"Amazon has included mobile data before in its Kindles, but those were strictly for books"
That is incorrect. I have a Kindle with 3G, and it comes with a web browser that works on 3G. They limit the amount of data you can use web browsing per month, but it has it. And it's free (not this price-per-year stuff). I'll attempt to post here from my Kindle in a few minutes.
There's a particularly good short story section of Larry Niven's "The Draco Tavern" dealing with this sort of thing.
A species genetically engineers a yeast-style organism that will act as a contraceptive. Unfortunately, the yeast causes complete infertility after a few generations. Since the species failed to limit the changes in a contained experimental area, their entire population is wiped out.
This can obviously be extrapolated to the human population. If we experiment with things like trait selection, we could end up wiping ourselves out because of problems we don't foresee. It would be nice if we'd perform our genetic experiments (with ourselves, our food supply, diseases) in a way that they couldn't completely destroy our species.
No, I'm not a luddite. But we shouldn't turn future humans into bananas, just waiting for a well-suited plague to kill us all.
The same argument you're using is an argument used for spying and throttling/capping of internet connections. It's an attempt to get us to turn on each other instead of the corporations screwing us over. Don't take the bait.
I find myself far less likely to vote for national candidates that send direct mail. More-local candidates that send direct mail make more sense, since I wouldn't likely know their positions otherwise.
Cases in point:
I get junk mail from "Romney For President" because I'm registered Republican. I would never vote for him for president (though I voted in the primary). They're wasting their money. They even ask you to put your own postage on donation envelopes so they don't have to pay it. That's led me to consider sending it back empty.
My girlfriend gets junk mail from "Obama For President" because she's registered Democrat. All the direct mail they send her talks up his Obamacare and Immigration policies, the two things she most dislikes that he's done. The junk mail has almost let me convince her to vote third-party in the election.
I don't think these political groups know what they're doing as much as they think.
I like "Don't throw stones in glass houses without proper protection."
And Blockbuster. It's always fun to see "Transmorphers" next to "Transformers".
Once again: seeking to stifle speech online is only likely to give that speech much, much, much more attention.
In the episode, a carbon tax was an example of taxing things that we want to reduce the use of. Think of it separately as energy-usage tax to encourage energy efficiency.
That probably isn't on the list because their "broad range of political backgrounds" economists don't agree on it. The things on this list are things that shouldn't be controversial. Our level of military intervention in the rest of the world has always been controversial.
See this one for the same thing done by the Music Labels:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml
And this one for Movie Studios:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100708/02510310122.shtml
And now we have book publishers. As it turns out, they're all crooks.
What about all the coverage of Amanda Palmer? Or the older coverage of Kevin Smith? Techdirt loves content creators and hates "gatekeepers". I highly doubt you're actually confused about that.
This doesn't seem like it would be a particularly impossible filter to recreate. Anyone want to get Internet-famous?
A more impressive "iPhone trick" would be if they made it stop dropping calls.
aliens*
If you're going to pointlessly correct someone, at least do it right!
But isn't that what "Cloud" means?
(I don't tend to trust cloud services.)
They come with two versions of firmware: the dd-wrt version and the "User-Friendly" version. I had very poor results with my recently-purchased router, especially compared to my old reliable WHR-G54S.
Re:
What's funny is that the candidate who was saying he would use obscenity laws to go after porn, Santorum, was soundly defeated in the primary. Why would they then take up his crazy stance?