"I think everyone already knew it was possible to print something that looks like a jet engine." ... except the university's funding agencies.

No word on whether the thing was ever powered up, or is simply a neat toy.

"will have to cite what regulations could possibly have been preventing Ma Bell from providing better service"

But it's not even that: regulations prevent innovation directly - that's just one of their indirect & unintended effects. When regulated as a public utility, the company is to some extent protected from competition (and thus the need to innovate and improve service).

If you think back to those transitions (like suddenly cheaper long distance), they coincide with -deregulation- rather than new -regulation-.

"if you actually HAVE competitors"

Well, it depends on the market area.
But think about it - should ISPness become a "public utility", do you honestly expect more or less competition to evolve there?

The competitors should make each other nervous.
The government squatting more regulation on us all should make us all nervous.

... but the converse does not hold.

error bars cannot compensate for questionable underlying assumptions

"PROXIES OF TEMPERATURE" ... part of the problem is that so-called proxies of temperature aren't.

Am I alone in seeing it as an absurd concern for state legislatures to ponder? If the price of having a "state university" is having elected politicians micromanage academic issues, isn't that a little too high?

I assume you have a deep well of information to justify that little ditty, but think we just can't handle it. Thank you for protecting us.

Homeschool! (State monopoly on education would be vile.)

Thanks for the grammar tweak, but I believe I was using the terms correctly. Here, "ipso facto" modifies the "that is" as an adverb, not "evidence" as an adjective.

You could've abbreviated those last two paragraphs to "I disagree, because XXXX". You just forgot the XXXX.

Now now, don't call them names. They're so well-intentioned.