Not quite sure he has a few billion on hand.

But yeah, he's clearly human. He made mistakes. He realized things went too far south. He decided to owe up and bail out instead of let the investment incentives keep him going. It was a personal choice. Personal morals. He clearly doesn't feel a responsibility toward the world, but feels he crossed a personal line that he cannot justify going beyond.

I agree that the people who end up messing stuff up for the rest of us should feel a sense of duty to fix things, and this guy clearly has a long road ahead to doing so. But that same sense should exist in every one of us when we, for instance, go out to vote.

We humans and our insecurities are so easily manipulated with the promise of security, gains and success.

What exactly do you call ditching $850M and investing heavily in a morally sound competitor (Signal)? Tell me, frank, what would it take for you to feel like this guy is doing something more than purely symbolic gestures? And more importantly, hold that measure to yourself. In his situation, what is the action that your moral high-ground would take that he is not measuring up to?

Amazingly, not all politicians are mere stereotypes. Some of them are actually human. Worth looking at who these specific people are and remembering their names.

We largely agree on the bigger picture. Though I personally have a little less faith in the power of market forces to keep the Internet neutral. Even if you break up the monopolies and give people choices, "firing" your ISP simply isn't all that powerful a statement as you would like it to be.

I'm all for sending my ISP a message if I hate what he's doing, and if taking my money elsewhere hurts him as much as you say it would, that would be awesome, but I simply don't think that it does. And that's mainly because 90% of people are sheep, and companies have gotten incredibly good at feeding the sheep pacification drugs. Most people will take almost any abuse you throw at them and still fake a smile if it'll get them more happy drugs (read: tv, sports, porn, whatever).

That's why I'm in the camp of, "you can't rely on market forces to keep these bastards honest, you need to write down what honesty means and then hold them to it".

Hey you, you seem frustrated. You also seem to be railing against something you clearly take issue with but wasn't in the comment you replied to.

I think you're frustrated with people hijacking the term "net neutrality" as whatever regulation is necessary to protect their own world-view. Did I get that right?

Net neutrality is not about leftist or rightist values. It is not about feminism, porn, fake news, or hate speech.

Net neutrality is nothing more than "my internet is the same internet as your internet".
The idea that the Internet is a domain of its own, and any gatekeeper that provides access to the Internet should treat it as-it-is, and not try to change what the Internet looks like to fit their personal beliefs or commercial interests. Whether that Internet has things on it that I like or dislike does not matter. What matters is that it's the same and stays the same. The ISP should be neutral, not biased. The ISP should show the picture as-is, not color it blue or red, censor it or favor it.

And here's the crux: for an ISP to treat the internet as neutral, you need regulation. If there is no regulation, every ISP will treat the Internet as biassed. Leftist ISPs will treat it leftist, rightist ISPs will treat it rightist and all ISPs will treat it in whatever way makes them more money. If you want your Internet to be the same as my Internet, your Internet speech to be unadulterated and free, you need to tell ISPs everywhere that they are not allowed to censor your speech, they are not allowed to change your Internet to look or act different.

Certainly the constitution doesn't care about granting the government the right of telling a company what to do, that would be serious overreach. It's really just an interpretation of what it means that the constitution *doesn't* tell us how to think of the Internet.

Does that mean that the Internet is something that only exists as whatever comes out of your end of the cable when you buy a service with a local Internet provider? If so, it makes sense to think of the Internet as a product that is generated by your local ISP, and therefore, they have the full right to decide what it looks like.

But this is not how people today think of the Internet. If you ask people today what the Internet is, they imagine it as a unitary thing that is available to people world-wide, and it looks the same to all people everywhere. The Internet is a space of freedom of access, freedom of information and freedom of expression. It's extremely important to understand that this Internet of freedoms is completely incompatible with the Internet as a service idea. You cannot have a free Internet and at the same time an Internet that is a commercially-selected subset of Internet that works best in the business context of your local cable company.

An Internet-as-a-service is an Internet where the ISP is the socialist government, dictating for you, what the cyber world gets to look like. This is the consequential Kavanaugh Internet: you may think of it as an Internet born from constitutional freedoms, but an Internet born from freedoms is decidedly un-free.

Once we realize that, it's up to us to decide what we want to do. Do we want to throw our hands in the air and see what kind of Internet market forces will create for us (note: it will be different depending on what state you live in)? Or do we want an Internet that mirrors our current perception of an Internet of freedoms? If we want the latter, the only way to get an Internet of freedoms is by writing it into law. Regulation that states exactly what those freedoms are, and tells the gatekeepers that they need to provide us with at-minimum a version of Internet where those freedoms are respected.

A lot of people think it makes no sense that regulation creates freedom, and a lack of regulation creates oppression. But this is precisely how things work in the real world. You cannot be free without legislation that tells you what your freedoms are. What do you think the constitution is? It is the supreme regulation of your personal freedoms. What you need is a constitution of the Internet. This is net neutrality.

Net neutrality is the constitution of the free Internet. And it doesn't exist (and neither do your freedoms) unless we create it.

This is exactly what you are seeing here. A judge interpreting what the law (constitution) tries to say about a distributor (ISP). In this case, the judge appears to see the distributor of Internet content to be the one who chooses how that Internet content should appear if consumed through their network. That is a perfectly valid if not disastrously incompatible interpretation of "Internet" as is currently understood by Internet users. We tend to think of the Internet as a thing in and of itself, where this judge appears to think of it as a pool of possible things that an ISP can cherry-pick content from to serve up for you.

Note that supreme court judges are different from regular judges in how their interpretations are made and how they are applied. For one, AFAIK, they do not hear experts, they are the experts.

Not sure it's the kind of thing you want to be doing every 5 minutes daily.

Proof that asbestos causes cancer does nothing to prove that cigarettes don't. Please check your logic.

Let me help you apply that: Proof that a lack of exposure to the environment in early development causes allergies does nothing to suggest that excessive cleanliness later in life is harmless. In fact, I daresay it's a very strong indicator of the opposite.

If you kill the SLS, be ready for all state support for NASA to dry up soon after. It so happens NASA's congressional support is dependent upon it injecting a good deal of federal funding into local state economies nation-wide.

You clearly have no understanding of what this project is, what it actually means to "spend money" in a national economy, nor what the implications of what you are proposing are.

It's easy, isn't it, to make naive suggestions based on zero understanding of the actual project, issues involved, alternatives and budgetary projections?

Aside from easy, it's also very damaging to go around eroding trust in the amazing projects and opportunities that are being worked on so hard every day.

No sure what your point is.

You can't eat gold, you can't build a house out of cows, you can't drive firewood down the road, you can't breed salt, beans don't keep you warm. What exactly are you trying to say? Everything generates value for different reasons. Bitcoin has its own, just like cows do, and neither are universally useful.

The value of beans is as real as the value of anything, bitcoin included.

Before you start making claims about what has value, consider defining value first.

If you feel value is a thing that enables you to use something to actually do something, get something, trade something or get something done, then beans are as valuable as bitcoin is.

But from your comment about "smoke and mirrors", it seems like perhaps you feel that value is only real if it is somehow permanent, unchanging, unfleeting. If that's your definition of value, I doubt you will ever find anything that meets the need to satisfy your insecurities.

What was the motivation of the judge? Why did he feel there was no antitrust violation? Is this a failure of the judiciary or a failure of the DoJ to build a decent case?

So then it's time to re-invent the internet.