Rather than argue with them, bet them money. If they are so certain of the quote, let their stubbornness make you richer. Mine stupidity. And slapping them with their own wallet my wake them up. 2 benefits.

history has shown over and over and over again that big government is very bad.

Too much of anything is bad. Some water is good for you, too much and you drown. Some big company influence is good for us; but too much and we get corporate fascism and/or corporate communism (which may degenerate to regular communism).

The slippery-slope fallacy can be used to justify any position.

Overly-influential banks already had a big hand in crashing the world economy recently and almost got us into another Great Depression. (True, gov't mistakes contributed to it, but run-away greed was the main cause.) I thank Big Gov't for having prevented another Great Depression...in this case.

What conservatives often fail to grasp is that "less government" and "more competition" are sometimes at odds. We need referees to enforce a competitive environment. It's too easy for big co's to buy away competition. We want them using their resources to make better & cheaper mousetraps, not to keep out other mousetrap makers.

Most voters don't know the difference. They don't know what they are missing in order to get a "smaller gov't". They hear the oligopoly viewpoint because the oligopolies pay a lot of money to get their view out there and to get politicians to mirror their view.

So 87% of Americans have Microsoft Access. Thanks for clearing that up :-)

Technically 100% of Americans have potential broadband access; it would just cost an arm and leg to get it in many places. For example, a billionaire may have high-speed satellite connections if their mansion is in a remote area. Having access is not a "Boolean value".

If one wants a practical formal definition of "having access to broadband", then one may have to apply a price threshold.

It is true those countries are more compact, making economies of scale easier, BUT even well-populated areas of the US still have limited, unreliable, and gimmick-heavy choices. I'm one. Thus, population density is not the full reason. We are doing something wrong in the US.

It looks and smells like oligopoly-based crony-capitalism controlling the strings, but you are welcome to present alternative explanations.

Do staff go down with O2 tanks for maintenance, cleaning, server work, etc?

No, just red shirts.

They changed "mainframe" and "server hosting" into "cloud", "client/server" into "rich client", "statistics" into "data mining" and "big data", the original Mac look into "Shading-free GUI's" or the "flat look", and "embedded" into "Internet of things". It's not the new technology I have trouble keeping up with, but rather the new names for old shit.

Next you know the young whipper-snappers will take "variables" and call them "dynamic constants" and rave about the New Way of Programming.

Soylent is often tastier.

I don't care how good it tastes. I'm not eating anything made of people!

azimuthally

Saying that word is like a party in my mouth.

This sounds promising. I could use a memory upgrade.

I get the feeling we're witnessing the beginnings of a superhero origin story.

Mix in a little gene-splicing, some radiation and a brilliant but shy lab assistant who's working late one night. Next thing you know, Manhattan is in shambles.

How USA of them

That reminds me of this spoof: http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?Ayn...

The total angular momentum of all solar system objects remain the same, correct? So if we ignore those flung out of the solar system for now (assuming it's not a signif. factor), if Jupiter increases its angular momentum (moves "outward"), then a good many objects will lose angular momentum to counter. Where did it go? Do many "long orbit" objects that once had a semi-circular orbits now have highly elliptical orbits (as many comets do)?