If you don't like Google or Facebook, don't use them. I don't use Facebook. They can do whatever they want, zero privacy, share all data, etc. Doesn't affect me.

These companies only survive if they satisfy their customers. If they annoy people they will go out of business. No regulation required.

This is news? I've been powering my DeLorean with trash for years!

We are only asking "Do We Need A Longer School Year" because schools are run by the government. If schooling were free market based, that question would be like asking "Do we need a bigger container size for milk?", and the answer would be that parents could choose whatever kind of school they want.

With the harder Google packaging comes hundreds of dollars of savings. Sounds like a win to me.

Why does government need to give us a permission slip to be considered married? It's insulting. Marriage is a private contract.

...so they should be able to do whatever they want with them. Allow traffic, throttle traffic, it's their property.

If you own a house, you can invite or exclude guests as you see fit.

If consumers are being exploited, why are they staying with the company?

The commercial skip is available the next day, and only on the small, well-defined set that is primetime network shows, so I assume Dish simply analyzes the show and sends the commercial start/end frame #'s down to the STBs. So we have yet another case of "illegal numbers" like the DeCSS episode.

What would be interesting is if the STBs were flexible enough to allow peer-to-peer download of commercial frame #'s. Then bored IT nerds could be posting commercial times 30 seconds after a show ended. What would the networks do about that?

Personally I use Windows Media Center and comskip, so all my commercials are skipped automatically, but this is not a regular-Joe type of solution.

In a truly free market, commercial marking would be allowed, but then the networks would simply:
A. switch the advertising to be "in show" with crawls, pop-in graphics in the corners, etc.
or
B. pay per episode with only short ads like Hulu does ("This episode of CSI is brought to you by Acme Metal Detectors")

With internet lines directly to people's TV / tablets / phones a producer of a show does not need a TV network. They just need a vendor like Apple/Google/Netflix/Amazon to stream it to the user. Those are your new big 4 "networks" right there.

Search Amazon for "Regis Faller polo". They are a delight for the imagination.

Would you rather Apple keep the money to pay workers and invest in R&D, or give it to the government and have it disappear into the black hole of special interests and lobbyists?

WRONG. If you increase business costs, businesses will have to increase prices, layoff workers, decrease pay, decrease R&D, etc. Economic intervention impacts the entire economy.

The Supreme Court did not "approve" of strip searches. They "approved" of the idea that states set arrest rules, not the federal government.

I didn't read the justices' reasoning, but there is nothing in the Constitution that prohibits a state from deciding its own strip search rules. Any restrictions on search/seizure only apply to the federal government, not the states.

Thanks for gambling my $$$.