The only thing I care about is unbundling the last mile. Once that is done most of the other problems resolve themselves.

Once you unbundle the last mile ISPs can get access to customers and competition happens.

Do you remember that time in the early 2000s when people had a choice of ISPs? That was because of unbundling. Too bad the FCC lost their court case or we'd still have unbundled services today.

Disclaimer: I have a female cousin who has served in the Victorian police for over 3 decades. I'm not claiming all Aussie cops are saints, but certainly the vast majority have their heart in the right place and are doing a tough job as best they can.

How do you tell the corrupt ones from the non-corrupt ones? You can't. I follow the example of law enforcement and assume they are guilty until proven innocent.

If law enforcement doesn't want these sorts of things to happen they can stop doing illegal searches and illegal surveillance. Problem solved.

We have gone from "It is better that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent man be convicted." to "It is better that ten innocent men get convicted than to let one guilty man go free".

It is disgusting.

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or are simply an idiot. I understand the desperate desire for some part, any part of government to protect privacy, but no matter how much you wish, the FCC was NOT created to protect "consumer freedom in the marketplace". One could argue the FCC prevented "consumer freedom in the marketplace" in the area of telephony by creating a telecom monopoly aka AT&T for around 40 years. The FCC was created by the Communications Act of 1934. To quote Wikipedia:

The stated purposes of the Act are "regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States a rapid, efficient, nationwide, and worldwide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges, for the purpose of the national defense, and for the purpose of securing a more effective execution of this policy by centralizing authority theretofore granted by law to several agencies and by granting additional authority with respect to interstate and foreign commerce in wire and radio communication, there is hereby created a commission to be known as the 'Federal Communications Commission', which shall be constituted as hereinafter provided, and which shall execute and enforce the provisions of this Act."

At far as I can tell the clock starts ticking on the 7 year statute of limitations when the debt is written off, NOT when it was incurred.

If it took 10 years for Comcast to provide internet service to the *entire* city, then CenturyLink should have 10 years to do the same. Seems fair to me.

"Any tin-pot dictator with enough money to buy the system could spy on people anywhere in the world," said Eric King

Any tin-pot dictator or any person with enough money.
Governments love that surveillance technology is getting cheaper and cheaper. What they fail to understand is the same technologies are getting cheaper and cheaper for *everyone*. Mobile phone videos of police, customer service call recordings, etc are already starting to make a difference. There isn't much we can do to stop government surveillance, the best we can hope for is being able to surveil back at them.

I think forcing Europe to create their own search engine is a good idea. Why should they depend on an American company for search?

By the time you reach secondary school (high-school) you start to realize that everyone from your parents to your church to your school to your government has been lying to you, at least in some part. You start to distrust authority and the government and don't believe them even when they are telling the truth. If authority says marujuana has "no medical use and a highest potential for addiction" and you know that is not true, maybe they are lying about vaccines being safe? If they lied to you about masturbation, maybe they lied to you about STDs? If the authorities continue to lie, the citizens will continue to not believe anything they say.
 

I had the opposite experience. CyanogenMod and AKOP used battery at such a rate my phone actually got warm when sitting on the desk doing nothing. That combined with crashing once a day or so made me go back to the carrier's firmware.

<blockquote>the smartphone that isn't capable of actively tracking a person is?</blockquote>

Answer: The cellphone you left at home or the cellphone which is powered off. It may be inconvenient to not have a cellphone available at all times, but it is not impossible.

We use Ansible, it seems to fit well with our needs, but others use Puppet or Chef.

My hope is the "do-baders" spend so much time keeping things secret they have difficulty "doing bad".

This sort of thing is why I seldom carry a cellphone anymore.

Because TW Telecom has "more than 27,000 route miles of fiber and over 16,000 "on-net" commercial buildings connected. "