Maybe. Nothing (today) forces TWB in that scenario to lease outside plant spectrum to anyone.

Although, as noted in my replies above, there's plenty of reason to suspect unbundling will be a requirement down the road, so this positions them well to quickly profit from it when it happens.

That's fine. That's almost certainly going to happen at some point anyway (given the rules forbidding local broadband initiatives being overturned today), so it positions them well to profit no matter who you want to be your end-use connectivity provider.

Again - go back to ECON101.

When companies' costs are raised, especially in a manner where they are raised on all the various merchants of a service, prices generally go up to account for it.

The law of capitalism means that it is IMPOSSIBLE for a regulation to raise the price of anything - all it can do is reduce the profit a corporation takes.

Bull. Shit.

Regulation means compliance. Compliance means paperwork. Paperwork means overhead. Overhead means expenses. Expenses mean increased costs passed on to customers.

You owe the Oracle a copy of a transcript showing that you have passed ECON101.

How companies like Time Warner will defeat Net Neutrality: Self-divestiture.

The "Time Warner Cable/Internet" you know of today becomes a myriad of companies specifically designed to continue on with business as usual while still adhering to the letter of the law:

- Time Warner Broadband - a company which does nothing more than operate Hybrid-Fiber-Coax outside plant (the actual wires on the actual poles).

- Time Warner Cable - a company which leases spectrum from TWB (above), and provides cable-video service on that outside plant

- Time Warner Transit - a company which does nothing more than provide wholesale (non-retail, non-mass-market) internet connectivity to ISPs and other service providers. As a wholesaler, TWT is not encumbered by net neutrality regulations.

- Time Warner Internet - a company which leases spectrum from TWB (above) to provide IP connectivity to end-users. It obtains *all* of its internet connectivity from TWT (above), and charges metered billing to all its end-users (you pay a flat rate PLUS you pay "by the bit", the same way you pay for water or electric today).

Netflix, et al, will have to tithe properly to TWT if they want access to TWI's customers, since TWT is the only path to GET to TWI's customers. The FCC can't really punish TWI for this move, without opening up an even messier Pandora's box of trying to tell ISPs "which upstreams they HAVE to obtain connectivity from".

Yes, it'll all be a LITTLE more complicated than that, but they've got teams of lawyers to work out the details.

While I am philosophically opposed to taxation in general, yours is a proposal I could live with as an "interim" measure... once people are used to directly contributing in this fashion, it's a natural next step to simply removing the form and letting people buy/fund things directly.

Google is shooting from orbit, well outside the purview of the usual "airspace" rules.

And this isn't about public airspace (ie, over public property) this is about private airspace (ie, over private property and below the 500' threshold).

With many drones disabling the GPS receiver is either [a] difficult or [b] strongly ill-advised (as it's used to make station-keeping in a breeze much easier and automatic as opposed to a constant fight against air current).

Re: Fire Departments

What happens today in the scenario you describe (where the neighbor's house is on fire) is that the subscription fire department comes out and provides preventative protection to your building so that it doesn't catch on fire in the first place.

Re: Roads

If you don't like the tolls on the roads you have to drive to get to work, maybe you need to move somewhere else. I live in a part of teh country where it's not uncommon for someone to own a house at the end of four to five miles of road where theirs is the only house on the road, at the far end. Why should everyone else be paying for upkeep on that road, subsidizing their choice to live in the middle of nowhere?

Re: A la carte tax and the military

Are you kidding? It'd be a GOOD thing if our military was pared down due to lack of general support for it. Here's the thing about Americans: When there is a genuine need to step up and take action, we are willing - nay, proud - to do so. But that happens ever so rarely (WWI, WWII), compared to the multitude of times where we decide to be Team America World Police, mostly because someone has to justify the hundreds of billions of dollars that got spent on this weapon system or that carrier group. Let the people who want to protect Kuwaiti oil pay to do so. Let the people who want to oust Saddam do so. And if those people aren't able to raise enough money to do so, then it's a "vote with your pocketbook" way of demonstrating that there isn't enough popular support for those deployments in the first place.

Speak for yourself.

I want services, and I'm willing to pay... for those services that I want.

I don't want to pay for stuff I have no use for. If you want to pay for those things, because you think you have a use for them, or because it warms the cockles of your heart to provide those things to other people, feel free to do so. But you don't have a right to make that decision for anyone else but yourself.

Now you can do that by having each person pay an "individually crafted" tax bill, but that's silly.

You can do that by moving everything into either subscription services (like a number of fire departments have done), or tolls (for using the roads).

I prefer the latter myself, but am open to the former if you can come up with a way to make it work.

I wish I had modpoints to give you for this.

The petition system is truly ingenious.

It's a way for the administration to line up 10-, 20-, 30-, 100-thousand people who think the administration is wrong, and then have delivered to them a customized message which tells the signers how wrong they are about things on a very specific topic.

The White House Petitions are designed to serve the administration, not the citizenry.

I'll take "Reasons why I'll never live in a house governed by an HOA", for $1000, Alex?

I'm happy to cede world dominance to another country. I don't feel like my "nationalistic ego" is so damned large that I have to sink the country's economy just to ensure that my country is 'running things' or whatever.

One of the key features keeping the classic alive is also potentially its use in cars. For the longest time, even when I had an iPhone, I maintained an iPod Classic, because its UI was much move navigable one-handed while driving, to drill down to find a particular playlist, or artist, or whatever. You could, by feel alone, figure out what you were doing in many cases, only glancing at the unit to determine when to hit the select button, etc.

It wasn't until I had a car which actually integrated my iPod into its in-dash entertainment system that I finally stopped worrying about that.