Can any legal types comment on whether it would be viable to fight back with our own Service Provider License Agreements?

"By providing me, <NAME> with service, you, <COMPANY> agree to be bound by this Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA)..."

Could we craft a generic boilerplate SPLA with provisions that nullify these kinds of anti-consumer restrictions, and just all print them out and mail them en masse to the legal dept. of any company we do business with? Would it be considered legally binding on them, just exactly the same way EULAs are legally binding on us? Has this already been done?

If you intend to process credit card payments through your custom application on the point-of-sale device, you'll likely fall under the purview of the Payment Card Industry's Payment Application Data Security Standard (PCI PA-DSS), which may require a source code audit and limit what you can have the software do. That may be no problem for you depending on your resources and intended use of your software, but it's worth keeping in mind.

Let's hope we heed the warnings of sci-fi.

Can anybody more knowledgeable than I comment on how this will affect binary (nVidia/AMD) video driver performance or compatibility, and thus Wine gaming?

If corporations were not recognized as individuals in a number of other annoying contexts (political contributions, "personal" rights, etc) then I *might* be inclined to agree. But as it stands, they've got the best of both worlds; no meaningful taxation like individuals are burdened with, but all the same protections and "rights" as well.

If the universe is under 15 billions years old, how do we know red dwarves can last 100 billion years?

Is it really that baffling? Let me take a stab at that missing piece:

Campaign manager: Hey tiny film studio, how do you feel about perjuring yourself to shut down this ad that's making us look bad? We'll owe ya one, and we have this funny feeling the perjury won't be prosecuted anyway.
Tinyfilmstudio: A corrupt congressman in my debt? Yes please; consider it done.
Campaign manager: I knew we'd see eye-to-eye on this one.

"Crime and politics, little girl. Situation is always... fluid." --Badger

What do you suppose are the chances that Microsoft itself is slowing down the W3C's progress, for exactly the reason you state? It would not be the first time a company sabotaged a cooperative effort to further their own interests.

If you think this is really just about a fishing boat, you haven't studied enough history or global politics.

It's EUR10 each, so that's only 60k pre-orders. I wrote a WoW addon that's used by a couple thousand people, and Minecraft is arguably 30x cooler than my addon. The internet is a big place; 60k people is pretty reasonable.

This is what DKMS was invented for. As soon as nVidia starts using it in their binary driver packages, this problem will go away and all your kernel modules will be recompiled automatically when a new kernel is installed.

This is a total straw man and you know it, and I'm disappointed the mods didn't call you on it.

If your mother can't run one script from a command line and follow the prompts to reinstall the driver, then she probably doesn't need the extra 3D performance from a proprietary binary video driver either. Set her up with the open-source driver and kernel updates won't be a problem.

The problem with this is that these content industries (games, movies, music, etc) have the nasty habit of defining piracy figures in terms of sales figures. So if they see falling sales figures, they will claim that as proof of a corresponding increase in piracy. I suspect this DRM lunacy will not end until at least one major company follows this kind of logic all the way to bankruptcy; sales keep going down, DRM keeps getting worse, customers keep getting more annoyed, sales go down even more, until the company is just out of business.

The real tragedy is that even then, in their dying breath, that company will claim that they went under due to piracy, not due to producing a worse and worse product (as the DRM gets more and more invasive).

To some extent I think the question of whether the globe is warming (or climate is changing, or whatever terminology comes next) is secondary.

Whether or not it's already happening in any measurable way today, I think we can all agree that it *could* happen in the future, so we (as a country, and a global society, and a species) need to be careful that it doesn't. To that end, studying human civilization's side effects on the biosphere seems obviously worthwhile.

I think the original batch of climate scientists were well-intentioned but did themselves (and us) a disservice by overplaying the initial data. They saw a potential problem in the future and tried to rally the public by saying "it's already happening!", but when that ended up not being very obviously provable, people started dismissing the entire concern. That, to me, is a huge mistake.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression was that the sorry state of broadband competition in the US wasn't the fault of laws, but economics: building the necessary infrastructure (coaxial cable, telephone lines, fiber, wireless hubs, cell towers, etc) is prohibitively expensive.

But that only highlights your original idea: high-speed data transfer is a kind of a natural monopoly, due to the aforementioned infrastructure needs. That makes it very much like any other utility: water, sewer, electricity, analog voice telephony, etc.

So I agree, classifying data transfer as a natural monopoly and running it (and, yes, regulating it) as a public utility just like all the other public utilities seems like the only reasonable long-term solution. Net neutrality is never going to be assured without strict regulation or strong competition, and the free market is never going to provide meaningful competition with such a high infrastructure cost to enter the market.