Do you mean that I can't take some age-old idea, process or system, add "on the Internet" or "with a computer" to it and patent it?

Dog-walking on the Internet sounded so promising too.

The ISPs aren't creating "slow lanes." They're simply refusing to widen the freeway until they're paid to do so.

Funny. Customers pay their ISPs for an advertised bandwidth. Content providers also pay ISPs for advertised bandwidth. Yet, ISPs are still able to turn up the speed if content providers pay them extra. It sounds like ISPs are purposefully not living up to their advertising in order to extort money from people who aren't their customers.

Provider pays to provide information, customer pays ISP for access to internet and then has to pay a per view fee to view content at reasonable speeds. So long as there's money to be extracted, the consumer will be squeezed.

This buys into the framing of the argument pushed by the ISPs. The content providers were already paying for their own connection to the internet. Now if content providers want to provide fast connections to their customers, then they not only have to pay their own ISP, but they also need to send money to every other ISP in the world. This fundamentally changes the structure of the market.

And you, as a customer, get a crappy connection to the internet unless the content providers pay. That's true regardless of what you pay your ISP for their advertised bandwidth.

If this goes too far, customers will eventually start suing their ISPs for false advertising. ISP customers are paying for a certain amount of bandwidth, not a certain amount of bandwidth IF the content providers also pay.

What celebrity did this Jenny person get medical advice from?

I did manage to log in. The mobile site does not work very well. I hope that your birthday was a good day.

I don't know about that. I mean, we try our best, but I wouldn't say we're good at it.

I'm impressed that I remembered mine.

TL;DR it became a shopping site in the Philippines and then went belly-up. True story.

Multiply was sold to some entity overseas. Apparently the shopping had always been there, but we were never really noticed. It was huge in Asia. Anyway, in December 2012, they shut down the social networking part of the site, which seemed really dumb because it turns out that the stores actually used the blog part of the site for their goods and there was actually never any sort of shopping cart system on the site to buy stuff.

So, yeah...the social stuff went away, and now the entire site is defunct because apparently just being a shopping site didn't work out. I think I got that all right.
http://multiply.com/

On the plus side, they did give us a lot of warning and allowed us to export all of our posts into a format that could be imported into blogger, which actually also conserved the comments. I posted my on its own blogger site and sometimes peruse it still for the memories.

Java's been around for almost 20 years. For a "fad" it has incredible staying power.

People used to think the internet was a fad too.

Microsoft is a major employer of technical talent in the Seattle area even though you didn't see that in your anecdotal experience. Microsoft employs just about 101,000 people worldwide. About 43,000 are in the Seattle area. Yes, not all of them are technical staff. Companies need to employ more than just developers, testers, and admins to operate properly. (Duh?)

Amazon has more employees at about 110,000. It has about 15,000 in Seattle. Those are mostly highly paid engineers, managers and programmers. It's hiring like crazy.

Boeing has about 170,000 employees. About 81,000 are employed in Washington state.

T-Mobile has about 4,800 employees at its local headquarters.

AT&T near Seattle manages operations in the Western US and performs engineering and testing. It has 4,592 employees in Washington.

Adobe's Seattle office employs about 500 people, focusing on product development and operations.

F5 employs over 1200 workers in Washington state.

The Seattle area hosts Google's third-largest engineering center. It has about 1000 employees.

You are simply wrong about the speed of internet connections and the government. Areas in the north has access to Verizon fiber. Other areas have access to high speed internet from Comcast. As for the government, they're working with private companies to establish citywide fiber. People aren't electing "anti-Internet candidates", whatever the hell those are.

So yes, Seattle IS a significant tech hub.

Fighting increases to the minimum wage. A higher minimum wage would increase wages for both the people at the low end and those immediately above the low end. Republicans don't like that.

Fighting government stimulus which provide jobs. Fighting stimulus creates a surplus of workers. More workers means more people looking for work. Businesses don't need to offer good pay to find workers. Republicans like that.

Fighting unemployment payments, food stamps, medicare, medicaid, and housing assistance. All that money eventually enters and supports jobs in local economies. That increases the demand for workers. That also increases salaries. Republicans hate that.

Fighting against sick or vacation days. Keeping people at work means that employers don't need to hire as many workers as companies in other countries. That creates lower demand for workers. That keeps salaries down. Republicans like that.

Yes. When developer salaries rise to match the salaries to those in medicine, then the field will get flooded with all types of people looking to do development work. This will include women. That's economics 101: supply and demand.

Getting too old to have kids, and dating a guy who has two, so I'm good. :^)