Is it overly cynical of me to wonder at this - I mean, Isn't part of their work figuring out ways to break into things? Or is that just the CIA etc?

You are so close to getting it. Without multiple electric grids, you can't have "competition" for distribution service. It's pretty obvious we won't ever get redundant grids - there isn't room, the enormous expense of building that much redundant infrastructure should make it clear how crazy the idea of competition should be...

Except it doesn't, for you? Are you really expecting to convince anyone that they can go out and start up a competitor to Comcast and Verizon? Or that they can expect anyone else will?

Ah, you may as well boycott the roads. They'll be thrilled, because your boycott is obviously doomed, and the very few silly enough to try it will curtail their own mobility (/ability to participate in society/democracy), hurting rather than helping their cause.

The only nuclear option is in the polling place in the next election. Any elected representative who isn't fighting this is out of office.

There is no functioning market in broadband ISPs.

Back when we all used modems to get on the internet, and anyone could set up shop with a bank of modems, and any customer could call any ISP they wanted, sure.

Let's compare and contrast that with today's broadband ISPs.

Broadband requires copper or fiber to each premises. Physical limitations prevent competitors, for the same reason you wouldn't have multiple electric utilities with multiple electric grids and multiple outlets in your house for each one. Then there are barriers to entry; if it costs billions plus a block-by-block, house-by-house battle for access, incumbents are sufficiently insulated from competition as to be a functional monopoly, or (if there are, say, 2 of them, cable and telecom) an oligopoly (or cartel).

Markets are amazing and wonderful. They just don't solve everything. You can't have a free market in police forces. Free market in judicial systems. Free market in electricity. Etc. Some things, it doesn't quite work.

The Internet, classic example, only exists because of DARPA - centrally controlled, big government research.

There were lots of telecoms that could have provided a network like it, but all of them were thinking about "how can I charge the most for the least" instead of "let me make something completely new, and make it incredibly cheap, and then there'll be a new telecom paradigm." To the extent they were aware of new paradigms as a possibility, they were concerned with stopping them, to preserve their existing businesses.

The government-scientist invented, publicly funded, Internet was wildly more successful than anything created by the free market to that time. Eventually the government privatized it, turning it over to a few companies, who became fantastically wealthy on the back of it.

It still stuns me when people say stuff like this. But then I remember, maybe they weren't here, and didn't see what happened.

The net has always been neutral. From time to time an ISP would try to test the boundaries, and then we would stop them:

2005 - Madison River Communications was blocking VOIP services. The FCC put a stop to it.

2005 - Comcast was denying access to p2p services without notifying customers.

2007-2009 - AT&T was having Skype and other VOIPs blocked because they didn't like there was competition for their cellphones.

2011 - MetroPCS tried to block all streaming except youtube. (edit: they actually sued the FCC over this)

2011-2013, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon were blocking access to Google Wallet because it competed with their bullshit. edit: this one happened literally months after the trio were busted collaborating with Google to block apps from the android marketplace

2012, Verizon was demanding google block tethering apps on android because it let owners avoid their $20 tethering fee. This was despite guaranteeing they wouldn't do that as part of a winning bid on an airwaves auction. (edit: they were fined $1.25million over this)

2012, AT&T - tried to block access to FaceTime unless customers paid more money.

2013, Verizon literally stated that the only thing stopping them from favoring some content providers over other providers were the net neutrality rules in place.

2015 was just the FCC formalizing what we've had since the internet was first invented. The Internet only exists because it was always neutral. This is about breaking the entire premise of the internet, after decades of it working properly.

You think you can have meaningful competition in "last mile" for internet, any more than you can have it for electricity? Hilarious. Someone's going to start up a new ISP, somehow get right of way to everyone's last mile? That's your competitive marketplace?

"Oh but the local governments." I can give you another list of all the cities and towns full of people who can't get decent service at all, from any ISP, and then when they try to build their own, the big ISPs sue and harass them to stop them from doing it...

Ah, right. The feds will hold the ISPs to their word. Then the invisible hand of the market will take care of everything.

It's like these assholes think the free market fairy can just wave her little magic wand and make anything work.

Except they don't think that. They know you have only 1-2 choices for ISP, and if both suddenly decide to provide shittier service, you're fucked. They even know that you know that. They're just testing to see if this makes it in above the pain threshold of the American voter, because everything that you can suffer, you will be made to suffer.

Libertarians are automatically against anything that has even a hint of humanity. We eat children and abuse the elderly for sport. At least, thats what I'm told I believe by random people on the Internet.

Yeah, but it's so much easier to complain about how "they took our Slashdot!"

Those who hate group X have a hard time seeing that there is a lot of shit flung at group X here. Substitute whatever group you want and there are people who irrationally hate them. I agree that there are very few places on the Internet where you get a larger cross-section of society than here. Despite all the crap, there is still a lot of insightful commentary Glad there are others who still recognize that fact.

Interesting is one way to put it with that additional context. That actually subtracts from my estimation of the original comment, but "headline" was all that was available to comment on before. He's certainly made headlines, but I have yet to see one that wasn't actually about an important issue. I'm not in Oregon any more though, so I only see the national ones.

The difference between standard mail-in ballots and absentee ballots is huge. First, mail fraud requires that the real voter never returns their ballot for every fraudulent vote. When a 2nd ballot comes in (the real one, or a replacement if they actually managed to get ahold of originals and the voter requests it because they never received their ballot), the voter is contacted and the ballots are examined to determine what happened. For 100% mail-in systems, there are no absentee ballots. They're irrelevant. Second, large-scale fraud requires massive coordination in order to create voters who don't exist and create counterfeit ballots linked to those voters. It requires access to the voter database and the ballot processing equipment in order to get them into the mail stream without being blatantly obvious. Doing so on any sort of scale would require the system to already be so thoroughly compromised that the fraud would be simply a matter of course at that point.

So no, while the system is vulnerable to certain frauds, wholesale fraud is not one of those vulnerabilities. Being "way more susceptible to fraud" is only obvious if you think about it for a few minutes and then stop thinking before you actually get to the important parts.

You apparently know nothing about him then. He's one of the few Senators I'm aware of who still commands a significant amount of respect from both sides of the aisle (among voters, anyway).

The signature is used when more than one ballot with the same voter information comes in. Only one will be valid, at most.

Might be easier, assuming you have access to voter lists necessary to craft counterfeit ballots and envelopes containing accurate voter data. What happens when those names pop up twice, half of which came from a single location, however, is not as easy to control. That requires significant access to the entire voting apparatus, and if you're that intimately involved with the entire process there are easier methods of fraud. Of course, that assumes there are people who have access to the entire vote-by-mail system at that level, which is not borne out by any evidence anywhere.

No, then you're followed in and monitored as you vote. It doesn't happen in the modern era, but it most certainly has happened. When it has happened, it happens on a wholesale level at every precinct in which it occurs. With vote-by-mail, it gets a lot more difficult to commit wholesale fraud without resorting to completely different means.