The whole point of bringing it up was to demonstrate the government isn't subject to it's own laws. Thanks for proving my point, though.

I know I'm going up against many years of case law here, but... the Fourth Amendment doesn't say anything about privacy. It says no searches and seizures without a warrant.

So the question is: Is it legal for MetroPCS to hand over the data, presumably in violation of their privacy policy and CPNI laws? Or did they do it because they were threatened and intimidated?

Ok? I'm here arguing against legal monopolies. Patents, government utilities, crony capitalism, it's all the same here.

I'm not sure how you "force" someone to share Internet, the Internet is built on sharing. I want to run a packet over your network, I pay or peer to connect to your network, problem solved, we're sharing a connection.

If a no network service provider is providing service, that probably means it's unprofitable, i.e. the total number of resources that would have to be expended to provide service exceeds the benefit the service will provide. Most people living in these areas aren't going to be running businesses, they'd be perfectly well served with some form of wireless connection which would do just as good a job with far less expense. No act of Congress can overturn this fact of economic law.

It's like subsidizing people to live in flood zones with federal flood "insurance", Housing is great, especially if you want to take the risk and assume the cost, but that's wasteful and just stupid.

Ah, an NSA shill. Welcome to the conversation.

If you wanna be taken seriously, maybe present a coherent point?

That's exactly what I'm arguing against.

That's a non sequitur. What if I replaced "Internet" with "Food"? You get a bunch of nonsense that, without exception, has caused famine and millions of deaths.

Who decides what is "infrastructure"? Of course /. will think Internet is vital; someone else might think food is vital. But that's not a reason to leave food to the government! Why would the Internet be different?

The Internet is too important to leave to the government. Or does the NSA and FCC need to tell you?

Find me a case where a vaccine caused autism. Go on, I dare you.

Now find me a case where predatory pricing benefitted a corporation. Or, stop denying basic facts of economics.

No one said anything about the Federalist papers being law. It's an argument by logic, which means you have to employ logic if you want to argue against it.

Further, if that's not as good as a dictionary then what is? Surely the Federal government doesn't gain the power to chuck kittens at foreign countries if we googlebombed "militia" to "feline warfare" - the powers don't change just because the language does.

Likewise, "general welfare" has never implied the power to do whatever strikes one's fancy just because someone asserts it's in your best interest. Remember when it was in our best interest to not drink alcohol on Sundays? Remember when it was in our best interest to plain not drink alcohol? (Ok, at least they got a Constitutional amendment for that one... but then it was repealed, and they banned drugs anyways.)

Raising an army doesn't imply conscription. The act of the executive branch doing something hardly means what they're doing is constitutional. It just means they're getting away with it, often with the implicit agreement of Congress and/or the courts.

The competitor here was taxpayer funded. That's the closest thing we'll ever see to immortality: When they fail, they don't go bankrupt, they get increased funding.

But let's assume EPB didn't engage in rent-seeking, the same article you link to describes how predatory pricing is almost entirely hypothetical:

Obviously, predatory pricing pays off only if the surviving predator can then raise prices enough to recover the previous losses, making enough extra profit thereafter to justify the risks. These risks are not small.

However, even the demise of a competitor does not leave the survivor home free. Bankruptcy does not by itself destroy the fallen competitor's physical plant or the people whose skills made it a viable business. Both may be available-perhaps at distress prices-to others who can spring up to take the defunct firm's place.

Further, the threat of litigation discourages entry into the market and price competition.

The term predatory pricing comes from the time when massive consolidation of railroads and oil was driving down prices. Smaller competitors sought reasons to stop it.

The price increases never came, of course. Same as computers today.

This point was rebutted by the people who wrote the general welfare clause, in Federalist 41.

To paraphrase: But what color can your objection have, when a specification of the objects alluded to by these general terms immediately follows, and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon? If the different parts of the same instrument ought to be so expounded, as to give meaning to every part which will bear it, shall one part of the same sentence be excluded altogether from a share in the meaning; and shall the more doubtful and indefinite terms be retained in their full extent, and the clear and precise expressions be denied any signification whatsoever? For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars.

Essentially, if the "general welfare" clause included things like a militia to defend the homeland, and post offices, as you presumably maintain, why even bother listing them separately?

It did take off; many people wrote XHTML documents, and it's default in e.g. Drupal. The problem was IE didn't support application/xhtml+xml until recently, which is exactly what gave XHTML all its functionality.

I know it's fun and all to make fun of WordPress, and it is indeed a piece of garbage for multiple reasons. But this seems more a fault of highly liberal error handling on the part of Web browsers and MySQL.

From what I understand, MySQL truncated the input passed in without throwing any complaints that data was being lost.

Second, if the HTML pages were served under the more secure application/xhtml+xml media type, the compromised page wouldn't have been usable, because the malformed syntax would have produced a fatal error, instead of silently corrected (this is specified in HTML5, which IE supports now, woo).

I've seen more security vulnerabilities with text/html's silent fixing of errors than I can count, including a notable XSS attack because someone thought you don't need to HTML-encode URIs in hyperlinks... but this leads to funny behavior even with valid URIs like <http://example.com/doSomething?run&copy;destination=baz> (if parsed as HTML, a copyright sign magically appears instead of the URL parameter you were intending).

Furthermore, this question "What religion are you" violates the equal protection of the laws, that the same law protects everyone equally (and religion is generally subject to strict scrutiny), the Fourteenth Amendment.

And it violates the Fifth Amendment - that a person cannot be compelled to speak against themselves: Providing the wrong answer would be speech against one's self.

I think we have a misunderstanding. I never said anything about forcing people to do anything.

And if you're going to use the term, at least use it correctly.

Religious exemptions are unconstitutional under the free exercise clause. Perhaps a rephrasing of my original point makes this clearer:

Judge: "You're being tried for $foo. How do you plead?"
Defendant: "Not guilty by religious exemption"
Judge: "What religion is that?"

If this is indeed a constitutional question, then if the defendant provides the wrong answer, they're guilty. That is an unconstitutional abridgment of the free exercise of religion: It makes certain religious guilty.