To be fair, Obama has invaded fewer countries during his first term than Bush did. On the other hand, it's pretty fair to say that Obama could have been the best Republican president since Ronald Reagan. You know if he had put an R next to his name, and if the Republican party wasn't foaming-at-the-mouth insane.
So, in your philosophy, authors have no rights to the fruits of their own, individual labor?
There are few philosophies that give authors inherent rights to a particular ordering of words and punctuation.
You maintain that they should just be humbly grateful that you deign to enjoy the products of their labor, with no obligation on your part to provide quid pro quo?
This is the way the world worked for thousands of years. Mind you, most societies included a moral obligation to compensate the author, if you enjoyed the work they authored. It was the invention of printing that changed things. Suddenly books could be replicated cheaply, and copyright was created to prevent businessmen from selling copies of books and cutting the author out the transaction. You see the man who didn't pay the author could charge less for his books than the man who did. As a side note, we see a very similar problem in manufacturing today, where the company that doesn't pay it's employees a living wage can generate more profit than the ones that do, yet no one has yet stepped in to protect factory workers and their "rights to the fruits of their own labour".
Personally, I'm torn on whether there needs to be any copyright at all. On the one hand getting rid of all copyright would allow publishing houses to return to the days where they take an authors work and publish it without paying him a dime. On the other other hand, maybe that would be better handled by non-disclosure contracts and standard civil law. There are other issues as well, so maybe we should continue to have copyright, but in today's fast paced technological world maybe copyright needs to be no more than a few years after first publication. A study indicated that for the vast majority of works covered by copyright 98% of their total net earnings are earned in the first 15 years. I think it went further and found that for a majority of works close to 98% of the total net earnings were earned in the first 7 years. Copyright could probably be reduced to as little as 3 years and still adequately compensate authors.
We should also whether a long copyright term encourages the under compensation of artists and the hijacking of author's rights. After all, if the rights last of 75 years, that gives a company good reason to take those rights from the author. If it only lasts 3 years? Why bother? They will be expired, soon enough. Also, if the author only expects to receive payment for 3 years he might expect to paid more for the publishing rights in each of those years, rather than being bamboozled into accepting a lower amount spread over a potentially longer time span. Of course, for virtually all of those authors they may actually be ending up with just less money when their works don't enjoy the longevity which the author believed they should have had.
This is a complex question, but there are countless indicators that the current status quo is not working and giving the constant attack on the rights of the public, I'm increasingly becoming concerned that copyright must be abolished lest we put more people in prison for the crime of enjoying without paying.
I've even seen code from computer engineers (hardware, not software) where the engineers refused to use function calls because "they add unnecessary overhead". I also had a boss who taught himself PHP and decided that his hobby project should be our live customer facing credit card processing system despite the fact that it took about a minute to discover and exploit the first SQL injection vulnerability.
There's a lot more to designing and writing good software than knowing the syntax of a particular language.
According to the book "Drive", it's not really a good idea to pay extra to document the code. The reward will get a temporary bump in documentation but afterward the reward period ends, the documentation will be worse than before the reward was offered. That's because the reward will erode the intrinsic motivation to do a good job, and the monetary reward will solidify the notion that documentation is a noxious chore that they should be paid extra to do (alternatively, they may get the idea that if they don't document the code they can earn bonuses later for doing something they would normally get paid extra to do).
The best way to get better documentation is to treat your programmers like they are humans, pay them an adequate base salary and explain that supplying adequate documentation is part of their job, and that they can't do the job well if they're not providing the required documentation. Of course, this may require the manager to actually implement some processes like code reviews to provide timely feedback and reminders that documentation is needed. You might even have to, horror of horrors, refuse to accept new code that isn't adequately documented. If the programmers like their jobs, they'll be willing to make the effort to do it well.
I've routinely found that the people who complain about group think think their comments are insightful and informative, when they actually tend to look like overrated trolling to me. I'm still mildly amused by the guy who thought that his claims that all environmentalists want to commit genocide should be +5 insightful, and not -1 troll. Clearly, Slashdot wasn't ready to accept his truth.
It's not about hate, it's about facts and if you don't understand the facts, you can't make an informed decisions. The currently projected cost of the health care bill that Obama signed into law is around $150 billion over 8 years. The Bush tax cuts are projected to cost the government about $3,000 billion over the same 8 years. The Bush tax cuts are actually 20 times more expensive than health care reform.
It's likely that the "stimulus" packages were actually too small to work. They sound big when you say $1.2 trillion in stimulus. But when you actually pull apart the packages to see what they did with it, you see about a third of it went to cover costs like increased unemployment claims and transfers to the states, a third of it went to additional tax cuts to appease the Republicans, and a third of it went to actual stimulus spending. U.S. GDP is about $15 trillion. Trying to get it running again with $0.4 trillion dollars of actual stimulus spending (3% of GDP) just seems unlikely to succeed. In the end the Stimulus packages ameliorated the recession, making it less severe than it would have been. However, on the other hand, the Republican approach of additional tax cuts have had literally no measurable impact at all.
I'm not acting like Obama had no choice, but I'm not sure that Obama actually had many better options that he chose not to take. The biggest mistake he seems to have made is trying to work with the Republican party, though, I'm sure many people would disagree with that observation.
This is somewhat true, if 9/11 hadn't happened, if the U.S. hadn't invaded Afghanistan and then invaded Iraq, then the Bush cuts might have only prevented the U.S. from paying down it's deficit. That's still a problem. Governments should pay down debt when the economy is doing well, and accrue debt when the economy is doing poorly. This allows the government to cushion the people from the harsh realities of laissez faire capitalism. However, if you ignorant give away your tax revenues to the rich during good times, you end up with a bare cupboard when the inevitable bad times arrive.
Beyond that, tax cuts have been shown over and over again to be a poor way to incite economy growth. The CPBB has a nice artilce on the The Myths of Tax Cuts. One important lines:
Making the Bush tax cuts permanent will "likely to reduce, not increase, national income over the long run".
and
Notably, informed observers such as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke (then a Federal Reserve Board governor) were predicting improvement in the economy before the 2003 tax cuts were enacted. In addition, supporters of enacting these tax cuts, such as conservative economist Gary Becker, acknowledged at the time that, whatever the tax cuts’ long-run effects on economic growth, they would not boost the economy in the short term.
So the tax cuts would not boost the economy in the short term, nor in the long term. It doesn't seem like such a good idea, now does it?
There are some great infographics that show the debt over time and the effect Bush's unfunded programs had on the debt. I think it was even shown on the Daily Show one night. Looking at the first graphic, the white area at the bottom is what the deficit might look like if neither Bush nor the economic downturn hadn't happened. You might have a hard time seeing the white area, it's very small. Looking at the second chart, you'll noticed the single largest contributing factor to the debt is the Bush tax cuts, and it's contribution gets larger each year. In theory, if Bush had been replaced with an inanimate carbon rod, the U.S. debt would be almost half of what it stands at today.
Of course, there are other informative graphics, like this Debt as a Percentage of GDP graphic. The most important fact to note from this graphic is that the rate of growth of the debt is actually slowing. If Obama were making the problem worse, the debt should be growing faster.
There's also a pair of infographics on this article from the New York times. The first one shows the difference between Clinton's policies and Bush's policies. At the end of Clinton's (Jan 2001), the Congressional Budget office was predicting 10 years of surpluses, if Clinton's policies were continued and the economy continued to grow at the same rate. At the end of Bush's term (Jan 2009) the congressional budget office was predicting 10 years of massive deficits if Bush's policies were continued even if the economy returned to normal growth.
The second New York Times graphic shows the contributions of Bush and Obama to the debt by policy change ($5.07 trillion for Bush and $1.44 trillion for Obama). $1.136 trllion of the Obama's debt contribution is stimulus spending and stimulus tax cuts. $0.278 trillion is non-defense discretionary spending and $0.152 trillion is health reform and entitlement changes. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the Bush tax cuts each were responsible for more debt by themselves than all of Obama's policies combined (projected costs across 2 terms to make the numbers comparable).
It's not a bad idea, there are obvious weak links at the selection process and post-selection training. Power groups would try to subvert both for broad-based influence. It could be modelled after countries that have mandatory military service, sort of a mandatory political service. Or alternatively somewhat like maternity leave where your old job is required to be "held" for you until after your service is over. Hopefully, it would have mandatory conflict of interest rules that prevent people from voting on issues that directly affect themselves or their employers.
It's probably adding unnecessary complexity to add the term extension, and would reintroduce many of the problems of the current system.
That's not quite right. In a true free market, if you are popular you succeed. In fact, good often doesn't succeed because good is expensive and cheap is more popular than good. The very interesting thing is that there's very simple methods for the incompetent doctor or electrician to avoid the consequences of his ineptitude. All he has to do is re-brand. Once "Doctor Anderson" is unpopular he becomes "Doctor Anders" or "Doctor Beeches" or whomever he decides to be. So, the free market achieves a temporary victory atop the corpses of it's martyrs and the very next day it's opponent has begun work on a new pile.
You can see exactly what happens now with self-help and get-rich-quick gurus. Whenever negativity builds about the scam they're currently running, they simply come up with a new fool-proof scam. What's worse is that many of the scammed will follow the scammers from one scam to the next, believing that each new scam will really work, this time.
Mostly I agree with you, I just think the consequences of a libertarian society would be even worse than most people can understand. It's like Chess, to be successful you have to look beyond your current move to the consequences of that move, to the consequences of the consequences and so on as far into the future as possible. Many novices can't see beyond the consequences of their first move.
Most of the debt accrued during Obama's term is attributed the unfunded liabilities introduced in Bush's terms. Most the debt comes from the Bush tax cuts and Bush pharma bill which has never been funded. The majority of the debt added directly by Obama is attributed to one time costs associated with stimulus packages.
If you think Obama is doing a worse job than Bush you aren't paying attention, or you're only paying attention to Fox News.
That's be fine if you weren't dead wrong on everything.
Marriage is a legal construct overseen by government and religions have no business interfering in legal contracts.
Civil unions are just a way of extending the discrimination against gays to the unreligious too, because as soon as we start down that path, religious groups will start campaign to keep certain rights and benefits for religiously married couples only. As will insurance companies or anyone else who might have to pay anything to the civil union spouse. They won't be able to help themselves when they get the chance to seize power and profits.
The judiciary isn't eroding the Bill of Rights, they're enforcing it. You should learn more about the history of the United States, for most of it's history, only lip service was paid to the Bill of Rights. So called "activist judges" are the very people who started enforcing it. You might want to consider the consequences of stripping judges of the ability to overrule unconstitutional laws if you want to enforce the constitutional limits on government.
Well one party wants to end his current job (shutting down coal plants) and the other wants him poor or dead (destroying unions, repealing environmental and workplace safety laws). Which do you think is preferable?
You can't take away the power, you can only move it somewhere else. And as far as I know, no one has yet figured out a better place to put the power. Corporations are currently designed to abuse their power, at least the government has some safeguards against abuse.
All of them would be the obvious answer. I have to agree though, I don't think the term should end at the author's death if it is a short, fixed term. Make it 7 years, with a single optional (ie. paid-for) 7 year extension. If I remember correctly, according to the economic analysis, that accounts for 98% of the revenues accrued by a typical work (there was an article about this on Slashdot not so long ago).
One interesting thing I want to point out is that al-Awlaki would not have been assassinated if he was residing here, or in France, or in Britain, or in any country where the US wouldn't be able to act with impunity. These actions are reserved for places whose lawlessness we find convenient.
Of course, if he were residing in France or Britain he would likely have been arrested, extradited to the U.S. and sent to Guantanamo Bay for eventual trial. I suspect that the lawlessness is more of an inconvenience than convenience. Though, you are correct that if he had been in country which wished to defend him (North Korea or Iran), the U.S. would likely not have acted.
The fact that the U.S. is assassinating anyone should be the concern. Once anyone starts protesting that it's worse because it's an American citizen, they lose my interest because they are weakening their own argument by implicitly accepting the assassination of non-citizens. You need to stand against all assassinations or none. If you choose to stand against only some, then you're nothing more than a morally bankrupt political puppet.
Even worse, Tyler Nichols contradicts his own argument. If you read through the comments on his blog you find that he eventually admits that nearly 100% of his paying customers tried the free version before paying, thus the first part of his premise is wrong. Most people who tried the free service didn't pay him, but enough did that he was considering keeping the site going as a pay only site. So his evidence contradicts his premise that freemium doesn't work. Instead he presents evidence that some businessmen are so wrapped up in their own indignation that they can't recognize a business model that's actually working as intended for them.
His biggest problem seems to be that his unsolicited marketing email was marked as spam (because it is spam). The best solution to that problem is either to accept that the free people may not even remember your site a month after they use it and expect some of them to flag it as spam, or to only send email to people who upgraded to the paid version. They're the people most likely to pay for his related easter site, anyway.
Amusing. You propose destroying the American economy to teach the rest of the world a lesson. I assume you've already cut off your nose.
You'd have to forbid the Pharma companies from selling to the rest of the world. They charge whatever price other people are willing to pay. Every other industrial country has a universal healthcare system, which means they have negotiating power because they're buying medicine for millions of people. The Pharma companies love the rest of the world because they're easy to work with. The U.S.? They love you because they get high profit margins because you have no bargaining power, they also hate you because they have to deal with 30,000 different purchasers.
I find it amusing that you think plunging the U.S. into another great depression will teach the rest of the world a lesson. It's unlikely there would be another World War which leaves the U.S. untouched and ready to supply the world's reconstruction needs to pull you out of it, this time.
I agree with you, but the system is worse than you describe. Reading that closely, it's private arbitration and hiring mercenaries to collect it. Who's fault is it when your kid gets shot while someone else is trying to "collect" on the debts they are owed because their kid is dead? Who will be willing to try and collect the debts from organisations that can afford standing mercenary armies to protect their assets?
No, running out of customers would be part of the business plan. Next week, we'd be selling something different under a different name and making new claims about the benefits of our new product. You act like this has never been done before.
The fraudsters will simply change names and products whenever their reputation starts to catch up to them. They routinely "go out of business" while they hatch the next scam, it's not a problem because they know it's going to happen and because they're selling nearly worthless products that are mostly profit it never hurts their bottom line, though it may drive honest competitors out of business.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, Obama has invaded fewer countries during his first term than Bush did. On the other hand, it's pretty fair to say that Obama could have been the best Republican president since Ronald Reagan. You know if he had put an R next to his name, and if the Republican party wasn't foaming-at-the-mouth insane.
So, in your philosophy, authors have no rights to the fruits of their own, individual labor?
There are few philosophies that give authors inherent rights to a particular ordering of words and punctuation.
You maintain that they should just be humbly grateful that you deign to enjoy the products of their labor, with no obligation on your part to provide quid pro quo?
This is the way the world worked for thousands of years. Mind you, most societies included a moral obligation to compensate the author, if you enjoyed the work they authored. It was the invention of printing that changed things. Suddenly books could be replicated cheaply, and copyright was created to prevent businessmen from selling copies of books and cutting the author out the transaction. You see the man who didn't pay the author could charge less for his books than the man who did. As a side note, we see a very similar problem in manufacturing today, where the company that doesn't pay it's employees a living wage can generate more profit than the ones that do, yet no one has yet stepped in to protect factory workers and their "rights to the fruits of their own labour".
Personally, I'm torn on whether there needs to be any copyright at all. On the one hand getting rid of all copyright would allow publishing houses to return to the days where they take an authors work and publish it without paying him a dime. On the other other hand, maybe that would be better handled by non-disclosure contracts and standard civil law. There are other issues as well, so maybe we should continue to have copyright, but in today's fast paced technological world maybe copyright needs to be no more than a few years after first publication. A study indicated that for the vast majority of works covered by copyright 98% of their total net earnings are earned in the first 15 years. I think it went further and found that for a majority of works close to 98% of the total net earnings were earned in the first 7 years. Copyright could probably be reduced to as little as 3 years and still adequately compensate authors.
We should also whether a long copyright term encourages the under compensation of artists and the hijacking of author's rights. After all, if the rights last of 75 years, that gives a company good reason to take those rights from the author. If it only lasts 3 years? Why bother? They will be expired, soon enough. Also, if the author only expects to receive payment for 3 years he might expect to paid more for the publishing rights in each of those years, rather than being bamboozled into accepting a lower amount spread over a potentially longer time span. Of course, for virtually all of those authors they may actually be ending up with just less money when their works don't enjoy the longevity which the author believed they should have had.
This is a complex question, but there are countless indicators that the current status quo is not working and giving the constant attack on the rights of the public, I'm increasingly becoming concerned that copyright must be abolished lest we put more people in prison for the crime of enjoying without paying.
I've even seen code from computer engineers (hardware, not software) where the engineers refused to use function calls because "they add unnecessary overhead". I also had a boss who taught himself PHP and decided that his hobby project should be our live customer facing credit card processing system despite the fact that it took about a minute to discover and exploit the first SQL injection vulnerability.
There's a lot more to designing and writing good software than knowing the syntax of a particular language.
According to the book "Drive", it's not really a good idea to pay extra to document the code. The reward will get a temporary bump in documentation but afterward the reward period ends, the documentation will be worse than before the reward was offered. That's because the reward will erode the intrinsic motivation to do a good job, and the monetary reward will solidify the notion that documentation is a noxious chore that they should be paid extra to do (alternatively, they may get the idea that if they don't document the code they can earn bonuses later for doing something they would normally get paid extra to do).
The best way to get better documentation is to treat your programmers like they are humans, pay them an adequate base salary and explain that supplying adequate documentation is part of their job, and that they can't do the job well if they're not providing the required documentation. Of course, this may require the manager to actually implement some processes like code reviews to provide timely feedback and reminders that documentation is needed. You might even have to, horror of horrors, refuse to accept new code that isn't adequately documented. If the programmers like their jobs, they'll be willing to make the effort to do it well.
I've routinely found that the people who complain about group think think their comments are insightful and informative, when they actually tend to look like overrated trolling to me. I'm still mildly amused by the guy who thought that his claims that all environmentalists want to commit genocide should be +5 insightful, and not -1 troll. Clearly, Slashdot wasn't ready to accept his truth.
It's not about hate, it's about facts and if you don't understand the facts, you can't make an informed decisions. The currently projected cost of the health care bill that Obama signed into law is around $150 billion over 8 years. The Bush tax cuts are projected to cost the government about $3,000 billion over the same 8 years. The Bush tax cuts are actually 20 times more expensive than health care reform.
It's likely that the "stimulus" packages were actually too small to work. They sound big when you say $1.2 trillion in stimulus. But when you actually pull apart the packages to see what they did with it, you see about a third of it went to cover costs like increased unemployment claims and transfers to the states, a third of it went to additional tax cuts to appease the Republicans, and a third of it went to actual stimulus spending. U.S. GDP is about $15 trillion. Trying to get it running again with $0.4 trillion dollars of actual stimulus spending (3% of GDP) just seems unlikely to succeed. In the end the Stimulus packages ameliorated the recession, making it less severe than it would have been. However, on the other hand, the Republican approach of additional tax cuts have had literally no measurable impact at all.
I'm not acting like Obama had no choice, but I'm not sure that Obama actually had many better options that he chose not to take. The biggest mistake he seems to have made is trying to work with the Republican party, though, I'm sure many people would disagree with that observation.
This is somewhat true, if 9/11 hadn't happened, if the U.S. hadn't invaded Afghanistan and then invaded Iraq, then the Bush cuts might have only prevented the U.S. from paying down it's deficit. That's still a problem. Governments should pay down debt when the economy is doing well, and accrue debt when the economy is doing poorly. This allows the government to cushion the people from the harsh realities of laissez faire capitalism. However, if you ignorant give away your tax revenues to the rich during good times, you end up with a bare cupboard when the inevitable bad times arrive.
Beyond that, tax cuts have been shown over and over again to be a poor way to incite economy growth. The CPBB has a nice artilce on the The Myths of Tax Cuts. One important lines:
and
So the tax cuts would not boost the economy in the short term, nor in the long term. It doesn't seem like such a good idea, now does it?
There are some great infographics that show the debt over time and the effect Bush's unfunded programs had on the debt. I think it was even shown on the Daily Show one night. Looking at the first graphic, the white area at the bottom is what the deficit might look like if neither Bush nor the economic downturn hadn't happened. You might have a hard time seeing the white area, it's very small. Looking at the second chart, you'll noticed the single largest contributing factor to the debt is the Bush tax cuts, and it's contribution gets larger each year. In theory, if Bush had been replaced with an inanimate carbon rod, the U.S. debt would be almost half of what it stands at today.
Of course, there are other informative graphics, like this Debt as a Percentage of GDP graphic. The most important fact to note from this graphic is that the rate of growth of the debt is actually slowing. If Obama were making the problem worse, the debt should be growing faster.
There's also a pair of infographics on this article from the New York times. The first one shows the difference between Clinton's policies and Bush's policies. At the end of Clinton's (Jan 2001), the Congressional Budget office was predicting 10 years of surpluses, if Clinton's policies were continued and the economy continued to grow at the same rate. At the end of Bush's term (Jan 2009) the congressional budget office was predicting 10 years of massive deficits if Bush's policies were continued even if the economy returned to normal growth.
The second New York Times graphic shows the contributions of Bush and Obama to the debt by policy change ($5.07 trillion for Bush and $1.44 trillion for Obama). $1.136 trllion of the Obama's debt contribution is stimulus spending and stimulus tax cuts. $0.278 trillion is non-defense discretionary spending and $0.152 trillion is health reform and entitlement changes. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the Bush tax cuts each were responsible for more debt by themselves than all of Obama's policies combined (projected costs across 2 terms to make the numbers comparable).
It's not a bad idea, there are obvious weak links at the selection process and post-selection training. Power groups would try to subvert both for broad-based influence. It could be modelled after countries that have mandatory military service, sort of a mandatory political service. Or alternatively somewhat like maternity leave where your old job is required to be "held" for you until after your service is over. Hopefully, it would have mandatory conflict of interest rules that prevent people from voting on issues that directly affect themselves or their employers.
It's probably adding unnecessary complexity to add the term extension, and would reintroduce many of the problems of the current system.
So when a Democrat signs a bill passed by a Republican congress, just one party or person is to blame?
That's not quite right. In a true free market, if you are popular you succeed. In fact, good often doesn't succeed because good is expensive and cheap is more popular than good. The very interesting thing is that there's very simple methods for the incompetent doctor or electrician to avoid the consequences of his ineptitude. All he has to do is re-brand. Once "Doctor Anderson" is unpopular he becomes "Doctor Anders" or "Doctor Beeches" or whomever he decides to be. So, the free market achieves a temporary victory atop the corpses of it's martyrs and the very next day it's opponent has begun work on a new pile.
You can see exactly what happens now with self-help and get-rich-quick gurus. Whenever negativity builds about the scam they're currently running, they simply come up with a new fool-proof scam. What's worse is that many of the scammed will follow the scammers from one scam to the next, believing that each new scam will really work, this time.
Mostly I agree with you, I just think the consequences of a libertarian society would be even worse than most people can understand. It's like Chess, to be successful you have to look beyond your current move to the consequences of that move, to the consequences of the consequences and so on as far into the future as possible. Many novices can't see beyond the consequences of their first move.
Most of the debt accrued during Obama's term is attributed the unfunded liabilities introduced in Bush's terms. Most the debt comes from the Bush tax cuts and Bush pharma bill which has never been funded. The majority of the debt added directly by Obama is attributed to one time costs associated with stimulus packages.
If you think Obama is doing a worse job than Bush you aren't paying attention, or you're only paying attention to Fox News.
That's be fine if you weren't dead wrong on everything.
Marriage is a legal construct overseen by government and religions have no business interfering in legal contracts.
Civil unions are just a way of extending the discrimination against gays to the unreligious too, because as soon as we start down that path, religious groups will start campaign to keep certain rights and benefits for religiously married couples only. As will insurance companies or anyone else who might have to pay anything to the civil union spouse. They won't be able to help themselves when they get the chance to seize power and profits.
The judiciary isn't eroding the Bill of Rights, they're enforcing it. You should learn more about the history of the United States, for most of it's history, only lip service was paid to the Bill of Rights. So called "activist judges" are the very people who started enforcing it. You might want to consider the consequences of stripping judges of the ability to overrule unconstitutional laws if you want to enforce the constitutional limits on government.
Correction: Ron Paul says that he wants to.
Well one party wants to end his current job (shutting down coal plants) and the other wants him poor or dead (destroying unions, repealing environmental and workplace safety laws). Which do you think is preferable?
You can't take away the power, you can only move it somewhere else. And as far as I know, no one has yet figured out a better place to put the power. Corporations are currently designed to abuse their power, at least the government has some safeguards against abuse.
All of them would be the obvious answer. I have to agree though, I don't think the term should end at the author's death if it is a short, fixed term. Make it 7 years, with a single optional (ie. paid-for) 7 year extension. If I remember correctly, according to the economic analysis, that accounts for 98% of the revenues accrued by a typical work (there was an article about this on Slashdot not so long ago).
Don't forget the Detainees at Guantanamo are specifically "not prisoners of war" because then the U.S. doesn't have to obey the Geneva convention.
One interesting thing I want to point out is that al-Awlaki would not have been assassinated if he was residing here, or in France, or in Britain, or in any country where the US wouldn't be able to act with impunity. These actions are reserved for places whose lawlessness we find convenient.
Of course, if he were residing in France or Britain he would likely have been arrested, extradited to the U.S. and sent to Guantanamo Bay for eventual trial. I suspect that the lawlessness is more of an inconvenience than convenience. Though, you are correct that if he had been in country which wished to defend him (North Korea or Iran), the U.S. would likely not have acted.
The fact that the U.S. is assassinating anyone should be the concern. Once anyone starts protesting that it's worse because it's an American citizen, they lose my interest because they are weakening their own argument by implicitly accepting the assassination of non-citizens. You need to stand against all assassinations or none. If you choose to stand against only some, then you're nothing more than a morally bankrupt political puppet.
Even worse, Tyler Nichols contradicts his own argument. If you read through the comments on his blog you find that he eventually admits that nearly 100% of his paying customers tried the free version before paying, thus the first part of his premise is wrong. Most people who tried the free service didn't pay him, but enough did that he was considering keeping the site going as a pay only site. So his evidence contradicts his premise that freemium doesn't work. Instead he presents evidence that some businessmen are so wrapped up in their own indignation that they can't recognize a business model that's actually working as intended for them.
His biggest problem seems to be that his unsolicited marketing email was marked as spam (because it is spam). The best solution to that problem is either to accept that the free people may not even remember your site a month after they use it and expect some of them to flag it as spam, or to only send email to people who upgraded to the paid version. They're the people most likely to pay for his related easter site, anyway.
Amusing. You propose destroying the American economy to teach the rest of the world a lesson. I assume you've already cut off your nose.
You'd have to forbid the Pharma companies from selling to the rest of the world. They charge whatever price other people are willing to pay. Every other industrial country has a universal healthcare system, which means they have negotiating power because they're buying medicine for millions of people. The Pharma companies love the rest of the world because they're easy to work with. The U.S.? They love you because they get high profit margins because you have no bargaining power, they also hate you because they have to deal with 30,000 different purchasers.
I find it amusing that you think plunging the U.S. into another great depression will teach the rest of the world a lesson. It's unlikely there would be another World War which leaves the U.S. untouched and ready to supply the world's reconstruction needs to pull you out of it, this time.
I agree with you, but the system is worse than you describe. Reading that closely, it's private arbitration and hiring mercenaries to collect it. Who's fault is it when your kid gets shot while someone else is trying to "collect" on the debts they are owed because their kid is dead? Who will be willing to try and collect the debts from organisations that can afford standing mercenary armies to protect their assets?
You'd probably never know for sure what caused the deaths and no one would ever be punished.
No, running out of customers would be part of the business plan. Next week, we'd be selling something different under a different name and making new claims about the benefits of our new product. You act like this has never been done before.
The fraudsters will simply change names and products whenever their reputation starts to catch up to them. They routinely "go out of business" while they hatch the next scam, it's not a problem because they know it's going to happen and because they're selling nearly worthless products that are mostly profit it never hurts their bottom line, though it may drive honest competitors out of business.