I can't tell if you are being sarcastic here or not. You think it is better for politicians to pass all kinds of nonsensical laws without thinking about them, and then let the people go to court to get the laws overturned? (Just disagreeing with a law doesn't stop it from being a law, you actually have to do something based on that disagreement. Just voting your rep out also doesn't remove the laws he voted for.)

Are you seriously suggesting that it was better for the Patriot Act to be passed into law without serious thought (or the DOMA, or the DMCA) and then have a lot of people disagree with the law?

The value of the company drops as the stock price drops, and the stock price drops as soon as it becomes obvious that customers are all cancelling their service.

And as you're getting all the little people to buy this 51% over a three year period, large companies who would love to take over the areas served by Comcast are buying stock at the same bargain-basement rates you are. They can afford it. The people you want to buy stock are having to cancel service so they have enough money to buy stock. You'll never make 51%.

I can safely predict, if you cut the price of a share of Comcast today by 50% TW would be tendering a takeover offer before COB. They'd be fools not to, and you just don't have the money to compete with them.

So why hasn't another company come in and taken all the customers away from them? Because as much as you hate them and think their service is bad, too many other people just don't care. They get service, they pay their bill, they watch their programs. That points out that you are likely to get less than 0.1% of the customers to follow you in your cancel service/buy stock plan, which would turn a three year plan into a 3000 year plan.

If they have no customers they have no dividends, and they have no cash flow to upgrade after the transition. Maybe you don't understand how the stock market works, but when you buy 51% of a company's stock the money doesn't go to the company, it goes to the people who owned the stock. Where do you get the money for all this upgraded hardware when nobody is paying for the service? You expect the stockholders to dump more money into the company when they've had to cancel their service to be able to afford what they've already bought?

TV is hardly dead, and I have no idea what you mean by anything after that.

You don't have to buy out Comcast to get that. We've got that here. Fiber backbone, coax to the house. Nobody had to cancel service or buy stock.

And your method of getting to the firing of the executives was for people to cancel their service and buy stock. Three years of no subs will definitely require some magic if the company doesn't go under in that time.

Sure it is, but not by your means of getting there. You get there by getting the investors together and buying the working company. You don't try to drive the company into the ground, buy the remnants, and then claim success.

It would take a fortune to rebuild Comcast as a "customer owned utility" once you kill it off over a three year period. And now there's a question that needs another answer: how much stock must someone own before they can get service from their customer-owned utility? It sounds like getting service from this new company would be a very expensive proposition. Or you don't mean "customer owned", you mean "owned by people you think care enough to run things the way you want them to."

Those are the names you promoted as being the new bosses. I think it is a joke, too.

And three years of no customers because they're all buying stock instead won't result in a bankruptcy. Sure. You'll never make it to 51% because TW will buy out Comcast just for the franchises long before your three year project is complete, and the faster you're able to buy stock as the price drops, the sooner the TW buyout will happen. If TW doesn't buy it all, smart stock fund managers will see fire-sale prices for a company they know will rebound eventually and they'll be buying the stock in large blocks. They won't share your concern for customer service, they'll be bottom-line guys looking for ROI. That may mean selling off the markets to some other large cable company and liquidating the original company, since by the time your three year plan is over, the only real assets will be the franchises.

But you'll never get everyone to drop service and buy stock, so it's a pipe dream anyway. It's also a failed thought experiment, so it's not even a nice pipe dream. A pipe-nightmare for the remaining customers -- those who haven't given up cable because they want the live and local services and are now paying exorbitant prices as the fixed costs are shared among fewer customers.

In my state, traffic circles and roundabouts are two different things that appear nearly identical but operate differently. For example, in a roundabout traffic in the circular roadway has the right of way over traffic trying to enter. In a traffic circle exactly the opposite is true: traffic in the circle has to yield to traffic waiting to enter. Sounds stupid, but that's the law. I treated a traffic circle like a roundabout one fine evening and wound up with a hefty ticket.

You have it 100% backwards. Under the current system if you've got enough money to pay for an ad, you can do that. (With the exception of certain ads that applies to all.) If you can get people together to pay for your ads, you can do that. Citizen's United kept that possible. (CU wasn't a new thing, it reiterated an existing concept called "free speech" even for people who are members of a group.)

Under a public campaign financing system where ads are paid for by the public and money is limited to those who have met some popularity contest, all you'll get to hear are ads from those who the "elite ruling class" have decided pass the test. Independent voices will go away because they won't get the money authorized to buy ads. Unpopular opinions are not wanted and must be silenced.

I'm sorry if all you listen to today are the ads paid for by the "elite ruling class", but my radio and TV carry all kinds of ads from people who haven't passed the popularity contests during campaign season. Yes, I'd love it if there was a prohibition on this seemingly endless stream of nonsense from people I know are lying (feel free to apply that to whichever party you think it applies to), but I realize that it only lasts a couple of weeks and that any "solution" to the problem would be worse than the problem it's trying to solve. Perhaps that's because I understand that the First Amendment isn't there to protect speech that is popular, it's there for unpopular speech.

A drone 'copter can fly just above treetops, or even below the treetops if actively navigated, and easily avoid detection by radar. The ground clutter would hide it very well until it was too late to do much about it.

Why yes, because nobody who wants to do something illegal with such a drone would ever violate an exclusion zone. Nobody would ever think of putting a drone in the back of a pickup truck, driving down Pennsylvania Avenue, and launching it while passing by The White House.

Cheating means something against the rules. Given the excellent show of rules lawyering that inflating the football at higher temperatures is an example of, they are clearly not guilty of cheating.

What is scariest is that Biden is a heartbeat away. Thanks for pointing that out.

Now to present a politically balanced scare -- the next in line if Biden is "also hit" is John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the house. Following him is currently Orrin Hatch, the Republican President Pro-Tem of the Senate.

No, there will be no election until the next regular presidential election.

Don't imagine that it cannot happen. This is how Leslie Lynch King became the first and only person in US history to become vice president and then President of the US without being elected to those offices. You might know him better as Gerald R. Ford. He was appointed VP after Agnew resigned, and then became President when Nixon resigned.

"Instead of" is a typo for what? And then you said more stock could be bought if everyone cancelled their service!

I'm sure it has, and I'm sure it has been fully depreciated too. But if the company has no money because nobody is paying their bills or everyone has cancelled service (the second option you gave) then what money will they use to upgrade?

The reasons that Google can do it at a lower price are two-fold. First, they don't have existing plant to maintain while they're over-building the existing stuff. Existing cable companies cannot just ignore the existing customer problems while they string new fibers all over; Google has no existing customers to deal with. Cable has a staff that is sufficient to maintain what they have, they have to hire or subcontract for the install of fiber; Google has one staff busy doing installs. Labor costs are a major part of your fixed costs.

And second, Google is focusing on a very limited number of cherry-picked markets and can dump loads of money into the system until it begins to turn a profit. It's the same way that Walmart can come into a city and cut prices until the competition goes out of business because Walmart has thousands of other stores operating at a profit that can subsidize that. And it's the same reason why municipal cable systems are an unfair competition to the market: a city can dip into the general fund (taxpayer dollars) to cover shortfalls from operating costs, a private company cannot. We have laws about dumping and fair trade for just such activities.

The problem is that getting to the point where you own it will destroy it. A cable system without customers cannot afford to maintain what they have, much less suddenly build out a complete new fiber system, and it will have zero say in negotiating contracts for content. You want a full set of ala carte channels? ESPN won't care and won't make that deal, and the customer-less Comcast will have no money to make it happen. You said it would take 3 years. That's a long time in a technology-driven industry. Three years of stagnation because there is no cash flow. Long before you reach the goal of ownership, your plan will drive the company into bankruptcy.

The same bargain-basement stock prices that you count on to gain control of the company in the first place will not go unnoticed by everyone else (like TW, or Google, or Microsoft) and they'll be busy buying stock for their own takeover.

It's a pipe dream filled with unicorns and pixies who magically maintain a company that has zero customers. And the only way you can suggest that TW wouldn't step in and complete the merger by buying the stock before you do is if you do the same thing to TW at the same time.

And THEN you say you'd want to put Lessig and Nader in charge. Neither one of them have run a company before and are political fringe thinkers who alienate people who do run companies. That's pixie dust in a nutshell.

What made it unclear is saying "instead of" and then continuing with a call for cancelling service so even more stock could be purchased. No, I think the only unclear thing here is how bankrupting a company is going to force it to build a full fiber system and give you cheap high-speed broadband.

Don't be mislead by the debt problem. If Greece had economic growth, it would not have a debt problem.

Greece rankes "mostly unfree" on the Index of Economic Freedom:

Greece's economic freedom score is 54.0, making its economy the 130th freest in the 2015 Index. Its score has declined by 1.7 points since last year due to a substantial deterioration in the control of government spending and smaller declines in business freedom, labor freedom, and fiscal freedom. Greece is ranked 40th out of 43 countries in the Europe region, and its overall score is below the world and regional averages...the rule of law remains problematic, with property rights weakly enforced, tax evasion on the rise, and corruption pervasive. Despite efforts to create a more business-friendly regulatory environment, the labor market remains rigid and slow to adjust to market realities...The overall pace of regulatory reform lags behind other countries. With no minimum capital required, launching a business takes five procedures and 13 days. However, completing licensing requirements still takes about four months on average...

By the way, regarding "austerity", Greece's public expenditures equal 58.5 percent of domestic output. That does not sound very austere to me.

Not if campaign finance becomes limited to public funding based on polling percentages, as was the desire of the person I first replied to.

There is no amendment specifically for campaign spending, and campaign finance laws quite often violate the letter, if not just the intent, of the existing First Amendment. Converting the current "system" into one that is funded by public money alone and the "up north" groups don't get any to spend is a clear violation of the existing constitution.

Yeah, three voices all spouting the same popular opinions. Who said that having multiple copies of the same opinion was a good thing?

There is a significant difference between an unpopular candidate not finding funding for his speech to be heard and the government legislatively taking his ability to speak away. In the former, an unpopular candidate may have sufficient money of his own to pay for his own speech; in the latter he is legally prohibited from spending his own money to speak.

A more textbook example of a violation of the first amendment, and the reason why the first amendment is necessary in the first place, would be hard to find.

Those who didn't toe the party line wouldn't be party candidates, and it would be the parties who do the work to get the signatures to get the money.

I don't know why a "tighter" (closer?) election is necessarily a good thing, and you really need a citation for the ridiculous claim that limiting the number of voices in an election to the popular opinions would make it any more interesting, or that "more participation" is defacto a good thing.

In other words, only the popular opinions get to be heard and the unpopular ones have no chance at all.

What laws were bought?

It's hard to get upset over three politicians who wanted to support the merger and asked Comcast for help writing a letter to the FCC. I'm more upset that the politicians are writing letters AT ALL, since that's an open attempt at speaking over the voices of their constituents who are capable of writing their own letters. I.e., a city councilor or mayor who writes a letter on behalf of his city is stealing the speech from all the people who don't agree with his opinion.

Only because the stock price would plummet and the company would be worth only the value of the plant. At that point Time-Warner buys it from bankruptcy for a pittance and the merger happens anyway.

What significant difference is there between nobody paying their cable bill and everyone cancelling service? A couple of months into the former and service would be cancelled automatically AND the company would have a large amount of write-off for the bad debts.

What color is the sky on your world, Cliff? Why not ask for unicorns while you're at it? Who PAYS for all this infrastructure upgrade if there are no subscribers?

I'm betting the phone allows M2M sim cards or something similar which would allow the authentification and encoding to happen in hardware on both the phone and hotspot/VoIP servers.

It would also solve handoff issues when moving from one access point to another.