The right wing should be opposed on free-market principles. The left wing should be opposed on environmental grounds. So which politicians should be in favour of this regulation again?

The apolitical ones, untainted by all that divisive right/left idealism. You know, the ones everyone votes for: Democrats and Republicans.

If you think that's not Interstate Commerce, I have some marijuana to sell you.

I don't get why I would want my ISP to have a say in whether or not (or how!) I disable my personal computer. But I also don't get why I'd want my government to have a role in that discussion either.

It's "self-sustaining" until you run out of whales. They say that by the year 3000, there won't be any of them left up there. This isn't some virtually limitless resource like sardines, which are capable of supplying all the oil we'll ever need.

If I were to justify my misspelling as an attempt to invent a new word that includes the meanings of both "vicious" and "viscous" would you call my bluff? Oh shit, I mean: what if I asked you that, but didn't say anything about it being a bluff?

I think "mining" is a pretty damn euphemistic way to talk about viscious slaughter of all the moon's whales.

Maybe I lack patience, but really, why are we still writing text based code?

Why did you submit your question as written sentences? Surely you could have expressed whatever you're asking, by carving a few notches on a stick, taking a picture and posting to imgur.

I lack the patience to try to figure out what you're trying to say, as text. Ask again, in stick, where we can communicate more efficiently.

Speech issues aside...

I think it's not a terribly uncommon opinion (I might even be in the majority on this, but maybe not) to feel that speed limits are generally bullshit. Especially on the wide-open highway, which is the most common place to see speedtrap-warning light-flashing, anyway. Bullshit laws should be violated, and it is in everyone's interest for everyone else to ignore them, disrespect them, resist them, mock them, undermine them, and shit upon those who enact them and enforce them. "Fuck you pigs" and so on. I want people to be able to drive 90 MPH in arbitrarily-marked 75 MPH zones, and I want them to get away with breaking the law, just as I hope to get away with breaking the law, too.

Usually. There's a catch, and this is where it gets really fun.

I've been caught speeding several times over the last few decades, and yet despite what I wrote above, about it being good for people to get away with it, I also think that every time I got caught, I deserved it and it was also probably in society's interest that I didn't get away with it. WTF?! Contradiction?

No. I deserved it, not because I was speeding, but because I was inattentive enough to get caught. I really was driving unsafely, but speed wasn't the main safety problem.

Speedtraps are an "are you paying attention?" TEST! And while I want people to generally get away with speeding and for speeding laws to not be successfully enforced, and for the cops who try to enforce them to have horrible days of frustration and failure with nothing to show for it, I don't want people to get away with failing "are you paying attention?" pop quizzes. I'd like everyone to pass those pop quizzes, but of course, we all know not everyone will. And if people fail their pop quizzes too often, I want 'em to flunk out of driving on public roads. So maybe not-so-fast on the "fuck you pigs" that I said above. I usually mean it, but this time, there's a lot less conviction behind the angry words. Sorry, pigs! I suppose I owe one of you a beer for all the "fuck you"s.

Flashers: you're helping daydreamers, space cases, vision-impaired, mirror-makeup queens, drunks, dumbfucks, etc cheat on their pop quizzes. Do you sincerely think that is a good idea? I am totally with you in disrespecting the law and thinking the government is, on average (with some admitted exceptions) is generally evil and that usually good for everyone, that it be opposed, restricted, resisted, mocked, shat-upon, disregarded, etc. But "are you paying attention?" tests really are a good idea and in the interests of public safety, no?

You're not worried about people speeding, but I don't think I have ever sat next to any other driver for very long, who didn't eventually rant about one of those people out there, who is driving like a dumbfuck. The cellphone jabberer is almost cliche, where just driving behind them watching how their car moves, you can tell what they're doing without even needing to see them holding the phone. Testing is how you're going to weed those fuckers out.

All we need, is just for it to be a fair test. It can be sudden and demand some quick reactions, but if it's further away than what a car should reasonably be expected to ever have to deal with, then whoa there. The cop shouldn't have concealment or look like something other than a cop (an "innocent" van, for example). But if you want to implement the test as an "innocent" van that suddenly looks like a cop and then starts measuring your speed so people have one second after that to get under the limit, ok. That sounds like a good test.

No, not the code. It's about giving freedom to the user. With GPLed code, nothing prevents a user from being able to maintain their system, except their own limitations (budget, tech knowledge, time, etc). With BSD-licensed code, the user may be able to maintain the system (if the developer opted to also BSD-license it to them) or they might have no (legal) options at all, other than to go begging on their hands and knees to the developer and agreeing to whatever terms are demanded. (It's almost as though, in the user-developer relationship, there are [at least] two perspectives. Imagine that!)

Some people, if they have ever stood in the shoes of a user rather than a developer (or been in a complicated love triangle, where there's a library/compiler/whatever hacker, an application hacker (who lives in both worlds at once), and a user), have a problem with that whole "go begging on your hands and knees" part, thinking it to have some faint whiff of not-freedom in it. I think this only happens to those people who don't create their entire systems from scratch, like when that guy who wrote that text editor, suddenly found himself needing to use someone else's printer driver. Because he was too much of a wimp to build his own printer, I guess. You know, a zealot.

You still pirated because you said it had DRM.
The DRM was removed.

WTF? When was DRM removed?

What i would like to know is what separates Facebook from AOL, Myspace, AIM, ICQ, BBS etc that came and went.

Facebook is more integrated into the rest of the web than all those other things.

None of the things you just mentioned, had millions of other sites embedding "like buttons" which give free intelligence to them whenever someone loads that other site's pages. Facebook, Google [Analytics], AddThis, and a few other things (Comscore and Quantcast) do something sort of similar (but at greater cost to themselves). I don't remember seeing AOL/MySpace/AIM/ICQ play that game. Go ahead, tell me what script or iframe tag MySpace (or AOL, ha!) ever got some other site to serve to all their users.

AOL and MySpace never (AFAIK) ran an OpenID server, or if they did, they convinced hardly anyone to use it. Facebook did that, except went a step further and did their own protocol instead of OpenID, and lots of sites use it. Look at the "sign in with" part of this page and tell me you see AOL or MySpace. The four (and only four) companies you see there, fucked the users by deviating from standards, and as their reward they get an explicit mention/branding instead of a generic enter-your-openid-URL blank. (If this ain't proof that Evil Is Basically A Good Idea, then I don't know what is. But that's beside the point.)

Do you remember ever seeing other sites show free ads to users, for MySpace or AOL, and where the webmasters thought it was basically a good/sane idea in their self interest? I can think of lots of sites I visit, where that site says "follow us on Facebook" complete with a link to Facebook. Facebook pays $0.00000000 CPM for this ad. It's a dumb ad too, since if you follow the link, you just see a scaled down abbreviated version of that site's own content and links back to that site. (Well, that plus some additional ads that Facebook got paid to run -- and where some of those ads, might even be for competitors to site you came from!)

If in 1997 you told you something like that could possibly exist, I would have laughed in your face. I still do laugh in your face in 2014 over the same thing, but it's a laugh of madness, drowned in the cacophony of a world gone mad.

Facebook is a bad site (there's no reason you should ever point your browser there), but on the other hand, they were brilliantly clever compared to all that came before them, in terms of getting value out of other sites. When Site X becomes the next big thing, there's a reasonably good chance that every pageload they acquire, will also help Facebook a little. Can you say MySpace was ever in such a position? Ever heard of dialup BBS that gained free data, sent from the user's computer, whenever a user picked any menu option on any of a few million other BBSes? Did you ever go to any site, where if you had firewalled off ICQ's servers, that other unrelated site wasn't able to offer all its usual interactivity?

Facebook is a totally different beast than MySpace, with basically nothing in common with it. MySpace was just some website that was popular for a while. Facebook is Shub-Internet.

Geeks: "The public does a bunch of very insecure things. Someone could abuse all the myriad mistakes, where we don't even vaguely try to adopt best practices, and they do something bad."

News: "These people have started exploiting everyone's known bad practices. So have these people. And these people. And them. And them."

Geeks: "Also, theoretically, these people and these people and these other people, could started exploiting our bad practices too."

Public: "Yeah, but that's hypothetical."

Snowden: "The government has decided to exploit everyone's bad practices."

Public: "HEY!!!!"

President: "Oh. Ok, we'll stop exploiting it quite so much."

Problem solved.

Geeks: "No, act--"

I SAID, PROBLEM SOLVED.

but how long until an airline gets sued because a passenger was unable to take an emergency-related call?

If you leave it to the market and then a passenger chooses to buy a ticket on a no-phones airline, then it's the call receiver who is responsible for declining the emergency call. "Our customer wanted to be in a phoneless environment and paid for that, furthermore demonstrating his preference. Sue him for not taking your call."

Furthermore, it's hard to imagine any scenario where anyone could ever have a reasonable expectation for being able to take an emergency call. Even if I fab an extreme over-the-top example (as I, like anyone, would love to do).

Guy happens to be the Last Doctor In The World. He says, "I want to fly on someone else's airplane, but I want to not listen to anyone else talking." So he buys a ticket on a no-phones airline. While waiting in the terminal, he turns off his phone. One second later, the President's wife calls him, and leaves this voice mail: "The President is choking on pizza! What do I do? WHAT DO I DO!?" but since the doctor turned off his phone, he doesn't see the call come in. He boards his flight, oblivious to the coming disaster.

Mid-flight, one of the passengers starts talking to another passenger. The doctor screams, "hey, shut the fuck up!" and everyone quiets down, because you never know when you might want to be on The Last Doctor In The World's good side. The captain makes an announcement over the intercom. The doctor glares, hatefully. He doesn't make a scene, but he writes the captain's name in his no-treatment book. The engines drone on, and he grimaces with discomfort, noting he's never going to treat anyone who works at Boeing, where they make such loud engines.

An hour later, he gets off the plane. He turns on his phone, and sees a bunch of voicemails from the First Lady. He calls her back. "Get your husband to cough up the pizza," he offers, rolling his eyes, but his advice has arrived too late. The president has already asphyxiated to death.

Unfortunately, right after the president's death, a bill arrived on his desk, which would have outlawed mass puppy shredding. It didn't get signed quickly, because it took a while for the then-vice-president to catch up. So one hundred thousand puppies where shredded, while it was still legal to do so. One of those puppies had an important passphrase tattooed on its ear, but now it has been shredded. Without the passphrase, no one was able to stop the nuclear launch that resulted in the deaths of three billion people.

One of the people whose gardener died in the nuclear war, sues Samsung for designing a phone that has an off switch, based on the idea that people HAVE TO receive emergency calls, no matter what anyone (even the owner of the phone) wants.

You're on the jury. What's your decision? If you rule in favor of the plaintiff, Samsung owes someone $3 to replace the plant that the dead gardener never got around to watering. And I will harbor a hypothetical-$3 grudge against you, from now to the end of time. OTOH, if you rule for the defendent, then I agree with you, my friend. What's it going to be?

It's the FCC. Their argument will be that they're banning a radio tech (and in a specific context, without regard for what ever someone is saying over that radio), not speech itself. See that person in the seat next to you? Tell 'em how unfair King George's tea taxes are, and how unfair it is that Parliament doesn't ave a seat for us. The FCC won't stop you.

The reason we should shoot this down, is that there's no technical reason to ban the tech. The FCC doing this is merely a horrible. unnecessary, and un-American. But it's not unconstitutional. It's not as though the framers ever thought to add "don't be evil." They just assumed we didn't want evil government. Little did they know.

I agree. Someone once told me I should not go out at night, walk naked (except for a hundred dollar bill pasted to each of my nipples) to the highest-crime district in my city, and start yelling "Some of my best friends are you people!" They said I would be safer if I behaved differently, stayed home instead, and STFU-ed up with my crazy rants.

I explained that even if I behaved differently, that doesn't stop the Russians from launching a nuclear ICBM strike, killing us all, including me. Safe is safe, unsafe is unsafe, there are no degrees in between, and all of us face one single adversary who has one simple agenda.