Is this company run by the kid who would steal anything that wasn't nailed down and then say "you didn't say I COULDN'T have it"?

Exactly. Remove network neutrality, prevent any government snooping (yay!), and regulate what "the cloud" does with your data.

But, considering that this is from the party that revoked due process during Bush II, and is saying nothing about Obama's continuation of it, despite their hatred of everything he does, I am still dubious of any anti-authoritarian stance they may take. Let them end warrant-less wiretapping, demand that everyone imprisoned by the US government be given a fair trial, and end torture. Then you can tell me you care about our civil liberties.

You saw a request and made it happen. If you worked for Google, we might be using G+ by now.

Many economists disagree with you on that.

Actually the stimulus package helped, but it was not enough to fix everything in two years.

Obama didn't wait two years. In 2008, Bush passed tarp. In 2009, Obama passed his own stimulus package consisting of tax cuts and infrastructure programs. By then, the GOP was crapping their pants in fear of the newly discovered national debt. So, should he have passed another stimulus in 2010? If he had, it would have been nothing more than a massive tax cut, which would have exacerbated the debt ceiling debate.

But never enough to break the constant stream of kneejerk filibusters.

Exactly. Jack Daniels is being nice to this guy because they don't have a leg to stand on. They can either threaten to sue and hope that the legal costs intimidate the publisher into submission, or try to work with the other guy.

But that isn't the greatest risk. You're still more likely to be killed by a lifetime of movie theater popcorn, or by a car wreck on the way home. (I am staying out of the gun-control argument. This is notable because it is flashy. Had it been common, we would have either stopped going to movies, found a way to make it uncommon, or learned to accept it by now)

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You make a convincing argument. I can agree with you in the case of non-swing states.

So why don't you vote for yourself every election? By your logic, the only question you should be asking yourself is "is there anybody I'd rather see in office". There is a difference between voting systems. Our current system was not designed to work well with third party candidates. Others are.

I have to say that with all the emphasis on "voter suppression" or "voter fraud prevention" this election, and the partisan BS that comes with the past few years, I don't know if I trust the current batch to change the system. We would need every provision and every aspect of the system to be monitored by at least one non-partisan non-profit third party with no political agenda.

  I think we would have an easier time finding a flock of benevolent mind-readers to remotely sense the majority of public opinion while riding through town on a pack of domesticated unicorns.

I wish I had the mod points for you. I just wish that we had a system that didn't center around false dichotomies. One where the voter has the freedom to vote for the guy he really wants without wasting his vote.

(As an example), I am still cursing mozilla and other new web browsers for the way they are keeping their UIs in a constant state of flux. Things like moving the home icon, making the status bar something that only appears if you hover over a link for 2 seconds, and just making everything look different from what it was 2 years ago. That sucks when you have to provide tech support for idiots who don't know if they're using netscape navigator or Internet Explorer 9.

And in Linux, I have found that there are plenty of GUI tools that I never bothered to learn, specifically because the Redhat version is different from the Debian version, and possibly the newer Redhat version is different from the older Redhat version.

So, yes, keep the G-d damned command-line in every version of every operating system, because I want to spend my study time learning new things, not just learning how to do the same old things in different versions of Windows/Linux.

And, no, I'm not going to make the argument for CLI reliability (that it never mangles your settings in such a way that you have to try again), or flexibility (that it's the only decent way to do scripting). Others have done a much better job than I could, in that area.

It doesn't matter. Nobody has any intention of doing that. When a company pollutes an area, often its' biggest supporters are the people living in that area. They're just happy to have jobs. And if this ever get to disastrous levels, what are the odds that reparations will be paid to those who lost everything? What are the odds that this will be paid for by taxes/fines on the people who benefited most from causing the problem?

Or would it make such development worthwhile? Alternate energies and new technologies have an uphill climb because they are having to fight against a well-established system with infrastructure and political clout on their side. If we had a reasonable system in place to require people to reduce emissions, then people would adopt newer technologies, the businesses that supply those technologies would grow, and they would have more money to research cheaper, more efficient production.

That is a problem. It's hard for us to tell some third world country "now that we got ours, the rules are changing"