Within reasonable (cannabis, alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, peyote) limits I don't view it as the job of the Government to regulate pleasure inducing substances. If you want to talk about the extremes (heroin and other opiates, cocaine, barbiturates), then yes, I think the use thereof should be regulated.

Sounds like someone has never had sex or a reasonably tough workout. :P

Aspirin isn't a sliver bullet either....

My preference is ibuprofen for head or muscle aches, followed by naproxen, and then aspirin. I'd concur with you about the liver impact of acetaminophen, I had my MD tell me once upon a time that I needed to cut back on the drinking, because of my liver results; I hadn't had a drink in over a month but had been on a regime of acetaminophen + codine following wisdom tooth surgery. That was a wake up call. :)

The best anti-depressant I have found is distance running. The second best is other forms of cardio exercise. SSRIs or SNRIs? Been there, done that, they did very little to help me with depression. I don't even think they took the edge off, although it's hard to prove that negative. Tried Celexa, Zoloft, Effexor, Prozac, and a few other ones. Not only did they fail to address (or even make manageable) the depression, they all came with a lovely side effect and then six months of the other extreme when I discontinued them.

So in your world there's no way to feel good besides using drugs or mass consumption?

But hardly anyone is running the stock Android anyways. They've all expended on the code, and made it different. Almost no one actually uses the "official Google version" at all...

But they can't because it's open source software. No one could make all of the Linux Distros use the same official kernel... it's not possible, because it's open source, and you can make it yourself.

But this is already the case. Amazon and Barnes and Noble do not sell Android devices with Google services on them.

I don't get why people have such a difficult time understanding that Google can't wrangle these cats, because it doesn't have an Iron Fist on the source code...

I've never seen a RISC processor that can match the performance of the best CISC processors. You know, nevermind the fact that tons of money has been poured into CISC processors making them faster and faster.

Sometimes, it's just a matter of where the attention has been placed.

So:
Some Federal agency serves up some rules on whatever
Congress, who is actually in charge of passing laws, says, "Hey, wait a minute. Shouldn't we have looked at this first?"

This seems to be one of those "We have to pass it to see what's in it." type of deals.

I am NOT saying the Republicrats are all above board in what they're doing and why ($$$), but it does kind of seem to be in their bailiwick to investigate before things like this are approved or passed.

It's still not a level playing field. The existing company has all the advantages of being an incumbent. 'Most' of them managing to kill the initiatives when they pop up not by legal threatening but by improving their service indicates that they can do better.

I'll remind you that, aside from the startup funding, the cooperative is still constrained by state and federal laws. Indeed, any commercial company can come in to offer the SAME service, and receive most, if not all, of the same benefits that a cooperative being formed by the local government can enjoy.

For example, the recent article from NY, where the state 'gave out' millions in tax breaks, such as tax free zones, to commercial companies in an attempt to 'create jobs'. Note that these tax breaks can disadvantage existing companies against new incomers who meet the standards.

So, for example, it's perfectly possible for the citizens of an area, deciding that a monopoly for internet service, offers various tax benefits, even direct funding in the form of a grant, to provide service of certain standards in the area. They can even exclude the existing operator. Any commercial company able to meet the requirements gets the money.

So while the government can give the cooperative various advantages, it's ability to do so is actually no more than what it can do for a commercial company. Whether it's more likely to offer them to it's new cooperative depends. Most of the time they seem to give the seed money but no more.

Really? How do you figure $100k paying jobs? You're assuming that every company that uproots and moves to NY, or which launches there, is going to be paying their lobby receptionist, clerical help, etc., six figures? What if they manufacture something. Is every assembly line worker going to be making six figures?

Then again, based on the number of almost completely destroyed iPhone screens I see, the Apple Watch could be a huge boon to companies that sell insurance and do screen repairs.

That kind of shit has always happened during wartime. I fail to see how some non-combatant dying in a drone strike is any worse than the non-combatants that died in Tokyo and Dresden. We aren't deliberately trying to kill them, sometimes they're too close to legitimate targets, other times we misidentify them.

Newsflash: War is a messy business. I'd just as soon prefer we didn't have to engage in it at all, but I'm not the one refusing to live by the rules of the civilized world. Why don't you save some of your condemnation for the people that refuse to fight in uniform and hide behind civilians? Both of those actions are war crimes, just so you know.

Sure, but something like that doesn't HAVE to, in order to still be a significant (and possibly lethal) PITA.

Stuxnet wasn't all about "getting anything out," either.

Why? And they're not 'taking over', they're 'forming competition'. Customers can still buy service from the commercial company.

In areas that they have done so they tend to kill the competitor, but that's because, like I've said multiple times, by the time they do so the company they're competing against is such a dinosaur that can't find it's own backside that it's universally hated.