So now articulately and accurately pointing out when people do unconscionable things is "two minutes hate"? Funny, the description I remember from 1984 was groups of people, gathered in theaters, vying to scream the loudest.

Come to think of it, sounds a lot more like the orchestrated August Town Hall debacle.

RIAA shill: Kids! Copying music is bad! P2P is bad! File sharing is bad!
Kids: [Keys click as they Google for "copy music", "p2p", and "file sharing"] Hm, I didn't know you could do those things...neat! Thanks, Mr. RIAA man!
RIAA shill; [Large sweat drop appears on head]

Or the fact the Unions are now more of a political force who pressure (mostly the democrat party) to do things their way).

In what way is this an argument against? Unions are supposed to represent the interest of the workers. Exerting political pressure is a perfectly legitimate way of representing.

We got this treatment in my University. The kindest version inserted a self-deleting script in your startup script, warning you on login that you have just deleted all your files, downloaded kiddy porn, and emailed your professors that you hate their guts. Oh, and, ha ha, only joking, now lock your damned screen when you leave the machine.

I didn't even have to have it happen to me; just hearing about it through the grapevine was enough to scare me straight forever.

Haven't you learned anything from Slashdot? Physical access is total access. Cleaning crew could just pull out their hacker-ninja 1337 skillz and be back on the net in minutes.

While what you say is true, it doesn't go far enough. Net Neutrality says: not only do they have to allow Skype, they can't charge the company running Skype extra for letting you get to it, or letting you get to it as quickly or as reliably as you do to anything else. Without full end-to-end protection against gotcha-games like this, the situation will hardly improve.

The FCC regulates what goes on in our communications commons -- traditionally, the electromagnetic airwaves, but others too (think publicly-owned, -funded, -subsidized, and/or -monopoly-granted cable/Internet/telephone infrastructure). Since these are owned by (or owed to) the public, they must be regulated for the public good. You have the right to speak freely, but you don't have the right to do whatever you want to alter, pollute, or dominate our commons. And just because some have built huge businesses on the model of taking advantage of the abuse of our commons doesn't give them the right for that situation to continue. They're our commons, and we have the perfect right to say what constitutes abuse and to enforce prevention of that abuse.

Now, the Fairness Doctrine -- saying that you have to give equal time to the opposing viewpoint -- is an admirable, but unworkable goal: how do you define what the opposing viewpoints are? If Fox News lets Bill O'Reilly have a say, what is the "opposing" viewpoint? Couldn't Fox put Chuck Norris on and claim he's the opposing viewpoint because he advocates armed insurrection and O'Reilly doesn't? Or would it be someone advocating the US adopt a Soviet system? Extreme examples, but illustrative -- you have to define what the center is to determine where its negation falls. And any such definition is bound to be arbitrary, or, worse, itself abused.

However, at the very least, you can go a long way toward preventing domination by a single viewpoint, or a single entity, by limiting ownership, the way we used to. Concentration of media ownership is, I think we can all agree, a bad thing. Getting more access to more people -- people, without preference for legal fictions like corporations -- is a good thing.

Looking at the article you linked, I see only good things coming from the vaunted Bogey Man called Mark Lloyd. It's all about re-democratizing the media, and attenuating the complete corporate big-money domination of it we have now. Things like Net Neutrality only serve to prevent the further erosion of media equality, and so are no-brainers. But he wants to -- rightly so -- go further toward this ideal, in other media too. I say more power to him, and I'm glad we have people like him in the machine now.

Not "a generator". A system of 100,000 generators, scattered throughout the country, centrally managed via data links. Which is the point.

I actually thought the visual side of things was fairly lame.

You forget, this was 1979. That kind of onscreen motion simply didn't exist at the time (at least, outside of vector displays). Starfields that fly past as though you were moving through them in 3-D? Planets shooting past? And not even in an arcade? Mind-blowing stuff, back then.

Aside from changing references to a few memory locations and altering the joystick handler to allow for the 5200's different controllers, the 5200 version is probably the same code as the original!

I can attest to this, even though I never owned a 5200. There were several 5200 games that people had dumped and tweaked to run on the 8-bit computers. You could usually tell because (1) the sound was usually somewhat strange and (2) you had to press * and # on the keyboard to do certain things that would normally be done with things like SELECT or OPTION.

The quote was not "people who are wrong are evil"; it was "wrong is evil". Wrong can be defeated by changing the minds of those who subscribe to it.

Now, if you want to argue about whether people who insist on staying wrong are evil, that's another matter...

"Just a flu" -- this exact type, H1N1 -- killed 30,000,000 to 50,000,000 people in the flu season of 1918-1919.

http://1918.pandemicflu.gov/the_pandemic/index.htm

NASA depends on good PR in order to survive.

That's the saddest part of all.

Clearly, he knows something we don't.

If the Tarantula Nebula, for instance, was located as close as the Orion Nebula it would cover about a quarter of the sky.

I can't begin to tell you how awesome that would look. It would be terrible for astronomy, of course -- blocking the view -- but still.