I'm confused why the FCC and the administration are looking for wifi specifically in schools. If students are going to be rough on whatever technology equipment you have, you should be getting them PCs, which are easier to repair than tablets. PCs are also suitable for some kinds of work that tablets simply aren't, notably the computer science classes that are all the rage right now. If you're getting PCs for classrooms, it makes more sense to wire them into the network directly. It's cheaper, it enables more types of learning, and you don't have to worry about kids dicking around on their personally owned iPhones instead of learning.

Given these factors, why are we trying to upgrade to next generation wifi specifically? I'd imagine that some schools would want to upgrade their CAT 5 based networks. Why are we not enabling that?

I didn't say it does. The Democratic and Republican parties agree, as their official positions, that the United States should be governed as a democratic republic. (Note the small letters on both adjectives.) No shit the Democrats are "in favor of democracy" and the Republicans are "in favor of republicanism." However, the Democrats are ALSO "in favor of republicanism" and the Republicans are ALSO "in favor of democracy." To an outside observer from a country whose political parties have more meaningful names, this isn't necessarily obvious. In the UK (where the parent poster seems to be from), some of the more major parties have more meaningful names. (For example, the "Labour" party picked their name because they claims to support policies that are better for "Labourers" than business owners.) That's the contrast I was drawing.

In fairness, the US's Democratic party has an official policy of republicanism. Every Democrat elected official from President Obama on down was, tautologically, either elected by individual voters, or selected in some manner to fill an unexpired term. In either case, the Democrat elected official is charged with voting on behalf of their constituents; their constituents don't get to vote themselves.

Also of note, the US's Republican party has an official policy of support for a democratic system of government. Republicans believe that the best way to select elected officials is generally in a "one man, one vote" style election (the exceptions are for things like unexpired terms.)

TLDR: The US is a democratic republic. The two primary political parties picked pleasant sounding names that have never had anything to do with issues they support.

The State of the Union address is normally in English on the four "broadcast*" networks, plus the three cable news channels. I haven't checked, but I bet there's at least one channel in my cable package simulcasting it in Spanish as well.

*In an affluent neighborhood, the broadcast networks will probably be coming in by cable or satellite too. If I understand correctly that makes them immune from this attack.

There wouldn't be any bribery. What there would (eventually) be is a State that is able to demand censorship. You can use Comcast's DNS to find sites criticizing Comcast because if Comcast blocked the site but Time Warner didn't, people would be able to tell the difference.

Right now, when a site is ordered off the Internet, everyone who cares finds out about it immediately, largely because of the fact that the ISPs don't implement the order simultaneously.

As a result, the government only does this rarely, and they only do it to people who they are accusing of crimes (generally piracy.) They don't do it to critics of the government.

The FCC's job is to silence people who aren't speaking correctly. Thst's what the rules against using a HAM radio to transmit on the FM bands are. That's what the rules against cell phone jammers are. That's what the Fairness doctrine was.

Now, the radio spectrum is constrained by physics. There is an absolutely finite capacity of information that can be transmitted over it in a given time span. There is a legitimate purpose in keeping users of the radio spectrum transmitting in their own blocks.

The Internet, though, has a theoretically infinite capacity. (If we need more bandwidth, we could run more fiber without running up against the laws of physics.) Sine one person's Internet transmissions don't interfere with anyone else's (from a physics standpoint) there is no legitimate role for the government to dictate the terms of anyone's Internet speech.

The FCC's job is to regulate the terms of people's speech. It would be wildly inappropriate for them to regulate the terms of speech of a newspaper, which is why the FCC doesn't regulate newspapers. It would be wildly inappropriate for them to regulate the terms of speech of a cabele television channels, which is why they don't regulate cable TV. It would be wildly inappropriate for the FCC to regulate the tems of speech of the Internet, so the FCC should stay out of regulating the Internet.

Nonsense. GP said this.

But the GP's point, and the key point in the Democrats' defense on this in general, is yelling "THIS IS OLD NEWS!!!111!!!1 YOU REALLY DON'T THINK THIS IS IMPORTANT!!!!!111" at people who want an investigation. That's why Clinton said "What difference, at this point, does it make?" ("At this point" was two months after the attacks.) That's been the answer from the State Department, the White House, and the media. And it's exactly what the GP said, and it's what I responded to.

Benghazi is two problems. The State Department, at the time led by Hillary Clinton, was allegedly negligent in not taking proper security precautions to prevent the attack. It also led a coverup to prevent the attack from hurting President Obama politically.

If Hillary Clinton was so negligent that her subordinates did not take the proper security precautions, she is responsible, through negligence, for the deaths of four Americans. Certainly there's an amount of negligence which would immediately disqualify Clinton from being voted for. If she gets the nomination, each voter will have to draw that line for themselves.
But was she negligent to that level? Were her subordinates? Was the President? I don't know, and very few other people do either, which is exactly why we need the investigation. Whether or not Clinton was negligent in preventing the attack is material to whether she deserves to be President, so the American people deserve to know what happened before they decide whether or not to vote for her.

The second issue is the coverup. We now know that Federal Government NEVER believed that a YouTube video was the cause for the Al Qaeda attack on the Benghazi consulate. The reason that the YouTube video spin was propagated in the first place was to prevent questions about whether the Obama administration's foreign policy was succeeding at preventing terrorism by hiding the fact that a US consulate was attacked by Al Qaeda.
Just like with the attack itself, if Hillary Clinton was responsible for a lie being told to the American people, that will disqualify her from being elected in the eyes of many people. Just how many depends people depends on just how responsible Hillary Clinton was. Because every voter has to draw that line for themselves, the American people need to know exactly what happened before they decide whether or not to vote for her.

As an aside, before you bring up veterans dying to support ignoring an Obama administration coverup, you may want to check out what Veterans Administration Secretary Shinseki has been covering up.

Well, the GP's premise was that people were claiming that "Benghazi is more important than..." whatever issue they were commenting on in comments on news sites. I was on topic, relative to GP, when I asserted that Benghazi is a bigger deal than he makes sound like.

The Slashdot topic is about Google's alleged ability to influence who people vote for. Relative to the Slashdot topic, the GP shoehorned a bullshit attack on calls to investigate the Benghazi attacks into a topic that had nothing to do with it. Kind of like what you just accused me of doing.

Let's take it as a given that "What difference, at this point, does it make?" counts as claiming to accept blame for something. How does that work, exactly?

Let's use a concrete example. President Obama used drugs, primarily marijuana and cocaine, from his late teens into roughly his late twenties. My source for this is Dreams From My Father, his autobiography. The book came out about 15 years before his Presidential campaign started, and he's answered questions about it throughout his political career. His answers have largely been, "It was stupid. Pay attention in class and don't do drugs." Anyone who was going to vote against him because he used drugs had all the information to do so, straight from the horse's mouth. That's what taking responsibility for something means.

If Hillary Clinton is legitimately culpable for the lack of security at the compound in Benghazi, then her negligence led to the death of four Americans in a terrorist attack. According to you, Clinton has already admitted this. Being responsible, through negligence, for the deaths of four Americans is a legitimate campaign issue, and the Clinton campaign (and you) should be prepared for Benghazi to be held against her throughout the campaign. That's what taking responsibility for something means.

Hillary Clinton hasn't, in fact, admitted that she is responsible. Democrat hacks are STILL pretending the Youtube video spurred a demonstration that Clinton couldn't have forseen. (Eleanor Clift made this claim on The McLaughlin Group on Sunday.) The genesis of this claim is a set of talking points put out by the State Department (led, at the time, by Hillary Clinton) to conceal the issue until after the 2012 election. The coverup, is a separate issue that Clinton is responsible for.

Right now, it looks like Hillary Clinton was legitimately negligent in preparing for the Benghazi attack AND that she led a coverup of the attack to benefit her party on the eve of a Presidential election. We don't know, largely because the Democrats have been stonewalling on this since September 13th, 2012. The American people deserve to know what happened, and that goes double if we're being asked to vote for Clinton for President.

NJ already has a law on the books that says that once "smart guns" become commercially available, all guns sold to consumers must be equipped with the "smart" technology.

Step two happened before step one did, because the people who want to outlaw private ownership of firearms have been telegraphing their intention for a generation.

Star Wars Battlefront 1&2 have had dedicated servers since launch as well.

Your first sentence is a red herring. Democrats enacted a plan that hurt the union members who helped elect them, and now they're being dicks about it. Calling the health insurance people use to take care of their family "fancy stuff" or even "Cadillac level" is tone deaf. Democrats are holding up the Keystone pipeline, which will be built with unionized labor. Private sector union jobs are very much down under this President, and further down still if you count back to when the Democrats took over the Senate in 2006. (Of course, private sector non-union jobs are also down, which also doesn't help matters.)

So I don't know that Democrats are better for rank and file union members. Certainly the Cadillac tax hurts union members almost exclusively. Whether Republicans can translate that into electoral success has nothing to do with the fact that Obamacare is bad for union members.

Actually, the Cadillac plan tax is projected to mainly affect health plans run by unions. Unions, and in most unionized industries union members, overwhelmingly support Democrats.

I'm pretty sure Verizon Wireless is not a free service, dude.

Ensuring that women aren't unfairly disadvantaged shouldn't be the goal. Ensuring that no one is unfairly disadvantaged should be the goal. Enforcing the kind of equality of outcomes you are talking about essentially means putting men at a disadvantage, which you also shouldn't be OK with.