They don't need to supply the advertised service?

There is no difference in practice. The more liberal positions of people like Rand Paul will never get any sway within the Republican party.

The murder of Freddie Grey wasn't all that unusual an occurrence, sadly. A person has been killed by police in the US approximately once every 8 hours. It's not always easy to see beforehand which egregious breach of civil rights by the police will result in widespread protests.

Also, white people have a strong tendency to riot for no good reason whatsoever (e.g. the 2011 Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver).

When the rubber meets the road, people like Rand Paul are not actually in favor of downsizing the government. They just want to eliminate restrictions on business and aid to the poor.

If you think Rand Paul has any principles here beyond eliminating regulation of business, you're deluding yourself.

Because until very recently, no ISP has had the power to extort money out of somebody else in this way. Providers have generally made amicable agreements and built out the interconnects together with little issue.

Comcast, as a last-mile provider, has a number of customers to whom it promises to provide a certain level of bandwidth. In order to supply this bandwidth, Comcast needs to create interconnects that are sufficient to supply it. Refusing to build the required interconnects with one specific provider is blatant spite.

And while I can (and do) blame my local government for the monopoly, Comcast has nearly all of its market reach from acquisitions, and it also spends quite a bit of money making sure local governments maintain its local monopolies.

Right. Voluntary because we didn't have any proper net neutrality rules in place.

The thing is, as an internet service provider, it is in the interest of both Comcast and Netflix's ISP to create the new interconnects as needed (in order to drive more customers and ensure a good experience for users). The reason is that Comcast isn't just an ISP. You hit the nail on the head: Comcast doesn't want Netflix to "steal" their customer base. Comcast, as a Cable company, is naturally antagonistic to Netflix, despite the fact that closer ties with Netflix would be good for Comcast's ISP business.

Or it would be, if Comcast didn't have a monopoly in many areas for high-speed Internet access.

Which is why I used the qualifier, "effective".

The impact was the same as outright throttling. The addition of new interconnects is standard practice among ISP's. Comcast decided to break with standard practice and prevent new connections until Netflix coughed up the dough.

http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious-graph-of-netflix-speeds-shows-the-importance-of-net-neutrality/

Verizon, Comcast, and others are arguing this for sure. I'm not so sure I believe that. Remember that the Netflix/Comcast deal cropped up because Comcast began effectively throttling Netflix for its users. That kind of throttling would almost certainly be illegal under the new rules. The deal itself may not be illegal, but the extortion should be.

Yeah, um, no. If that's what he was opposing, he would also be proposing similar rules being enacted by somebody else. He's not. This is just a smokescreen: he wants to kill Net Neutrality because he likes the rich people who tell him he should. It doesn't help that he thinks all government is evil and should be abolished.

I'll be very interested to see how well Bernie Sanders does. Because he is no friend of the rich. I doubt he has much of a chance in the primaries, because his politics just aren't all that popular (sadly), and he's going to have a hard time raising money. But he'd be amazing as a candidate.

If the scientists who published the study were able to access the data, others can too.

And it's really rich claiming that "politics shouldn't enter into it". This law is a political ploy to attempt to forestall action on climate change. Period. There is no scientific merit to be had here, just political maneuvering.

Google might show you ads that could entice you to buy something you might not otherwise buy.

Phishers might steal your account and, if you have Google Wallet attached, might use your account to spend money. Or they might use your e-mail to gain access to other accounts (e.g. bank accounts).

The complaint is that companies are hiring people from outside the US because they can pay them less. The answer to that is simple: crack down on wage discrimination.

Except that it's often surprising how easy it is to de-anonymize data. I would definitely not want my medical data made public, even with anonymization, because I know that some clever person may later come up with a way to link my identity to my medical data using a method that the original researchers never considered.

As for temperature data, the nice thing there is that we have independent data sets. For temperature records, for example, we have satellite measurements which are fully public.

In actuality, this restriction would have essentially zero impact on the scientific conclusions: it's just a way to attempt to block action on climate change. People could say, "But hey, some fraction of this data was gleaned from private sources," and use that as an attempt to throw out the whole thing, despite the fact that removing the private data doesn't change the overall conclusion.

Well, that would completely eliminate a wide variety of potential research avenues. Many scientific studies are only possible because the data is confidential. Medical studies in particular: you really don't want the public to have access to the private medical data which is used in medical studies.

In this specific case, there's a lot of international temperature data that is simply not available publicly, largely due to a variety of local political concerns.