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It seems reasonable at first to predict that people won't tolerate their own glasses looking unusual. But I think the same way you predict that, can also be used to predict that nobody will ever walk about with bluetooth crap sticking out of their ears. Yet, there the gargoyles are.

This guy was the future but this guy wasn't? Are you sure you have the fashion expertise to really distinguish between the two? (I'll be the first to admit that I don't have that expertise either...)

Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - check - sometimes, but you don't go to jail if you're not patriotic

The 215 people arrested under the Smith Act might beg to differ.
As may victims of the suffragette repression and "red scare".
In more recent times, Laura Berg might have a few select words to say about this.

They would no longer be able to make political endorsements, but could report on all issues including political campaigns.

Bullshit they would be able to do that. The line between reporting information and advocacy gets blurry. Sometimes the information has such inescapable conclusions, that there's just no line at all.

Did you watch Frontline this week? It slammed GWB's big spending pretty hard. Had that episode run before the 2004 election, you damn well know some people would be screaming that it should be "regulated" speech.

Don't believe me? There's a case before SCOTUS right now, where they're trying to decide whether a movie about a politician was a documentary or campaign advocacy.

Required-to-be-"objective" news would have to be so softball that it's pointless. You can't report what any politician does or says, because their action might be too "obviously" right or wrong, so that mere information becomes political persuasion. If president Johnson goes up to the podium, blows a baby's brains out, sucks up the blood, and grins at the reporters, nonprofit reporters can't say he did that, or their so-called "news" will be labeled "Johnson-bashing."

You think I'm being absurd, but there's that Hillary movie case. It made it to the courts, dudes. This is not a joke and I'm not making it up; it happened and it does happen all the time. In my own locality, there was a stink about whether mailing information about voting records was too PAC-like. I'm not complaining/cheering here about these decisions going the right or wrong way, but they have to be made and sometimes it's a mess. Reporters aren't going to want to get into that kind of trouble, so non-profit news will suck.

When will we see 3D porn in theaters?

Funny, that list left out Albuquerque (which also has some occasional issues with speed cameras).

last time I checked you cannot "waive away" your constitutional rights.

You can effectively (i.e. defacto) waive them away. I always liked this quotation, written (coincidentally enough) by PRZ's lawyer when celebrating the dropping of charges against PRZ (last paragraph):

There are forces at work that will, if unresisted, take from us our liberties. There always will be. But at least in the United States, our rights are not so much stolen from us as they are simply lost by us. The price of freedom is not only vigilance but also participation.

In some sense, the constitution really is "just a piece of paper." If the people don't really believe in it, don't hold it to be truly representative of their values, and don't participate in defending it, then it is not the law. It isn't in force; it's just ink on a page, part of a fairy tale.

I see signs that a shockingly high fraction of Americans really don't feel any reverence for the rights asserted by the constitution. They think the law is wrong, and that it is unjust and undesirable that police are hampered by court oversight. A society where police have to get warrants, isn't the society they want, and it's probably not going to be one they vote for.

If the constitution asserts rights that people believe do not really exist, and public policy does not recognize those rights, then those rights are not protected. They've been waived.

That's really the big question. Do we want to have a government where the executive has the power to use magic words (e.g. "national security") which automatically circumvent all of the constitution's checks and balances?

Is this exploit a bug or a feature? I know what Stalin would say, but I'm more curious about the opinion of average citizens. Sometimes they say surprising things.

It seems to me that this concentration of power will certainly lead to abuse. I had been hoping that the FTC would impose restrictions on this new behemoth, but that does not appear to be the case. You've all heard the arguments before, but no one expresses the need for dissent better than Noam Chomsky.

From Noam Chomsky:

"There's a general tendency for the whole system to move toward oligopoly, a small number of huge corporations which dominate one or another area and usually interact."*

"The current merger is ... a step towards restricting control over the global media system to an even narrower range of private power interests, relying -- as is often the case -- on publicly funded initiatives, ideas, development, provided to them as a gift without public consent, even awareness."*

A good Chomsky resource.

For those with a taste for the ironic, here's the transcript of a chat with Prof. Chomsky in 1995 on AOL.

For general corporate news, try http://www.corpwatch.org/

Check out this concern from the ACLU about the possibility of censorship as a result of this decision.