That is not true, Republicans are not nearly as beholden to the Entertainment Industry (not that they don't tend to do their bidding, just that the Entertainment Industry does not give nearly enough money to Republican candidates to make them an essential support). If Republicans were as beholden to the Entertainment Industry as Democrats are, there would be vey few Republican elected officials, since the Entertainment Industry overwhelmingly favors Democrats. This fact always makes me wonder what causes so many Republican elected officials to support an industry contrary to their own self-interest.
1) News Corp is part of the Entertainment Industry; they're certainly not in journalism, and they are so blatantly Republican that the RNC should be counting their operating expenses as part of its budget.
2) There is more to the Entertainment Industry than Hollywood studios, which I agree do tend to trend Democrat because most of them are very pro LGBT rights. Telcos, ISPs, and the record industry can also all be considered Entertainment Industry, and all of them trend Republican. It's going to be very interesting to see what happens to MSNBC when Comcast finishes their takeover; I wonder if any of their current commentators will have a job when it's over, or if it'll turn out like the WSJ after News Corp bought them out.
He ran as a Democrat. That means he ran as someone who is committed to the interests of the Entertainment Industry, Unions, and trial lawyers. No one who is not committed to the interests of those three groups can get the Democratic nomination.
To be fair, you can't run as a Republican unless you are committed to the interests of the Entertainment Industry either. The only Senator saying anything sensible about Network Neutrality today is Al Franken; he only managed to get elected because he came from the entertainment industry, and they mistakenly believe that he is their creature.
But a government "for the people" should have an office filled with people who work "for the people", instead of for corporate interests.
There was once a line between Government and Corporation. This line is so blurry now in certain countries, that I think we crossed it a while back.
I think that line got completely erased about the time the Feds starting bailing out corporations . . .
By the time that happened it was already too late to do anything else. By the time we got to the point where we had to bail out the banks and the carmakers our hands were tied; it was either that or face Great Depression 2. As it is the US is looking at a lost decade, like the one the Japanese had in the 90s; if we had crashed all the way down, like we did in 1929-1932 when a timid and conservative Congress and President decided to focus on deficits rather than putting people back to work--hey, sound familiar?--we'd probably never fully recover.
The real root of the problem was eight years before, when a Republican Congress and Clinton (and later Bush) relaxed banking regulation to the point where banks could shop around for their own regulator (naturally picking the one whom had been conveniently defunded and couldn't actually regulate anything), leverage themselves up to twenty times their actual worth, and then siphon all their money into their shareholder's pockets before burning the business down on the way out. That's the real story behind the recession, but it's not one the "No more bailouts!" crowd wants to hear, because they don't want to acknowledge that the conservative utopia they've been living in for the past ten years is fatally flawed.
There's still some going on, but Obama is trying hard to finish us off. We may get that "healthcare" bill rolled back to get a little more breathing room, but it is doubtful.
God I hope not. The last thing we need is a massive healthcare bust less than ten years after our massive banking bust.
That is where we were heading, before the healthcare bill passed, you know. Costs are skyrocketing; more and more people are being priced out of the market; those that haven't gotten out altogether were being forced into ever more exotic (read: complex and failure-prone) plans, etc etc. We just heard this tune with home loans; Obama could hear the opening notes with healthcare, and took steps to stop it in its tracks before its swan song.
Don't get me wrong; it's not exactly a good law. There's no single payer system, very little ability for government to force drug companies to lower their prices to what everyone else in the world has to pay (every other major industrialized nation has single-payer, and can usually dictate to healthcare companies what they will charge), nor is there meaningful tort reform. What they did was provide the minimum amount of reform necessary to prevent a healcare collapse in the next decade or so; hopefully by then enough Republicans will have died to let us get some meaningful reform passed.
At least they kept their paws off of the moronic idea of letting health care companies choose their own regulators; that was one of the big contributors to the banking problem, and is the only real result of letting companies sell across state lines like the Republicans want.
The irony is that Reagan gets credit for fixing the economy, when in reality he did so by following Carter's playbook. Hell, he even used the same people to do so: the Fed chief and most of his economic advisors for the first part of his presidency were the same people used by the Carter administration. It was only late first term and second term that Reagan went off on his, "tax breaks for the rich and unbounded government deficit in support of the military industrial complex will save us!" bender that threw us into another recession (the S&L crisis of 1987, which was ironically similar to the banking collapse of 2007-8, except on a smaller scale), and set the tone for American decline for the next thirty years.
I didn't exactly say they were the same, except in that they're quite commonly rich lawyers in bed with corporate America/special interest groups.
On the Democratic side you have big media/unions, on the Republican side you have big oil/big pharma. Both of them would like to expand government and take away individual rights. Each party just wants to take away different ones.
I'd argue that big media is contributing roughly equally to both campaigns, though weighted more to Republicans these days thanks to Limbaugh's radio empire and News Corp. And frankly of the big special interest lobbies I like the unions the most: they're largely responsible for the 40 hour work week, child labor laws, and workplace safety, among other important rights that we take for granted these days. Sure there's the ongoing problems with pensions and retiree health care, but when you look at the history of both problems you see it's not the unions' fault--hell, they've been agitating for fully-funded programs over unfunded mandates long before the Republicans got religion about structural deficits; it is literally their livelihoods at stake here!--but rather the politicians themselves, on both sides of the aisle, who wanted to simultaneously promise the moon while steering funding away from actually keeping those promises. It allows them to give ever larger pensions to unions, and thus ignore their other issues like workplace safety, while giving money to other interests like the corn lobby so they can get more votes.
OTOH, trial lawyers are a big Democrat booster, and that frightens me big time because their main agenda is ensuring that everyone will continue to sue at the drop of a hat over the most frivolous things imaginable. These are the guys impeding tort reform, and I hate them with every fiber of my being.
You want a connection with NN compliance? Contract for it. It's called a business-class connection. Put it in the contract terms. If they violate it, you terminate the contract. It's pretty simple.
1) Despite living in a suburban area, the fastest "broadband" I can get is 6MB download, 1MB upload (from AT&T or TW). Three blocks away the houses have FIOS (no AT&T there) which gets up to 50MB/25MB, but they are never expanding here, according to customer service. None of the three--AT&T, Verizon, Time-Warner--offer business class lines, or the opportunity to negotiate for a guaranteed neutral network.
Or do you suggest I move to an area where they do offer business-class lines? And how long do you suppose the local ISP monopolies/duopolies will even offer business class lines that don't censor, or at least artificially slow down, their competitor's sites?
The EPA and the Clean Air Act--along with even more aggressive regulation here in CA due to Los Angeles's unique geography--got rid of all those smog clouds, saving us billions in costs from increased health care and lowered lifespans.
That's what's missing here with the FCC. The Clean Air Act gave the EPA authority to regulate certain emissions (CO2 not among them!). But Congress passed it, President Bush signed it.
The FCC, OTOH, is just acting without explicit legislative power to regulate NN.
The Communications Acts of 1934 and 1996 both allow and require the FCC to regulate NN for Telecommunications companies. The problem is that the Bush administration FCC redefined ISPs as "information services": services like Google or Netflix which provide, process or store information, rather than "telecommunication services": services which allow you to connect to third parties to exchange information (like phone companies or shipping companies). Now, they are free to do this if they like--the Supreme Court upheld their right to reclassify ISPs as either type of service--but the problem lies in that, according to the 1996 law, the FCC has no power to enforce NN on "information services," like they can for "telecommunication services."
The important distinction with the new NN regulations is that the FCC is going back to calling ISPs intermediaries for information, rather than pretending by some form of tortured logic that everything you get off of the Internet actually originates from the ISP itself.
private cables rely on poles and underground tunnels on public land
Yes but that public land is owned by the STATE not the FCC. The commission (and the us congress) has zero authority to regulate lands owned by the Member State Government/legislature.
But the FCC isn't regulating the land; it's regulating the communications traffic that crosses state and international boundaries, which most definitively is under the federal government's jurisdiction.
They are proposing no such thing. Net neutrality takes away the power of private cable companies to censor content, but it does not give the government authority to do so.
If the government has the authority to tell private companies what their networks must carry, they also have the authority to tell them what they cannot carry. Or soon will.
Then wake me when that happens. In the mean time, I'm going to be protesting against the people who currently are censoring content, and not the people who might at some point in the future.
Thanks for reminding me I want the EPA abolished too!
Anyone who says this has a very short memory. As late as the 1980s there was a dense orange-yellow smog cloud pretty much permenantly hanging over Los Angeles and many other metropolitan areas, unsurprisingly much like there are today over places like Beijing. The EPA and the Clean Air Act--along with even more aggressive regulation here in CA due to Los Angeles's unique geography--got rid of all those smog clouds, saving us billions in costs from increased health care and lowered lifespans.
a single server? and they went to the trouble of ensuring the removal of fingerprints, serial numbers and encryption?
I am not a huge fan of wikileaks but this really doesn't seem to fit in at all with how they operate. However it fits in perfectly with more nefarious and far less moral organisations such as the US government.
I'm not saying it's likely, just that it's possible. Assange does seem to be a big fan of cloak-and-dagger stuff--not that it's unwarranted much of the time!--but it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility that he planted the computer himself.
Granted it would be completely idiotic to do this, but then it wouldn't be the first time someone did something stupid. Jumping to conclusions makes fools of everyone.
Please stop watching Maddow and Olbermann. There is a shortage of judges because Obama has been slow to appoint candidates (remember, Democratic majority in the Senate), and Gitmo could be closed by a stroke of his EO pen. And we know he loves him some EO.
I don't watch Olberman, and I don't even know who Maddow is. Gitmo can't be closed until there is funding to move the prisoners somewhere else, which was explicitly revoked by congressional Republicans. Or did you think the two hundred or so political prisoners still held there just evaporate at the stroke of his pen?
Look at the list of his pending appointments on Wikipedia. They're all from Jan 5. You think maybe the Senate needs a little time to review those before approving them?
Do they need more than two years? The Senate's had the appointments "on hold" for so long that they had to be re-submitted for the new session of Congress.
Without Republicans, we would have had a stronger stimulus, with far less wasted on tax cuts for the rich
What tax cuts for the "rich"?
How about the $270 billion the Republicans just gave out to people making more than a quarter million a year? Oh, they were bleating about the deficit, and how they wanted to let unemployed people starve in the middle of a recession to save their malnourished children, but when it came to giving their favorite contributors free money from the Treasury, hey, screw the deficit!
How about instead of snark, you contact your senators and representative, and vote for liberals (that's liberals, not Democrats) whenever possible? There are people in government trying to block this, you know. Hell, it'd already be law if not for Senator Wyden.
My senators and representatives? What am I, Comcast?
There may be the odd politician that will throw us a bone, but given the current electoral vetting process you can be damn sure that most of them never even make it onto the ballot. I do vote, but when it comes down to it Democrats and Republicans are just two heads of the same hydra.
And that's exactly the reason for our current problems. After the Republican-appointed Supreme Court (2/3rds of justices appointed by Republicans) threw out campaign finance reform, allowing unlimited campaign spending by corporate interests, Democrats immediately tried to reinstate the law, and then tried to pass a new law at least mandating disclosure. Senate Republicans fillabustered the law, delaying it until after the election; now it's dead.
Without Republicans, we would have a public option for healthcare.
Without Republicans, we wouldn't have a chronic shortage of federal judges these last two years (due to secret holds by unknown Republican senators.)
Without Republicans, we would have network neutrality.
Without Republicans, we would have closed Guantanimo last year.
Without Republicans, we would have had a stronger stimulus, with far less wasted on tax cuts for the rich, and would probably have 1-2% lower unemployment than we do now.
Look, Democrats aren't really all that "good" a party either; some of their constituencies, especially trial lawyers, frighten the heck out of me. But don't tell me the Democrats and Republicans are the same. I know better.
If the telecom operator provides a branded phone with apps that can't be removed and one of those apps is eating your data traffic then you should get that data traffic for free.
Sure you "should". But will you, without some kind of lawsuit? Probably not.
The new US customer service model: the customer is always wrong, and largely irrelevant.
Warmest on record where they keep the thermometers over blacktop as well. LOL Where is global warming when we need it. Snow in every state except Florida.
And the summer was ridiculously hot, yes. Anyone who thinks that global warming means that temperatures will become uniformly higher, or less chaotic, is either dreaming or trolling.
Prepare yourself. Global warming actually means stronger hurricanes, drier dry spells, bigger floods, and more chaotic weather all around.
Couldn't have anything to do with the urbanization that occurred between 1880 and 2011 could it?
If by "urbanization" you mean "unprecedented emission of greenhouse gases combined with massive deforestation" then yes, that's pretty well supported by theory and observation. If by "urbanization" you mean "the false rumor that the presence of concrete magically makes thermometers in the ocean and in space register higher temperatures" then no, it couldn't
You know all other things being equal, MS has less motivation to violate my privacy than Google does, as selling my data to advertisers isn't their primary source of revenue. For that reason alone, I look more favourably on Bing than Google search.
"Despite the fact that they have yet to do so, I don't trust Google to not sell my data to evil companies, such as convicted monopolist Microsoft. That's why I use Bing."
These people have no 'right' to a state-paid cell phone.
Unless, of course, their jobs require the use of a phone while away from their office. Either that or the state can look forward to a flood of reimbursement paperwork on a regular basis.
As Gov. Brown pointed out, there is no way in hell that two out of five of all state workers require being on-call 24/7.
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That is not true, Republicans are not nearly as beholden to the Entertainment Industry (not that they don't tend to do their bidding, just that the Entertainment Industry does not give nearly enough money to Republican candidates to make them an essential support). If Republicans were as beholden to the Entertainment Industry as Democrats are, there would be vey few Republican elected officials, since the Entertainment Industry overwhelmingly favors Democrats. This fact always makes me wonder what causes so many Republican elected officials to support an industry contrary to their own self-interest.
1) News Corp is part of the Entertainment Industry; they're certainly not in journalism, and they are so blatantly Republican that the RNC should be counting their operating expenses as part of its budget.
2) There is more to the Entertainment Industry than Hollywood studios, which I agree do tend to trend Democrat because most of them are very pro LGBT rights. Telcos, ISPs, and the record industry can also all be considered Entertainment Industry, and all of them trend Republican. It's going to be very interesting to see what happens to MSNBC when Comcast finishes their takeover; I wonder if any of their current commentators will have a job when it's over, or if it'll turn out like the WSJ after News Corp bought them out.
Was he elected under false pretenses?
He ran as a Democrat. That means he ran as someone who is committed to the interests of the Entertainment Industry, Unions, and trial lawyers. No one who is not committed to the interests of those three groups can get the Democratic nomination.
To be fair, you can't run as a Republican unless you are committed to the interests of the Entertainment Industry either. The only Senator saying anything sensible about Network Neutrality today is Al Franken; he only managed to get elected because he came from the entertainment industry, and they mistakenly believe that he is their creature.
But a government "for the people" should have an office filled with people who work "for the people", instead of for corporate interests.
There was once a line between Government and Corporation. This line is so blurry now in certain countries, that I think we crossed it a while back.
I think that line got completely erased about the time the Feds starting bailing out corporations . . .
By the time that happened it was already too late to do anything else. By the time we got to the point where we had to bail out the banks and the carmakers our hands were tied; it was either that or face Great Depression 2. As it is the US is looking at a lost decade, like the one the Japanese had in the 90s; if we had crashed all the way down, like we did in 1929-1932 when a timid and conservative Congress and President decided to focus on deficits rather than putting people back to work--hey, sound familiar?--we'd probably never fully recover.
The real root of the problem was eight years before, when a Republican Congress and Clinton (and later Bush) relaxed banking regulation to the point where banks could shop around for their own regulator (naturally picking the one whom had been conveniently defunded and couldn't actually regulate anything), leverage themselves up to twenty times their actual worth, and then siphon all their money into their shareholder's pockets before burning the business down on the way out. That's the real story behind the recession, but it's not one the "No more bailouts!" crowd wants to hear, because they don't want to acknowledge that the conservative utopia they've been living in for the past ten years is fatally flawed.
There's still some going on, but Obama is trying hard to finish us off. We may get that "healthcare" bill rolled back to get a little more breathing room, but it is doubtful.
God I hope not. The last thing we need is a massive healthcare bust less than ten years after our massive banking bust.
That is where we were heading, before the healthcare bill passed, you know. Costs are skyrocketing; more and more people are being priced out of the market; those that haven't gotten out altogether were being forced into ever more exotic (read: complex and failure-prone) plans, etc etc. We just heard this tune with home loans; Obama could hear the opening notes with healthcare, and took steps to stop it in its tracks before its swan song.
Don't get me wrong; it's not exactly a good law. There's no single payer system, very little ability for government to force drug companies to lower their prices to what everyone else in the world has to pay (every other major industrialized nation has single-payer, and can usually dictate to healthcare companies what they will charge), nor is there meaningful tort reform. What they did was provide the minimum amount of reform necessary to prevent a healcare collapse in the next decade or so; hopefully by then enough Republicans will have died to let us get some meaningful reform passed.
At least they kept their paws off of the moronic idea of letting health care companies choose their own regulators; that was one of the big contributors to the banking problem, and is the only real result of letting companies sell across state lines like the Republicans want.
What would be the point. It isn't enforceable and even if laws were passed, you can circumvent it by tracking from an offshore server.
Sure. As long as you don't want to do business in the US.
People still do business in the US?
The irony is that Reagan gets credit for fixing the economy, when in reality he did so by following Carter's playbook. Hell, he even used the same people to do so: the Fed chief and most of his economic advisors for the first part of his presidency were the same people used by the Carter administration. It was only late first term and second term that Reagan went off on his, "tax breaks for the rich and unbounded government deficit in support of the military industrial complex will save us!" bender that threw us into another recession (the S&L crisis of 1987, which was ironically similar to the banking collapse of 2007-8, except on a smaller scale), and set the tone for American decline for the next thirty years.
I didn't exactly say they were the same, except in that they're quite commonly rich lawyers in bed with corporate America/special interest groups.
On the Democratic side you have big media/unions, on the Republican side you have big oil/big pharma. Both of them would like to expand government and take away individual rights. Each party just wants to take away different ones.
I'd argue that big media is contributing roughly equally to both campaigns, though weighted more to Republicans these days thanks to Limbaugh's radio empire and News Corp. And frankly of the big special interest lobbies I like the unions the most: they're largely responsible for the 40 hour work week, child labor laws, and workplace safety, among other important rights that we take for granted these days. Sure there's the ongoing problems with pensions and retiree health care, but when you look at the history of both problems you see it's not the unions' fault--hell, they've been agitating for fully-funded programs over unfunded mandates long before the Republicans got religion about structural deficits; it is literally their livelihoods at stake here!--but rather the politicians themselves, on both sides of the aisle, who wanted to simultaneously promise the moon while steering funding away from actually keeping those promises. It allows them to give ever larger pensions to unions, and thus ignore their other issues like workplace safety, while giving money to other interests like the corn lobby so they can get more votes.
OTOH, trial lawyers are a big Democrat booster, and that frightens me big time because their main agenda is ensuring that everyone will continue to sue at the drop of a hat over the most frivolous things imaginable. These are the guys impeding tort reform, and I hate them with every fiber of my being.
You want a connection with NN compliance? Contract for it. It's called a business-class connection. Put it in the contract terms. If they violate it, you terminate the contract. It's pretty simple.
1) Despite living in a suburban area, the fastest "broadband" I can get is 6MB download, 1MB upload (from AT&T or TW). Three blocks away the houses have FIOS (no AT&T there) which gets up to 50MB/25MB, but they are never expanding here, according to customer service. None of the three--AT&T, Verizon, Time-Warner--offer business class lines, or the opportunity to negotiate for a guaranteed neutral network.
Or do you suggest I move to an area where they do offer business-class lines? And how long do you suppose the local ISP monopolies/duopolies will even offer business class lines that don't censor, or at least artificially slow down, their competitor's sites?
The EPA and the Clean Air Act--along with even more aggressive regulation here in CA due to Los Angeles's unique geography--got rid of all those smog clouds, saving us billions in costs from increased health care and lowered lifespans.
That's what's missing here with the FCC. The Clean Air Act gave the EPA authority to regulate certain emissions (CO2 not among them!). But Congress passed it, President Bush signed it.
The FCC, OTOH, is just acting without explicit legislative power to regulate NN.
The Communications Acts of 1934 and 1996 both allow and require the FCC to regulate NN for Telecommunications companies. The problem is that the Bush administration FCC redefined ISPs as "information services": services like Google or Netflix which provide, process or store information, rather than "telecommunication services": services which allow you to connect to third parties to exchange information (like phone companies or shipping companies). Now, they are free to do this if they like--the Supreme Court upheld their right to reclassify ISPs as either type of service--but the problem lies in that, according to the 1996 law, the FCC has no power to enforce NN on "information services," like they can for "telecommunication services."
The important distinction with the new NN regulations is that the FCC is going back to calling ISPs intermediaries for information, rather than pretending by some form of tortured logic that everything you get off of the Internet actually originates from the ISP itself.
private cables rely on poles and underground tunnels on public land
Yes but that public land is owned by the STATE not the FCC. The commission (and the us congress) has zero authority to regulate lands owned by the Member State Government/legislature.
But the FCC isn't regulating the land; it's regulating the communications traffic that crosses state and international boundaries, which most definitively is under the federal government's jurisdiction.
Just because the government hires you to plow snow from public roads with your truck does not give them title to your truck.
Right, but it is fair for them to tell you not to shake down every restaurant along the way to avoid piling the snow in their driveways.
They are proposing no such thing. Net neutrality takes away the power of private cable companies to censor content, but it does not give the government authority to do so.
If the government has the authority to tell private companies what their networks must carry, they also have the authority to tell them what they cannot carry. Or soon will.
Then wake me when that happens. In the mean time, I'm going to be protesting against the people who currently are censoring content, and not the people who might at some point in the future.
Thanks for reminding me I want the EPA abolished too!
Anyone who says this has a very short memory. As late as the 1980s there was a dense orange-yellow smog cloud pretty much permenantly hanging over Los Angeles and many other metropolitan areas, unsurprisingly much like there are today over places like Beijing. The EPA and the Clean Air Act--along with even more aggressive regulation here in CA due to Los Angeles's unique geography--got rid of all those smog clouds, saving us billions in costs from increased health care and lowered lifespans.
a single server? and they went to the trouble of ensuring the removal of fingerprints, serial numbers and encryption?
I am not a huge fan of wikileaks but this really doesn't seem to fit in at all with how they operate. However it fits in perfectly with more nefarious and far less moral organisations such as the US government.
I'm not saying it's likely, just that it's possible. Assange does seem to be a big fan of cloak-and-dagger stuff--not that it's unwarranted much of the time!--but it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility that he planted the computer himself.
Granted it would be completely idiotic to do this, but then it wouldn't be the first time someone did something stupid. Jumping to conclusions makes fools of everyone.
Well, the other possibility is that this is a backup Wikileaks server, running from within the Icelandic parliament.
Please stop watching Maddow and Olbermann. There is a shortage of judges because Obama has been slow to appoint candidates (remember, Democratic majority in the Senate), and Gitmo could be closed by a stroke of his EO pen. And we know he loves him some EO.
I don't watch Olberman, and I don't even know who Maddow is. Gitmo can't be closed until there is funding to move the prisoners somewhere else, which was explicitly revoked by congressional Republicans. Or did you think the two hundred or so political prisoners still held there just evaporate at the stroke of his pen?
Look at the list of his pending appointments on Wikipedia. They're all from Jan 5. You think maybe the Senate needs a little time to review those before approving them?
Do they need more than two years? The Senate's had the appointments "on hold" for so long that they had to be re-submitted for the new session of Congress.
What tax cuts for the "rich"?
How about the $270 billion the Republicans just gave out to people making more than a quarter million a year? Oh, they were bleating about the deficit, and how they wanted to let unemployed people starve in the middle of a recession to save their malnourished children, but when it came to giving their favorite contributors free money from the Treasury, hey, screw the deficit!
My senators and representatives? What am I, Comcast?
There may be the odd politician that will throw us a bone, but given the current electoral vetting process you can be damn sure that most of them never even make it onto the ballot. I do vote, but when it comes down to it Democrats and Republicans are just two heads of the same hydra.
And that's exactly the reason for our current problems. After the Republican-appointed Supreme Court (2/3rds of justices appointed by Republicans) threw out campaign finance reform, allowing unlimited campaign spending by corporate interests, Democrats immediately tried to reinstate the law, and then tried to pass a new law at least mandating disclosure. Senate Republicans fillabustered the law, delaying it until after the election; now it's dead.
Without Republicans, we would have a public option for healthcare.
Without Republicans, we wouldn't have a chronic shortage of federal judges these last two years (due to secret holds by unknown Republican senators.)
Without Republicans, we would have network neutrality.
Without Republicans, we would have closed Guantanimo last year.
Without Republicans, we would have had a stronger stimulus, with far less wasted on tax cuts for the rich, and would probably have 1-2% lower unemployment than we do now.
Look, Democrats aren't really all that "good" a party either; some of their constituencies, especially trial lawyers, frighten the heck out of me. But don't tell me the Democrats and Republicans are the same. I know better.
The "something seriously worthwhile" is the glasses-less 3d.
And first-party games by Nintendo.
If the telecom operator provides a branded phone with apps that can't be removed and one of those apps is eating your data traffic then you should get that data traffic for free.
Sure you "should". But will you, without some kind of lawsuit? Probably not.
The new US customer service model: the customer is always wrong, and largely irrelevant.
Warmest on record where they keep the thermometers over blacktop as well. LOL Where is global warming when we need it. Snow in every state except Florida.
And the summer was ridiculously hot, yes. Anyone who thinks that global warming means that temperatures will become uniformly higher, or less chaotic, is either dreaming or trolling.
Prepare yourself. Global warming actually means stronger hurricanes, drier dry spells, bigger floods, and more chaotic weather all around.
Couldn't have anything to do with the urbanization that occurred between 1880 and 2011 could it?
If by "urbanization" you mean "unprecedented emission of greenhouse gases combined with massive deforestation" then yes, that's pretty well supported by theory and observation. If by "urbanization" you mean "the false rumor that the presence of concrete magically makes thermometers in the ocean and in space register higher temperatures" then no, it couldn't
You know all other things being equal, MS has less motivation to violate my privacy than Google does, as selling my data to advertisers isn't their primary source of revenue. For that reason alone, I look more favourably on Bing than Google search.
"Despite the fact that they have yet to do so, I don't trust Google to not sell my data to evil companies, such as convicted monopolist Microsoft. That's why I use Bing."
Um, what?
These people have no 'right' to a state-paid cell phone.
Unless, of course, their jobs require the use of a phone while away from their office. Either that or the state can look forward to a flood of reimbursement paperwork on a regular basis.
As Gov. Brown pointed out, there is no way in hell that two out of five of all state workers require being on-call 24/7.
Politicians telling Scientists how to do science, what could possibly go wrong.
You would have thought they'd learn from Vietnam when they told the military how to wage a war...
Or hell, just look at the climate change "debate".
Didn't have to wait too long.
Sony is suing for a restraining order:
http://kotaku.com/5731200/sony-fires-back-at-playstation-3-hackers
I was wondering why I got modded "Funny"...