Uh...Philae was a European probe, not NASA. Your argument is invalid.

Didn't Keystone XL die in senate the other day?

DDG uses a multitude of sources for it's results, like Yandex, Bing, Yahoo, and others (it will directly pull stuff from Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, etc) including it's own crawler. So no, it's not just a front end for someone else's results, it's more of an aggregator with a focus on privacy/anonymity.

Gregory Benford had a great column about this, all the way back in 2000. It also involved a nuclear powered satellite.

It's human nature to react more extremely to new things, especially if they seem "unnatural." This might have been a survival instinct in bygone days, when the hominid who noticed that bush was out of place could take another path and avoid getting eaten by the sabertooth tiger behind it. But like so many such instincts, it translates poorly into the technological era.

Actually, Inquisition is available on last gen consoles (PS3 + X360), but that fact is often glossed over. It would have been interesting to see them included in the comparisons here.

OK. Let me explain it another way. A technology innovation has shifted part of the production possibility frontier curb.

My degree is in economics. What you are proposing is a zero-sum game. This is not how life works.

If you can get more grain out of a field, that will enable you to use that grain for other purposes. Cattle, chickens, etc. Your food choices increase. You can put some of the field into lumber at the same overall bushel production. Heck, you work less hard for the same number of calories. You can get a job in manufacturing perhaps. Basically, the increase in calorie production means an overall improved quality of life for both the individual farmer and the community as a whole.

My people were farmers. There was a story I was told as a kid.

A farmer went on a long journey. When he came back, he had a new corn seed. He planted it and had yields 50 bushels per acre higher he had last year and it was much higher than all his neighbors. His neighbors wanted to buy seed from the farmer. He refused to sell it to him.

The next year, the farmer's yield was only 35 bushels per acre better than his neighbors. Every year it decreased, until his yield per acre was back at the original amount.

The moral of the story is twofold. First, crops germinate.

Second, a rising tide raises all boats if you let it. Just because your neighbors also have more grain doesn't mean you'll have less. With more grain, you can raise more head of cattle, have more chickens, reduce the amount of grain and begin raising vegetables. Even if the price of grain declines, the amount you can do with that grain should offset the decline.

Space: Above and Beyond followed a very similar path to the original BSG (only ran one season, etc.) Except it was, arguably, pretty well written. It was definitely one of those 'ahead of it's time' shows. I could see a reboot doing very well, if only someone could wrestle the rights away from Fox - and this time not spend such a huge chunk of the production budget on bleeding edge CGI (which ended up being the perfect reason to axe it).

I just brought in WOW for my personal experience. If this goes well, I will also consider WOW for my business environment.

Dang. There's a lot of folks afraid of "Skynet". Terror does not become us.

My ILEC is CenturyLink, a national company. The neighboring ILEC is actually a locally owned company that is much smaller and is providing much better service.

The point is, even if I wanted wired IP service from a competing ISP, that's not possible because the ILEC owns the copper to my property and the ILEC cannot provide L2 connectivity over its existing infrastructure, and has no plans to upgrade that infrastructure.

Meanwhile, a neighboring, locally owned ILEC is running FTTH to its rural customers...

I haven't spoken enough with the competing ILEC to know if they'd be able to finance their fiber buildout without capturing the revenue from voice and data service on top of their plant.

I don't understand your reference to my state. I agree that we shouldn't make laws for everyone based on the conditions in a particular place.

That's actually a great reason to limit FCC oversight, since it is a federal entity and makes rules that are national in scope...

Why does Verizon have the right to saturate my property with 700mhz energy?

I didn't sell that to them.

If they want to shoot 700mhz energy across (and through!) my house, why don't they have to buy rights to that? If they are preventing me from being able to do anything in my own home with 700mhz because of their harmful emissions, why don't I have any recourse against them?

Nobody would let me park across the street from your house and shine lasers or even flashlights into your windows.

Why is Verizon given this same privilege, albeit in a section of non-visible spectrum?

The current RF energy governance framework we have in the US may not be appropriate. The spectrum licensees certainly benefit from legal protection from competition, and from legal usurpation of my property rights on a massive scale...

I am near the edge of my ILEC's territory. If I wanted a different ILEC from a neighboring territory to be able to provide service at my address, I would need to petition for the two ILECs in question to agree to "hand me off" from the current ILEC to a different one.

This comes directly from the state public service commission in my state (North Dakota).

Legally, only one ILEC is allowed to run copper pairs to my property. They have no interested in upgrading their plant.

They have a protected monopoly.

In many jurisdictions, only one cable company can put coax in the ground.

They have a protected monopoly.

IP protections, like copyright, are a government protected monopoly.

Frequency allocations, overseen by the FCC, are a government protected monopoly.

Access Easements on private property for incumbent wire owners (e.g. the cable company can put a truck or a box on your property if they like) are a government grant of special privilege.

Given all of the government collusion with the current infrastructure, asking if government can address its own problems seems a bit silly. Of course it could. It could stop enabling all of the stuff it currently enables, for one.

If you try to factor the residential broadband problem into an OSI-type layer model, perhaps what makes sense is to limit vertical integration.

E.g. if there is physical plant, IP transit, content delivery, and content production, it would be problematic to allow, for instance, SONY, to own all 4 of those layers in some specific area.

Ideally there would be robust competition at each layer.

Another action the government could take would be to stop approving merger/consolidation deals that have the net effect of consolidating layers and/or markets in such a way that overall marketplace competition suffers.

In some communities, public utility ownership of layer 1 (physical plant) would make a lot of sense and would be voter supported. In others, it wouldn't, and wouldn't. Both models are worth trying.

As you go up the stack, there are lots of opportunities for different business models. Community owned IP transit? Why not? This is, in some regards, the case at current internet peering points. The members co-own the exchanges. It is in some respects like the agricultural co-ops that are so common in rural America - the land of rugged individualists.

People are, after all, not opposed to working in groups when they like the group and when the cooperation makes sense (as opposed to being coercive in nature)