You don't have to cheat Einstein to populate the galaxy. Nanotech based Von Neumann machines could easily spread out and cover our galaxy in a million years, the technology is certainly not impossible, indeed it is likely to be developed in the relatively near future should we decide to do so, and the possibility to live indefinitely in mechanical or biological bodies does not seem to be impossible either.

What could we do in a 1000 or 10,000 years. The Fermi Paradox is entirely valid given the assumptions normally made for the prevalence of complex life that would be millions or billions of years ahead of us.

The assets of the company do not vanish instantly as the stock price drops.Once we have 51% of the vote we can vote in a new consumer friendly board of directors to fire the current executives. Comcast is one of the worst run companies in America. It has the worst customer service and only maintains it function by being a monopoly. I have a friend who works with technology provider and Comcast has blown 3 deals with them strictly out of incompetence and laziness.

1st question. You don't upgrade during the transition you upgrade after. Just the roughly 2 billion they paid in dividends could be put to use.

2nd Tv is already dead is is all out IP bandwidth. The last mile doesn't have to be fiber coax is just fine. Also I don't want them to magically maintain a company with no customers, I want the executives fired and the middle management fired and rebuild a customer centric customer own utility. It not a pipe dream it a well worn business model.

3rd Lessig Nader is a joke. You could have one of on the board anyway it doesn't really matter as the economic collapse showed us many boards are just a nepotistic rubber stamp. My Dad still goes through every proxy vote to vote against people he thinks have responsibility for the collapse.

4th it doesn't have to go completely bankrupt, all we need is 51%.

...less than any other ISP? No. Just like Google funded Mozilla this is more of a long term effort to push more people and more services online, where Google can get a piece of it. The "old media" advertising budgets are still pretty huge and people willingly sign up to Google's services so there's no need to get shady. In fact their roll-out is extremely slow if they were seriously intending to become a major ISP, they're really just trying to shame the rest of the country into demanding they get the same kind of service from their incumbents. Who needs cable TV when you got gigabit service and can watch any show, any time over streaming without hitting any caps? That's what Google is selling, of course it's out of self-interest but for tech geeks I think they're on our side in this case.

One browser that supports multiple profiles should accomplish that just fine.

You're not a web developer are you?

Well that's the whole problem: democracy is subject to the voters, so if the voters are blithering idiots, well you're not going to get a very good government.

This is why democracy simply doesn't work in countries with moronic, uneducated populaces such as Zimbabwe, Egypt, or the United States.

Ah, Americans and their "mammoth snowstorms" - try living on a rock in the middle of the North Atlantic. You know what we call a snowstorm with gale-force winds and copious precipitation? Tuesday ;) Our last one was... let's see, all weekend. The northwest gets hit by another gale-force storm tomorrow. The southeast is predicted to get hurricane-force winds on Thursday morning.

Here's what the job of someone dispatched to maintain antennae for air traffic control services has to deal with here. ;) (those are guy wires)

I would agree, but only if we can let all the people who get stuck in a predictable storm die of hypothermia on the roads. Except, of course, nobody will let that happen. We'll spend millions of dollars and possibly endanger rescuer's lives to save them.

"Charge them the cost," I hear you cry? Yeah, that's not really going to go over well, and the lawyer's fees will dwarf anything we might recoup - not to mention pretty much guaranteeing whomever is in charge will never be elected to office again.

No - you (and I mean both you, personally, AC, as well as most of humanity) is too fucking stupid to stay safe, so the government is doing it for you. If you weren't so stupid in every. single. disaster. it might not be necessary. But utterly braindead humans show up every time. So stop blaming the evil gubmint - blame yourself and the dumb bitch next door. You're the reason these bans are put into place.