People were already paying in 1994 and earlier, when most of the information was on university and government servers. They're run by different entities now, not funded by government grants and public funding.
I do remember those days, and mailbombing blatantly commercial marketers when they popped up, as if that would stop them. There were a lot of people against the commercialization of the Internet then, in spite of it's inevitability when the network transitioned.
All these years later, I find that I prefer the market system to a system where the government and it's agencies fund the sources.

Many sites that once had 2-3 ads on a page apparently decided that they needed a dozen or more to try and get around adblockers, just like the drug spammers who try anything to get through, as if you must buy it if they defeat your filter. I still whitelist sites I use regularly, but didn't think of it until one posted a simple request and explanation, and when whitelisted, it had pretty unobtrusive ads. Others, I whitelist them, get inundated with garbage, and remove them right away.
The ball is in their court.

Filling out all those federal complaint forms actually accomplished something? I just did it out of frustration and because I knew spam texts hadn't been legalized yet.
Marketers have to buy their legislation like everyone else.

Winning a customer at a loss never works out, look at how badly Amazon is doing after many years of losses.
It's all in the business planning, and nobody is forced to sign up with Groupon for marketing, any more than they're forced to advertise in grocery store circulars. Simply reading the requirements should tell the business if they can make their system work for them.

Flight schools were losing money on flights since the cost didn't even cover fuel, but they apparently got enough students to cover it since they still run them occasionally.

Utilities were given specifications to follow, but they've changed several times. From an isolated control and monitoring network to one connected to the internet for government access, the regulators can't decide if they want security or convenience. Being bureaucrats first and foremost, ease of use (monitoring) for the government will be the side it will always drift towards.

The BBC has a Pentagon announcement that they plan to quintuple their "Cyber Defense" staffing. Completely unrelated I'm sure.

It's been a few years, but the last I checked, the ones issuing these federal laws, piled on top of thousands of others that nobody can even count, were not in the judicial branch. These justices can only issue rulings on law brought to them, they can't create laws. The federal prosecutors are handed a stick through laws, and if they choose to intimidate with the stick, that's one thing, but the stick can be withered or removed entirely by the legislators. I'm not sure Anonymous could come up with a large enough check to get Congress to do their jobs though.

The trademark office created the joke by giving him the trademark. There've been at least two movies by that name, one http://archive.org/details/CarnivalOfSouls1962 and the other a Wes Craven movie in 1998.
Maybe I should try to register Psycho or something.

They've trained me well enough. I may not even buy the base game if I know there will be extensive DLC until it's a year old and the "Platinum" or "Complete" versions roll out for $20-30. I'm not sure how that helps them, but even DA:O had a Gold and Platinum version. I bought the gold too early, then bought the platinum later, and combined it was still less than the launch price.

They might come back.. maybe not pagers, but something a little less capable. I'm always amused when going into "secure" areas with signs posted saying no cameras allowed, but people in the area are using a variety of smartphones. A few incidents and phones without cameras might show up in some large corporations again. I'm not sure anybody even makes them anymore, someone must.

The CIA runs on it's own. In Iraq they have their own camps, their own security ground forces, and their own aerial drones with attack capabilities. They strike targets that could be hit by the military, but spooks prefer not to tell anyone what they've found, know, or suspect.

Who needs the military? They're rarely on the same page anyway.

So the prog rock CDs i buy are expensive because of all the saturation advertising and airplay?