I'm aware of this. That's why I keep doing it! Like our soon-to-be-ex-Commander In Chief once said, bring it on. Comcast's days of monopoly are going to come to an end. If they thought they had it rough under Chairman Martin. . . Can't wait to see what an actual competitive broadband marketplace looks like.

Gov't commenting is different than regular comment. Like when the FCC allows "public comment," it's not all willy-nilly. You can't just scratch your initials on any wall. Maybe Obama's folks are attempting to channel comments so they don't have to sore through a million "ur awesome" and even more inane posts before finding something they might be able to use. A theory, anyway. Lessig, of course, has a direct line to the transition team, but he's got a stake in the optics of this kind of experiment.

I'm with you. Have you heard their new song? It rules, of course.

The Stones were already evil, independent of Altamont. Dammit, I have too many Libertarian friends (at current count, two). It makes it difficult to unload with both barrels. Your "police state boogeyman" argument is fucking ridiculous and needs to be let go. When our Gov't affords immunity to the telecom giants in the mass surveillance of the citizenry, I think we're already there. By the by, our police exist to uphold the status quo, and to a lesser degree, to protect the citizens from inflicting undue harm on themselves. They succeed at only one of their aims. Our military exist to open new foreign markets through force, with the political cover of "humanitarian intervention." They haven't "protected" Americans since WWII. One only has to trace the history of the Central Intelligence Agency, to see the hidden hand of the global free market ideology — coups, assasinations, petrodictatorships and more have been the result of the American quest for economic hegemony. Even the Marshall Plan (which cost a lot more than the New Deal, my Libertarian friends), was a carrot designed to ensnare a divded Europe on the tenterhooks of American-style capitalism. Hey, the investment paid off, right? For a while, anyway. To trace the roots of our current global financial crisis is to reveal the fingerprints of a poison philosophy that has always benefitted the few at the expense of the many. Take a drive through the country, if you don't believe me. they're still waiting for that glorious free market trickledown in Selma, AL, among other places. What will replace this utterly flawed and now broken system is not within my ability to forecast. I do believe it should take more into account than individual profit, however. Because to choose otherwise is to be complicit in the destruction of the world and our place in it.

You should read The Singularity is Near. What Kurzweil demonstrates is that ALL technology, — from fire to GPS — can be plotted with a series of s-curves, with a flat point preceding a major paradigm shift. He presents data to prove his"law of accelerating returns," in which the time between paradigm shifts becomes more compressed. Then there's Moore's Law, which describes the exponential evolution of computing technology (size-price-performance) basically doubling every two years. Kurzweil suggests we've trimmed time here, too, and it's now more like one year. So there is compelling evidence that these advances in computer technology will eventually allow us to reverse-engineer the human brain and digitally reproduce its processes in such a way that making the distinction between sentient organic and sentient mechanical is difficult-to-impossible. Then there's bio add-ons (already real), as well as genetic enhancement and molecular assembly/disassembly through nanotech. Strap yourself in, dude. It's within your lifetime, provided there isn't a countervailing Law that prevents civs from reaching Singularity — something built in and entropic. Maybe we use too many resources in the acceleration phase; perhaps we devastate our environment; hi-tech weapons (grey goo) could unleash total holocaust; we could be struck by that big ol' meteoric object, etc. Fun stuff to ponder.