I agree - and this technology will give more parents the peace of mind to hand over the keys to their kids. I only see good coming from this.

No. There's plenty of space to learn - and now there's recourse for abusing the freedom they've been given. The car doesn't shut off, the parents are required to remove driving privileges... if my kids want to drive my car, there are rules. I already told my son (months away from getting his license) that I will never buy him a car - I will by myself a car and let him use it as long as he's obeying the rules. He didn't complain... I don't owe him a car. It's a privilege. If he doesn't want to be monitored, he can pay for his own car and his own insurance... it's just that simple.

The context of my statement was presidential elections. Ideally, the president should matter very little. Unfortunately, after 240 years, the U.S. Constitution is essentially turned on it's head. In times of peace, the majority of governing is supposed to happen locally. If that still happened, we'd have much greater control over our local politics.

The other bad part about that is that by the time the primaries get to my state, the ones I liked have already been eliminated by the party establishment. I can vote in either primary (but not both) because we don't do party registration in my state, but by the time the primaries come around, anyone that would have made a significant difference is already eliminated.

Only nobody sold Obama as a constitutionalist... in fact, for liberals, "constitutionalist" is one of their many examples of "code words" for "racist." He was sold as a constitutional scholar... so he knows about it, he knows what it says, he just doesn't care.

So it's acceptable, then, because they've always done it. Gotcha.

The problem is that everybody seems to defend the politicians on their side, no matter how immoral or corrupt they've proven themselves to be. Confirmation bias, I suppose.... it's always worse when the other person does it.

That!

I've had a number of arguments against certain candidates because they quite obviously lied... and partisan apologists for that candidate would say "yeah, but all politicians lie!" This has happened, of course, for politicians from every party... but it shows that far too many of us not only accept it, but condone it. "It's OK because it's the one I support... but if your candidate lies I'll never stop mentioning it!"

I remember when Bill lied to a grand jury, and there were far too many people who said "yeah, but who wouldn't in that situation?" I wouldn't... I wouldn't have been in that situation, either. Which leads us to the fact that it's not just politicians, it's a large (and growing) segment of our society that believes that lying and deceitful behavior, immorality and selfishness are OK.

There is no sense or morality or common decency anymore. Sure, most kids lie about their bad behavior, but it used to be that parents would punish them even worse for lying about it. Nowadays so many people don't want to punish their kids - they want to be "friends," that kids get away with anything by lying about it... and those kids grow up, and breed more kids just the same; they grow up to be politicians, businessmen, police officers, and all manner of people that we are supposed to be able to trust. I even had an argument with someone boasting about screwing up someone else... their defense was "there's no law against it." I had to ask "since when to common decency and common sense need to be written into law?"

I think this is what people don't get.... it may be true that that links to certain services were weak points, but what Comcast wanted to do was charge the content providers for those links, despite the fact it was already their own customers that wanted (and WERE PAYING FOR) the bandwidth. The larger problem is that I am a Comcast customer, and also a Netflix customer. I pay Comcast a lot of money every month for service - nearly $100 when you include everything (yes, including modem rental), and what I want to use that service for is (sometimes) to stream Netflix. Comcast should want me to be a happy customer with how much I'm paying. They obviously don't give a crap... but since there's no reasonable competition in my area, I (you know, the actual Comcast customer) am screwed. Netflix is not "pushing" their content, I, the customer, am pulling it over the bandwidth I've already paid for.

Every industry with competition is driven towards serving the customer. Period. The problem here is not throttling, it's ultimately a lack of competition and collusion between ISPs. I'm not a big fan of regulations - if you actually have a free, competitive market, you don't need regulations, but companies take advantage and participate in anti-competitive behavior otherwise. The regulations shouldn't restrict the services of the company, they should be to keep the free market free, even if that means that, in the short term, people get their netflix throttled.... long term goals are much more important.

I agree and disagree... I'm one of the people "stuck" with comcast, paying nearly $100/month when you include all the fees and stuff (because I'm not bundling TV or phone service). My only other choice is wireless (Clear, which is not fast enough) or AT&T... which is also many times slower than Comcast. There are other cable companies around, but they seem to have sliced and diced up the areas they serve... when I put my address in with the other cable company, they actually say "good news! you can get service with comcast!"

However, more competition - and not a "coordinated ISP system" would be better. Although it's quite obvious, it's probably also quite difficult to prove these companies are colluding to divde the market in an effort to artificially inflate prices. I don't know what the solution is, but I rarely accept "more government" as an answer.

So what if we're near the bottom when it comes to internet service... I can't think of anything people need or want to do and can't because of any limitations. We're also near the bottom due (in large part) to geography. Net neutrality isn't going to fix that.

I certainly don't like most of your list, but all of them "kooks?" The choice of Sarah Pailin made my choice to vote third party pretty easy, but if you think they are all kooks then there is no one the republicans can pick that you will not call a "kook." You're simply being a blinded partisan.

Agreed... I was initially against net neutrality, but after some thought I went completely to the other side of the issue, agreeing 100% with the concept of net neutrality (which is besides the point in this discussion). From what I understand, however, these regulations go far beyond that into the realm of another power-grab by a U.S. government agency.

Not irrelevant, because you can't impose these kinds of burdens (financial and otherwise) on people without the certainty that they'll make things better.

I've always felt I should be able to leave the fruits of my labors to my family. Let's take the case of a moderately successful musician whose wife stayed home with the kids while he was out on tour. He's killed in a tour bus accident. Yes, she should continue to collect royalties. They're not all Elvis or Madonna - most musicians barely scrape by. Yes, there should be some reasonable time limit, though. What that is escapes me... perhaps life of spouse; I wouldn't want to say life of children, but then if there are special needs children that are still being taken care of by the family as an adult then it seems unfair to cut them off because their mom died, too.

But where should it end? I don't know... but we need to stop treating all musicians as if they're part of the tiny, less than 1% fraction that makes millions of dollars from being a performer.