"employers would just lay off these layabouts with entitlement issues."

Come now, let's not jest. The layabouts with entitlement issues have no employers, they ARE the employers. The bourgeoisie, the top 1%, the "haves" -- whatever you should call them -- those are the real layabouts here, with the perhaps the most supreme entitlement issues society has ever known.

If the local people want to vote, and allocate their tax dollars to provide free internet, even if it puts corporations out of business, they should be allowed to. That's what democracy is all about, isn't it? The will of the the people?

Or are we really a government controlled by the lords of the free-market, where the will of the people is no longer relevant?

(And keep in mind, this money from the city coffers is going to SOMEONE to install and maintain the services. So it's actually probably going to stimulate local industry at the expense of big corporate industry.)

Wow, we better do away with all sorts of state-funded things, then, if it's a requirement EVERYONE that is taxed must use them.

"It doesn't matter what generation anyone belongs to -- you'll do things the way the employer wants them done, or you won't be employed."

This is not true, nor is it ideal. If a whole generation of people, or even half of that generation, is willing to continually break the rules to use their own devices, employers cannot commence with the wholesale termination of half their labor force. Production would grind to a halt. There would be economic turmoil.

No, if they're smart, employers will find a way to use the workers own technology as free capital.

This is not only a shift in technology, but a whole generation of people communicate differently! Every new mode of communication has been disruptive of the previous: post disrupted the courier, telegraph disrupted post, telephone disrupted telegraph, electronic mail disrupted all the previous, and now we have technologies to send visual as well as text along (PDF attachments, for example) that have disrupted hitherto necessarily paper documents -- are we at all surprised that text messaging, twitter, and facebook should disrupt elements of previous forms of communication?

This is not a question of "what will employers allow" but rather "how do people communicate".

Interesting concept, about jamming the technology.

Of course, it would be much easier to kill someone with a handgun, or damage their property with a sledgehammer. Or just run you over themselves.

That said, there are a lot of systems that you can interfere with, and in each case it's very illegal. Tampering with railroad tracks seems like a pretty good low tech example. I'm not naysaying security concerns, but they should be kept in context. I think we are all now used to assuming ultra-high hack-proof security as a necessity, what with whole industries built on DRM and cybercrimes more common. But really, none of us are terribly physically secure in our person, save that we rely on common law and social order, and a good bit of common sense, to keep us out of harm's way.

These technologies can save lives. They have vulnerabilities, but I would say the vulnerabilities are no greater than the ones that already exist.

I am kinda glad it uses Silverlight. Hulu is a dog on one of my older laptops, but Silverlight plays Netflix with nary a hitch.

Some tough campaign finance reform could fix this problem. One election cycle could solve it, if the American people would use their power (the vote) accordingly.

I totally agree with you, though. I do believe that the people have the power to solve the problem, though... they just don't. Why they don't, that's the hard question.

The American people are just about ready for a New New Deal, I think. The powers-that-be have pushed for too much, too quickly. If they were more patient, they could've skimmed the cream off the top of the milk as our economy grew, and still become richer at a rate that was faster than the rest of the nation's increase in prosperity, but they were greedy, and now they might have doomed themselves.

As soon as people get their heads out of their asses and stop voting on nonsense no on really cares about anyway (gay marriage, intelligent design, abortion, etc.), the change will come quickly, I think. Of course, you have pastors in churches telling their congregations that if they don't vote ultra-conservative, god is going to torture them in a special part of hell for all eternity, and they've been programmed to believe it, what can you really expect?

And let's not overstate how bad it is. The relative badness to what it COULD be is perhaps greater than the Great Depression, and other bad times for us, but it's really not totally miserable. Times are bad, people are even losing their homes and such, but we haven't yet gone to soup kitchens. If people were starving, we'd have riots in the streets. The powers-that-be have been smart enough to keep that from happening... so far... but I wouldn't rule it out just yet.

That's because it makes no sense to spend resources giving someone experience if you're going to force them to take a job with a different company in order to get a pay raise.

Yes, but not from U.S. graduate students. From foreign graduate students studying in the U.S.

I don't think traffic courts around here are based on the "reasonable doubt" test.

Humans treat other humans this way, too. Those with lots of power and wealth inevitably inflict such a life onto other humans. Even an individual of meager means in rich country might have some poor girl barely affording her food, yet working long hours in a textile factory, or the like. But why? Because the sweatshop job is better than the alternatives.

Babies can die if they're not held. There is some biological imperative that requires a baby to be loved. Similarly, cows have a biological imperative to live, to reproduce, to eat, and so forth. If, any any point, cows didn't prefer their life to not living, they could, as human babies do, simply not live in their environments. It happens to a lot of "wild" animals that are brought into captivity. They have problems with reproduction, with behavior, with health, and generally do not so so well out of their natural environments.

I mean, when you think about sitting around all day under incandescent lights, eating yourself to obesity, killing yourself, essentially, so that someone else can have a nice meal, or make a buck... how is it so different from the plight of most of humanity? In fact, daresay that starvation is something a farm animal might never have to worry about.

You're making the assumption that Mother Nature would be kinder or more generous to these animals, but that's not necessarily true. There are predator animals and prey animals. We are apex predators. If humanity was wiped out in an instant, you'd still have big animals eating smaller animals all day, every day. I even suggest that slaughter is a more humane way to die than being eaten alive by a predator, no?

All that aside, eating plants is more efficient, but as omnivores, our nutritional needs are better satisfied by eating some amount of meat. Sure, you can take measures to eat no meat, and I certainly have no problem with anyone doing that, I just really don't understand it.

If we didn't eat animals, all those cows, chickens, and pigs would never be alive in the first place.

This is like saying we should stop sending food to starving nations because they'll just increase their birthrates, and just need more and more food. (Which is actually happening, btw.)

You guys should keep going. This is getting really entertaining. :)

Are you saying fission is to blame? I thought the earthquake and subsequent tsunami were to blame. Do you think the sum of the "engineering shortcuts" that might have been taken all throughout the affect area will total less damage to human life than those taken at the nuclear plant?

This isn't Chernobyl all over again, where negligence caused a catastrophe. This is the result of a natural disaster.

A battery isn't fuel, so it's apples an oranges.

The "round trip" efficiency isn't as important other factors. In the case of fuel, we're usually interested energy density. Volume and weight are critical.