US candy is already overpriced because US sugar (inside the US) is several times the world market price because we blather a lot about free trade, but are just as protectionist as the Japanese are about rice.

> After Four Days, Philae Team Gets to Rest

Thank god. I have this comfy shirt I've been meaning to wear...

Hey, they're doing it wrong.

That isn't supposed to happen until the second or third season.

Great. Just what I need, another 30 spams a day.

Thank you!

Putin, you're an idiot and a thug and a hack, and your people are idiots and thugs and hacks.

Nowadays you inject silicone into the pig's hips and ass.

Well, they have good reason to be scared of being declared the utility thing, and this goes well beyond forced net neutrality.

I recall way back when the Clintons tried Government Health Care 1.0. Eventually, at one point, the insurance companies threw up their hands as a last defense and said, "Fuck it. We'll just cover everybody at our own cost." This wasn't good enough, of course, because the goal wasn't universal coverage, but universal government coverage.

But that's an aside. Here, being a utility means ultimately becoming more like a water or gas or electrical company, with even less competition than now, and then service quality and rates become a game between their lobbyists and the politicians, where they whine they need an increase, slacking off, and the politicians play a game between believing it so they approve the increase, and their own political base, who wants no increase at all because democratic threat.

That's a whole different corporate world and game to play. Companies can play it, but it cuts profits way, way down from a freewheeling bleeding edge high tech.

I am for net neutrality ("You agreed to participate in this common pure data transmission service called The Internet without subverting and perverting it.") but declaring it a utility? Oh god hell god fucking god no.

I has a major sad if that's what it takes to get the laws done. (We'll leave for the moment the disturbing constitutional improprieties philosophically of such massive changes being done via a regulatory agency fiat rather than directly by Congress.)

I recall my 8th grade teacher complaining when I said I liked science fiction; she said it wasn't very good literature. I was offended. To spite her, I got the highest grade by 10 points out of 200 students taking that common course. Don't you look down on me! >:-(

30 years later, I see her point (though I doubt she could explain her own point if pressed; I have a feeling it was knee jerk meme regurgitation.)

The ideas are large and wondrous and often genius in scope. The prose is rarely of clever quality, if you put clever phrasing like Shakespeare or Twain as top examples.

Some can put up some clever banter, but in this sense, the only "science fiction" author I've read who has clever prose even remotely like that of a Twain is Neal Stephenson in things like Cryptonomicon. It's not just grand ideas, but the turn of the phrase is spectacular.

(TBH I'm not even sure if these count as science fiction. Science faction may be more accurate.)

Not if the speech is part of the criminal activity.

I can tell you there's a drug house over there that sells whatever for whatever price, but I can't do it if I'm advertising for them.

"Unscheduled maintenance" sounds like something China would say when they had problems.

The government of the USA is the largest spending thing. Ever.

Under Obama we passed 1943 in adjusted spending per person, the height of WWII, where we were engaged in a major war on two fronts and building one major warship a week.

So, no. Fuck your "dire straits" bleat.

No. Someone fleeing you ramming it up their ass is not, in turn, ramming it up your ass.

You mean he set a speed record on a crappy motorcycle.

> and Guam

"Oh no! Someone took the credit card receipts from the grocery's trash! Well, according to Guam law, we must notify consumers."

(Opens window). "Hey, Frank! Charlie took your credit card receipt! Oh, and Paul, get your damned chickens off the runway!"