From The Right Stuff:

Gordon Cooper: You boys know what makes this bird go up? FUNDING makes this bird go up.
Gus Grissom: He's right. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.

You might even say this opens windows into trade mark law.

the libertarian solution would be to remove these blocks and open up the options.

We had such a situation at the turn of the 20th century. There were too many poles and wires. A more recent example is the fiber that was laid in the late 1990s. In some cities, each fiber company was allowed to lay its own fiber. This actually resulted in some streets being cut into just weeks after they were patched over from the previous fiber install.

Any sane solution to the Comcast problem requires a public infrastructure. The free market would work well re-selling service over that public infrastructure. That's what we're arguing about here anyway--free access to a public entity, namely the Internet. The irony of libertarians arguing for a pure free market on something that was created by the government never gets old.

I figured as much; but don't knock that. Talk to anybody who has wrecked the plastic on their sport motorcycle. If you could print that stuff at a reasonable price, that wold be HUGE.

Copper and silver have anti-microbial properties. This problem was solved centuries ago by pure dumb luck.

[nothing good] ever comes outa Africa.

Drink some coffee, google around a bit, and get back to us.

I take it to mean 1/3.

There's no way a country that small, and that close to the US could hold out as a communist nation in the face of unrestricted trade with the US - it'd become so utterly dependent on the US that it'd simply have no choice but to bow down to US wishes and culture.

Have you been to Berkeley? Joking aside, the US is starting to have more trouble keeping its own states in line on issues like pot, gun control, immigration and even monetary policy. Living next door and trading DVDs is no guarantee that you will always get along.

They'd totally be into this... unless they've already done it and you're violating their patents. In that case, hide resume from Japan.

Except for the battery, a street car was often an electric "bus". It drew the power from overhead lines. These were common until we were forced into automobiles by a combination of post-war cultural attitudes and downright bamboozling by the likes of GM.

So yes. Switch back. There. FTFY.

Is there any precedent for a country to create new land like this, and claim territory around it? If international law is good for anything, it seems like this would be a good time to cite it.

Wow. I was rather embarrassed over not having read TFA and everybody pointing out the finger-print thing. After reading your post I think I'm standing up pretty good by comparison.

Before: That guy has an iPhone that I can fence for $100, and maybe he has about $100 in cash.

After: That guy has an iPhone with a credit limit in that's probably in the $1000s, and I can buy stuff with that until he wakes up in a ditch.

E*D*M*T*P*J*

Where E=documented experience, D=degree or other credential, M=motivation, T=talent, P=practice, and J= the number of jobs available.

If you have a really high E for COBOL, maybe it will overcome the low J. Same deal with a lot of these other unpopular languages. That's not to say "life" won't develop on some unlikely "planet", but it's not the best place to look.

Standard disclaimer: I'm leaving out some factors, and any ridiculous inference you've just made is not what I meant to imply.

Just for the heck of it, I tried speed test to see what I was actually getting. It was 5.8mbps down/1.24mbps up. Now that I come to think of it, even though my plan was purchased at 3mpbs, they doubled everybody for free recently.

So. Not really upset by my bandwidth and rate caps--they are easy to track and I'm generally 10-15% usage at the end of the month. I'm more upset by them modifying content (e.g., redirecting dns to their search and blocking some sites without saying why). I'm also just a bit annoyed by them not sending a bill; but I discovered that when my service was cut off all I had to do is call them. They used caller ID to pull up the account, asked me to key in a verification, and then took my payment without me having to talk to a human being. The Internet was back on as soon as I got off the phone. It was stupid and smart at the same time--they should have sent me a billing reminder, but they recovered in a very astute way. This reminds me, I should probably call them and check my account st... NO CARRIER.