I've lived in Los Angeles all my life, sport. There are infinite ways to exclude someone from business in my city if the city council wants to do it. And they've been bribed to do it.

Did you fail to see my posting where I pointed out that, since 2006, municipalities don't control franchising agreements? Living somewhere doesn't make you knowledgeable about state laws, apparently.

But let's address your first point, even if it were true:

There are no exclusive franchise agreements preventing this.

There are actually. They don't permit ISPs from operating unless they agree to provide access to the whole city. You can't just provide access to one part of a city and not the rest. This prices smaller operations out of the market by default.

Requiring coverage across all of a city is not the same as an exclusive franchise agreement. Your point is irrelevant.

Imagine a thousand small local ISPs starting up around the country all just trying to serve one or two neighborhoods. These are small ISPs that have ambitions of growing but they need to start somewhere.

So tell me why this hasn't happened in California. There are no exclusive franchise agreements preventing this.

There are allways going to be exceptions. Pehaps your town is so small that the big ISPs are not interested in servicing it.

California banned municipalties from enacting franchise agreements in 2006 -- instead such agreements are at the state level. California doesn't have a significant number of places where consumers have a choice beyond the incumbent phone company and the incumbent cable company. Why is this? Probably because of the reasons in my posting that you dismiss with your anecdote.

I hate the big ISPs too. Everyone does. But the solution to them is competition. Not government regulation. Just remove the stupid laws that make it illegal for rival companies to lay cable in their territory.

You are hoplessly naive. In order to compete with incumbent ISPs you have to have massive resources. If you start with small, local deployments, the incumbents will make local price cuts to drive you out of business. Even if you have the resources to make deployments across most population centers in a short time, the result will be lower prices and no profits. If you just built out, your equipment costs will be much greater than incumbents.

The only way to get competition is to force unbundling of local loops. This means more regulation.

Also for the record, I expect that within a year, it WILL increase my monthly internet bill. I've never met a bureaucrat yet that didn't like a few more dollars of taxes collected.

I expect that ISPs will add a "fee" for net neutrality compliance. This fee will have zero connection to any taxes or costs incurred by ISPs -- it will be a hidden price increase and extra profits by ISPs.

Wow!

I have been using Pandora Radio at work for over a year now. I have "trained" one station such that I skip tracks only about once or twice a day.

It helps me focus. Perhaps it blocks out other distractions, I really don't know. All I know is that I have much better focus when the music is playing.

As for what music: it's quite a wide range. New Age/Celtic/Progressive Rock/Folk/Folk Rock, etc..

But they won't let you keep old citizenship if you decide to become a citizen of the USA.

That's absolutely not true. At one time ('80's I think), on becoming a natualized US citizen, you had to hand over your foreign passport. Not now.

Here is what the State Department has to say on the matter

You're kidding. Have you actually experienced them? The tax issues are mindboggling in their complexity because the US law is written for US institutions and concepts.

The complexity issue can be solved at a cost of <$1000/year.

Get an accountant to prepare your taxes. I am resident in the USA and have rental properties in the UK, so my taxes are fairly complex. If I had more income from the UK, the tax filings would be more complex, but really, it's not that hard as long as you are prepared to pay a professional.

Jizzbug is correct, you always have to file

umm, No (unless there are special rules that apply to non-resident citizens)

This is the strongest rebuttal yet to the government assertions that people do not have an expectation of privacy in emails. If the Whitehouse and State Department staffs think that a private email account if secure enough for government business, then clearly the government expects that emails are private.

This the the best rebuttal to claims that the government has the right to root through people's emails (even just the metadata) without a warrant.

Or, maybeæ you knowæ crowfund it just because traditional investors are too scared to do new things

Stop right there. People don't "invest" on kickstarter. They have no ownership interest in the business. The people who fund in kickstarter take all the risk, while having no possible upside beyond the products that they buy.

I could make a political point about how kickstarter and its kin are a response to laws that limit risky investments by all except the wealthy and the effect of "the closure" in Venice in the 14th centuary.

every 5th text was silently dropped :

Every 5th? Wow, that's good. With my T-Mobile service, most texts from AT&T are dropped. I suspect it is because my number was originally a Pacific Bell number and somewhere within AT&T is a database that still shows my number as one that is with AT&T.

The reason we have ISIS is because we defeated Saddam Hussein without thinking much about what would come next.

I heard one theory that ISIS is really a creation of Bashar al-Assad. Before ISIS was around, the West was all for regime change in Syria. Now we are effectively supporting the dictatorship in Syria.

In my experience, it won't.

I reported to a small non-profit that their list of email addresses had leaked. I knew this because I used a unique address when registering with the site and I later started getting SPAM at that address. It might not have been a hack that caused my address to leak, but, irrespective of the means by which my email address had leaked, there should have been an investigation.

I reported it to the CEO, who passed it to the IT head, who basically could not get his head around the idea that there might be a problem.

(e.g. "Hey, you might want to keep an eye on those Tsarnaev brothers -- see attached description of the stuff they were doing while they were still here in Russia.")

With my most elaborate tinfoil hat on, I wonder if the FBI delberately did not stop the Tsarnaev brothers.

In what field does one get more resources because you failed? Perhaps some people think that the price of the FBI having better tools (and the rest of us having less privacy) is the death of a small number of people at a high profile event?

Perhaps someone thinks that the price of stopping the next 9/11 plot is to let a smaller plot go ahead.