Everybody is for sale. The size of the bribe has to do with how much they already agree with what you are asking for. In this case the dems are at the top of the list because it is taking more to convince them to betray the people that voted them in. The reps would probably go along with it anyway to "support small business" and only require a token donation.

You can't call it a tie because statistics determine the margin of error to be greater than the vote difference. It makes much more sense to say the winner cannot be determined. A tie means they had the same number of votes and that is extremely unlikely.

If they claim its a trade secret they must declare the chemical family of the secret portion of the fluid. I'm not saying this is perfect but it is a step in the right direction for declaring the chemicals used.

Wow, not a known universe fan I guess. It's good to know you don't consider him prizeworthy, plenty of others do though which is why Ringworld got both the Hugo and Nebula that year.

Please let us moderate the summaries. Bad summary of a bad article.

I was in Red Square on New Years Eve attending the festivities. There was no way the bomber could have made it in before midnight due to the massive police and military presence (to get in I went through 3 checkpoints where I lost my alcohol and bottled water). However, after midnight they dropped the security and a bomber could have made quite an impact at any of the several stages surrounding the downtown area that were still packed with people (the streets were closed off to cars so everyone was just walking around). This spam text was a lucky break for the Russians, things could have gone much worse.

That's completely absurd. That's like saying the only way to prevent theft is to reduce the police force. However, the idea that if there is regulation there must be someone benefiting from it is absolutely true... we're called taxpayers.

The Internet views China as "controllable"

This seems to me to be a direct response to the Democratic party outspending the Republican party in the 2008 elections. Because of the larger number of people donating small amounts of money to the Obama campaign the Democrats were able to outraise and outspend the Republicans who depended on small numbers of wealthy people contributing the maximum. Nobody knows the intent of SCOTUS in deciding this, maybe it was oversight, maybe they didn't like the move to the left that would eventually leave Democratically nominated Justices in power, nobody knows but them. But the effect of this ruling is to allow the wealthy to skip past the restrictions they were under in 2008 and give them the fund raising advantage in 2010 and beyond.

Whislteblowers are a safety valve. They should be punished for what they do because it is breaking an oath either to a nation or employer. But if someone sees something so disturbing going on and they deem its worth sacrificing their career or life in order to make public they are helping keep our society from becoming too Orwellian. That this is starting to happen with more regularity is the disturbing part, perhaps the secrets we are keeping have hit some critical mass and the secret keepers can no longer even stomach it.

I totally agree with you that it should be law, however the citizens of the US as a whole are not able to form an educated opinion on this yet. We on /. are not even able to discuss this without misinformation about net neutrality popping up and muddying up the discussion. If this went to congress now the special interests would start a campaign convince the public of the dangers of "the government takeover of the internet". They already have a head start by being large contributors to just about every member of congress. The FCC is doing what they can to try to protect the internet while the issue evolves. One day I think we should take it to congress but doing that too early would only make things worse.

While this would be fine for a household, satellite internet has such limited download/upload bandwidth it would be next to worthless for business or school applications that are the focus of this money. Plus, the latency makes gaming a real challenge!

That's a little naive don't you think? I agree this is mostly politics but during a recession there are programs that would cause extreme amounts of chaos if they are cut or would cause more of a setback than is responsible. Here's a couple; say that during a recession we cut NASA down to nothing, saying we can't afford "science, discovery, and development" right now but soon as the economy improves they are back in business. The amount of time it would take to get them ramped back to a productive level would be more expensive than just borrowing during the downtime. So it is fiscally responsible to use deficit spending for that because its cheaper than the alternative. Or how about health care, if every time we hit a recession we let people get sick and die how would that help our workforce work out of the recession? So it would make sense to borrow money for that as well. The flip side to this is that when things improve we don't instantly cut taxes because the government is pulling in more taxes than it uses. When Clinton left office there was a surplus and Bush's first action was to cut taxes, it happens over and over again, when things are good we want low taxes but when things are bad we need the governments help to get through it. We have to break out of that mindset.