That's not true: the President is perfectly free to veto all spending until Congress is willing to give him a sane budget (or 2/3 of it is insane enough to override him).

The city fucking deserves what it got!

If Baltimore's police wasn't made up of murderous, jackbooted thugs, then there wouldn't be any riots in the first place.

Compare and contrast Baltimore or Ferguson to Charleston and how the latter city handled the Walter Scott murder. Whereas the governments of Ferguson and Baltimore (until recently) dug in their heels against their own citizens in defense of their corrupt police, Charleston's leadership had the basic decency to prosecute a blatantly obvious crime without trying to spin or weasel their way out of it. As a direct consequence, there have been no riots in Charleston.

The lesson for government here is simple: if you don't want riots, then respect the citizens' rights!

No, I mean like how the old, old AT&T (before the monopoly was broken up) used to only allow "approved devices" on its landline network, gave you exactly one choice of phone (the Model 500), and had to send a technician out to hard-wire it, using screw terminals, to the phone network (i.e., this was before RJ-11).

Good question. The main problem with all of these is proof. How do you determine intent of a dropped packet? Was it congestion, a hardware failure, or did the ISP have it in for that packet specifically? The guy screaming "I'm gonna kill you!" is the top suspect when someone turns up dead, but the cops still have to prove he did it.

When Comcast was using Sandvine Comcast denied, denied, denied that they were doing anything to degrade their users' internet experience. It took the EFF and a massive coordinated traffic logging effort to prove that Comcast was lying about intentionally disabling Lotus Notes (and BitTorrent) connections.

a costlier service

There is very little technical reason for a byte of amazon to cost more than a byte of wikipedia. Once those packets reach the backbone networks (a process that Amazon and Wikipedia both pay for through their ISPs) they're essentially identical, except in the fact that Amazon has more money and they have more to lose if something were to happen to that packet, and that would be a real shame.

The original plan was simply "neutrality". All bytes are equal. More bytes can cost more money, but those additional bytes are equal too.

And that's where it started falling apart. Bytes delivered by copper all cost the same, bytes delivered by fiber all cost the same, bytes delivered by avian carrier all cost the same. Bytes delivered wirelessly... well, they cost the same too but some major neutrality players were doing deals with telcos to provide some services free on phones. Which was more important to them, neutrality? Or getting wikipedia to the mobile masses with no data charges? Well, as long as the net was mostly neutral (except when it suited them) it's a good thing, right? But hypocrisy is the moral rot, and rot spreads quickly.

Personally, I have two horses in this race: in my personal life I'm an internet user, at work I develop web applications. I had my experience with value-subtracted ISPs years ago. Before Time Warner traded an agreement not to compete here with Comcast for an agreement from Comcast not to compete elsewhere, one of our customers had Time Warner Cable at their office. One day I get an angry call from them that we're down. I check the status of our servers and say "no, we're up" and they insist we're down and I ask them if we're down why are they the only customer calling me. They insist. I do a traceroute from the development server and everything looks fine to me. They continue to insist. I remote into their computer and sure enough, the application isn't loading. I open a ticket with our colocation facility to let them know that some routing is fucked up specifically between IPs A and B. It's closed: nothing wrong. I tell them to call their ISP. TWC insists its on our end. I roll my eyes and mirror their database on the development server and call it a day. Day 2: we're "down" again. Neither the main server nor the development server are reachable from that customer now. TWC insists its on our end. I set up a mirror on our mail server. Day 3: we're down again. We have a three-way call with TWC. TWC insists it's on our end. I tell them that every single one of our customers using DSL are having no problems at all and offer to pay the cancellation fee so our customer has internet that works. (By this time I had reviewed all of our server logs and discovered that they were literally our only user in the city coming from TWC, everyone else had DSL). Tier 2 support is on the phone in 15 seconds. Now, this is probably about a decade or so ago, so these are not the exact words used but I won't forget the general gist of it any time soon:

Tier2: We changed a setting in their router to allow them to access their "business application". Everything should be fine now
Qz: Thank you. For future reference if we have other customers on TWC what setting is this so we can make sure it's configured correctly and avoid this problem in the future?
Tier2: Oh, it's not a setting that the customer can change.

So, what is the intent of a setting that blocks access to an ISP user's commonly used websites?

My bank can and do notify me when there is 'odd spending' happening on my credit card.

The key phrase there is "credit card." Your bank does that precisely because it is the one liable for fraudulent charges. If you were the one liable -- is is the case with debit cards, or phone bills (as per this article) -- then they wouldn't give a shit.

That sort of thing happens with old people. When my grandmother died (in the '90s), we found out that she had still been renting her phone!

My Comcast bill is autopaid... using my bank's system, where the payment is "pushed" (not "pulled") only if it conforms to the rules that I set (namely, that it is not more expensive than usual). In fact, I got an email a few days ago saying that my most recent payment was not sent because Comcast tried to increase the rate by almost double. It's time to negotiate again... Google Fiber can't come soon enough!

Hey, it could be possible on planes flying the Tripoli - Mogadishu - Kabul route!

The words "engineer," "architect," and "developer" have been rendered meaningless by all title inflation (especially bullshit like "sales engineers").

Here's a newsflash for HR and others who hire workers:

IF THE JOB DOES NOT CONSIST MOSTLY OF DOING MATH AND REQUIRE THE WORKER TO BE LICENSED BY THE STATE, IT IS WRONG TO TITLE IT "ENGINEER!"

by telling carriers that they can't charge more for premium levels of service

Close.

The original plan was to tell carriers that they can't make Vonage and Skype a premium level service (add the voip package for only $15/mo!) to prevent them from competing with their phone service (only $9.99!). Or make Netflix an unusable service to stop customers from cutting cable. Or make browsing Amazon difficult because Barnes & Noble paid them to. Or sell 90% of the bandwidth they sold to me to their "fast lane" partners, while the sites I actually want to see get the last 10% of the bandwidth I paid for.

Much like the Occupy Movement, nobody took control to keep the message on point and eventually the whole thing devolved into a flaming mess, helped along by the telcos themselves spouting bullshit about how network neutrality meant you couldn't pay more for faster internet.

is your definition of that due to your political positions or is it a moral absolute?

Actually, it's pretty easy to decide if something is a moral absolute or not: If it's OK for everyone to do it then you can, if it's not OK for everyone to do it, then you Kant.

You missed the GP's point: the problem is not that true negatives were found; the problem is that they were not published. Because they were not published, future researchers might waste more effort re-discovering them.

Tell me, what's on the horizon tomorrow that I can't do with my 100Mbps connection

Download two linux cd images in a second?

Of course. But if I'm going to use an antenna, then what the fuck would I be paying the cable company for?!

More to the point, I think the situation violates at least the spirit (if not the letter) of the FCC's must-carry rules.