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.

A key point here is it was wildly inappropriate for Comey to recommend no prosecution in this case on TV. It is totally not his decision. The prosecutors in the DOJ are the ones who get to decide if prosecution is warranted. The FBI's job was to investigate and generate a report to the DOJ. They do get to make a recommendation regarding prosecution but it is only a recommendation. Comey absolutely should not have announced the recommendation at a press conference before the DOJ has even started reviewing the final FBI report. It reeks of prejudicing the entire case since it places inappropriate pressure on the prosecutor in the DOJ to not prosecute when they may well be inclined to prosecute when they see all the evidence.

Comey s assertion that Clinton and her people had no intent to do harm by mishandling top secret compartmentalized information so they should not be prosecuted is also way over the line. The fact is they did mishandle top secret information, and it is unknowable if that mishandling resulted in the information being accessed by foreign powers or others who were not authorized to see it. You knowingly mishandle classified information in violation of the oath you signed there have to be consequences otherwise why should anyone bother to protect classified information. If Clinton is elected President how can she expect the millions of Federal employees working for her to protect classified information when she knowingly didn't and got away with it.

Thirdly mishandling email is only part of the case against the Clinton. A key reason Clinton may have been using this private server is there may have been email between her, foreign governments and affluent individuals who were donating large sums of money to the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State creating the appearance that she was soliciting bribes in return for favorable decisions from the State department on things like arms deals. Clinton is claiming these are personal emails so she withheld them from the FBI but they may be a trail pointing to public corruption.

It smacks of whitewash to suddenly short circuit these investigations so Clinton will have a clean path to the nomination at the convention which is just a few days away now.

I wish I'd known about these servers. I would play WoW again if it was the 2006 vintage instead of the crap its become. To answer your criticism, if Blizzard wants to keep WoW going forever, roll back to 2006 vintage, and focus entirely on new and interest dungeons and gear. Also put the level cap back to 60 and keep it there. New and interesting PVE dungeons was the only thing that made WoW great. Making the game "easy" for casual players was another tragic mistake.

2006 vintage WoW would be right before Burning Crusade came out and BC would be just about the time WoW started to suck and I quit playing. In 2006 there were 64 player raids, no constantly shifting level caps that constantly trashed all your gear, you lived to get to get to level 60 and collect PVE gear.

Every good guild on the server I was on, including my own, blew apart about that time, people wandered off to PvP to get the gear Blizz was handing out like candy to distract from the fact all their hard won level 60 PVE gear was being trashed and running Molten Core and BWL was officially pointless. It had become a waste of time doing PVE raids entirely which was the whole point of WoW.

In those days you only ran dungeons with people on your server, yea it sucked waiting to get groups sometimes but you actually made friends and learned to trust or not trust the people you played with on your server. When they started jumbling together pick up runs from all servers you didn't know and couldn't trust ANYONE you were raiding with. Dungeons just became a whirlwind you ran through as quickly as possible and half the time someone in the group would be a total ass and get away with it.

And FutureAdvisor provides robo-analysis for free. Sure, you can pay them 0.5% a year to manage your portfolio for you, but they tell you everything you should do.

Of course, they go heavy on international funds and REITs, and you can't have it tilt funds in the direction you want. But they encourage extremely low-cost index funds and seem to be a good option.

Of course it might be an intentional backdoor to allow NSA, DHS, FBI, law enforcement to track persons of interest so you can be SURE facebook would be upset that it was made public as would the three letter Federal agencies using it.

The cooler thing would be if you have enough high speed printing capacity that you could manufacture and assemble a 1000 drone swarm in a very short period of time and overwhelm an adversaries defenses without requiring a ship big enough to carry a 1000 completed drones. And then another one, and another one. You would need a tanker full of plastic and a freighter full of batteries, electronics and propellers.

âoeKill decisionâ baby.

I would mostly agree with parent. Soylent is fine execpt the community isnt big enough so the comments are barely there or worth reading, the name is kind of bad and the stories are routinely just old enough to be yesterdays news on Slashdot or Hacker news.

Their Twitter feed, which is where I get my news feeds, also puts these really annoying lame "from the deptâ attempts at humor in the tweets instead of just the title of the story and the link:

Razer Acquires Ouya Software Assets, Ditches Hardware from the kicked-down dept

They will even thorten the title to make room for the utterly stupid âoefrom theâ.

The best solution to replace Slashdot would probably be if Hacker news grafted the classic Slashdot look, commenting and moderation system on to their generally good stories and great community.

There is a high probably no Sunday talk show would have let him speak once they found out what he was going to say. They are all owned by giant media conglomerates you know. They wouldnt risk the wrath of the Federal government. Pretty sure Snowden went to Greenwald because he was one of the few journalists with the balls to do the story. The Guardian was hammered by the UK government for running it.

Remember when the CEO of Qwest defied the NSA plan to tap all data and phones lines after 9/11. The Federal government pulled all their contracts from Qwest, hammered their stock and then put him in prison for a phony securities rap. Qwest was a rare corporate hero among telecoms, long since swallowed up by CenturyLink who are just as bad as all the rest.

Iâ(TM)m not blaming âoebankersâ exactly, Iâ(TM)m blaming people who loan money to people who are may or may not pay it back and when they dont get paid back they go running to their central banks or governments and demand they get made whole at the expense of everyone else. Same thing happened in the U.S. in 2009 with the TARP and assorted other bail outs.

Yea the rating agencies really sucked especially leading up to the crash in 2008, but it doesnâ(TM)t relieve lenders of ultimate responsibility for their actions. If the credit ratings are wrong its the responsibility of the lender to figure this out, no one else.

Lenders collect interest on their loans partially to cover the potential risk they wont get paid back, the higher that risk the higher the interest they collect. If they collect high interest rates on risky mortgages and then when someone defaults on them central banks and governments make them whole it creates massive moral hazard.

If the Greeks were a bad risk prior to 2008, which they probably were, the interest rates they had to pay should have been higher and they would have been dissuaded from borrowing or lenders would have been dissuaded from lending to them. Instead the EU created a perverse system where risky borrowers (all of the PIIGS) got relatively cheap money and a lot of it and were incentivized to take as much of it as they could. The EU and the lenders are 100% to blame for this situation for throwing the money at them.

The PIIGS shouldâ(TM)ve never entered an economic union with Germany in the first place, they had no chance of competing with Germany locked in to the same currency. It was a win win for Germany on all fronts.