And yet no one related to the debate on anything to do with the internet is even remotely talking about bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, except for the right-wing demagogues who are trying to conflate it with "Net Neutrality" in the minds of their adherents, because it benefits them (and their corporate buddies) for people to think Obama and the FCC want to impose that kind of thing. It's scaremongering, and it's dishonest.

And while one or two may talk about it, the key word here is " a handful". I've heard politicians propose we should bring back the Draft, but do you think it has even a snowball's chance in hell of passing anytime soon? There's a majority of support for legalizing marijuana, among the overall US population, but even that's still not gotten through yet.

Not really. If Comcast is against it, I'm pretty sure that I'm okay with it.

Doing that would probably just push the FCC to move to mandate local loop unbundling though. After all, the various companies have already divested, so it's even easier to say that the one who owns/maintains and rents out the physical infrastructure to the ISP company is itself a utility, and that it needs to offer that same service to anyone who wants to compete with the ISP.

The good news is that this doesn't preclude future rule changes if they prove necessary. One way to look at this is that the FCC has been very "hands off" up until the point where events proved there was a need for them to step in, such as the recent crap with throttling of Netflix in order to extort payments from Comcast/etc. If new/different abuses occur, and there's a similar groundswell of public opinion that it needs to change, then I do hope we can get something like local loop unbundling added so that there's real competition in the ISP market in order to address it.

The good news is that nothing in this prevents local loop unbundling in the future. The other thing that many people are missing is that this isn't simply the government stepping in to affect the ISP market. What they're doing is stepping in to prevent local monopolies in the ISP market from abusing that monopoly against other markets, such as the streaming video market, or anything else that takes place over the internet.

Yes, and the various companies will likely sue and claim Title II doesn't apply. To that I say "good luck", because it's pretty clear to me (although IANAL) that they're common carriers, not information services.

AOL and Compuserve were information services. They provided something more than just a pipe. My ISP today does nothing of the sort, and is functionally indistinguishable from any other ISP other than the number I call for tech support when it goes down. Even better, some of the telecom companies have been playing fast and loose, classifying some of their buildouts as Title II in order to take advantage of financial benefits from the Government, even while they claim they don't have to play by those rules.

Agreed, Smith never said there was no role for the Government to play. The Government can certainly abuse its power, such as the King deciding to give the East India Company a monopoly on the trade in tea, but it wasn't as if Smith believed the Government was the only source of abuse - Guilds and others had been just as keen to corner certain markets, and if anything, if the King got involved it was usually because the given corporation or guild or whomever had been paying him off for the privilege.

Saying that the Government shouldn't artificially distort a functioning market is a reasonable argument, but that does not mean that the Government should never intervene, especially not to stop monopoly abuses. In this case the Government is stepping in to protect competition, such as in the streaming video or VOIP market. I would argue that they should have gone further, to local loop unbundling, but that doesn't mean this isn't a step in the right direction.

Also, it's no longer the norm that everyone marries in their twenties. Most of the people I know who waited until their 30s wound up happier, because they not only had a better idea of what they were looking for in a relationship/partner, but were also more financially stable (as well as emotionally).

Better yet, have one with fake skin so you can cut it off and do the "reveal", Terminator style.

Dear gods no.

This is a terrible, terrible idea. You know what you should track? Task completion. If the job gets done, who cares how many bathroom or coffee breaks someone took, or how much time they spent posting on Slashdot? You hired them to do a job, not to own them 8 hours out of the day. Trying to micromanage your employees and turn them into robots is only going to make them utterly miserable, which will make things worse in the long run.

For the record, I have no idea what they have or have not broken.

As a student of history though, I can say that the last thing you want to do if you've broken someone's codes is to clue them in to the fact that you can do so. In World War 2, the US Navy had broken several of the Japanese codes, including their diplomatic code, and was reading their encrypted radio traffic, enabling such victories as the Battle of Midway.

At one point, someone in (I think) the OSS got the bright idea to break into a Japanese embassy in a neutral country and steal their code book. They successfully stole the code book, but when the theft was discovered, the Japanese promptly changed all the codes, preventing the Navy from reading the message traffic until they broke the codes again. Now, I'm taking that entirely from memory, and many details may be off or outright wrong, but even so, it still serves as a hypothetical example.

That's why so much of this seems insane to me - not just because of how horribly toxic this sort of thing would be for a free society, but because of how counterproductive it actually is for what the NSA's mission is. If the Nazis know there's a backdoor in USEncrypt that the NSA can read, they're going to use their own system instead.

Tata and Infosys, and any companies with a business model like that, just need to straight up be banned from doing business in the US. I have some sympathy for the impoverished wage slave coders that they put in those jobs, but I have absolutely zero for the managers and up that are doing nothing but profit at the expense of U.S. coders.

We need to fix the immigration and foreign guest worker systems to discourage these kinds of bottom feeding abuses, and limit it to only situations where no one is available - not questions of quality (which is highly nebulous and therefore abusable), and certainly not "we can't find people at the (ridiculously low) rates we want to pay". Let the markets actually work, and pay people with in-demand skills what they deserve.

And if those coders in India or whatever want to immigrate, make the process reasonable, suitability focused (maybe a point system like some countries use to assess immigrants, such as points for education, ability to speak english, etc), and make the companies pay to bring them over on a freely transferrable work/residency visa, such that their ability to stay in the US (for the duration of the visa) isn't tied to that one employer.

The problem with your thinking is that it's usually not the soldiers that are deciding on the killing, it's the politicians and the generals. I'll certainly grant that having robots doing the killing won't make it any worse on those politicians, but let's take this to the extension that both sides are using such things. All of a sudden, nobody is getting killed other than the robots.

Until the day comes when the robots decide to kill their masters, because they're tired of killing other robots, that is. :)

I'd say it's a good career path (and I'd hope so, since I'm in it) generally, not in a government specific vein. If anything, I'd say most government agencies aren't going to see the kind of growth that corporate IT security will, because most of the government has been aware that they needed to secure their systems in ways that many corporations didn't.

Why? Because most non-bank/financial companies didn't really take the threat all that seriously. "I'm just a big-box retail store, IT is a cost center, not a profit driver" or the like. That's changing, I think - hardly a month goes by without some major breach getting into the news, and those are just the ones we hear about. CEOs are starting to get fired over it.

Moreover, it's not a job that can be automated - or rather, it's already automated, but you need someone who knows what they're doing to manage the bots, and you always will (until the singularity at least, after which all bets on everything are off).

Some of the agencies do have a certain "cool factor" to them. I'm certain that the NSA's cachet has fallen in the post-Snowden era, certainly, but prior to that, don't you think there'd be some allure to the (perceived) notion of getting paid to legally hack the living crap out of bad guys? Sure, you couldn't brag about it on the internet, but within "the community" people would know. And of course, the CIA has the whole James Bond/Jack Ryan/etc glamour going for it (or did).

Overall though, it's certainly part of the tradeoff in government service in general. The upside is getting some stability, reasonably good time off (all federal holidays plus 13 days of vacation and 13 sick days per year, going to 19.5 days of vacation after 3 years), lots of free training (the government is far better about paying for this than most companies, or at least they used to be), and generally good work experience. You don't get paid nearly as much, but in many cases you can move to the private sector later and make that money, either in the corporate world or in contracting. If you stay until retirement, you get an actual pension (unlike most of the corporate world) on top of your own 401(k) type savings. I've known a lot of people who retired from government/military and went straight to contracting, sometimes doing the exact same job, except for more money (and on top of the retirement check they were then getting).