No, in other words, don't assume the right to preempt state regulation because you want to force the states to allow something, based on your interpretation of a law controlling the FCC, because the next group in power will use the precedent YOU created to preempt other state regulations that you might not want preempted. That's a pretty simple, clear message.

If you actually read the article, you'll see THAT is the message he's sending. If you manage to use an interpretation of current laws regarding the FCC such that the FCC can preempt state controls on intrastate matters, then you've just opened the door to many other uses by people you don't want doing the same kind of thing in ways you don't like. I think the phrase "don't be a hypocrite" would apply.

I said it was a clear message, and it is a shame it has to be spoken. It is a shot across the bow, so to speak, for people who support the current FCC attempts to preempt state bans on municipal ISPs, so they'll know that the argument "you aren't authorized to do that" won't apply when the FCC under a potential different political control acts to preempt state regulation of other matters using the same law as justification.

And your point would be?

In what way are they more energy efficient?

Every statistic I've seen along those lines laughably compares rural households to apartments... ignoring office buildings, shopping malls, the energy cost of all the public buildings, the energy cost of basically everything but the apartments.

For the stat to mean anything you'd want the total gross energy consumption of the city divided by the population vs the total gross energy consumption of some other area divided by its population.

I've never seen anyone cite that stat so I'm a little dubious that anyone has it.

I think it's more useful to think of the number as a quantification of how much that advertising is worth: that's the amount of money operators are depending on (one way or the other) to keep providing what they're providing.

How you actually get it to them is a whole different question. They've talked about micropayments and subscription models and other things, but ads have the nice characteristic of requiring zero overhead for the viewer. There's nothing to install; you "pay" just by having it on your screen. Whether it's actually worth it to the advertiser is insanely difficult to say, but they are (at least for the moment) actually forking over the money.

Everybody would love a more precise system, where you pay for the page views that are of interest to you, but that shifts the burden from millions-of-site-operators to billions-of-viewers, and they're all incensed about having to "pay" for something they were previously getting for "free". People keep trying things, but it comes as no surprise to me that for a lot of side, throwing a few basic ads onto the page for pennies-per-thousand-impressions is the easiest way to monetize their effort, at least for the vast array of small sites.

Big sites (like Slashdot) can do better, because the economies of scale make it worth the overhead to try to get money from viewers, and maybe some day we'll get that packaged down to a point where other sites can get it. But since the total sum of money is pretty substantial, I think a lot of viewers will say, "I hate ads, but I hate paying even more."

And my thesis committee - "Ballistic properties of early 21-century office furniture and of Executive personalities: an exoteric analysis"

The police kicked down the door, breaking the glass and maneuvering through the room with guns drawn. The living room was empty. They searched the kitchen. Nothing. One of them kicked in the bedroom door and swung his assault rifle in a wide angle as he crashed through.

Immediately he saw that the floor was covered with spam. A computer's hard drive had exploded under pressure and was oozing a liquid discharge of strange attachments and cryptic URLs across the desk and onto the floor. " Couchsurfing sucks... here's a better couch!" they yelled, one after another. Then the fumes struck him.

Overwhelmed, he stumbled backward, spraying vomit across the living room as he fell. He lay on the spammy floor unconscious, convulsing, muttering the same thing over and over. "Delete... delete... delete... delete..." The other officers quickly ran out of the front door, dragging him along by the legs as they struggled to cover their eyes which were lachrymating upon exposure to the spam. One of the units outside called for backup and unwound a yellow tape labeled "POLICE LINE - DO NOT EMAIL" around the residence. A forensics van pulled up, and several officers strapped rubber gloves onto their hands and Pentagon-surplus armored spam filters on their faces. They reentered the building, treading lightly, taking flash photographs, and laboriously stuffing individual spam emails into each of 10,000,000 Ziploc bags.

About twenty minutes later, Detective Protagoniste and the Commissioner arrived at the scene in their unmarked car.

"Well, what do you make of this mess, Detective?" asked the Commissioner, as they approached the building. Protagoniste picked up one of the bags, and held it up to the light, and replied, "Commissioner, as of now, the spam's been caught... but not the Spammer!"

Jenkies and Zoinks, made me laugh and almost snort OJ out my nose, thanks :)

You realize calling the Big Bang an "explosion" is a metaphor, right?

I gather that there is a countervailing trend, in the form of reformers in the government. China's version of "communism" is pretty far removed from anything visualized by the early social theorists, and it was plagued by a lot of outright insanity for decades, but it always had collectivism at its core. Mao was one of the great mass-murderers of history, but he wasn't corrupt, merely deranged.

I wouldn't call it a benevolent dictatorship, but I was put in mind of it by your mention of the unelected senators. They still had to campaign; it's just that they ended up stumping on behalf of the legislators-cum-electors. The most prominent example was the Lincoln-Douglas debates: they were running for the Senate but really trying to get legislators to vote for their party. It meant that national issues often trumped local issues, and the state legislature suffered for it.

My point there is that democracy, while important, isn't a cure-all. It's inherently adversarial, a conflict which has notably ground today's national legislature to a standstill. Even popularly-supported reforms get no traction, much less anything with even a whiff of controversy. And it's too inflexible to stop the largest discretionary component of our budget from pumping many billions to the military-industrial complex: I don't buy the theory that they're manufacturing wars for it, but even without that kind of explicit corruption it's still not as responsive as you'd like to imagine a directly-elected legislature should be.

I'm not an expert in China's structure, but I wouldn't count them out just because they're unfamiliar. Certainly the system is ripe for corruption, and they do need to fix it, but they have managed to reform themselves already even under one-party control. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here. There's much to do.

We'd still have global warming even with 100% of electricity being generated from nuclear power (or solar/wind, for that matter). To stop it, you have to eliminate the fossil fuels used in transportation too.

(I suppose it's possible cars and airplanes might have switched to tiny fission reactors or RTGs in the absence of environmentalist opposition -- or that electric vehicles might have become popular sooner -- but it doesn't strike me as likely.)

I like to be able to toggle flash on and off. What is more, i whitelist some sites only to have them annoy me with flash videos.

I've been using bing for years mostly because I didn't want there to be only one search engine. Try them out. They have boolean searches. I know... the evil microsoft... but the search engine is good.