My personal apologies for the ridiculous partisan groupthink on slashdot, which moderated your post down to -1. It's becoming so prevalent, it's almost unbearable to read comments any more.

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Dear God the last thing I want is a bureaucrat deciding which neighborhood gets the next broadband upgrade.

You made my point beautifully. My point is that the same principle would/should apply to Comcast, rather than making the original practice illegal as a preventative measure.

Um, seriously?

Mitt Romney was the 70th Governor of Massachussetts until January 4th, 2007.

Mike Huckabee was 44th Governor of Arkansas until January 8th, 2007.

Neither of these men hold a legislative or executive position.

WTF? I'm a Troll because I don't know what the big fuss is about? I guess because I don't immediately tow the /. party line on all issues, "rabble, rabble, rabble", I'm a Troll.

The United States has long ago enacted laws to prevent this sort of practice. Microsoft was nearly split up as a result of such in the 90s, if you recall. Intel was also reprimanded smartly because they paid a percentage of marketing fees for companies that would agree to exclusively use their products over a combination of Intel+AMD.

Doesn't this [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act] prevent that?

Assuming that the Justice Department does its job re: anti-competitive behavior, and the Justice Department does its job re: not allowing monopolistic, anti-competitive businesses to merge, I cannot imagine a world in which any Justice Department would allow an ISP to prevent a given provider to prohibit the traffic of another provider. That would be like ATT not allowing an MCI Worldcom telephone call, and there would be immediate outrage. Immediate.

It sounds like to me that if we were concerned that the Content Carriers would become Content Producers, and thus would favor their own Content over a competitor's Content, then we shouldn't allow mergers like Comcast / NBC.

To sum it up, the problem is the monopoly, not the hypothetical misuse of the monopoly.

I'm for your solution as well. I think having the government sponsored/created monopolies is the problem, anyway.

Neither of those gentleman actually hold a public office. Keep that in mind.

Can someone explain to me, in simple terms, why Net Neutrality is needed? What are we worried about? This just means, to me, that we're going to be able to pay a bit more and get a bit better internet experience. Similar to, if I want to take a toll road, which is less congested than the rest of the highway system.

Why should Verizon, for example, be forced to prioritize gaming traffic at the same rate as, say, high speed internet for a Doctor's Office that is looking up records in a central database?

Who the fuck said anything about a 100% tax rate?

There is no example of free-for-all (libertarianism), nor does true libertarianism actually espouse an anarchical free-for-all. That's what MSNBC will tell you, but it's not the case.

Libertarians respect the rule of law, but we also respect the rights of an individual to direct his own path. Hence, Nokia is allowed to do what it damn well pleases with Qt.

Hence the reason we have the rule of law. We create laws that prevent sociopaths from doing things that they shouldn't. When in government, we have a balance of powers that prevents the Executive from screwing us over (when the Legislative and Judicial does its job), and visa versa.

You cannot make the case that "smart sociopaths rise to power, thus become CEOs" and thus insinuate that capitalism is bad. There just isn't any justifiable case that can be made for it. The author that I responded to suggested that the Banking Crisis of 2008 was a result of corrupt CEO's, and it was. It absolutely was. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have banks, and it doesn't mean that the government central banks (ECB, BCB, Federal Reserve) aren't just as corrupt, and just as harmful to the economy. It also doesn't mean we shouldn't have CEOs, because plenty of companies have powerful CEOs who do good things.

The ultimate point that I'm making is that Nokia is free to do whatever they like. That's part of capitalism. If you want a government telling Nokia what to do, then you deserve the outcome that you get.

You're right. The new NVIDIA Teslas (C2070) have 448 cores, not 292. If you're doing work that a super-computer needs to be doing, your software is massively parallel. Otherwise, run it on your laptop at home.