From wikipedia entry:

In 2003 Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, published and popularized a proposal for a net neutrality rule, in his paper Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination.

That indicates that people were trying to do this before 2005. Why, if a law already existed?

The summary is the first I've heard of net neutrality as just "reinstating" a law. That word appears nowhere in the wikipedia entry.

Not only that, but there are many different interpretations and degrees of "net neutrality" legislation. So which one was in effect pre-2005?

hiding our human nature to enjoy intoxicants, sex, and all the other naughty things that people are prone to do just results in layers of lies and social artifice

You left out other traits common among animals and people, such as violence and theft.

I'm not claiming that puritanism is the right approach to civilization, nor am I saying that human nature should be ignored, nor am I saying that all humans are prone to violent behavior.

But any civilization, if it wishes to avoid collapse, understands the negative consequences of uninhibited human nature and tries to control its people to some degree. Most of that control is exercised through social pressure, but laws are also used as a last resort.

I don't think that a global queue necessarily increases utility.

First, if all of the cashiers are busy during the peak time, then there's not any real loss of efficiency. So the only real issue is fairness.

A global queue does appear to be an improvement in fairness, but there are costs. One of them is the extra space, which means that you potentially lose some cashiers (and thus efficiency) for this fairness. Another cost is the attention of customers so that they respond quickly when they need to move to the register (personally, I don't like paying constant attention to the irrelevant details of daily life).

And why is this fairness worth those costs? The "unfair" cases have an effect on the order of 5 minutes (otherwise you can move to another line). Those same shoppers probably encountered a lot more unfairness on the drive to the store (miss one light, and a hundred people who arrive at the intersection after you get to go first). Who cares? Where did this obsession with unfairness come from? Life isn't fair, and it's certainly not going to be fair down to a 5-minute resolution any time soon.

The only kind of unfairness that really matters are things that have a profound impact on your life. or things that are systematic against some person or group of people (and therefore might add up to a profound impact). This is neither.

We've got a lot more influence over government than we do over the top two telcos.

That's not how I look at it, at all.

Even if the ISPs/Telcos have a monopoly and collude to raise the price of communication, they still want that communication to happen (to some degree), because that's how they get paid. Ok, so let's say that prices and quality start to vary more, and that they rise in general (big assumption, considering that we haven't seen any evidence of a general rise in prices).

Is that really so horrible? Are we so cheap that we are willing to risk it all by involving the government? Even before there's a real problem? I mean, the internet has been a shining success story, with relatively little involvement by the government, and now it's suddenly urgent that we involve the government?

I see nothing urgent about this. Let's give it a few more years, and see what kinds of horrible abuses happen.

Mathematics predates the scientific method, so mathematics can't be dependent on the scientific method for discovery.

Even for those aspects of computer science that actually could apply the scientific method seem to mostly dismiss it.

Academic papers usually read more like an essay than a scientific study. They spend time trying to captivate your attention with a problem, come up with a solution that works under some set of constraints, downplay the significance of those constraints, and then spend a lot of time showing you the solution and how well it works under their contrived scenarios.

They spend no time trying to construct experiments that will disprove their hypothesis (usually you can't even call it a hypothesis), and if they do find bad cases they call them "degenerate" cases and downplay those, too, or maybe add something to the list of constraints under which the solution works.

I would like to pose this challenge: pick a few academic papers; identify the hypothesis; identify the experiment that tries to disprove the hypothesis; and show a clear indication in the paper whether the experiment disproved the hypothesis, was consistent with the hypothesis, or was inconclusive (i.e. experiment not good enough).

Take the C-Store paper, for instance:

"We present preliminary performance data on a subset of TPC-H and show that the system we are building, C-Store, is substantially faster than popular commercial products."

The paper has been influential, and the argument convincing. I even like the paper and find it insightful. But it looks more like they had an idea, tried it out, and published as soon as the numbers were good enough. I don't see much effort to control variables at all.

So a "formal science" is like other science, except without the scientific method?

I'm sure that some people define the terms that way. But to me, that means that the word "science" loses almost all meaning.

That is a general question about moving.

The simple answer is not to alienate your good friends when you move away. With the advent of air travel and telephones, this is really not too hard. The more complex answer is that things change and people change, and good friends should not be upset with you just because you want to move away for a few years.

It seems like what we call "real computer science" (like algorithms or theory of computation) is actually math. I don't see anything scientific about it at all.

Programming seems more like engineering than anything else (sure, it uses algorithms; but not much more than building a bridge uses math, and we call would call designing a bridge "engineering").

The only things I can think of that I would call "science" are: (1) benchmarking a complex system to get some empirical results; and (2) troubleshooting problems.

I'd be interested to hear why we keep focusing on the word "science" when that seems like a relatively small part of what we do.

It's not about the quality of the education, or even the prestige of the institution on your resume.

It's about being around the people most driven to be successful. It drives you to try equally hard to succeed, gives you an opportunity to learn from people who are or will be successful, and allows you to build relationships with the people most likely to need you as a business partner or employee later.

Why is lending or gifting what is supposedly yours a bizarre new right?

I notice that you still left this right undefined, and continue to describe it in vague terms.

What about devices that can only download content because they are incapable of transmitting a signal?

What about NDA-covered material?

What about other agreements, like employment? Should you be able to lend your job to someone else?

Would you allow "book brokers" that dramatically over-provision books, and allow people to rent books with minute-level granularity?

Can you rent out individual pages?

What about a physical book? Is the binding itself in violation, because it prevents you from lending individual pages?

What about lending to someone with different media? Can someone with an e-book lend it to someone as a physical book? What constitutes the "same" media versus "different" media? What about different revisions of the same device?

What about software bugs, old/new display formats, or malfunctions?

The problem is no consumer group exists which can fight all the way to the Supreme Court, which is probably what it will take.

Where did that come from?

Sure, the e-book practices are bad. That's why I buy physical books.

Legislation is not the answer here -- let alone asking the Supreme Court to somehow bestow some bizarre new "right" upon you out of thin air.

Ignoring the inherent dangers of crowdsourcing - why are we supposed to believe that this site is more reliable, and has less bias than your average twitter channel?

Exactly. Even if sites like politifact are well-intentioned, it often turns into more of a counter-argument (e.g. presenting additional, possibly relevant facts from another perspective) than fact-checking (that is, something is actually false in the original claim).

Nothing really wrong with that, except that they present the site as though it is somehow above the fray. It's not.

And that leads back to the frustration that I feel. I am a software engineer with a strong science background. To be told that I have to accept folklore as a source of database knowledge - that is just so very very wrong.

Any better ideas?

Decisions are complex. Any big decision is guided by objective, quantifiable things; but often decided by very subjective considerations. If it were totally objective, the decision would essentially have already been made. All you can do is learn a lot about the system, weigh the considerations, and make a judgment call. Or you can trust some people along the way to help you make a decision.