Oh you stupid lying fuck.

Haters gonna hate... Sigh...

Only if you follow the "Austrian School" line of thinking

Of course. Everything else is an attempt to turn Marx' feces into chicken salad.

it's because the town doesn't want to pay obscene 90+% profit margins

The "obscene" profit margin would, presumably, have been to some kind of Comcast. My question was, why — if people capable of running an ISP live in or near the own — would they not form a private ISP of their own, enjoy the modest 45% profit margin and the adoration of neighbors?

The people of the town can elect or depose the leaders of city hall.

Yes. Same applies to the State legislature.

What do you mean?

What I meant is that if the town does not have people capable of running an ISP, but creates one anyway, the service will be horrible and yet, because of governmental monopoly, nobody else would offer competing service either. The townfolk will be settled with that bond (or, more likely, a tax-hike) and shitty service. Congratulations.

step in when the market fails

Except that does not really happen. Pretty much by definition.

If the government entity receives no unfair treatment and has to play by the same rules as every other company

Begging the question, aren't you? A giant "if"...

It is pretty bad, when local governments keep would-be challengers of private companies out. When it is the municipality itself, that's running it, things can only be worse — because, infamously, you can not fight city hall. Very simply, if the town has expertise to run an ISP, why wouldn't not those people form a private company to do it? And if they don't, their establishing a governmental ISP anyway will preclude anybody with a clue from ever setting up shop...

It is like Slashdot's earlier obsession with "Municipal WiFi" has not taught anybody anything...

Iridium Corporation has been healthy since the bankruptcy (amazing what ditching your debts can do...). They've already launched some replacement satellites and are planning to replace the whole network over the next several years.

You can definitely do this (I have, back when it was a lot harder) but I'd suggest picking a PvE server and a stealthy class like Rogue or Druid if you plan to explore areas significantly beyond your character's level. Stay out of enemy cities and give mobs with skull icons a wide berth and you can explore a lot of the world with a low level character. As beautiful as the zones are, though, I'm not sure you'll keep busy for more than a week or three *just* exploring.

On the other hand, there's really no grind to speak of until you approach/reach the level cap. Pick up a questline and follow it, run some dungeons (there's so many at low levels you don't need to do the same one twice) and you'll level up extremely fast and with very little boredom. If you're a casual player, the rest system will make your leveling go even faster. There's even a class they added recently, the 'Monk', which gets an big boost to leveling, and their refer-a-friend program bonus makes leveling just ridiculous. And if level capping faster than most single player games wasn't enough, they've started offering a huge boost when you buy the current expansion, so you can start a character at close to the maximum level, ready for almost anything in the game.

Of course things get dull again not long after you hit the level cap, so you might also consider rotating MMOs; there are tons of them these days; play one till you get bored or hit the "grind starts here" level cap, then switch to another; when you get back round to the first it should have new content to keep the grind away a while longer.

Equality before Equations!!:

WASHINGTON, DC - President Obama announced in a Rose Garden press conference today that in light of the recent Amtrak accident he is calling on the Congress for bipartisan action on Physical Law Reform, and if they don’t act, he will.

Mr. Obama stated that if the Congress refuses to act on this reform of the laws of physics, he will sign an executive order repealing them outright and implement reform on his own. “Reforming these so-called ‘Laws of Nature’ is the right thing to do, and it will help working families and keep them safe.”

Said Mr. Obama: “The deadly Amtrak accident is just the latest example of how the GOP’s refusal to act has put many in danger with deadly consequences”.

“This reform will have immediate benefits from instantly efficient electric cars that no longer need to obey the ‘laws of thermodynamics and energy density’ to the being able to drive around a curve at high speed without needing so-called ‘Centripetal force’ to keep you on the tracks.”

Obama continued “So if the Congress refuses to act, I will issue an executive order repealing these so-called ‘laws of physics’, We cannot continue living in the past having to follow ‘Laws’ handed down from Sir Issac Newton over 300 hundred years ago, this is not who we are”.

“It’s time to put equality before equations, people instead of physics and fairness over formulas,” the president said.

Obama dismissed the simplistic Newton’s laws of motion as a holdovers from a bygone era of racism where the ‘majority’ felt they could impose their vision of the physical world on everyone else with their so-called ‘classical mechanics’.

In a related development, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a statement that President Obama's Physical Law Reform does not violate the Constitutional separation of powers because the Founding Fathers didn’t foresee that people of the future would be so stupid as to fall for this kind of malarkey.

Also, would he rather Firefox baked EME into their own code instead of using an Adobe plugin?

...and was he just as mad at Apple a few years back for *not* including a proprietary Adobe plugin with their mobile browser?

People cheat at every game, because there are always people who want more reward for less effort. WoW was actually a lot less grind-y than other MMOs when it came out, and it's driven the competition to be more friendly to casual players. It's been some time since I played, but from what I hear they're still making efforts to make things easier for casual players, and if you're not obsessed with minmaxing and getting rare stuff you could certainly explore and play for years without ever grinding content. With upwards of 10,000 quests and continents bigger than many games' worlds, it absolutely puts the 'massive' in MMO.

If you *are* grinding, I'm sorry, but Blizzard isn't forcing you to aim for piles of gold, rare mounts, or heroic gear sets. *You* want to be a top tier player with better stuff than everyone else, but then you complain about having to work harder than other players to get it. It is hard because you want it to be hard, it is a chore to keep the 'riff-raff' out, so you can show off what a special snowflake you are. If the stuff was easy to get...you'd want other stuff.

Now I won't argue that Blizzard is guilty of exploiting players' OCD; there's always something you really want tantalizingly within reach. It's very much a 'one more quest...one more battle...one more level' addictive sort of experience. It's well balanced, in that lots of things seem to be *just* worth the effort to aquire them, and once you do, there's more...and more...and more. Addictiveness is of course not a bad quality in entertainment, like a novel you can't put down, but if you can't keep in control and balance it with your life, or have to resort to exploits that make the game worse for everyone, then it's simply not for you. Sorry!

That the Big Education discriminates against Asians and Whites has long been very well known.

Citation needed.

I did offer a citation. Here it is again.

None of these links cite any studies.

Ah, so you did see them — you just didn't like them. Why, then, did you pretend, I have not offered anything? Could it be something personal?..

The first is the story of a girl who believes

What? Since when is one girl's account not enough to prove everything and destroy the reputations of all involved?

But, jesting aside, the 2011 article you dismiss as "one-girl story" says:

Studies show that Asian-Americans meet these colleges' admissions standards far out of proportion to their 6 percent representation in the U.S. population, and that they often need test scores hundreds of points higher than applicants from other ethnic groups to have an equal chance of admission. Critics say these numbers, along with the fact that some top colleges with race-blind admissions have double the Asian percentage of Ivy League schools, prove the existence of discrimination.

Seems rather convincing to me — which is why I cited it in the first place.

primarily to allow them to admit "legacy" students, who are children of other Harvard alumni

In that case, they wouldn't be favouring "underrepresented minorities" over Whites. The phenomena you describe may well exists, but it would not account for all of the observed discrimination. And, besides, I've encountered plenty of Asians among Harvard students even 20 years ago. Their children are now "children of alumni" too, which further reduces the effect, with which you try to explain the existing anti-Asian bias.

They simply must discriminate against the more successful races, because otherwise they will have disproportionately many Asians and too few Blacks. This would make them a target of various boycotts and governmental investigations by the assholes favoring equality of results over that of opportunity ...

Why isn't it discrimination to select students who score higher on a standardized test?

Of course, my objection was to the objectionable sort of discrimination — such as that based on race or sex.

And I protested the term "reverse" discrimination, because it has no direction — whether Purple Americans discriminate against Green ones, or the other way around, it is still racial discrimination and neither direction is "reverse".

Actually, affirmative action is reverse discrimination

Though I agree with the spirit of what you are saying, the term "reverse discrimination" is a misnomer at best and discriminatory at worst — because it implies, that discriminations are or can be different. They aren't and they can not — any preference given to one race, sex, etc. is discrimination and there are neither "forward" nor "reverse" among them.

Back to the topic, I'm surprised, it took so long. That the Big Education discriminates against Asians and Whites has long been very well known. Asians in particular have been advised to not identify their race at all — this would put them into the same category as Whites, which is an improvement. For ultimate win, claiming to be Black — if you can pull it off — is the best. The suit, apparently, compares the treatment of Asians with that of Blacks — which is a safer ground — but the real outrage is the Black privilege ... Too bad, the claimants in this suit are too chicken to go all the way.

I can not imagine, who — other than people with serious dislike for America and a wish to hurt it — would impose such policies on the country. No one would set out to find a surgeon of a particular race to treat them — why is it Ok to seek out a firefighter or a judge of a particular origin? It is so patently idiotic, a sinister motive is easier to imagine...

"James Bond has a license to kill, does he not?"

"That's right."

"Shoot someone, get off scot-free?"

"Yes, why?"

"So then, why do computer crimes carry a worse sentence than murder?"