Raw potatoes and "fresh apples" (which are also raw) are the same color on the inside... Also, baking a potato does not change the color of the inside.

Obama hasn't gone after anyone who didn't leak national security secrets That's an incredibly misleading "fact." Executive Branch employees have retaliated against whistleblowers in the VA scandal, the Fast and Furious scandal, and the Benghazi scandal, to name a few.

Obama's whistleblower protection initiatives don't seem to be doing the job.

Generally speaking, engineers that work for the Federal Government fall under civil service laws and do not belong to unions. These laws, which are intended to prevent a Democrat president from firing all the Republicans when they take office, and then four years later having the new Republican president fire all the Democrats, make it generally hard to fire government employees or to degrade working conditions so much that they quit. Government Engineers are also almost uniformly on the General Schedule (GS scale), which means that their pay and promotion procedures are set by law for the entire GS system, rather than individuals being able to advocate for their own salaries like you'd see in private industry.

Union contracts are written with the same protections for the workers as goals, so the conditions are similar to what you'd see in a union. However, with a union, there's an organization which you're supposed join and pay dues to. Among government engineers, you see similar conditions, but there's no organization to which you pay dues.

My home state is stupid for having this law. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING good to be said about a law that mandates the use of a technology that hasn't been thoroughly studied, and can't possibly have been because the law was created before the technology was.

That said, California also has this law. Not just New Jersey. Great company, guys.

The reason Belichick was struggling with this is because of an NFL rules change this year. In the past, (like, say, in 2008), teams weren't allowed to use imagery from the game currently in progress, but were allowed to use still photos of previous games.

The NFL has changed the rules so now you are allowed to use still images and video of previous games (by watching it on your Microsoft Surface, The Official Tablet of the NFL) but still not photographs or video from the game in progress. The league controls the game day tablets (rather than the teams) and imposes access controls to prevent teams from circumventing it.

Belichick was struggling with the tablet last Sunday because he was trying to get the video of last Sunday's game, and he hasn't figured out how to get past the access controls yet.

The Surface tablets that the NFL uses are in giant ass cases (necessary because games are played in the elements) that say MICROSOFT SURFACE on them in giant letters. It was clearly visible while Dilfer, at least, was talking.The commentators who screwed this up think iPad and "tablet" mean the same thing.

The government enforcing AT&T's monopoly was heavy-handed regulation of everybody EXCEPT AT&T. If the government allowed competing telecommunication services, AT&T wouldn't have been able to stifle technology the way the previous poster was complaining about.

The fact is, the government will use its power to help its friends (AT&T in this case) and hurt its enemies (potential competitors.) This is why we should have as small a government as it takes to fulfill the roles delegated to the National government in the Constitution.

The Constitution doesn't actually say that the Supreme Court is supposed to be the arbiter of Constitutional disputes. That comes from Supreme Court caselaw.

AT&T's monopoly was imposed by the federal government. Government using a lighter touch in telecom regulation in the 1930s would have allowed all those products to market under somebody else's banner. AT&T being an abusive monopoly until they were broken up in the '80s is NOT an example of "We need government because the free market is horrible."

If that's the only line you're drawing, I agree with you on governments having specific, limited powers rather than rights. What you said was still confusing.

You're obscuring the issue. The FCC tried to enforce Net Neutrality on the Internet, and the courts said that they can only enforce it if Congress grants them the power to do so. The FCC then went to Congress and asked them for the power to regulate the Internet, and Congress told them that they are not allowed to do so.

Under current law, the FCC does NOT have the POWER to regulate the Internet.

The FCC's job is to make sure nobody broadcasts on a frequency other than the one they are allotted. Somebody has to do this, because the RF spectrum is limited in capacity by the laws of physics. The Internet does not have a similar limitation. You can add capacity to it by running additional lines. Since they wouldn't be helping everyone not interfere with each other on the radio spectrum, regulating the Internet would be out of scope.

Lucy Koh is well known to people who have been following the Apple vs. Samsung litigation, which has been going on for awhile now.

Also, Koh is American, and has made some pretty laughable rulings in favor of the American company. The fact that not even Lucy Koh buys Apple's bullshit is what makes this newsworthy.

The headsets have been a Motorola sponsorship for a while

I'm confused why the FCC and the administration are looking for wifi specifically in schools. If students are going to be rough on whatever technology equipment you have, you should be getting them PCs, which are easier to repair than tablets. PCs are also suitable for some kinds of work that tablets simply aren't, notably the computer science classes that are all the rage right now. If you're getting PCs for classrooms, it makes more sense to wire them into the network directly. It's cheaper, it enables more types of learning, and you don't have to worry about kids dicking around on their personally owned iPhones instead of learning.

Given these factors, why are we trying to upgrade to next generation wifi specifically? I'd imagine that some schools would want to upgrade their CAT 5 based networks. Why are we not enabling that?

I didn't say it does. The Democratic and Republican parties agree, as their official positions, that the United States should be governed as a democratic republic. (Note the small letters on both adjectives.) No shit the Democrats are "in favor of democracy" and the Republicans are "in favor of republicanism." However, the Democrats are ALSO "in favor of republicanism" and the Republicans are ALSO "in favor of democracy." To an outside observer from a country whose political parties have more meaningful names, this isn't necessarily obvious. In the UK (where the parent poster seems to be from), some of the more major parties have more meaningful names. (For example, the "Labour" party picked their name because they claims to support policies that are better for "Labourers" than business owners.) That's the contrast I was drawing.