Hunan rice is merely the standard economic textbook example.
Other examples of Giffen Goods:
* British University places (Universities in Britain are charging students as much as they legally can because to charge less would make them look second-best)
* Housing (the housing bubble is a brilliant example of a Giffen Good - the more expensive houses got, the more people wanted them; cheap houses, no matter how good, were seen as inferior investments)
* Stocks (expensive stocks are almost always seen as "good" because they're expensive even though the ROI is so low even at the best of times that nobody wanting to make money ever buys them)
You can add to this list absolutely ANYTHING that has gone through a bubble-burst phase. When demand increases as price increases, increased scarcity will increase price further, thus increasing demand. Eventually something always gives. If you hear on the news terms like "over-evaluation", "unsustainable prices" and "adjustment downwards", there is a really good chance you're looking at something whose value to people increased as a function of price rather than maximizing then tailing off (as rational, intelligent people might think). Google lists many other examples specifically described as Giffen Goods.
I am not deep enough into the economic world to know if you could ever eliminate such behaviour, but precisely because it's a major culprit in economic bubbles, stagflation (the weird situation in which stagnation can also create hyper-inflation) and other psychotic behavours in the market, the more you can reduce the odds of such stuff the better.
Let's take a look at IPv4 addresses. ARIN is demanding justification in order to hand out IPv4 addresses. Microsoft bought 666K of them. Y'know, unless Microsoft is planning on opening almost seven hundred thousand satellite offices in countries economically unable to upgrade right now, the "justification" offered has bugger all to do with planned usage. They'd have used non-routable addresses and a proxy if usage was the key factor.
Apparently to enough people that Amazon hasn't seen it as a bug. If people are willing to pay thousands for a pop paperback, it would be economic stupidity to fix the error. If the extreme prices had actually cost Amazon money (directly or indirectly), the bug would have been fixed long ago.An alternative explanation is that the bug has been random enough that fixing it would have merely added a few dollars chump-change to the sales - nowhere near enough to pay for the bugfix.
Hmmm. I'm definitely getting the impression, though, that it's more the former case than the latter.
It isn't. The Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb. It didn't use plutonium at all.
In terms of geometry, what you'd need is a naturally-occuring uranium deposit that contained sufficiently few impurities that it had achieved a self-sustaining natural reaction, both on the ground and on the meteorite. We know the first one is possible because we've found such places. Since it can occur on the ground, it is reasonable to assume it can happen in space under suitable conditions. You also want the deposits on the planet to have undergone the geological process of "folding" (where layers of rock are bent out of shape - very common thing to have happen). The more extreme the fold (and it can get very extreme indeed) the better.
A slightly less favourable geometry would need a steeper angle of incidence, at least the way I was picturing it, but under suitable conditions a more energetic impact would likely work as well. So we've doubled the endless possibilities.
Anyone who confuses fission with fusion has good reason to be an anonymous coward. Anyone who cannot comprehend what "thermonuclear" (lit. "nuclear heat") is, again, has good reason to hide. Anyone who cannot understand that two sub-critical masses joined with sufficient force can exceed the critical mass is just plain dumb.
I've seen books on Amazon before that were in the thousands of dollars - books that you can find at any used bookstore for 50 cents, we're not talking ultra-rare stuff here. So this isn't a new bug and they're bound to have had complaints many times before. I think this is the first time they've let the loop get this far though.
There are at least two sites on Earth known where natural deposits of uranium were pure enough to have undergone a thermonuclear process of the kind found in a nuclear reactor. Although improbable, it is certainly possible for an entirely natural nuclear bomb to arise. It is, agreed, exceedingly unlikely but all the processes required do exist in nature and therefore must combine somewhere, at some point in time, in just the right way.
The actual suggestion, as originally proposed by James Lovelock and expanded-upon by others, is that you look for the following:
a) Dynamic equilibriums involving chemicals that are unstable in each other's presence and/or in the presence of the radiation from their sun
Unless the chemicals are replenished, such a system MUST reduce to a stable equilibrium, although this is insufficient to say HOW they are replenished.
b) Evidence that one or more of the chemicals cannot arise naturally (ie: there ISN'T a geological process, even an unknown one, that could ever create the compound)
Not all chemicals have a natural proginator. Doesn't matter how alien the world is, doesn't matter how strange or exotic, not everything can happen naturally. The reliance on a mysterous get-out-of-jail-free "unknown" simply doesn't cut it for some stuff. Chemistry is remarkably simple and the rules of what chemical reactions can and cannot happen are very well known. Those rules are as true in any solar system in Andromeda or on any planet that has no sun at all as they are here.
c) Evidence that the compounds resulting from the natural reaction of the compounds observed in the atmosphere are BELOW the levels that can possibly occur as a result of the reactions that must be taking place
We can observe every damn element in an atmosphere along with exactly what compounds those elements combine to form, their ratios and their temperatures. There are no hidden variables within the atmosphere itself. If the chemicals that should be there aren't, then the chemicals are being removed by a variable that is NOT a part of the atmosphere.
d) As environmental conditons change (such as distance from the sun, etc), the ratio of compounds in the atmosphere changes such as to oppose that environmental change
ie: There's one or more negative feedback loops - not just on the addition of compounds to the atmosphere but also on the removal. Geological processes don't work this way. This isn't through our limited knowledge. Volcanos don't select what gasses they spew according to the time of year. If the gravitational pull is enough, they may vary in frequency. What they cannot do is vary in composition.
In addition, the vast majority of chemical reactions have POSITIVE feedback loops, not negative ones. The only way to produce negative feedback loops in sufficient quantity to overwhelm the positive feedback loops is to have a living component.
Meet these four conditions and life is guaranteed present. It may be present at some level when not all four are met (the statement isn't reversible), but it can never be absent when all are true.
There is NO extension to these rules which will allow you to determine the presence of intelligent life.
Economics theory refers to what you're talking about as a Giffen Good. As prices rise, so does the appeal and therefore so does the demand. The usual laws regarding supply-and-demand, etc, don't work. Prices will rise to what the market will bear, but as prices rise the desirability ensures that the markets will always bear just that little bit more. Which is why you get market bubbles in the first place. The greater the overpricing, the greater the prestige in owning the commodity.
Ultimately, all bubbles burst and when the IPv4 market bubble burts it is going to cause a LOT of pain because none of those caught in the bubble will have bothered preparing for IPv6. They'll assume that there'll always be some way to extend the range, some way to inflate the bubble still further. We've all seen similar posts on Slashdot even, where people should be smarter than that,
The politicians who created the current mechanism were voted in specifically to deal with "criminal elements", to be "tough on crime" and to treat all who are suspect hashly (to do otherwise is to be accused of pussyfooting and being soft on criminals). The politicians are also routinely required by voters to have law enforcement Look Impressive. Nobody wants things just done, they want them done on Reality TV.
Ultimately, this situation was created by the voters themselves and blaming the people the voters put intoo power doesn't cut the mustard. Ignoring the cause but treating the symptoms is a good way for the cause to continue causing.
Based on the rate at which different Indo-European words change, scholars now place the age of the world "wheel" (along with the words "horse", "chariot" and "axle") at around 5,000 BCE. In other words, it's not just wheels that have survived, but the entire specification of land vehicles. So, yeah, I'd have to agree specs can hang around a very, very long time.
Not fond of the GIF format, myself, but for limited-pallet lossless bitmapped images, they're certainly the best out there. In some ways, TARGA is better. In fact, it would be trivial to extend TARGA to any number of bits per colour plane you liked. However, TARGA is (a) not really used much, (b) not used in animated images at all, and (c) not really compessible at the colour-plane level, you'd need to squash the whole file or nothing.
Then ban misleading or wilfully degenerate presentation. (I wish the US would. Get rid of Talk Radio, most of the news channels, over 50% of politicians, 100% of the campaign ads AND Sarah Palin in one go.)
Information can be true or it can be false. That's it. I've no objection to Japan banning false information, provided it is indeed false, but the claims seem to have nothing to do with false information.
Presentation can be deceptive and frequently is. The best lies contain only truths, merely truths selectively chosen and couched so as to present a picture utterly different from reality. AGWers and NeoCons use the technique all the time. Banning perversions of reality that are designed to mislead or corrupt is not such a bad idea, again provided (a) it's actually a perversion of reality and not just something the politicos don't like, and (b) it really is designed to mislead (see: Time Travel in China story for details on the hilarity that ensues when alternative realities are banned when it's obious to anyone that they're intended as fiction).
Getting rid of the genuinely sick and twisted scaremongering, along with the genuinely sick and twisted efforts to hide the reality of the situation, would not be so bad. But that's clearly not what is intended here. What is intended here is to convince people that the Japanese parliament is The Word Of God. This isn't the first time that the Japanese government has decided it was a Living God. Didn't end well, the last time, did it?
Sellafield's nuclear plant workers routinely get doses in excess of 500 mSv and rather more often than they should get doses in excess of 1000 mSv. The leukemia levels are 2,000 backgound. Plutonium (not exactly a natural element) is found in the house dust in people's homes. Yet in the court case over those deaths (later dramatized by Granada TV's "Fighting for Gemma"), the courts ruled that not one single incidence of leukemia could be attributed to Sellafield.
It's bloody obvious to anyone who hasn't contracted Mad Cow Disease as to what the reality is.
In other words, you're a bloody idiot.
(Incidentally, I find it interesting that a functional, operational, tuned and monitored nuclear power plant can give 1000 mSv doses but the workers at Fukushima - a reactor that has been subject to repeated extreme earthquakes and explosions, a partial meltdown and a tsunami - are only supposedly getting a tenth of that. Pardon my skepticism, but shouldn't people in a nuclear accident site get MORE than people at a functional and officially "safe" site?)
The plastic boxes weren't nearly as much of a problem as the cardboard insets they used to use - the sulphur content would literally dissolve sections of the CD.
Never had any problems fitting CD cases in jacket pockets. Mind you, I don't wear American jackets, so maybe you should check to see if the RIAA owns the fashion industry that side of the pond.
I agree with you in that it isn't good for democracy and that such a platform should be provided. The mere fact that one company could have the power to effectively eliminate all such platforms is, however, proof that what we have is most certainly not democracy than that claims that a single entity can ever constitute democracy are highly suspect at best, propoganda at worst. Far from scoffing, I take it as a dangerous sign that the media (who are ethically obliged to provide accurate, honest information) have lost their marbles and that Joe Public has ceased to comprehend what freedom and democracy even mean. The words are over-used and are abused to the point where they have become meaningless noise. Far from laughing, I consider that to be dangerous to the extreme. When words mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean (Lewis Carolls' Humpty Dumpty), with no meaning or substance of their own, abuse becomes inevitable and rational, democratic societies become impossible.
Calling companies out is about all anyone can do, but let's face it. We do NOT meet Plato's requirements for functional democracy, we meet Plato's requirements for dictatorship-dressed-as-democracy. And in such a world, populist speakers will ALWAYS trump rational speakers. Plato recognized that danger and saw it with his own eyes with the ruinous wars that the people were talked into fighting because they were ignorant and let others think for them.
For that reason, calling companies out will have minimal benefit. Companies are foerever being called out on charges of corruption, cowardice, or whatever. If it made any real impact, Halliburton and BP would no longer exist. Neither would AT&T. In fact, I'm trying hard to think of a major company out there that WOULD exist. They're all guilty and the Invisible Hand has served only to hand them "get out of jail free" cards.
One group taking down WikiLeaks doesn't really matter when it comes to democracy. Indeed, since choice is a part of democracy, one group is perfectly entitled to censor what they like, since one group is utterly insignificant. Indeed, that is how you identify democracies.
The Internet is not democratic and hasn't been since deregulation. The Internet is a federation of dictatorships. You have no choices. If you live in an area where X runs the backbone, ALL ISPs without exception are mere window-dressing over X. They can't provide anything X doesn't pipe, they can't charge less than X charges them, they can't give you freedoms or rights X doesn't grant you. To claim you can choose another provider is like saying you can choose to buy Fords in different shades of absolute black. If you believe in such illusions and phantoms, I've a Golden Gate bridge you can buy.
All we have here is an extension of that. Amazon has pwned the data centers, so choice has been eliminated. That's not democracy, that's dictatorship that's telling you it's democracy. It's as close to real democracy as Saddam Hussein's elections or the Tea Party.
Apparently, because having just one party and no elections makes a democracy. And in later news, why Rupert Murdoch tapping everyone's phones is good for privacy.
Wait... are you saying that there's a sport that's organized? Besides, I didn't even know there were any sports in the US, unless you consider cheerleading or scripted physical abuse a sport.
Apparently it took five years of screaming at the top of their lungs for the police to notice them. Seattle apparently has rather more Lestrades' than Holmes'.
It's worse than that. Based on the somewhat heated discussion I had in which I was slammed for stating that privacy and security are an aspect of freedom, I'd have to say that not only do people value convenience far more than security, they regard security as a major liability,
Slashdot Mirror
Hunan rice is merely the standard economic textbook example.
Other examples of Giffen Goods:
* British University places (Universities in Britain are charging students as much as they legally can because to charge less would make them look second-best)
* Housing (the housing bubble is a brilliant example of a Giffen Good - the more expensive houses got, the more people wanted them; cheap houses, no matter how good, were seen as inferior investments)
* Stocks (expensive stocks are almost always seen as "good" because they're expensive even though the ROI is so low even at the best of times that nobody wanting to make money ever buys them)
You can add to this list absolutely ANYTHING that has gone through a bubble-burst phase. When demand increases as price increases, increased scarcity will increase price further, thus increasing demand. Eventually something always gives. If you hear on the news terms like "over-evaluation", "unsustainable prices" and "adjustment downwards", there is a really good chance you're looking at something whose value to people increased as a function of price rather than maximizing then tailing off (as rational, intelligent people might think). Google lists many other examples specifically described as Giffen Goods.
I am not deep enough into the economic world to know if you could ever eliminate such behaviour, but precisely because it's a major culprit in economic bubbles, stagflation (the weird situation in which stagnation can also create hyper-inflation) and other psychotic behavours in the market, the more you can reduce the odds of such stuff the better.
Let's take a look at IPv4 addresses. ARIN is demanding justification in order to hand out IPv4 addresses. Microsoft bought 666K of them. Y'know, unless Microsoft is planning on opening almost seven hundred thousand satellite offices in countries economically unable to upgrade right now, the "justification" offered has bugger all to do with planned usage. They'd have used non-routable addresses and a proxy if usage was the key factor.
Apparently to enough people that Amazon hasn't seen it as a bug. If people are willing to pay thousands for a pop paperback, it would be economic stupidity to fix the error. If the extreme prices had actually cost Amazon money (directly or indirectly), the bug would have been fixed long ago.An alternative explanation is that the bug has been random enough that fixing it would have merely added a few dollars chump-change to the sales - nowhere near enough to pay for the bugfix.
Hmmm. I'm definitely getting the impression, though, that it's more the former case than the latter.
It isn't. The Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb. It didn't use plutonium at all.
In terms of geometry, what you'd need is a naturally-occuring uranium deposit that contained sufficiently few impurities that it had achieved a self-sustaining natural reaction, both on the ground and on the meteorite. We know the first one is possible because we've found such places. Since it can occur on the ground, it is reasonable to assume it can happen in space under suitable conditions. You also want the deposits on the planet to have undergone the geological process of "folding" (where layers of rock are bent out of shape - very common thing to have happen). The more extreme the fold (and it can get very extreme indeed) the better.
A slightly less favourable geometry would need a steeper angle of incidence, at least the way I was picturing it, but under suitable conditions a more energetic impact would likely work as well. So we've doubled the endless possibilities.
Anyone who confuses fission with fusion has good reason to be an anonymous coward. Anyone who cannot comprehend what "thermonuclear" (lit. "nuclear heat") is, again, has good reason to hide. Anyone who cannot understand that two sub-critical masses joined with sufficient force can exceed the critical mass is just plain dumb.
I've seen books on Amazon before that were in the thousands of dollars - books that you can find at any used bookstore for 50 cents, we're not talking ultra-rare stuff here. So this isn't a new bug and they're bound to have had complaints many times before. I think this is the first time they've let the loop get this far though.
There are at least two sites on Earth known where natural deposits of uranium were pure enough to have undergone a thermonuclear process of the kind found in a nuclear reactor. Although improbable, it is certainly possible for an entirely natural nuclear bomb to arise. It is, agreed, exceedingly unlikely but all the processes required do exist in nature and therefore must combine somewhere, at some point in time, in just the right way.
The actual suggestion, as originally proposed by James Lovelock and expanded-upon by others, is that you look for the following:
a) Dynamic equilibriums involving chemicals that are unstable in each other's presence and/or in the presence of the radiation from their sun
Unless the chemicals are replenished, such a system MUST reduce to a stable equilibrium, although this is insufficient to say HOW they are replenished.
b) Evidence that one or more of the chemicals cannot arise naturally (ie: there ISN'T a geological process, even an unknown one, that could ever create the compound)
Not all chemicals have a natural proginator. Doesn't matter how alien the world is, doesn't matter how strange or exotic, not everything can happen naturally. The reliance on a mysterous get-out-of-jail-free "unknown" simply doesn't cut it for some stuff. Chemistry is remarkably simple and the rules of what chemical reactions can and cannot happen are very well known. Those rules are as true in any solar system in Andromeda or on any planet that has no sun at all as they are here.
c) Evidence that the compounds resulting from the natural reaction of the compounds observed in the atmosphere are BELOW the levels that can possibly occur as a result of the reactions that must be taking place
We can observe every damn element in an atmosphere along with exactly what compounds those elements combine to form, their ratios and their temperatures. There are no hidden variables within the atmosphere itself. If the chemicals that should be there aren't, then the chemicals are being removed by a variable that is NOT a part of the atmosphere.
d) As environmental conditons change (such as distance from the sun, etc), the ratio of compounds in the atmosphere changes such as to oppose that environmental change
ie: There's one or more negative feedback loops - not just on the addition of compounds to the atmosphere but also on the removal. Geological processes don't work this way. This isn't through our limited knowledge. Volcanos don't select what gasses they spew according to the time of year. If the gravitational pull is enough, they may vary in frequency. What they cannot do is vary in composition.
In addition, the vast majority of chemical reactions have POSITIVE feedback loops, not negative ones. The only way to produce negative feedback loops in sufficient quantity to overwhelm the positive feedback loops is to have a living component.
Meet these four conditions and life is guaranteed present. It may be present at some level when not all four are met (the statement isn't reversible), but it can never be absent when all are true.
There is NO extension to these rules which will allow you to determine the presence of intelligent life.
Economics theory refers to what you're talking about as a Giffen Good. As prices rise, so does the appeal and therefore so does the demand. The usual laws regarding supply-and-demand, etc, don't work. Prices will rise to what the market will bear, but as prices rise the desirability ensures that the markets will always bear just that little bit more. Which is why you get market bubbles in the first place. The greater the overpricing, the greater the prestige in owning the commodity.
Ultimately, all bubbles burst and when the IPv4 market bubble burts it is going to cause a LOT of pain because none of those caught in the bubble will have bothered preparing for IPv6. They'll assume that there'll always be some way to extend the range, some way to inflate the bubble still further. We've all seen similar posts on Slashdot even, where people should be smarter than that,
The politicians who created the current mechanism were voted in specifically to deal with "criminal elements", to be "tough on crime" and to treat all who are suspect hashly (to do otherwise is to be accused of pussyfooting and being soft on criminals). The politicians are also routinely required by voters to have law enforcement Look Impressive. Nobody wants things just done, they want them done on Reality TV.
Ultimately, this situation was created by the voters themselves and blaming the people the voters put intoo power doesn't cut the mustard. Ignoring the cause but treating the symptoms is a good way for the cause to continue causing.
Based on the rate at which different Indo-European words change, scholars now place the age of the world "wheel" (along with the words "horse", "chariot" and "axle") at around 5,000 BCE. In other words, it's not just wheels that have survived, but the entire specification of land vehicles. So, yeah, I'd have to agree specs can hang around a very, very long time.
Not fond of the GIF format, myself, but for limited-pallet lossless bitmapped images, they're certainly the best out there. In some ways, TARGA is better. In fact, it would be trivial to extend TARGA to any number of bits per colour plane you liked. However, TARGA is (a) not really used much, (b) not used in animated images at all, and (c) not really compessible at the colour-plane level, you'd need to squash the whole file or nothing.
APNG is a nice format. Must say an animated version of OpenEXR would be fun too.
Then ban misleading or wilfully degenerate presentation. (I wish the US would. Get rid of Talk Radio, most of the news channels, over 50% of politicians, 100% of the campaign ads AND Sarah Palin in one go.)
Information can be true or it can be false. That's it. I've no objection to Japan banning false information, provided it is indeed false, but the claims seem to have nothing to do with false information.
Presentation can be deceptive and frequently is. The best lies contain only truths, merely truths selectively chosen and couched so as to present a picture utterly different from reality. AGWers and NeoCons use the technique all the time. Banning perversions of reality that are designed to mislead or corrupt is not such a bad idea, again provided (a) it's actually a perversion of reality and not just something the politicos don't like, and (b) it really is designed to mislead (see: Time Travel in China story for details on the hilarity that ensues when alternative realities are banned when it's obious to anyone that they're intended as fiction).
Getting rid of the genuinely sick and twisted scaremongering, along with the genuinely sick and twisted efforts to hide the reality of the situation, would not be so bad. But that's clearly not what is intended here. What is intended here is to convince people that the Japanese parliament is The Word Of God. This isn't the first time that the Japanese government has decided it was a Living God. Didn't end well, the last time, did it?
When marriage is illegal, only outlaws will have inlaws.
Sellafield's nuclear plant workers routinely get doses in excess of 500 mSv and rather more often than they should get doses in excess of 1000 mSv. The leukemia levels are 2,000 backgound. Plutonium (not exactly a natural element) is found in the house dust in people's homes. Yet in the court case over those deaths (later dramatized by Granada TV's "Fighting for Gemma"), the courts ruled that not one single incidence of leukemia could be attributed to Sellafield.
It's bloody obvious to anyone who hasn't contracted Mad Cow Disease as to what the reality is.
In other words, you're a bloody idiot.
(Incidentally, I find it interesting that a functional, operational, tuned and monitored nuclear power plant can give 1000 mSv doses but the workers at Fukushima - a reactor that has been subject to repeated extreme earthquakes and explosions, a partial meltdown and a tsunami - are only supposedly getting a tenth of that. Pardon my skepticism, but shouldn't people in a nuclear accident site get MORE than people at a functional and officially "safe" site?)
The plastic boxes weren't nearly as much of a problem as the cardboard insets they used to use - the sulphur content would literally dissolve sections of the CD.
Phonograph?
Never had any problems fitting CD cases in jacket pockets. Mind you, I don't wear American jackets, so maybe you should check to see if the RIAA owns the fashion industry that side of the pond.
I get worried when Slashdotters start ranking microwaved geeks by taste. Masterchef this isn't.
I agree with you in that it isn't good for democracy and that such a platform should be provided. The mere fact that one company could have the power to effectively eliminate all such platforms is, however, proof that what we have is most certainly not democracy than that claims that a single entity can ever constitute democracy are highly suspect at best, propoganda at worst. Far from scoffing, I take it as a dangerous sign that the media (who are ethically obliged to provide accurate, honest information) have lost their marbles and that Joe Public has ceased to comprehend what freedom and democracy even mean. The words are over-used and are abused to the point where they have become meaningless noise. Far from laughing, I consider that to be dangerous to the extreme. When words mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean (Lewis Carolls' Humpty Dumpty), with no meaning or substance of their own, abuse becomes inevitable and rational, democratic societies become impossible.
Calling companies out is about all anyone can do, but let's face it. We do NOT meet Plato's requirements for functional democracy, we meet Plato's requirements for dictatorship-dressed-as-democracy. And in such a world, populist speakers will ALWAYS trump rational speakers. Plato recognized that danger and saw it with his own eyes with the ruinous wars that the people were talked into fighting because they were ignorant and let others think for them.
For that reason, calling companies out will have minimal benefit. Companies are foerever being called out on charges of corruption, cowardice, or whatever. If it made any real impact, Halliburton and BP would no longer exist. Neither would AT&T. In fact, I'm trying hard to think of a major company out there that WOULD exist. They're all guilty and the Invisible Hand has served only to hand them "get out of jail free" cards.
One group taking down WikiLeaks doesn't really matter when it comes to democracy. Indeed, since choice is a part of democracy, one group is perfectly entitled to censor what they like, since one group is utterly insignificant. Indeed, that is how you identify democracies.
The Internet is not democratic and hasn't been since deregulation. The Internet is a federation of dictatorships. You have no choices. If you live in an area where X runs the backbone, ALL ISPs without exception are mere window-dressing over X. They can't provide anything X doesn't pipe, they can't charge less than X charges them, they can't give you freedoms or rights X doesn't grant you. To claim you can choose another provider is like saying you can choose to buy Fords in different shades of absolute black. If you believe in such illusions and phantoms, I've a Golden Gate bridge you can buy.
All we have here is an extension of that. Amazon has pwned the data centers, so choice has been eliminated. That's not democracy, that's dictatorship that's telling you it's democracy. It's as close to real democracy as Saddam Hussein's elections or the Tea Party.
Apparently, because having just one party and no elections makes a democracy. And in later news, why Rupert Murdoch tapping everyone's phones is good for privacy.
Wait... are you saying that there's a sport that's organized? Besides, I didn't even know there were any sports in the US, unless you consider cheerleading or scripted physical abuse a sport.
Apparently it took five years of screaming at the top of their lungs for the police to notice them. Seattle apparently has rather more Lestrades' than Holmes'.
It's worse than that. Based on the somewhat heated discussion I had in which I was slammed for stating that privacy and security are an aspect of freedom, I'd have to say that not only do people value convenience far more than security, they regard security as a major liability,
Official denials should always be treated with suspicion.