I would love a free market for broadband Internet. The big companies that offer broadband Internet, though, don't want one and will use all of their power and influence to keep one from emerging.

That might be the real reason, but the public reason the big ISPs offer up is "unfair competition" from government - even when the "competition" would be serving an area that the ISP isn't serving. And yet, Comcast and Time Warner Cable claim they aren't competing with each other because they serve different areas.

At one point, the prevailing scientific theory was that planets were a rarity. Then we found the first exoplanet and astronomers started wondering if they might be more common. By now, with the thousands of exoplanets found, we know that planets are plentiful. We don't know how many Earth-like ones are out there, but many astronomers think that this is more of a deficiency in our planetary detection methods than a rarity of Earth-like worlds. (Bigger planets are easier to detect.)

Not if you factor in meddling by a certain mad man in a blue box. He makes the math go all wibbly wobbly.

Exactly. Currently, our furthest space probe is Voyager 1 and that's only 0.002 light years away from us after travelling for 37 years. At that rate, it will take 18,500 years before it travels one light year and over 200,000 years before it travels 11 light years. Even if we could leave right now and cut the travel time in half, we still wouldn't arrive until the year 102,014. To put it another way, we as a species (Homo Sapiens) have only been around for 200,000 years. A probe sent to this closest planet at Voyager's speed, would have needed to have been sent when Homo Sapiens first emerged in order for it to have arrived now.

It's even worse when the big ISPs are trying to kill municipal broadband in an area they don't serve. Because you can't have the government competing with them in an area that they might, someday, begin to consider serving. Until then, the residents should grovel (over dial-up) at the big ISPs' feet for broadband Internet service.

Thanks. That's the one I was thinking of. And, yes, Hulk is the best. Though Captain America managed to pull off the "here's my rear and chest facing in the same direction" pose. Must be that super soldier serum.

Considering that I'm married with two kids, I've already found a woman who is attracted to me. She's never arched her back and stuck her butt out. And she's certainly never twisted her spine so that I could see both her chest and rear at the same time. Honestly, if she did that pose, I'd be concerned about rushing her to the hospital, not thinking "Boy, does that look sexy."

I actually like coding in PHP. You can create some really nice applications using it. Then again, you can create really nice applications with just about any server side language if you know what you are doing.

My main beef with PHP is the inconsistency with built-in function names. If you want to replace within a string, you use "str_replace", if you want to split a string into an array, you use "str_split". However, if you want to get part of the string, you use "substr". And if you want to compare two strings, you use "strcmp". If they could get some consistency there, it would vastly improve the language.

How has PHP been given a monopoly on the entire industry? There are other languages out there and many of them are used quite a bit. PHP may or may not be the most popular (I honestly have no stats to tell either way), but even if it was vastly more popular than any other web programming language, it would be far from a monopoly.

For a split second, I was going to voice my outrage over such a thing happening before my brain kicked in and I remembered that BBSpot is a humor website.

In my defense, though, when a teen can be arrested for writing a story in which he uses a gun to kill his neighbor's pet dinosaur, the humor/satire stories can be hard to separate from the true stories.

Sadly, "perceived slights" can spill over into the real world. For example, there are plenty of stories where people freaked out because a dad was taking photos of his children. Why? Because "man taking photos of child" = pervert! Call the cops!!!!

If you disagree with someone's position, by all means, argue with it (as you appear to be doing), however lobbing death threats and revealing personal information about the person isn't debating their position. It's committing illegal acts in order to scare your opponent into submission.

As a dad, I've noticed the "dumb dad" stereotype. However, I wouldn't say "I'm ok with it so long as men aren't badly stereotyped in this other medium." Instead, I'd be working to get rid of all stereotypes be they "dumb sitcom dad" or "helpless video game female."

This sounds very similar to comic book covers where the women are invariably drawn in highly suggestive poses while the men aren't. (As if women could twist their spines just right so as to best highlight their rear and chest areas.) Somewhere, someone draw an alternative poster for The Avengers movie where Black Widow was drawn in a normal post and the rest of the cast drawn in the kinds of poses women typically get. It looked utterly ridiculous, yet the "normal" version looked fine because we've been conditioned to expect this sort of thing.

Now, if someone calls attention to it and someone else happens to disagree with them, pointing out the flaws in their argument is fine. Calling them names isn't helping their case at all. And threatening them with real physical violence is showing that the criticism is but the tip of an iceberg sized problem.

Side note: Some are claiming that the threats probably weren't credible. However, her address was posted online by some of the people. If someone insults me online, I shrug it off and continue with what I was doing. If someone said "I'm going to kill you" and then posted my address online, though, I'd take that threat seriously. I wouldn't just say "Internet Trolls are going to be Internet Trolls."

Except that this COULD help a police officer who has been wrongly accused. Take the Ferguson case, for example. Let's suppose that the officer had a body camera and it clearly showed the kid doing what the officer claimed he did. Perhaps people would agree with the officer and not be calling for his arrest. However, if the officer had a body camera and it showed the kid standing with his arms up while the cop opened fire, it would provide hard evidence of wrong doing. In other words, this could help exonerate good cops whose actions are misrepresented and bad cops whose actions might otherwise go unpunished thanks to them lying about the circumstances.