Nice aimless slur, but your comment still didn't include a citation for your imaginary claim about the Fairness Doctrine. No one I've read about who backs Net Neutrality (whether FCC-mandated or otherwise) has advocated bringing back the broadcasting Fairness Doctrine. I'm not even clear on how the two policies are related. Post a citation, not a whiny complaint, or you're just a blowhard.

This is the norm in Britain. And it works. But trying to get people to do this in the States is like pulling teeth.

The government's hands are already there. In fact, the government's hands put the Internet there in the first place. Net Neutrality is not a "trojan," but rather an idea to rely upon the sort of peering agreements that already exist between network providers rather than allow them to discriminate amongst content providers, since many network providers are also content providers. It would prevent, say, Comcast from impeding your Netflix streaming.

That is like saying the FBI, the Navy, and NASA are the fourth, fifth and sixth branches of government. The FCC may be an "independent agency" in the sense that it can create certain regulations within its particular focus, but that power is derived from the executive branch in a way defined by legislation (initially the Communications Act of 1934). The majority of its upper management is appointed by the President. This makes it no different from any other part of the government and is consistent with the Constitution's separation of powers.

Right, we need to get a little less nerdy and return to the main topic: skeletons. So who do you think would win, a Kirk skeleton or a Picard skeleton?

Either is far too long when five minutes is enough to visit /. and read uninformed rants about them. Process, shmrocess.

No, he's absolutely correct: Linux is scheduled for EOL in 2011, and even now Linus is only patching critical security bugs (we'll still probably see at least a few of those every Linux Patch Tuesday until EOL, and frankly I'll be happy to see my last LPT). And look, there hasn't been a major update since Linux SP4 in 2006, and he stopped active development of Linux's integrated web browser, Firefox, years ago, so it's not like we weren't warned. I'm not sure what everyone here is complaining about - sure, this Microsoft Russia guy is itching for us to switch to Windows now that Linux is going away, but most of us upgraded to PostLinux 7 Business Premium Edition well over a year ago. This is a non-story.

And ask yourself: which is more serious, a non-disabled person parking in a disabled parking spot, or someone sharing 24 songs on the Internet? If stealing a disabled person's space strikes you as more serious, perhaps the song fine should be lower than whatever your local parking fine is. Does no one on these juries think of these sorts of comparisons?

Easily one of my favorite sentences ever. :)

Also, the individual mandate and insurance market ideas are Republican - something most Republicans are quick deny, as it has been forbidden by their religion since 2009.

Rejecting the corporate bonuses of companies on government welfare is not leftist, it's conservative: the taxpayer should not be paying bonuses to the management of failed companies. And if you think the financial bailouts themselves are leftist, you have a funny idea of what "leftist" means.

Take out your wallet and look at your ATM card. If the card bears the name of a bank rather than that of the government, the president is not a leftist.

I doubt we ever will, and for precisely the counter-reason you suggest: that it would endanger the dominant parties. The people will never be able to accomplish anything that endangers the political status quo so fundamentally. To be more blunt, one of these two political behemoths (the one that rhymes with Shmepublican) is tremendously good at taking any benign issue and turning it into a terrible communist plot. Examples:

• Campaign finance reform. Large companies that stand to benefit much from inclusion in federal budgets bribe our politicians and then wait for their kickbacks. Conservatives hate government spending, but don't seem to mind the bribes that lead to this spending.
• Health Care. I live in Massachusetts and am very familiar with which party invented health insurance mandates and state insurance markets (hint: our governor at the time has also appeared on Sesame Street as a game show host).

Instant Runoff Voting is a great idea, and one entirely compatible with conservative ideas, but that doesn't matter. If it were somehow to gain a public spotlight, the Republicans would do the same sort of thing they've done to other good ideas. IRV would become Tea Party fodder; they'd ignore all specifics and call it Instant Rigged Voting. And the media, which also ignores all specifics and strives to cover controversy, would fuel it. Sorry if I'm a cynic, but I live in the United States and have been paying attention for the past decade. The country's ability to communicate effectively and think independently is broken, and we won't have things like IRV until or unless this changes.

In 2010-2011, you can write highly functional applications using HTML5 and Javascript, make them installable on your web browser, and have them work offline. Please stop assuming the Web is as it was when you were in junior high.

There was no Web when I was in junior high, you insensitive clod. :)

I'm glad you summarized all this because I've also seen and used plenty of these offline apps and they can be quite sophisticated. It will be interesting to see if the Web can become an app platform, beyond webmail and the other common cloud services we have today. Frankly, I look forward to it. Most of my life computing has been a balkanized activity, users running in one of several parallel ruts depending which hardware/software platform they happen to use. At times there has been convergence, at other times divergence. The Web has always held the promise of making the old platforms irrelevant, and in a very good way.

That depends on what factors influence the bottom line. Under Republican policies, which I've been assured many times are extremely "business friendly," we deregulated banks and finance companies and allowed the lines between them to blur (some of this was supported by President Clinton). Under President Bush we also depopulated the SEC, which was charged with the oversight of these businesses. In other words, we did exactly what banks and financial institutions were asking us to do. And it turns out that doing exactly what these businesses wanted was not as "business friendly" as we'd imagined, as the crash of 2008 demonstrates. It turns out that if we'd kept post-Depression era policies in place, all of the companies that lobbied for deregulation in the 1990s and 2000s would have been much better off, millions of jobless Americans wouldn't be jobless, and a lot of the tech companies that TFA mentions would be selling more cloud services and shiny devices than they currently are. The bottom line suffered tremendously for our "business friendly" policies. So these people are putting their money not just behind what they believe, but also on the bottom line.

Thanks for that. It's a great interpretation. I had wondered about the fact that he had the horn in the new loop.