Yes basically Texas industry is very good at painting politicians as against "free market" ideals if they try pass regulations that either hurt themselves or help others (including the actual citizens).

Take for instance the case in West Texas where bail bondsmen lobby to keep the amount of bail bonds high for petty crimes. While many sherifs want to lower the amount of said bail, all the bails bondsmen have to do is say that sherifs are "soft on crime". Many people are caught stuck in jail for really stupid stuff to satisfy the business needs of bail bondsmen.

This is huge in Texas. Just notice the dry laws in North Texas. There are areas in the North Texas that have a huge number of liquor stores that make insane profits. These areas are owned by those with great political power so that they can make the revenue off the booze sales from nearby areas where cannot by booze.

When people say in Texas say "free market", they usually mean that there is regulation that benefits their access to markets while limiting the access of others. So its essentially "free for me". A good example of this was when my friend and me tried to setup an ISP in central texas, much to our chagrin, we realized that only certain corporation$ or people are free to do that.

I know this happens in a ton of other places (say for instance in New York, where I live now). It is just funny that in Texas there is such a conflict between what politicians say about "free markets" and how the markets actually stack up.

On a serious note, these are only "times of austerity" for some programs. Since 9/11 went down, contractors who make hardware for spying and provide services to provide logistics/security to US personnel abroad pretty much get a blank check from the Federal government. Pretty much no elected official wants to be seem as "soft on terrorism".

The very few that question the trillions we have spent on the war on terror are called conspiracy theorists or are labeled as nut cases.

I read that as "can of sperm". I was surprised someone else canned their sperm, I thought I was the only one that did that.

Yes but the problem with going house by house and cable by cable looking for anyone flying under the radar is that you start trying to detect an extremely low level signal out of a ton of noise. You can't cheat statistics though and the false alarm rates of your detection algorithms become increasingly significant. So you start picking more and hopefully "better" data looking to detect a higher level signal in less noise.

Civil liberties and freedom go right out the window as you try to declare war on an idea. So now you go after people expressing an idea.

Or you just become insanely power hungry and corrupt from the incredible power that you have been entrusted with.

Either way, you broke they system you were trying to "protect"

Honey if you call and I'm not home I'll be at the gym or the nuclear weapons facility.

I would add
5. Establish an election holiday so people can actually take their time and (hopefully) make a better decision about who to vote for.
6. Limit time between campaigning to a month or two at most

This shutdown has been a long time coming lets face it. Congress has been mostly broken for years. It seems someone is always ready to throw a wrench into the gears no matter what the issue is (Except war and surveillance, because hey no one wants to be that guy that gets blamed for a terrorist attack). Its good that things have come to a head because the whole world needs to see that the US government is broken.

Typical Slashdot bullshit. If I told you to start your own Apple or Microsoft you'd piss and moan about monopolies, regulations, ip laws, predatory business practices that would get in your way. But you have no qualms about telling someone unhappy with Amazon, B&N, etc... you would say "start your own book shop", "start your own health care company", "start your own hospital", or "start your own fucking space program" etc.... without even a CLUE that the predatory business practices and monopoly powers of the big boys of other industries are the same or worse than for technology companies.

The message here is very clear. You either go along with what the executive branch wants you to do, which is plainly goes against the 4th and 1st amendments or you are a traitor. The stunning lack of previous resistance by corporations that provide internet, phone, and telegraph service to NSA's agenda have created the expectation that corporate "people" are willing to cough up data that lets the US spy on its citizens on a massive scale without any kind of objection.

Yes I would hope he would end up in a mostly democratic country as well. It would be great to see people in Iceland rise up against international espionage of the color that the NSA is engaged in.

But after the US almost got the Turkish government to amend there constitution to use Turkish bases in the Iraq war, I realized how the US has become an agent against democracy. They used all kinds of economic and military incentives that almost brought Turkey to amend its constitution against the sentiment of the vast majority of voters in that country. I would expect the current US government would play the same knuckle twisting to get a lowly "traitor" extradited from any western ally and hence the US would play a role in spoiling another democracy.

According to Interfax.

God speed. Enjoy the hot Venezuelan women. There is no justice for you in the US...not anymore.

Everything has a cost associated with it. Chopping down a stand of trees will cost you because you will have to expend resources to get more trees. We may not understand or we may ignore the cost associated with using the environment to do business, but that doesn't mean it doesn't cost us.

Investing in renewable resources/sustainable energy is not an exercise in philanthropy for the aforementioned reason.

These are standard questions for any government contract. If you presuppose renewable resources/sustainable energy is philanthropic venture then of course it look like a waste. Also if you assume that government contracting will be wasteful it probably will be.

What in bullets and body bags? Wars are incredibly hard to measure because of detrimental effects on mental and physical health and environmental damage.

Austin is a huge renters/buyers market of very tech savvy people. Apartment complexes go out their way to install this shit to try and get more renters in Austin. Very friendly city laws and city run utilities top it off. You know a lot of towns that can offer that?

Google fiber isn't some charity project or government funded effort to bring high speed to unprivileged kids in Kentucky or something. They are looking to actually make money. In Austin, they can make money.

1. Owning their own electric utility.
2. I am guessing there is already a pretty good amount of fiber in the city already....
3. High levels of actual city official interest. Meaning they are will to actually make the difficult choices happen to make this happen.
4. High visibility when South by Southwest rolls through every year.
5. Tons of apartments and properties that will go out of their way to install this stuff to lure the kids in. I used to live in apartment in Austin that was one of the first in the nation to install high speed wireless internet. This is a huge renters market.
6. Its a much smaller town than the gigantic blob cities like Dallas or Houston.