ways for these folks to make as much money as a test pilot is paid. They do what they do to advance our progress in aeronautics and space.