There could be a delay on it so that it only runs the search after you stop typing for a certain period of time. So if you're searching for "cheese and biscuits", it won't return results for "c", "ch", "che", etc. But if you pause after "cheese", you'll get some search results. After you add " and biscuits", the results will update for the new query. Depending on how Google implements this, it could be very cool.
And even if they are making money hand over fist (which very few bloggers actually do), they should pay income tax on their earnings, but shouldn't be forced to buy business licenses. (Though at that point, it might make financial sense to set up a LLC or something.)
Were an ardent fan of music or specific bands that might have promoted views of lifestyles you no longer want to be associated with?
Well, I certainly didn't go through a phase in my freshman year of college where I enjoyed only country music. And if I did, you wouldn't see me posting about it on a site such as Slashdot under my real name.... oh, nuts.
"God HATES you for masturbating..." What a fucking horrible thing to say to a child, yet it is said daily in almost every single house of worship across this planet.
One of the advantages of having gone to an Orthodox temple for a bit is knowing where the "Masturbation = sinning" rule came from (at least in Judaism) and realizing how flawed the reasoning behind it is (even within the context of the religions rules). Basically, there used to be a rule that, if a guy died without his wife having given birth, the younger brother was supposed to sleep with the wife to give her an offspring in the dead brother's name. Putting aside how weird that must have been ("I know you are grieving over your brother's death but could you sleep with his wife this week? She really should get pregnant soon."), that was the religious custom of the day.
Now, this guy, Er (yes, that was his name), died without his wife, Tamar, giving birth. His younger brother, Onan, was told to fulfill the custom. Realizing that the offspring wouldn't be counted as his own, he had sex with her but "spilled his seed" at the last moment. The Torah says that for this sin, he was killed.
Some took his punishment to mean masturbation ("spilling seed") was a no-no, but his crime (in the context of the society in which he lived) was having sex with Tamar without fulfilling his obligations to try to impregnate her.
Furthermore, ancient societies didn't realize that "seed" (semen) dies after a period of time and was replenished by the body. So refraining from spilling some "seed" today didn't mean that that seed would have a chance to impregnate your wife when you slept with her two weeks from today. In fact, if "seed" was sacred and needed to be used for the creation of babies, then it stands to reason that guys should sleep with as many women as possible as often as possible to give their seed the best chance of sprouting (so to speak). I wonder how many religious types would approve of that interpretation.
The saddest part of this story? No, not the tabloid link that gets vast parts of the story wrong. No, the saddest part is, thanks to a new obsession of my kids, I can't read this story about prehistoric sea sponges without singing "Who lives in a pineapple under the sea!"
I felt crippling anxiety in school for 10 years... Of course WiFi didn't exist back then so it wasn't that
This means that the only logical reason is that... WiFi travels back in time and affects kids in the past as well! We must stop this time traveling WiFi menace!!! Won't somebody think of the children?!!!! (You can tell it's important because of all the exclamation points I used.)
The problem with your argument is that you knew that your bank cards went missing. In my case, I didn't know that my name, DOB, SSN and address were compromised. (I still don't know by whom.) The only way I caught the identity thieves in the act was because they were dumb and paid for rush delivery on the credit card they opened in my name... and THEN changed the address to their address. (Or, more likely, the address of someone they used to shuffle things back and forth.) I wound up getting the card and, of course, questioned why I was getting a card I didn't apply for.
Now, had the thieves been a little more competent, changed the address and not paid for rush delivery, the card would have gone to them. I wouldn't have known about it as they charged up a storm. I still wouldn't have known about it as they (likely) would have opened up more lines of credit in my name. I'd finally know about it when the credit agencies tracked me down and demanded payment, not caring that I wasn't the one who racked up the charges. By that time, my credit would be messed up and I'd have to fight for years to clear things up and avoid bankruptcy.
Not every identity theft case involves a lost card which is easily cancelled.
The problem is that your identity can be stolen anywhere your information is stored. This means your company's computers, your doctor's, your insurance company, a government computer, etc. Plus, individuals in any of those places could want some extra cash and pull your information from the otherwise secure computer systems to use in indentity theft. (Perpetrated either by themselves or sold to other people who use the information thus protecting the seller from being caught.) And once your information's out there, it could be posted online and you could face identity theft from a variety of sources. All the while, your personal computer could be highly secure with not a single successful security breach. Your identity is only as secure as the least secure place that it is stored... and all too many of those places are completely out of your control.
I agree. Part of the problem in my case was that the credit card company *cough*Capital One*cough* that opened the card in my name wouldn't tell me what the address on the card was. (The card got sent to my house but then the thieves changed the address on it.) They claimed that they'd be liable if I went there with a gun and shot them. So I contacted the police and *they* contacted the credit card company's special "for police only" line... which was directed straight to voice mail and never answered! Giving both me and the police the run around during an identity theft investigation should be illegal.
It likely does break some laws, but the police are too swamped with other cases to go after the company and I don't have the resources to sue them. Therefore, they don't get punished and feel free to open credit lines without even the bare minimum of checking.
I'd go one step further. Don't tell me when any random company when they sell the report to a company. Tell me when a company wants to gain access to my credit and let me approve or deny them. Of course, this doesn't make the credit agencies any money so I'll keep my credit frozen (something they hate) and just deny everyone access to it unless I decide to temporarily "thaw" it.
As a victim of identity theft and someone who has lost his job in the past, I can say that, in many ways, identity theft is more stressful. If you lose a job, you need to worry about not having money and you need to find another job. Once you find a job, though, that worry goes away (or at least goes back to normal levels).
When your identity is stolen, your information is now "out there." Even if the thief is captured (unlikely), he might have shared the information with a dozen other people or have purchased the information from someone who sold it to other people. This means that plugging one leak doesn't end the stress as other leaks could pop up at any time.
In addition, you don't merely need to deal with one company (ala getting hired). You need to deal with at least three big credit agencies that really don't care if your identity was stolen. You need to prove to them that they have the wrong information on file. You might also need to deal with collection agencies who really don't care that you're not the one who bought that boat in Florida and the stereo equipment in California. You might also need to deal with credit card companies who (like the credit agencies) really only care about their profits and don't see your identity theft claim as "profitable." Then there's dealing with police officers who, while they might be well-meaning, really have no training to deal with these crimes and possibly no jurisdiction for the crimes.
With all that stress, it's a good thing the FBI has made Identity Theft a top priority. Oh, wait, they haven't.
When my identity was stolen and I tried to get the local police to investigate, I quickly found out how important my case was. Hint: somewhere between "Not Very" and "Why Are You Bugging Us With This". My local police department even admitted that they might not have jurisdiction. If we tracked the identity thief down and he was in a different state (highly likely in my case) then they would have to hand the case over to that state's police department. In the end, I gave up trying to push my case through and just accepted that I'd need to keep my credit files frozen. (Which, BTW, is an excellent way to prevent identity theft in the first place.)
It would be nice if the Federal Government would take Identity Theft seriously, but, like you said, there's no money in it. You do a lot of investigating and bust a few small time thieves, saving individuals thousands of dollars. Or you can bust a few copyright violators and save the Entertainment Industry billions of dollars*.
* Billions of dollars figure calculated by the Entertainment Industry using their super-secret formula involving number of sales they would like, number of sales they actually have, some math and a random number generator.
And Identity Theft victims, on the other hand, pay their own bills and the bills of their "other selves."
(Sadly, this is true to some degree. Not that I paid any bills when my identity was stolen, but the bank was more than eager to give my money to other people claiming to be me even though there were multiple red flags.)
When parents are accused on child porn for taking photos of their kids in the bath, saying "child porn must be pornographic" is completely untrue. It seems that all it takes is for one person to object to the amount of clothing on a child for the "child porn" label to be tossed around.
Kind of like when I was crossing from Canada back into the US once. We were traveling with my wife, kids, her brother and his wife. The border guard asked standard info: where we were going, where we were from, etc. Then he asked (in a very accusing tone) which one of us wasn't born in the US. We all kind of paused trying to think if we had said *anything* to lead him to that impression before answering (truthfully) that none of us were born outside the US. We got let on our way but it was still puzzling at the time.
I'll match you your under-ten kids with my under-ten kids. They don't expect 3D in a movie. When we saw Toy Story 3, we saw the non-3D version and they loved it. They didn't leave asking why it wasn't 3D. Right now, 3D *is* a novelty. While a few movies are coming out in 3D, many more are non-3D. (And many of the 3D movies are really 2D movies which are "converted" into 3D in post-production to catch the 3D trend.)
Time will tell whether 3D turns into the "Next Big Thing" like color and sound were or whether it fades away (as it has done many times before). Still, right now, I don't think it is a foregone conclusion that 3D is going to be the expected norm when people go to a movie theater.
Here's the backup (at least as far as the RIAA and MPAA calculate it). "We've made $X last year. We wanted to make $Y. $X - $Y = $200 billion. Therefore, there must have been $200 billion in piracy last year."
In related news, piracy has cost me millions of dollars because I want a salary of millions per year and don't even come close. Dirty, rotten pirates!!!
I've used my Nintendo Wii on my SD TV to browse websites and the text isn't blurry. They should be able to pull off clear text even if the TV isn't high-definition.
Or perhaps we're merely the first in our neighborhood. There could easily be a "galactic hub" somewhere out there where dozens of alien species thrive and interact. Meanwhile, we're in the "galactic backwater" that real civilized aliens tend to steer clear of. Just because we haven't found alien life doesn't mean we're the first life in the whole galaxy (much less the whole Universe).
I've long felt that the "detectable broadcasts" issue was the most likely weak spot in figuring out whether anyone was out there, but for slightly different reasons. (Although yours are good too.) First of all, if civilization ever moves beyond a single planet, radio communications won't cut it. Would you want to talk to your friend orbiting Saturn with an hour delay at each end? Send a message, wait 2 hours, get a reply, reply back, wait 2 hours, etc. Yes, it's doable, but if non-radio based technology presented itself that would make for quicker communications, that would be rapidly adopted.
Of course, we're still a radio-based species so we'd be looking for radio-based signals. If some aliens are broadcasting their "Anyone Out There?" messages using subspace signals or some such, we'd completely miss them. They could be blasting the signals directly at Earth and we could be missing them entirely.
Secondly, just because it's radio-based doesn't mean we'd detect it as intelligent communication. Suppose I took five recordings, encoded them using five different codecs/formats and them compressed them in five different ways (zip, rar, etc), stripping out any identification as to the file/compression formats. Would you be able to decipher what the recordings were? Now, suppose four of those recordings were gibberish but one was a non-English language of my choice (not revealed to you). Would you be able to tell which is the real signal and which was the noise? Possibly, but it would be more difficult. Throw in an alien compression scheme, encoding schema and language and you raise the task to near impossibility. We could be disregarding a signal as noise when it's really some intergalactic P2P network sharing out the latest tunes from the hot new band from Sirus.
Finally, think of how big the sky is. When the Hubble Space Telescope took its famous Deep Field image, it scanned a mere 0.0002% of the sky. It found about 3,000 galaxies. If we figure that the Deep Field photo was typical of the entire sky, we're talking about 15 million galaxies. Each of those galaxies likely has billions of stars. We can't possibly look everywhere at once. A signal might be sent directly to us and we could miss it because our radio telescopes were looking 10 degrees to far to the left.
If a project like SETI strikes gold and finds a signal from an alien race, I'll be surprised at the discovery, of course, but I'll be more surprised at the great stroke of luck that they were looking at the right part of the sky at the right time and were able to decipher the transmission enough to separate the signal from the noise.
Most creationists nowadays hide behind the Intelligent Design curtain. "We just want to teach the 'theory' that this was all created by *cough*Someone*cough*, not necessarily God *cough*itwasGod*cough*. This isn't religious at all. *cough*God*cough*"
This school board seems to be ditching the ID facade and is going for full-blown creationism. On one hand, I admire their honesty. They're not talking about "possible creators" as if anyone but God is in their minds as the creator. On the other hand, they're doomed to failure. There's a reason most creationists have retreated to ID. The courts have repeatedly struck down teaching creationism as imposing religion and thus a violation of the First Amendment.
If they want to *say* that God created the Universe and Evolution is bunk, they're free to do so (First Amendment again), but the First Amendment doesn't give them the right to force their views into the public schools alongside current scientific theory.
In an ideal world, we wouldn't need the government to intervene. If my ISP suddenly started loading their "preferred" sites faster, I would simply leave them and go to any of my dozens of other choices. Information on which ISPs were mucking with speeds would be public and well documented for everyone to access in order to make informed purchase decisions.
In the real world, however, most people have only one or two broadband ISPs. If my cable company mucks with site speeds, I might be able to go to my phone company. If they muck with the speeds also, I have no options. (Actually, I'm stuck after the cable company as Verizon doesn't have FIOS where I live.)
Network Neutrality opponents argue that "the market" will fix any problems, but how can "the market" fix the problem when you have a monopoly or duopoly? I'm not a huge fan of government regulations, but there are places where they should be and this is one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
There could be a delay on it so that it only runs the search after you stop typing for a certain period of time. So if you're searching for "cheese and biscuits", it won't return results for "c", "ch", "che", etc. But if you pause after "cheese", you'll get some search results. After you add " and biscuits", the results will update for the new query. Depending on how Google implements this, it could be very cool.
Easy. Here's the algorithm that the RIAA and MPAA would like ISPs and websites (such as YouTube) to use:
if (isAudioFile()) {
AssumeCopyrightedBy("RIAA");
} elseif (isVideoFile()) {
AssumeCopyrightedBy("MPAA");
}
And even if they are making money hand over fist (which very few bloggers actually do), they should pay income tax on their earnings, but shouldn't be forced to buy business licenses. (Though at that point, it might make financial sense to set up a LLC or something.)
Well, I certainly didn't go through a phase in my freshman year of college where I enjoyed only country music. And if I did, you wouldn't see me posting about it on a site such as Slashdot under my real name.... oh, nuts.
One of the advantages of having gone to an Orthodox temple for a bit is knowing where the "Masturbation = sinning" rule came from (at least in Judaism) and realizing how flawed the reasoning behind it is (even within the context of the religions rules). Basically, there used to be a rule that, if a guy died without his wife having given birth, the younger brother was supposed to sleep with the wife to give her an offspring in the dead brother's name. Putting aside how weird that must have been ("I know you are grieving over your brother's death but could you sleep with his wife this week? She really should get pregnant soon."), that was the religious custom of the day.
Now, this guy, Er (yes, that was his name), died without his wife, Tamar, giving birth. His younger brother, Onan, was told to fulfill the custom. Realizing that the offspring wouldn't be counted as his own, he had sex with her but "spilled his seed" at the last moment. The Torah says that for this sin, he was killed.
Some took his punishment to mean masturbation ("spilling seed") was a no-no, but his crime (in the context of the society in which he lived) was having sex with Tamar without fulfilling his obligations to try to impregnate her.
Furthermore, ancient societies didn't realize that "seed" (semen) dies after a period of time and was replenished by the body. So refraining from spilling some "seed" today didn't mean that that seed would have a chance to impregnate your wife when you slept with her two weeks from today. In fact, if "seed" was sacred and needed to be used for the creation of babies, then it stands to reason that guys should sleep with as many women as possible as often as possible to give their seed the best chance of sprouting (so to speak). I wonder how many religious types would approve of that interpretation.
The saddest part of this story? No, not the tabloid link that gets vast parts of the story wrong. No, the saddest part is, thanks to a new obsession of my kids, I can't read this story about prehistoric sea sponges without singing "Who lives in a pineapple under the sea!"
This means that the only logical reason is that... WiFi travels back in time and affects kids in the past as well! We must stop this time traveling WiFi menace!!! Won't somebody think of the children?!!!! (You can tell it's important because of all the exclamation points I used.)
The problem with your argument is that you knew that your bank cards went missing. In my case, I didn't know that my name, DOB, SSN and address were compromised. (I still don't know by whom.) The only way I caught the identity thieves in the act was because they were dumb and paid for rush delivery on the credit card they opened in my name... and THEN changed the address to their address. (Or, more likely, the address of someone they used to shuffle things back and forth.) I wound up getting the card and, of course, questioned why I was getting a card I didn't apply for.
Now, had the thieves been a little more competent, changed the address and not paid for rush delivery, the card would have gone to them. I wouldn't have known about it as they charged up a storm. I still wouldn't have known about it as they (likely) would have opened up more lines of credit in my name. I'd finally know about it when the credit agencies tracked me down and demanded payment, not caring that I wasn't the one who racked up the charges. By that time, my credit would be messed up and I'd have to fight for years to clear things up and avoid bankruptcy.
Not every identity theft case involves a lost card which is easily cancelled.
The problem is that your identity can be stolen anywhere your information is stored. This means your company's computers, your doctor's, your insurance company, a government computer, etc. Plus, individuals in any of those places could want some extra cash and pull your information from the otherwise secure computer systems to use in indentity theft. (Perpetrated either by themselves or sold to other people who use the information thus protecting the seller from being caught.) And once your information's out there, it could be posted online and you could face identity theft from a variety of sources. All the while, your personal computer could be highly secure with not a single successful security breach. Your identity is only as secure as the least secure place that it is stored... and all too many of those places are completely out of your control.
I agree. Part of the problem in my case was that the credit card company *cough*Capital One*cough* that opened the card in my name wouldn't tell me what the address on the card was. (The card got sent to my house but then the thieves changed the address on it.) They claimed that they'd be liable if I went there with a gun and shot them. So I contacted the police and *they* contacted the credit card company's special "for police only" line... which was directed straight to voice mail and never answered! Giving both me and the police the run around during an identity theft investigation should be illegal.
It likely does break some laws, but the police are too swamped with other cases to go after the company and I don't have the resources to sue them. Therefore, they don't get punished and feel free to open credit lines without even the bare minimum of checking.
I'd go one step further. Don't tell me when any random company when they sell the report to a company. Tell me when a company wants to gain access to my credit and let me approve or deny them. Of course, this doesn't make the credit agencies any money so I'll keep my credit frozen (something they hate) and just deny everyone access to it unless I decide to temporarily "thaw" it.
As a victim of identity theft and someone who has lost his job in the past, I can say that, in many ways, identity theft is more stressful. If you lose a job, you need to worry about not having money and you need to find another job. Once you find a job, though, that worry goes away (or at least goes back to normal levels).
When your identity is stolen, your information is now "out there." Even if the thief is captured (unlikely), he might have shared the information with a dozen other people or have purchased the information from someone who sold it to other people. This means that plugging one leak doesn't end the stress as other leaks could pop up at any time.
In addition, you don't merely need to deal with one company (ala getting hired). You need to deal with at least three big credit agencies that really don't care if your identity was stolen. You need to prove to them that they have the wrong information on file. You might also need to deal with collection agencies who really don't care that you're not the one who bought that boat in Florida and the stereo equipment in California. You might also need to deal with credit card companies who (like the credit agencies) really only care about their profits and don't see your identity theft claim as "profitable." Then there's dealing with police officers who, while they might be well-meaning, really have no training to deal with these crimes and possibly no jurisdiction for the crimes.
With all that stress, it's a good thing the FBI has made Identity Theft a top priority. Oh, wait, they haven't.
When my identity was stolen and I tried to get the local police to investigate, I quickly found out how important my case was. Hint: somewhere between "Not Very" and "Why Are You Bugging Us With This". My local police department even admitted that they might not have jurisdiction. If we tracked the identity thief down and he was in a different state (highly likely in my case) then they would have to hand the case over to that state's police department. In the end, I gave up trying to push my case through and just accepted that I'd need to keep my credit files frozen. (Which, BTW, is an excellent way to prevent identity theft in the first place.)
It would be nice if the Federal Government would take Identity Theft seriously, but, like you said, there's no money in it. You do a lot of investigating and bust a few small time thieves, saving individuals thousands of dollars. Or you can bust a few copyright violators and save the Entertainment Industry billions of dollars*.
* Billions of dollars figure calculated by the Entertainment Industry using their super-secret formula involving number of sales they would like, number of sales they actually have, some math and a random number generator.
And Identity Theft victims, on the other hand, pay their own bills and the bills of their "other selves."
(Sadly, this is true to some degree. Not that I paid any bills when my identity was stolen, but the bank was more than eager to give my money to other people claiming to be me even though there were multiple red flags.)
From Hermes: "Sweet something of someplace!"
When parents are accused on child porn for taking photos of their kids in the bath, saying "child porn must be pornographic" is completely untrue. It seems that all it takes is for one person to object to the amount of clothing on a child for the "child porn" label to be tossed around.
Kind of like when I was crossing from Canada back into the US once. We were traveling with my wife, kids, her brother and his wife. The border guard asked standard info: where we were going, where we were from, etc. Then he asked (in a very accusing tone) which one of us wasn't born in the US. We all kind of paused trying to think if we had said *anything* to lead him to that impression before answering (truthfully) that none of us were born outside the US. We got let on our way but it was still puzzling at the time.
I'll match you your under-ten kids with my under-ten kids. They don't expect 3D in a movie. When we saw Toy Story 3, we saw the non-3D version and they loved it. They didn't leave asking why it wasn't 3D. Right now, 3D *is* a novelty. While a few movies are coming out in 3D, many more are non-3D. (And many of the 3D movies are really 2D movies which are "converted" into 3D in post-production to catch the 3D trend.)
Time will tell whether 3D turns into the "Next Big Thing" like color and sound were or whether it fades away (as it has done many times before). Still, right now, I don't think it is a foregone conclusion that 3D is going to be the expected norm when people go to a movie theater.
Here's the backup (at least as far as the RIAA and MPAA calculate it). "We've made $X last year. We wanted to make $Y. $X - $Y = $200 billion. Therefore, there must have been $200 billion in piracy last year."
In related news, piracy has cost me millions of dollars because I want a salary of millions per year and don't even come close. Dirty, rotten pirates!!!
I've used my Nintendo Wii on my SD TV to browse websites and the text isn't blurry. They should be able to pull off clear text even if the TV isn't high-definition.
Great. More outsourcing. Why pay American torturers when third world countries will do it for much less?
Or perhaps we're merely the first in our neighborhood. There could easily be a "galactic hub" somewhere out there where dozens of alien species thrive and interact. Meanwhile, we're in the "galactic backwater" that real civilized aliens tend to steer clear of. Just because we haven't found alien life doesn't mean we're the first life in the whole galaxy (much less the whole Universe).
I've long felt that the "detectable broadcasts" issue was the most likely weak spot in figuring out whether anyone was out there, but for slightly different reasons. (Although yours are good too.) First of all, if civilization ever moves beyond a single planet, radio communications won't cut it. Would you want to talk to your friend orbiting Saturn with an hour delay at each end? Send a message, wait 2 hours, get a reply, reply back, wait 2 hours, etc. Yes, it's doable, but if non-radio based technology presented itself that would make for quicker communications, that would be rapidly adopted.
Of course, we're still a radio-based species so we'd be looking for radio-based signals. If some aliens are broadcasting their "Anyone Out There?" messages using subspace signals or some such, we'd completely miss them. They could be blasting the signals directly at Earth and we could be missing them entirely.
Secondly, just because it's radio-based doesn't mean we'd detect it as intelligent communication. Suppose I took five recordings, encoded them using five different codecs/formats and them compressed them in five different ways (zip, rar, etc), stripping out any identification as to the file/compression formats. Would you be able to decipher what the recordings were? Now, suppose four of those recordings were gibberish but one was a non-English language of my choice (not revealed to you). Would you be able to tell which is the real signal and which was the noise? Possibly, but it would be more difficult. Throw in an alien compression scheme, encoding schema and language and you raise the task to near impossibility. We could be disregarding a signal as noise when it's really some intergalactic P2P network sharing out the latest tunes from the hot new band from Sirus.
Finally, think of how big the sky is. When the Hubble Space Telescope took its famous Deep Field image, it scanned a mere 0.0002% of the sky. It found about 3,000 galaxies. If we figure that the Deep Field photo was typical of the entire sky, we're talking about 15 million galaxies. Each of those galaxies likely has billions of stars. We can't possibly look everywhere at once. A signal might be sent directly to us and we could miss it because our radio telescopes were looking 10 degrees to far to the left.
If a project like SETI strikes gold and finds a signal from an alien race, I'll be surprised at the discovery, of course, but I'll be more surprised at the great stroke of luck that they were looking at the right part of the sky at the right time and were able to decipher the transmission enough to separate the signal from the noise.
Most creationists nowadays hide behind the Intelligent Design curtain. "We just want to teach the 'theory' that this was all created by *cough*Someone*cough*, not necessarily God *cough*itwasGod*cough*. This isn't religious at all. *cough*God*cough*"
This school board seems to be ditching the ID facade and is going for full-blown creationism. On one hand, I admire their honesty. They're not talking about "possible creators" as if anyone but God is in their minds as the creator. On the other hand, they're doomed to failure. There's a reason most creationists have retreated to ID. The courts have repeatedly struck down teaching creationism as imposing religion and thus a violation of the First Amendment.
If they want to *say* that God created the Universe and Evolution is bunk, they're free to do so (First Amendment again), but the First Amendment doesn't give them the right to force their views into the public schools alongside current scientific theory.
In an ideal world, we wouldn't need the government to intervene. If my ISP suddenly started loading their "preferred" sites faster, I would simply leave them and go to any of my dozens of other choices. Information on which ISPs were mucking with speeds would be public and well documented for everyone to access in order to make informed purchase decisions.
In the real world, however, most people have only one or two broadband ISPs. If my cable company mucks with site speeds, I might be able to go to my phone company. If they muck with the speeds also, I have no options. (Actually, I'm stuck after the cable company as Verizon doesn't have FIOS where I live.)
Network Neutrality opponents argue that "the market" will fix any problems, but how can "the market" fix the problem when you have a monopoly or duopoly? I'm not a huge fan of government regulations, but there are places where they should be and this is one of them.