Because while they're eager to keep an 8th century moral code (and dress code for women), they seem decidedly more modern in their choice of military forces and interest (but not yet attainment of) nuclear weapons.

Because, you know, when you're the Grand Ayatollah, some "Bikinis" are OK but definitely not others.

HA HA HA hee hee hee ha. Wait, you were serious?

Academia, technically, is part of the "real world." It's just the part with 180 degree different rules and priorities than the "industry" part that employs most Americans is. I have plenty of friends in academia and I love them to death but when we compare "what's happening at work" I will talk about the life or death of some multi-million dollar project that's keeping me up at night, and they will reveal their big pain point at work is that some guy caused an uproar at a conference because he give a citation in a paper to an ally and finessed his work around giving a citation to someone who he got in a snit with several years ago about different interpretations of a theory.

Now, that doesn't make one job better than the other but they sure are different. As they say, same planet, different worlds. Or, as the great academic Dr. Ray Stantz once told a colleague, "Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything. You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."

You are correct, it has gotten a lot more lazy recently. Once upon a time, when newspapers were printed once or twice a day and TV news aired only at 6 pm and 10 pm, there was a lot more time to get your facts straight and - most importantly - request a balancing comment from the "other side of the story." Today, there are so many sources of "news" - heavy finger quotes there - that operate in near real time that people are exposed to lots of rumormongering in the guise of journalism due to pressure to be first to get clicks (and the low reportorial standards that accompany a rush to publish in minutes).

Generally speaking, if I see something sensational online I will wait until I see it from an outlet that hires actual reporters (like CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, et. al.) instead of "bloggers" who just scour Twitter for unsubstantiated scoops (like Gawker properties, Deadspin, whatever) or "writers" who are just paid to write opinions with no pretense at balance (like Slate, HuffPo, Fox News, et. al.). So even if Facebook "told" me that Robin Williams was dead at noon, I was perfectly content to wait until someone did some fact checking and reported it on cnn.com two hours later before I believed it.

Iraq: 4400 American lives lost - some of whom were people some of us knew and loved - in the service of a falsely-premised, bullshit-justified war. So fuck you.

Oh, and if you care about that sort of thing, we also pissed away $1.1 trillion in Iraq. Which is, like, kind of a incredible shit-ton of money.

Also, fuck you again for diminishing the loss of the thousands of American personnel and hundreds of thousands (if not more) of Iraqi civilians who died.

I have yet to hear George Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell or George Tenet weigh in on the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Or did you mean someone else?

Sometimes there actually are real bogey men dictators. The Bush administration lied terribly about the rationale for invading Iraq 11 years ago. Does that necessarily mean that all the countries of Europe that are decrying the activities of Vladimir Putin today are lying? Because Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande are not exactly the first people I think of when I hear the term "neo-con."

The Slashdot crowd can't have their cake and eat it too. "Classic" Bell Labs did a tremendous amount of innovative research that transformed the telecommunications and computer industries. But they did it precisely because they were a regulated monopoly that had no competitors and fat, government-regulated margins. In essence, the old AT&T spent lavishly on Bell Labs projects that in many cases they not only didn't make money on but were actually forbidden (like UNIX) to make money on because they had no need to be competitive.

But on the flip side, everyone here seems to agree that monopolies are bad and competition is good. Which, for consumers and shareholders, I agree is ideal. But if you're looking for someone to subsidize basic research with little or no investment return potential, don't look to a competitive company to do it. Even Google's "research" is almost always connected to a profit-making initiative, although whether they actually bring it to market is a much different question.

So long story short - the old Bell Labs only made sense as a luxury that could be afforded by a monopoly that had cash to burn. If you want competition, you don't get businesses that can throw cash into a burn pit for the benefit of science.

Ugh. Please don't make me sound like I'm defending Comcast, which I loathe.

But the fact is that every large consumer-oriented business has a part of their playbook that every employee who touches the customer should be a salesperson. Are you the McDonald's cashier? You're selling. Are you the rep in a Verizon store? You're selling. Those are easy. Do you work the fry machine? Then you don't talk to the customer, and you're not selling. That's the difference in your example.

But pretty much every consumer services megacorp has done the research and learned that every "touch" you have with a customer needs to be a selling opportunity, and you get very good sales results - which seems counterintuitive, but it's true - if you do so. When you call for support, that's a touch and up-sell opportunity even if you were angry when you called in; same when the DSL/cable installer shows up to your house, even if they are late showing up. You may be angry at first, but a shitload of real-world research shows that most consumers are simply unaware of any given company's latest/greatest/whatever, and you might be interested in it once you have vented your frustration with $MEGACORP.

Again, I have no love for Comcast (I am a Xfinity subscriber in Seattle for TV/Internet and for more than two years I have struggled to read my cable bill and figure it out in a line item fashion) but they are certainly no more evil than almost any other large company in this respect.

I have no idea if it's true, but a story used to circulate among Apple employees that one engineer worked up the bravery to leave a note on His Steveness's windshield that suggested he "Park Different." There was reportedly an effort to track down the offending employee by Apple security but it never bore fruit.

I get your drift, but the Earned Income Tax Credit program is a poor example of something to pick on. EITC is one of the very few financial aid programs out there that both Republicans and Democrats like because they agree it's effective. The short version is that the EITC rewards you for going out and getting a job, which is where the "earned income" in the name comes from. It was created to combat the paradox that getting a low-wage job can disqualify you from getting certain types of welfare, resulting in you making less money by working than if you just lived off government assistance. So EITC "grosses up" your working income to make sure you have an incentive to be gainfully employed and you aren't losing out on benefits because you're working.

You don't get the EITC by being jobless or living off public assistance; it in essence gives you an additional incentive to work. So while you may think that our welfare programs are busted in general, EITC is not the piece of that program to criticize.

This doesn't necessarily invalidate your point, but your recap of the results of the Judge Greene decision and the divestiture of AT&T is a bit off. The original Department of Justice rationale - this suit being pursued under the conservative Reagan administration, which you would have thought wouldn't wanted to do it - for splitting up AT&T was that it was an un-natural combination of heavily regulated industries (local phone service) and largely unregulated industries (long distance). The ultra-conservative DoJ anti-trust bigwig who actually pursued the case did so on the doctrinal belief that you should either be in a regulated business (rates set by a local Public Utility Commission, as local phone services are/were), or in a competitive business (market pricing) but not both since it allowed the competitive business to be subsidized by the regulated business and distort competition.

What was going on was actually the reverse - AT&T made lots of money selling long distance but not much selling local phone service, and in effect it was subsidizing your local phone bill with what expensive long distance service cost. So, while opening up the LD market to lots of competition did in fact drive prices down for consumers, most people's local phone bills went up because the ILECs were no longer being subsidized. Local phone company "innovation" pretty much went into the toilet (remember, they toyed with making modem users buy separate additional phone lines, and their idea of "broadband" in the early '90s was still ISDN). It wasn't until the advent of ADSL as a way to compete with other emerging broadband technologies forced their hand in the late '90s (in concert with the 1996 telecom deregulation act) that there was much innovation or cost savings for customers in play.

So in some ways the Ma Bell breakup was an interesting exemplar of the "law of unintended consequences" and a demonstration of how heavily regulated services can sometimes drive higher prices and lower innovation than ones with a more open market. Competition will always make a company move faster than regulatory bureaucracy - so your "HEAVY regulation" mentioned above would need to not just be regulation per se but the type that also incentivized investment and competition.

By the way, if you're really interested in the Ma Bell divestiture and its consequences, be sure to pick up The Deal of the Century by the Washington Post reporter who covered the trial and its aftermath.

That's what happens today, except it is spent on TV ads, direct mail, paid media placements and talking heads. Paying people for their votes directly would probably be cheaper for everyone involved except the advertising and PR firms who reap a windfall each election cycle.

I don't actually like the idea of buying votes - I think accepting money for a vote is fundamentally prostituting your most basic civic rights. But that's a choice and I don't see why prostitution isn't legalized, either. I guess my point is just that "vote selling" is only one degree of separation away from the status quo today and might actually be a more efficient way of getting to the same place.

Nope, sorry. For three reasons:

1. 1.) VoLTE on one carrier is not necessarily compatible with VoLTE on another carrier. VoLTE is not plain VoIP - like Skype etc. - where it is a pure "over the top" Layer 7 application that any IP network should support. It is built at a much lower layer in the OSI stack, and each carrier's implementation will be optimized for their own network and may not be compatible with another carrier's.
2. 2.) To roam on "any network" (at least in the US) requires your phone to be able to access all the different LTE bands licensed to different carriers. Most phones sold in the US don't because it costs extra money to support the frequency bands of multiple carriers which is pointless when 95% of customers will use the phone for its two-year lifetime on the carrier that they bought it from
3. 3.) Also - to roam onto another network, by the way that GSM cellular technology works, your home carrier must have a roaming agreement with the "other" carrier. Generally speaking, the big US carriers have roaming agreements for international use and for remote rural use, but not in domestic areas where they have their own networks. The simple explanation is that if you lose your Verizon signal for a second and your phone tries to go roam onto T-Mobile, that costs VZ a lot of money.... whereas in that area it's more likely that you will get a VZ tower back within a few minutes and not cost them any roaming fees if you didn't attach to a roaming network. TL;DR - somebody will always pay more if you are using a network other than your "home" carrier, and that somebody will end up being you - at a rate that will make it economically unfeasible.

Lastly, if you thought that VoLTE was going to mean that you could just use any given carrier at your convenience, I'm sorry but that's just not how cellular works. In the mobile (GSM and its successor technologies like LTE) world, you have a "home" carrier (who gave you your SIM and sends you your monthly bill) and you will always use your home carrier whenever possible because it's less expensive for them. To use another carrier - even if they have better coverage in a certain area, and your device has the other carrier's frequencies enabled - means that your home carrier will absorb roaming charges and they will pass those along to you. With a markup. So it makes no economic sense for you or your carrier to just let you use the network that has the strongest signal in any given area... or if they do, be prepared to pay out the frickin' wazoo for every time you surf the web on a carrier that isn't your home provider.

Did you actually use any smartphones in 2006?

The typical smartphone of 2006 - think BlackBerry Curve or Motorola Q - was a keyboard-driven (it may or may not have had a touchscreen, and if it did it probably had a stylus) and optimized to do e-mail and calendaring passably well. The experience of browsing the web on BB OS or Windows Mobile (or, God help you, Windows CE) was so painful as to be something you did in a pinch because you had to, not because you wanted to. Built-in apps were generally carrier-loaded crapware. Don't even get me started on how difficult it was to do things like, you know, make phone calls.

So the smartphone of 2006 was basically a decent mobile e-mail device, and that's it. The all-touchscreen, web-friendly user experience of the iPhone - remember, back then stuff like "pinch to zoom" was a big deal that nobody had seen before - was radically different. It may have been evolutionary, but it certainly wasn't incremental.

News flash: basement-bound nerds think being a world champion-caliber athlete is easy. Film at 11.

Let go of your hatred of the dumb-ass jocks who got laid in high school but could never compete on a professional level, and consider that it might not be so brainless to be a world-class athlete. All this study says is that the very best athletes have learned to do it on autopilot, but for everyone else a lot of thinking is involved.

Geeks can actually simulate the experience to a certain degree, given that some modern video games have evolved to a high degree of realism. Play "Madden NFL" on an expert difficulty level, and you'll see just how hard it can be for a NFL quarterback to try to read the movements of 11 defensive players simultaneously and pick the best route to throw the ball... even when you don't actually have to have the arm strength to throw it. Play "MLB the Show" on an expert level and you'll see how hard it can be to react in a tiny fraction of a second whether you're swinging at a 100 mph straight-ahead fastball, an 85 mph changeup that looks just like a fastball, a 90 mph slider that stars out straight but breaks away from the pitcher's arm, or a 70 mph knuckleball that just floats all over the fucking place.

TL;DR - (some) video games these days are good enough to replicate just how hard professional level athletics are, even without the actual physical exertion. Please don't dismiss athletics as brainless if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

Why, because the Republicans - so notoriously unfriendly to business - would have cracked down and decreased H1Bs? Not bloody likely. At best, knowing today's Republican party, they would have upped H1B quotas but stipulated "no Mexicans" to assuage the Arizona contingent.

Note that I say this as someone who is a GOP apostate but nonetheless is technically one of the approximately four registered Republicans in the greater Seattle area. Today's GOP sadly fails to understand that, given the rest of their pro-business policies, they would have Silicon Valley in their pocket if they just learned to stop yammering on about eeeevilution, gay marriage and "Obamacare gave me leprosy!" A lot of the tech world would flock to their cause if they stopped clinging to idiotic social conservative policies that alienate everyone in America who isn't white, Christian and over 50 years old.

Long story short to the OP - don't use this as a tool to bash Biden/Obama, because the Republican ticket would have jacked up H1B quotas, not reduced them. If you're anti-H1B, you may not like the current administration policies but they are no worse than the alternative.