So because it was "human nature" that slaves would just naturally not want to be slaves, you think you can denigrate the struggle for abolition as "a farce?".

Nice logic, asshole. Having something to gain does not somehow magically de-legitimize struggles for justice.

I just started learning Python a couple of months ago (I come from a Perl/PHP web development background).

Really, get over the whitespace-indentation thing. It's such a small thing to get hung up on compared to how much more powerful, elegant, and flexible the syntax is (for starters). That, and it encourages you to indent source code properly anyway.

It's getting easy to pigeon-hole libertarian rhetoric that seeks to divide politicians and government in general from the people they represent.

The argument that "we should do nothing, because we suck at it" (where "we" means us and our government by the people) just doesn't pull weight for me anymore. It's not as if we have more influence over commercial network operators through any other means.

Sure, market fundies are always telling us that we can exert influence within a robust, competitive marketplace. NEWSFLASH: 2 options for millions of consumers is NOT competitive! Foster some real competition in the marketplace, and then you can use the competition argument.

And, gee, who do we call to enforce competition? Could it be, government regulation?

So much for doing nothing.

The idea that a technology "works better" is also conveniently vague. There are many goals to a network. Some people want to communicate. Others want to make money. These two do not always mix. I'd like my interests in how to reconcile the conflicts of these interests represented by some policy other than "always give the businesspeople what they want".

Maybe the FCC sucks, but it's //mine//. Your oligopolist ISP is not.

I normally have 3-10 tabs open at any time, but Slashdot is my home page, so it usually pops up when there's only one tab open - when I start my browser.