Yawn... Broadcast news is entertainment first, and journalism as a distant second. A a product it is crafted to attract eyeballs (or ears, in the case of radio) of a certain demographic so that they can more easily target ad buyers. Anyone who does not get this is an idiot. Anyone who takes any one of these sources as the source of his world view is a complete idiot. Guess which network has the highest number of complete idiots in their demographic?

Oh, please. Look, I know that's what a lot of people (those who get their world view from Fox News) believe, but it is simply not the case. So unless you have a citation (hint: their some isolated cases), kindly STFU with the echo chamber bullshit.

So it's a libertarian's wet dream, then. All the downsides, then are just "the price of doing business" in the wild free market. Right? Is this a great country or what?

I'm going to get jumped for saying this, but stick with Windows for fat client development. Unless you are looking at developing web apps, you are going to be almost completely disappointed at the selection of tools available to you on Linux when compared to those for Windows. I'm not saying that there aren't tools for doing this on Linux, but dear gawd, why would you want to when the VS tools are so much easier to work with. And by "work with" I mean get work done. Use MySQL on Linux as your db server, by all means, but do your client development with what you already know.

Insightful? Really? For a post that truly did miss Bruce's point? That point was, BTW, that if you don't have a good reason for keeping something, don't. Make that a policy and enforce it. Anything, not just evidence of corporate sleaze, can become a liability. Only a fool would keep potentially dangerous garbage when she didn't have to.

Plot device, perhaps, but if you've read the entire "robot" series of novels, you'll see that it was used to provide a unique "angle" from which to tackle some classical problems of ethics. As a practical matter, I rather doubt that such a set of such laws, even if they were logically sound, could be reliably built into a machine such that no contrivance, hardware or software, could be used to circumvent them.

Yeah? So? The message should be clear enough, find some other way to make money and stop being a leach.

TFTFY.

Seems to me that the GOP did a pretty good job of blocking legislation that they didn't like for the last 6 years, even without a majority.

Well, that's a good question, and arguably applies to companies of all sizes. And my answer is, "You'll know because you're doing the things you're supposed to be doing. You know, like employing things like SIEM, IDS, IPS, etc.

TFTFY. Something that, by nature, occurs in a sizable portion of the population, and which has, itself, no debilitating signs or symptoms is not really a disorder, so politics has nothing to do with it.

Strawman much? Your argument seems to want to blame Title II for the evils of a monopoly. Google wants that status so that they can do what only the ILEC's are allowed to do right now. That's a huge change in this monopoly game.

Sorry, but I don't see much of distinction there. Terrorism and murder are no more, or less, justified by any particular religious belief. Hurting other people because you believe the invisible man in the sky somehow demands it of you is kinda the very definition of bat-shit crazy.

WTF? Will of the people? As interpreted by "elected lawmakers? You must be joking.

You and your friends are probably the assholes who talk and text through the movies in the theaters. Enjoy your "social" experience.