To be fair, a decade later they also passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.

*whoosh*

From what? What's colliding with player's skulls with such force they're going to get fractured?

Other sports manage to find solutions to this without helmets. Think wrestling, water polo.

Nothing in the entire Federalist, so-called Anti-Federalist papers, or drafts of the Bill of Rights support this theory. Major citation needed. If you can find this, great! But I can't.

I don't like intellectual property any more than the next guy on /., but the First Amendment was not written to intentionally or unintentionally supersede Congress' copyright law-making ability, which is more specific than the First amendment.

The order of the provisions don't matter. The Constitution is a single, cohesive work spread across something like a dozen sheets of paper (two for the unamended Constitution; one for the Bill of Rights and 27th amendment and including one proposed amendment not (yet) part of the Constitution; and whatever the rest of the amendments are written on).

Like all common law works, the order of the statutes doesn't matter, and the dates in which they were passed doesn't matter. Hence why laws repealed specifically mention the sections of the Code to modify, or which previous laws are null and void. It is called lex specialis and instead of refuting my point, you just reiterated your point without managing to explain the hard reality of common law away.

Another example:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Before this amendment, Congress already had no power to search and seize property (unless maybe they could work it into "necessary and proper", because it's generally agreed there needs to be some warrant system in order to serve justice).

After the amendment, now there's an exception! Now all of a sudden, the ability to search and seize property is in (very narrow) cases, actually permitted. For better or worse.

Regardless, now "necessary and proper" no longer applies to search warrants, the more specific Fourth Amendment is the exclusive statute on what's lawful.

Concussions are caused by sudden forces applied to the brain, right?

Well then, let's get rid of the helmets. No, really. It's not like there's hard game pieces flying towards your head at 90+ MPH (hockey, baseball, lacrosse). The only long-term damage that a helmet can protect against is skull fractures. Other than that, they reduce the pain associated with hitting your head, making it easier to damage your brain.

I can't say I've heard this position before, and it doesn't really make sense. Laws are interpreted by most specific supersedes most general; not most recent supersedes oldest. This is called lex specialis , it's a mainstay of parliamentary procedure as used in common law settings like the US.

When laws are repealed, it's because they're specifically removed, e.g. "The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed." (When SCOTUS finds a law unconstitutional, it remains "on the books" as do all laws, but common law prohibits other courts from being able to enforce it since an unconstitutional law is no law at all.)

The Bill of Rights wasn't supposed to introduce new "rights" but merely codify the ones that already existed. To be clear: There's no law permitting Congress to restrict the freedom of speech, therefore the law is unconstitutional. The First Amendment is unnecessary in this case.

In some cases, the First Amendment might add additional protections where the law is otherwise more generic and would allow it. Primarily, this means state constitutions. The Consititution was expanded so the Bill of Rights guarantees apply to state-level actions, too. In these cases where state-level actions are curbed, the First Amendment (via the Fourteenth Amendment) is to credit.

That's the very argument GP is arguing against. What's the retort to that point? All the article does is show how uniformly the First Amendment has been applied (or lack thereof, in the positive), not what the reality is supposed to be (in the normative).

That is, show us the free speech exception in the United States Constitution, instead of just assuming SCOTUS rulings are always correct. (And there are actually a few! Copyright law as mentioned in Article 1 section 8, for instance.)

Only if by "liberal" do you mean in the traditional sense of liberty and the Enlightenment period's understanding of the scientific method. It does not hold true for the American layman's use of the term for an ideology. For such pesudoscientific nonsense as eugenics, anti-vaccination, anti-GMO, "alternative" medicine, state censorship of violence in media, and complete ignorance of economics, you can't get much worse than American progressivism.

Also consider that the data is being treated equally: In both cases, it's being paid for. It doesn't matter who's doing the paying, does it?

It's not the ISP setting the policy of how the data is getting paid for; it's one of the two end-users who is voluntarily opting in. Either I pay for it, or someone else does, in either case, the ISP and/or routers don't care.

That definition makes it impossible to provide toll-free broadband, then.

Consider if I went to a website, and it asked my ISP "How much is this user being charged to visit us?" And the ISP said "$0.50". And so they cut me a check for $0.50.

What if instead of paying a million people a million small checks, what if it were easier to pay a single check to the ISP for the same amount?

What's the difference?

Again, it's not Net Neutrality, because it's not causing packets to be dropped based on source or destination. You're arguing against a by-definition argument.

But let's look at your argument (apparently) against bandwidth caps and toll-free broadband as a separate issue.

So you're on a prepaid or otherwise pre-negotiated plan because your service provider wants to budget for their capacity. How else do you handle overages, other than an overage charge or ending service altogether?

Suppose that Facebook invents the Facebook Phone (ignoring the real attempt for a moment), it has its own protocol with the tower for shuttling data, but at the tower level, uses IP over the Internet. Isn't that effectively the same thing? But what do we do, make it illegal for companies to manufacture such products? That's absurd for a huge number of reasons including having to deploy a "proprietary product police" (God help us if the FCC or FTC take over this job), and covering a huge number of products already out on the market today (Netflix-enabled TVs, anyone?).

No one has made any mention of a bandwidth cap "for a specific website", though. I said what if I paid the bandwidth costs you would otherwise incur.

Net Neutrality is a routing rule: "Don't degrade service (technically, drop packets) based on source/destination". Bandwidth caps don't do this.

You might not like monthly caps, but don't call it a Net Neutrality issue. That's a separate battle.

There's many different ways Internet traffic can be billed. There may be a peering agreement in place (where peers exchange roughly equal amounts of packets, and aren't otherwise concerned about their ultimate source or destination); there may be some arrangement where service is provided over the course of a time period, e.g. a 1Mbps dedicated pipe, or a shared 50Mbps pipe; or you might charge per-packet.

For the latter case, the "charge" may be in the form of tiny fractions of a USD per packet, but more likely, it just counts against your data plan for which you've prepaid. In this case, what's wrong if I want to offer to pay your costs associated with receiving my services? None at all: Anyone is allowed to do that.

Absolutely not; prices are set based on what the market can bear, completely independent of input materials. If a vendor makes a huge investment in widgets and no one wants to buy, it ends up being a sunk cost and they'll sell it below cost (because supply and demand).

Additionally, cost is defined as "the value of the next best alternative." Unless the network is at capacity, it costs me nothing when my neighbor uses e.g. T-Mobile's no-charge music streaming.

What's being proposed is called toll-free broadband and all parties have an opportunity go in.

Net neutrality, on the other hand, is a routing philosophy. It applies to routers. It says don't drop packets based on source or destination (dropping packets being how the Internet signals congestion and prioritizes in general). Toll-free broadband doesn't violate this rule.