You act as though the regulations came out of a vacuum. AT&T lobbyists created those regulations and their pet congressmen & senators enacted them. Because the regulations limit who can compete against AT&T.

If corporations had no influence on government, THEN you could cry about government intervention. Every person with a functioning brain, however, knows that corporations are deeply mired in our politics and they heavily influence what regulations will effect them.

This is why free market utopianism is such a crock. Business do not want to compete with each other and will use every ounce of their power & every legal trick they can create to prevent an upstart from disrupting their markets.

Ironically the only way to have a free market is if the government forces them to.

Now you're just being stupid. When we replaced farm work with industry, we were creating manufacturing jobs. Millions of them. This is the exact friggin' opposite of that. We are shrinking and offshoring those well paid manual labor jobs. They're not coming back, at least not in the form of employment for people. I'm sure we could rebuild with robots and use 1/100th the employee labor we used to use for the same tasks.

Also, in that time having a college degree, ANY college degree was a guarantee of a good career. Now? Now it might get you a job as checkout person at McDonald's.

The situations are not interchangeable.

Having an interest in technology does not mean you have to blind yourself to the pitfalls of technology. I love my cell phone, but I acknowledge that it was assembled through labor practices I would deem inhuman for laughable wages with unregulated toxic waste disposal. Technology is not a panacea.

Let's suppose 20-30% of Americans are employed as engineers, doctors, lawyers, CEO's. The non-trade jobs. What happens when we roboticize the other 70-80%'s jobs? Will ALL of them train to become robot repair techs? Doubtful. So where will they work? How will the economy keep moving? These are questions that NEED to be asked and answered instead of living in fantasy tech land.

I remember when the 'job creators' were busy creating jobs in China and shutting factories here. Every pundit was on and on about how we'd all be consultants and living in a service economy. Well now those people get mocked for not getting a STEM degree while they work in McDonald's or Wal-Mart next to all the other poors. Not everyone gets to live in Galt's Gulch buddy.

"Industrial robots have proven useful in reducing EMPLOYEES in large factories, with major enterprises enlisting their services to LAYOFF EMPLOYEES. The Factory-in-a-Day project, which kicked off in October, aims to also make robotic technology beneficial to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), by LAYING OFF EMPLOYEES within 24 hours."

Not one of those companies gives a damn about your privacy. They all collect and data-mine more information about you than the NSA does, it's why the NSA tapped them to begin with. They are only doing this to a) prevent or at least minimize foreign countries using the privacy scandal to fund competition against them; b) prevent or at least minimize foreign countries from penalizing them legally; and c) for the slight bit of positive marketing with people who believe they care.

You complain about "piecemeal laws" then argue that we should have a bunch of local laws instead of one unifying national one. Then you want a new government body to go around inspecting everyone and making different regulations for different people.. Have you read the definition of piecemeal?

Or paying taxes so a rural inbred farmer can stay afloat against market forces, join the Tea Party and bitch about teh gubment!

Right, so the liberty loving conservatives make no effort to interfere with abortion (between a woman & her doctor), homosexuality (who's business is it what two or more people do in their bedroom), drugs (it's a private transaction between you and your drug dealer!) etc etc.

Which is exactly why there is a national ban. It's not to remove the equipment currently in place, it is to ensure that when that equipment is due to be replaced or in new construction that less polluting options are the only ones available on the market. Dumbass. I really wish you rural hick inbreds would get off of that "black helicopters coming to take mah guns and fireplace" nonsense and grow up.

The same right wing that feels fine regulating vagina's, Muslim mosques and that rampant voter fraud that nobody can find evidence of but is obviously happening or how did a black guy get to be president? That right wing?

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA good troll, good troll sir.

People with uncompromisable principles are often an inconvenience to everyone.

..we've all suspected it was true a long time ago. Honestly I think the bigger surprise was that the surveillance wasn't worse. There have been people who've sworn for years that every time you lick a stamp the Post Office sequences your DNA....

The idea that broadcasters make their money off advertising is a bit simplistic. Advertising is just one aspect of their business. You have to include DVD sales, fees from streaming services, online sales of content, retransmission fees from cable operators, syndication fees, etc.

The industry pitches a fit every single time some new technological innovation comes around about how it will destroy them until they figure out how to monetize it. This is nothing new and I'm frankly tired of hearing these mewling quims beg for the government to guarantee their profits. The very industries where they make significant amounts of money are the same industries they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to. If it were up to the broadcasters we'd all still have B&W TV sets with rabbit ear antennas.

Hilarious that there's another thread today about how increased mechanization is destroying the job market, so let's see.. self driving cars/trucks replacing all the professional drivers, manufacturing robots taking over the factories that haven't already moved to China, car dealerships doomed so there goes the jobs AND the thousands of small businesses and their local taxes.. tell us again how this is all good and the displaced workers will all go into software consulting, robot repair and get engineering degrees and we'll all have well paying middle class lifestyles. Go on, I'm waiting.