Really? We have a small oily fish by that name. Also known to pioneers as a Candlefish, because you could catch them by the bucketfull, smoke them, and either eat them or actually *use them as candles* in your log cabin for months after.

Spelling comes from wheat? Learn something new every day.

Better yet, with this, can I just get a yeast infection or a series of them to take care of all my drug needs, synthesized from the sugar I eat directly in my small intestine?

Someone should read history.

Drug laws in the US are less than 100 years old. It was the late 1930's for most of them. I would suggest you read the arguments in congress while debating the law. It seems that the group FOR the law was arguing that these substances empowered the lesser races. (Im making it polite and not using the slang they used)

Drug laws in the US had more to due with racial control than they did with helping the addicts.

Just to make a point stoners are considered "lazy, irresponsible, thieves, untrustworthy, etc" All the same stereotypes used to describe blacks in the 30's, 40's, and 50's.

I fully comprehend the positive concept behind libertarian thinking, even if I have become almost as disillusioned with liberty as I am with Marxism.

The one point that libertarians and distributists agree on is that more competition is always good; Net Neutrality, by forcing an even playing field for all bits/second, fosters a truly free market in cyberspace where the cost of participation is and should be low. If we're going to live in a capitalistic society, the least we can do is remove barriers to entry into estate ownership, so that all may at least have the dream of becoming an owner someday. Cyberspace offers us the opportunity to expand that a huge amount, even the children's game Minecraft has a space that if mapped onto the real world, would fill several planets.

You forget rape. And, I sadly suspect, Catholic Priests were and are affected by this. Both in recruitment and retention, as well as ending up in jail.

I'm not sure that there is a two class system by design. That is certainly true for desert societies, but come cultures are MUCH more complex than two. Even Marx's comrades were three classes, also in Brave New World.

I'm for distributed sustainable energy budgets for high tech cultures. That means your energy budget depends on the climate you find yourself in, and is somewhat outside of your control. Cheap fossil fuels are nice for a time, but their regeneration cycle is too long to be sustainable over the long term.

However, every inch of this planet has plenty of ambient energy lying around, just not necessarily in a usable form. Getting it into a usable form is NOT a one-size-fits-all mass produced solution, and can't be. Anybody who says, just end the use of fossil fuels tomorrow, has not looked at the cost. I'm blessed in the Pacific Northwest with four major sustainable sources of energy at different times of the year, and with the new batteries, we can do even better.

As for climate change- there really are only two sustainable strategies- adapt and use the changes in weather to generate usable electricity, grow more food, store excess carbon in our graves. Or try to fight with outlandish ideas like eliminating fossil fuels, putting powdered aluminum in orbit to throw energy away, or the stupid carbon tax that will never work anyway.

My money is that cultures and species that adapt instead of trying to fight, will win out in the long run. I place that bet due to the history of this planet- when conditions change, species that adapt to the new conditions live, everybody else goes extinct.

My error in conflating that and utilities, so apologies. But my impression is that's what's been behind Net Neutrality, to effectively turn the pipes to the Internet into a regulated utility. And to make broadband a basic human right.

Yes, but a closer analogy would be ATT or other phone companies, or Western Union. Different type of utility, still as necessary to business. But what if say, the electric company could say "You are small fry, the local aluminum mill pays us more for electricity, so you get no service at your house today"?
 
 

How can govt. second-guess a business's motives when a business charges more for carrying something that costs them more to carry. Without degrading into govt. effectively dictating their pricing structure.

 
You know as much about TCP/IP as I do. Exactly how does a bit from one source "cost more to carry" than a bit from another source? All bits coming in from the backbone are the same. The only question is the size of the pipe coming in from the backbone, not the content of the bits. So that explanation simply doesn't hold.
 
 

They don't go far enough, regulation-wise, for you?

 
Or with freedom. The regulation should be towards maximum freedom of association- a company *should* be free to block traffic from a source they don't want to do business with, or slow down any packets for content they don't like. Discrimination and bigotry *should* be legal, be it baking a cake for gays, allowing black people at the lunch counter, or restricting netflix from eating up the common internet pipe.

Common carrier laws don't determine either how much you'll charge nor how much you'll make, they merely dictate that you can't discriminate in what you carry.

As in, you can't choose customer A over customer B just for the hell of it.

Now, personally, I'm against common carrier laws because I'm against freedom of communication and against dictating required associations, but that is an entirely different matter than money as well.

Yes we should. We should adapt our lifestyles to *local* conditions, where possible. That means diversifying our culture by geographical regions, and gasp, paying attention to natural weather sources and barriers.

RepRap comes close, but I was more referring to a full on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine. RepRap can print something like 90% of its parts, but there are still parts within itself that it cannot manufacture as of yet.

Especially once the tech matures to the point where 3d printers can make 3d printers.....

There's still quite a bit of difference between public access to 3d printer files and public access to 3d printers.

I only see this causing issues.

1) Windows Admins writing power shell scripts to do stuff on linux boxes
      a) setting permissions to 777 because they got in the way.
      b) why will it not write the file to c:\?
      c) A power shell script developed and tested on Windows, then pushed out to all the servers and crashing the Linux boxes.
      c) Do you really believe that a Linux admin would allow a windows Admin to run a Power Shell script as root?
2) Linux Admins being asked to manage windows servers because "You know Power Shell" (If they can get the Linux admin to manage the 300 windows servers on top of the existing 500 Linux servers he manages, it saves them headcount and $$$)

Personally I see it going the way all the other Microsoft products have gone when they release a Linux version. It gets adopted by a few windows admins that are forced to work on linux. However the Linux admins and the bulk of Linux systems will never see it or use it. It will eventually get dropped because of the bugs, memory leaks, and issues that are found in it. Those that are never fixed because they concentrate on the Windows version and ignore the Linux version.

Judging from history it is another Embrace, Extend, Extinguish attempt. Microsoft is just pulling from it's old bag of tricks.