I was responding to the way that you rephrased the OP, and inquiring because parents who use the term "the best way to raise my children" usually hide behind their ignorance.

The last line wasn't a content-free one-liner. Your response shows that you've thought it out. You know the goal, and aren't hiding behind "I know best how to raise my children". It's only meaningless for you because you've really thought through the goals.

Parents' belief that they know what's best for their children is usually egotism.

What's our responsibility when they're clearly wrong? (i.e. the vaccination-autism conspiracy theorists)

To protect parental rights? To protect the children themselves? To protect the rest of us?

Determine the goal before you look for a solution and you're more likely to find it.

The problem we have is that we are too caught up in being right that we can't have an honest discussion about fairness to find common ground.

Of course government and society are going to be hopelessly inefficient at achieving big things if we can't even agree on what the goals are. Even those who aren't corrupt, egotistical, or stupid are doomed to fail when everyone's measuring success against different criteria.

"it is our duty as humans to make it as fair as we can"

1) We can't even agree on what's fair, and can't have an honest discussion about it. We have trouble dealing with the fact that there are consequences of bad decisions or bad behavior. Warm and fuzzy isn't scalable, but politics today is about emotions and fear.
2) It's our duty as humans? Seriously, what crack have you been smoking? What duty do we have because we're humans? Are we INHERENTLY responsible for something more than a chimpanzee or a maggot? Why? Because the FSM said so?

Lastly, things that "taxation is addressing"? Taxation addresses a need to acquire revenue. What's done with the money that's collected may or may not be something that has to be addressed. The Constitution lays out the duties of the federal government and says what it can and can't do. If you want the rules changed, there's a mechanism. It's fully my right and responsibility to bitch about where the government exceeds its authority, and the most direct impact that I can address -- "standing" so to speak -- is where something's taken from me to give to someone else by someone who's not technically authorized to do so.

I understand that I'm being a purist, and I'm willing to make concessions for "the greater good", but there's no reason my contribution should go to provide something for people who have no responsibility to contribute as well.

If you want fairness, then you have to have consequences for failure.

It's a commonwealth and not a state...

It's good to know what the theoretical improvements are to see whether or not a goal is worth pursuing. There's a huge difference in discussing the science and marketing a product.

So they did the reverse of all of the people trying to legally appeal to pervs?

Verizon's incentive is also driven by moving people off copper pairs, since they have to share those pipes with anyone who wants to lease them cheaply (CLEC, alarm company, etc). VOIP over fiber is very different from POTS from a regulatory standpoint.

I'd just release a version for online gaming sites called the Gambling Analytical Binary and Library Architecture - GAMBLA.

$319 for Windows 7 Ultimate is pretty fucking obscene.

Everything's bigger in Texas, even pithy quips.

My guess is that it was probably a progression from "Haiping's PHP" to HPHP to HipHop.
Two syllables vs four or more... looks like they're not just computing more efficiently, but also speaking more efficiently!

I think that eventually someone will throw up a network of those high altitude balloon UAVs with some kind of mesh topology and a series of ground stations with Google and similar datacenter-in-a-shipping-container web services out in the middle of nowhere, including in the third world.

The network itself will be better protected from vandalism than copper or fiber, and properly meshed, highly resistant to centralized attacks. Can you take out all of the Google shipping containers on the network?

Solar-powered repeater stations on the ground can turn whatever RF transport that's used and translate into WiFi.

This would be a perfect opportunity for a large-scale IPv6 rollout, while they're at it.

Interested? Someone's going to do it. Why not have it be you?

Isn't a femtosecond thus technically a standard unit?

Do you need any better of a sign that something's wrong?

It seems as though everyone's excited about "wireless broadband", but the speedtest app on my iPhone says 416ms ping while I'm on 3G.

Latency that's even half that is useless for many applications, and just frustratingly slow for just about all the rest.

Are we just heading for a new definition of the digital divide whereby some people don't have access to *useful* broadband?

-Nev