"Most modern day Christians don't walk around killing people for not following the laws in the old testament, "
I'm sure the victims of the Lord's Army in africa will feel relieved.
The problem is political. Religion is just a lever which gives the people involved tools - religious fanatics - to provide a means to their end (gaining more power/prestige/money/ego gratification).
Trump is using similar levers in the USA.
ALL of those levers become easier to manipulate during periods of regional/global recession or other stress such as famine. Blaming the "other" for problems is an easy way out. Bombing them (either from aircraft or via suicide bombers) simply provides more tools for the unscrupulous to use in their furtherance of the pursuit of power.
Kneejerk reactions of responding to violence with more violence is simply playing into the hands of the powerbrokers everywhere. Quite frankly I'm surprised that South Africa didn't spiral into that particular maelstrom after the fall of the Apartheid Regeime and the fact that it didn't provides hope and proof that alternative resolution paths DO exist and CAN work.
"I've still got a pile of 19" LCD monitors from 2003 at my workplace that are still operating as if new. "
You're lucky. Monitors of that vintage usually die from cooked CCFL inverters long before anything else falls over (14-16 months in $workplace experience)
Led backlights have much longer service lives and that's why we set a policy of avoiding CCFL over a decade ago.
"The steam tractor made a huge difference in the amount of labor required for farming, first in threshing rigs and then in ploughing, and innovation was quite rapid during the industrial revolution. "
Correct. The rapid growth of european cities during the industrial revolution was a direct result of people having the choice of staying put in the countryside and starving to death or moving to cities, taking shitty pay and not starving to death.
There's also the shell game played in the rates of employment.
1 worker working 1 40-hour/week job is one job.
1 worker working 4 4 hour/week jobs is four jobs.
1 worker on a zero hours contract - and working zero hours - is one job.
Never mind that the latter two cases won't pay the bills for the worker and in the latter case those contracts usually include clauses preventing working for anyone else.
If you want to see _real_ employment stats then always insist on seeing full time equivalent figures
"Most of the surface will be used to provide food and water to the now subterranean human race"
Where the surface is rooftops and subterranean is the lower floors.
It's already starting to happen.
I live in England at the moment. The entire countryside is artificial(*). Farmers are fully aware of that, yet they're facing restrictions on using greenhouses (which are startlingly more efficient than open land and usually result in almost zero application of pesticides) on the basis that they "disrupt the natural character of the countryside"
(*) There is nothing natural whatsoever about green fields or stone walls and even England's woods or forests are almost entirely plantations (the amount of acres of actual 2000+ year old natural wild forest is a number closely approximating zero)
"Replacement birthrate in a modern society is ~2.1 U.S, Germany, France and many other countries have a birth rate well BELOW replacement rates."
Closer study of those stats and the underlaying economies leads one to the conclusion that the best way to deal with the population crisis is to actively bring the poor and poor countries out of that privation.
Cheap energy is the key - over the last few hundred years that's been carbon driven, but it's clear we can't continue down that path without poisoning the ecosphere (Anoxic oceanic events are a bigger risk factor than sea level rises) and wind/solarPV are boondoggles. The way forward is nuclear molten salt - and it's increasingly likely that the country selling these will be china. (Fuson won't be viable until it's viable and that is unlikely in the lifetime of even my great grandchildren.)
One of the things to bear in mind is that the big driver of _new_ employment as technologies have obsoleted old ones has seldom been seen coming until it was actually fairly well established. Fast food has existed for centuries but it was the development of automobile strip-malls and production line techniques which allowed it to become a major industry.
At the same time that robotisation allows the turning out of myriad identical meals (or a small set of the same), consumer demand is driving greater individual variation. This is an opposing force which will require more robotic complexity (and hence greater expense) or will result in the spectre of automated fast food joints being a decade-long fad before becoming yet abandoned storefronts along the roadside.
"People have been saying we are about to enter that era for 150 years."
It's actually the core of the communist manifesto - what happens in a post-capitalist economy.
The Bolshevecks attempted to leapfrog the capitalist part and it didn't work out so well (what we call "communism" bears little relationship to what Marx originally proposed)
"One machine can work 24 hours straight, displacing three jobs"
More than that. One machine works 24*7 with the lights out, faster than the humans, with no breaks and doesn't require as much supervision, so it's it's more like 3.5 to 4 jobs once you factor in the knock-on effects.
On the other hand, most machines are replacing humans for dirty/inconvenient jobs that noone really wants to do. Fast food is no different in this respect to working in the pickling tanks of an automobile factory (and where the easiest way to replace humans once the really nasty jobs were eliminated was simply to let the existing ones retire, not training replacements).
Additionally, if a machine is reprogrammed to cut corners on cooking time and that results in food poisoning incidents (this is what drove a number of severe outbreaks in London MacDonalds branches in the 1980s-90s and has been fingered in tens of thousands of USA outbreaks) then the blame can be firmly placed on the head of whoever made that change, rather than blaming minimum wage employees who were simply doing what they were told lest they be fired.
The secondary effects of the loss of such jobs is often missed.
For some reason the largest market for 45rpm single records was 16-18yo female filing clerks. The decline in singles sales since the 1960s _directly_ matches the loss of such jobs with increasing automation.
Making sales 1% of the industry's peak is now a big deal in the top40, when that chart is irrelevant - even lumping streaming sales into the mix makes no dent in the loss of absolute numbers since the end of the 1960s.
The reason the recording industry is getting so nasty about copyrights is because it's increasingly desperate for income. It's acting like a cornered wild animal.
"Old Heny Ford had a lot of strange ideas, but the idea of having employees who could buy stuff wasn't one of them."
That was actually secondary.
His primary motivation for increasing wages was to reduce staffing turnover and therefore the highs costs of training new hires or repairing their botchups.
This is the same problem that chinese manufacturers are facing and why some are heavily investing in robots (Foxconn) along the coastal provinces whilst others are taking advange of improved transport links and relocating their factories inland where the employees actually live.
The added cost of the latter course of action is offset by being able to pay lower wages, not having to deal with 25% turnover each year and not having to provide accomodation or evening meals.
Indeed. The PIPCU have yet to secure a single solitary criminal conviction in any case.
In the cases where targets have called their local police when PIPCU have shown up, the locals have quite rightly assessed that it's a civil matter and PIPCU have no right to be onsite - moreover as they have not consulted the local police before showing up (legal requirement), their presence is a criminal matter all in itself. Thus you're now looking at police telling police to go away or face arrest.
The best advice I've seen on this if/when PIPCU show up is to refuse entry and call the local fuzz immediately.
One of the problems is that people roll over and play dead when CoLP show up with unenforceable warrants (they're out of their jurisdiction)
A couple of targets have called their local fuzz, who have shown up and told CoLP to piss off.
CoLP have also repeatedly seized domains without court orders (illegal) thanks to registrars who roll over and play dead on a letter on police letterhead.
There have been more than enough convictions of corrupt british police to underscore that this is a really bad idea. A lot of the registrars are wising up.
That noone seems to want to talk about is that every geological record of a massive CO2 release is accompanied by evidence of a simultaneous oceanic anoxic event and large scale dieback of megafauna (which includes animals our size)
There's evidence that this may have already started and started spreading.
If the Gulf Stream is interrupted, the net effect would be a rise of sea level along the entire US eastern seaboard - about 3 feet at Chesapeake Bay - _without_ changing global average sea level at all.
This is because the Gulf stream acts like a gradient, pulling water away from the US coastline.
This is a more likely near-term scenario than a 6 foot sea level rise (which would take at least a century) as all it takes is a decent size freshwater plume entering the northeast Atlantic ocean from Greenland glacier melt and the amount of freshwater coming in from this direction is increasing.
Freshwater in these volumes sits as a layer on top of salt and could force the Gulf Stream to "dive" or stall. There are a number of academic papers analysing this possibility and they all agree it's quite likely to occur if enough glacial melt occurs. The other effect would be a mini-ice age in northern europe (which is 5-8C warmer than it would be without the Gulf Stream transporting heat to the area) and it's been hypothesised that the middle ages cold period was due to a combination of volcanic eruptions and gulf stream effects.
A 6 foot sea level rise over a century doesn't need evacuations. Populations shift in faster cycles than this anyway. The bigger issue is large infrastructure planning to ensure things like major roads and power plants aren't going to be flooded before the end of their planned lifecycles.
"I should think that the easiest time to attack a jet aircraft is"
Given the lax state of USA security procedures, the easiest way for any terrorist to cause maximum damage is to send a suicide bomber up to the TSA checkpoints during a busy period.
Perhaps then they might consider that the security theatre increases risk, rather than decreasing it.
"From what little I know about Romania, it doesn't seem like a good idea to turn yourself over to the authorities with the corruption scandals going on"
"(the US)... it's just not that powerful a position. It's relatively weak economically and militarily"
The USA spends more militarily than the next 12 countries combined and several times more than all the rest of the list combined, whilst having an economy smaller than china or the combined EU and a mindset that economic growth is infinite (it isn't. Even single digit percentage growth is impossible to maintain across 100 years. Economies always hit limits and all economists who came up with the fundamental theories acknowledged this even if their disciples haven't)
Letting the military tail wag the political dog is a fast way of tipping the country down the shitter. It happened to the russians (SDI was a success story not for its technology but because it scared the USSR into overspending on its military and then imploding) and it has happened to many empires in the past (the British empire was a success mostly because it avoided war as much as possible(*) and failing to do so (ww1) was what killed it).
(*) At its peak size the british army was smaller than the prussian police force. Trading brings prosperity so the vast majority of the population of colonies weren't inclined to rock the boat very much, vs other empires which needed standing armies simply to force the colonies to remain inside the empire.
The expanding militarism and unsustainable military spend of the USA, coupled with rising mercantilism will eventually result in the edifice collapsing(**). TPP seems to be a way of exporting mercantile policy to the rest of the world, but most of the rest of the world is well aware that mercantilist policies were followed for centuries before finally being abandoned over 200 years ago because of their downsides.
(**) It's hard to build or maintain "essential" infrastructure in a mercantile environment and the lack of maintenance of that infrastructure is starting to show across the entire USA, with money that should be going into education + R&D being diverted to military vanity projects which are unlikely to ever provide any economic or societal benefits.
"the math that we all were taught failed the vast majority of our generation"
The more pointed truth is that most teachers are crap.
Disclosure: My parents are teachers. I've circulated among the teaching community for decades. There are a few brilliant ones, some good ones, some effective ones, many substandard ones and a few awful ones - with about 2/3 being the latter two categories. Most of the teachers my parents worked with had trouble balancing their checkbooks (I know this because they'd often get me to do it) and couldn't comprehend simple interest calculations, let along compounding interest - which doesn't hold out much hope for more complicated activities. In addition most lacked any form of curiosity or basic problem-solving abilities.
Most elementary teachers come to the job from humanities-type backgrounds. Maths grads tend towards "harder" science jobs, which is likely to have a bearing on the personalities encountered. (Poor teacher pay across the board means most competent people will go where they can be paid more. Teacher salaries have declined in real terms by at least 50% worldwide since the 1960s, even more in countries such as the USA and UK.)
If a teacher comes to the subject with the attitude of "maths is hard" then they'll impart that onto the kids. One of the most important "fixes" needed in education is not to fix what kids are taught, but to fix (or remove) broken teachers and administrators.. The current structures mean that they're the ones most likely to stick around.
The whole thrust of common core (as mentioned) is best common practices.
Kids should be taught XYZ by ABC age, but what all these legislators (and a bunch of "teachers" who should be sacked) don't grasp is that the "best" method is _what works best for that child_
Different methods work differently for different children. Mandating any particular method is a guarantee that some will "fail", but it keeps jobsworths happy and as jobsworths invariably end up at the controls (they know how to work the system but not WHY the system is setup that way), the outcome is inevitable.
WWVB operates a transmitter at 60kHz which is receivable across the lower 48 states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and there are supposedly a large number of radio-controlled clocks available in the USA which utilise the signal.
There are known to be reception problems in the east coast of the USA (covered on the Wikipedia page) and NIST have attempted to (but been blocked from) setup an east coast transmitter. The NIST page advice should be noted. Modern houses with foil-lined insulation are effectively faraday cages at low frequencies and positioning of the clocks for best reception is important.
If you wish to improve the situation, mudge your congresscritter about it.
If you're using the book model, it's more like you're selling your annotated version without bothering to pay royalties back to the original author.
A lot of GNU authors were commercial or BSDists who were sick of seeing their work effectively pirated (either literally, or by having companies fold their BSD work in and sell it for profit). At least with GPL there's an obligation to pass an annotated copy back to the library if you start selling it and some teeth which make it painful enough for companies which won't play along to actually toe the line when caught.
Slashdot Mirror
RICO requires criminal convictions.
Otherwise I suspect they probably could.
Mind you, as soon as there's a criminal conviction for the shakedown operations (Prenda?) then the RICO path may well be open.
"Most modern day Christians don't walk around killing people for not following the laws in the old testament, "
I'm sure the victims of the Lord's Army in africa will feel relieved.
The problem is political. Religion is just a lever which gives the people involved tools - religious fanatics - to provide a means to their end (gaining more power/prestige/money/ego gratification).
Trump is using similar levers in the USA.
ALL of those levers become easier to manipulate during periods of regional/global recession or other stress such as famine. Blaming the "other" for problems is an easy way out. Bombing them (either from aircraft or via suicide bombers) simply provides more tools for the unscrupulous to use in their furtherance of the pursuit of power.
Kneejerk reactions of responding to violence with more violence is simply playing into the hands of the powerbrokers everywhere. Quite frankly I'm surprised that South Africa didn't spiral into that particular maelstrom after the fall of the Apartheid Regeime and the fact that it didn't provides hope and proof that alternative resolution paths DO exist and CAN work.
"I've still got a pile of 19" LCD monitors from 2003 at my workplace that are still operating as if new. "
You're lucky. Monitors of that vintage usually die from cooked CCFL inverters long before anything else falls over (14-16 months in $workplace experience)
Led backlights have much longer service lives and that's why we set a policy of avoiding CCFL over a decade ago.
"A lot of people have been hired to develop, use, and maintain the software systems that are involved in legal cases in the 21st century."
But not as many as the clerks that were replaced. That's why e-discovery continues expanding.
"The steam tractor made a huge difference in the amount of labor required for farming, first in threshing rigs and then in ploughing, and innovation was quite rapid during the industrial revolution. "
Correct. The rapid growth of european cities during the industrial revolution was a direct result of people having the choice of staying put in the countryside and starving to death or moving to cities, taking shitty pay and not starving to death.
There's also the shell game played in the rates of employment.
1 worker working 1 40-hour/week job is one job.
1 worker working 4 4 hour/week jobs is four jobs.
1 worker on a zero hours contract - and working zero hours - is one job.
Never mind that the latter two cases won't pay the bills for the worker and in the latter case those contracts usually include clauses preventing working for anyone else.
If you want to see _real_ employment stats then always insist on seeing full time equivalent figures
"Most of the surface will be used to provide food and water to the now subterranean human race"
Where the surface is rooftops and subterranean is the lower floors.
It's already starting to happen.
I live in England at the moment. The entire countryside is artificial(*). Farmers are fully aware of that, yet they're facing restrictions on using greenhouses (which are startlingly more efficient than open land and usually result in almost zero application of pesticides) on the basis that they "disrupt the natural character of the countryside"
(*) There is nothing natural whatsoever about green fields or stone walls and even England's woods or forests are almost entirely plantations (the amount of acres of actual 2000+ year old natural wild forest is a number closely approximating zero)
"Replacement birthrate in a modern society is ~2.1 U.S, Germany, France and many other countries have a birth rate well BELOW replacement rates."
Closer study of those stats and the underlaying economies leads one to the conclusion that the best way to deal with the population crisis is to actively bring the poor and poor countries out of that privation.
Cheap energy is the key - over the last few hundred years that's been carbon driven, but it's clear we can't continue down that path without poisoning the ecosphere (Anoxic oceanic events are a bigger risk factor than sea level rises) and wind/solarPV are boondoggles. The way forward is nuclear molten salt - and it's increasingly likely that the country selling these will be china. (Fuson won't be viable until it's viable and that is unlikely in the lifetime of even my great grandchildren.)
One of the things to bear in mind is that the big driver of _new_ employment as technologies have obsoleted old ones has seldom been seen coming until it was actually fairly well established. Fast food has existed for centuries but it was the development of automobile strip-malls and production line techniques which allowed it to become a major industry.
At the same time that robotisation allows the turning out of myriad identical meals (or a small set of the same), consumer demand is driving greater individual variation. This is an opposing force which will require more robotic complexity (and hence greater expense) or will result in the spectre of automated fast food joints being a decade-long fad before becoming yet abandoned storefronts along the roadside.
"People have been saying we are about to enter that era for 150 years."
It's actually the core of the communist manifesto - what happens in a post-capitalist economy.
The Bolshevecks attempted to leapfrog the capitalist part and it didn't work out so well (what we call "communism" bears little relationship to what Marx originally proposed)
"One machine can work 24 hours straight, displacing three jobs"
More than that. One machine works 24*7 with the lights out, faster than the humans, with no breaks and doesn't require as much supervision, so it's it's more like 3.5 to 4 jobs once you factor in the knock-on effects.
On the other hand, most machines are replacing humans for dirty/inconvenient jobs that noone really wants to do. Fast food is no different in this respect to working in the pickling tanks of an automobile factory (and where the easiest way to replace humans once the really nasty jobs were eliminated was simply to let the existing ones retire, not training replacements).
Additionally, if a machine is reprogrammed to cut corners on cooking time and that results in food poisoning incidents (this is what drove a number of severe outbreaks in London MacDonalds branches in the 1980s-90s and has been fingered in tens of thousands of USA outbreaks) then the blame can be firmly placed on the head of whoever made that change, rather than blaming minimum wage employees who were simply doing what they were told lest they be fired.
"How many file clerks do you know?"
The secondary effects of the loss of such jobs is often missed.
For some reason the largest market for 45rpm single records was 16-18yo female filing clerks. The decline in singles sales since the 1960s _directly_ matches the loss of such jobs with increasing automation.
Making sales 1% of the industry's peak is now a big deal in the top40, when that chart is irrelevant - even lumping streaming sales into the mix makes no dent in the loss of absolute numbers since the end of the 1960s.
The reason the recording industry is getting so nasty about copyrights is because it's increasingly desperate for income. It's acting like a cornered wild animal.
"Old Heny Ford had a lot of strange ideas, but the idea of having employees who could buy stuff wasn't one of them."
That was actually secondary.
His primary motivation for increasing wages was to reduce staffing turnover and therefore the highs costs of training new hires or repairing their botchups.
This is the same problem that chinese manufacturers are facing and why some are heavily investing in robots (Foxconn) along the coastal provinces whilst others are taking advange of improved transport links and relocating their factories inland where the employees actually live.
The added cost of the latter course of action is offset by being able to pay lower wages, not having to deal with 25% turnover each year and not having to provide accomodation or evening meals.
"...a conviction is another. "
Indeed. The PIPCU have yet to secure a single solitary criminal conviction in any case.
In the cases where targets have called their local police when PIPCU have shown up, the locals have quite rightly assessed that it's a civil matter and PIPCU have no right to be onsite - moreover as they have not consulted the local police before showing up (legal requirement), their presence is a criminal matter all in itself. Thus you're now looking at police telling police to go away or face arrest.
The best advice I've seen on this if/when PIPCU show up is to refuse entry and call the local fuzz immediately.
One of the problems is that people roll over and play dead when CoLP show up with unenforceable warrants (they're out of their jurisdiction)
A couple of targets have called their local fuzz, who have shown up and told CoLP to piss off.
CoLP have also repeatedly seized domains without court orders (illegal) thanks to registrars who roll over and play dead on a letter on police letterhead.
There have been more than enough convictions of corrupt british police to underscore that this is a really bad idea. A lot of the registrars are wising up.
"They were caught on camera."
Cameras which the gang had paid someone to disable - he'd failed to do so.
"Imagine running software on your PC that sends a stream of cat jpegs to another person running the steganography software. "
No need to imagine. Someone was doing it 20 years ago, only it was Claudia Schiffer gifs posted on Usenet
That noone seems to want to talk about is that every geological record of a massive CO2 release is accompanied by evidence of a simultaneous oceanic anoxic event and large scale dieback of megafauna (which includes animals our size)
There's evidence that this may have already started and started spreading.
If the Gulf Stream is interrupted, the net effect would be a rise of sea level along the entire US eastern seaboard - about 3 feet at Chesapeake Bay - _without_ changing global average sea level at all.
This is because the Gulf stream acts like a gradient, pulling water away from the US coastline.
This is a more likely near-term scenario than a 6 foot sea level rise (which would take at least a century) as all it takes is a decent size freshwater plume entering the northeast Atlantic ocean from Greenland glacier melt and the amount of freshwater coming in from this direction is increasing.
Freshwater in these volumes sits as a layer on top of salt and could force the Gulf Stream to "dive" or stall. There are a number of academic papers analysing this possibility and they all agree it's quite likely to occur if enough glacial melt occurs. The other effect would be a mini-ice age in northern europe (which is 5-8C warmer than it would be without the Gulf Stream transporting heat to the area) and it's been hypothesised that the middle ages cold period was due to a combination of volcanic eruptions and gulf stream effects.
A 6 foot sea level rise over a century doesn't need evacuations. Populations shift in faster cycles than this anyway. The bigger issue is large infrastructure planning to ensure things like major roads and power plants aren't going to be flooded before the end of their planned lifecycles.
"I should think that the easiest time to attack a jet aircraft is"
Given the lax state of USA security procedures, the easiest way for any terrorist to cause maximum damage is to send a suicide bomber up to the TSA checkpoints during a busy period.
Perhaps then they might consider that the security theatre increases risk, rather than decreasing it.
"From what little I know about Romania, it doesn't seem like a good idea to turn yourself over to the authorities with the corruption scandals going on"
Corrupt countries are more likely to cut a deal.
"(the US)... it's just not that powerful a position. It's relatively weak economically and militarily"
The USA spends more militarily than the next 12 countries combined and several times more than all the rest of the list combined, whilst having an economy smaller than china or the combined EU and a mindset that economic growth is infinite (it isn't. Even single digit percentage growth is impossible to maintain across 100 years. Economies always hit limits and all economists who came up with the fundamental theories acknowledged this even if their disciples haven't)
Letting the military tail wag the political dog is a fast way of tipping the country down the shitter. It happened to the russians (SDI was a success story not for its technology but because it scared the USSR into overspending on its military and then imploding) and it has happened to many empires in the past (the British empire was a success mostly because it avoided war as much as possible(*) and failing to do so (ww1) was what killed it).
(*) At its peak size the british army was smaller than the prussian police force. Trading brings prosperity so the vast majority of the population of colonies weren't inclined to rock the boat very much, vs other empires which needed standing armies simply to force the colonies to remain inside the empire.
The expanding militarism and unsustainable military spend of the USA, coupled with rising mercantilism will eventually result in the edifice collapsing(**). TPP seems to be a way of exporting mercantile policy to the rest of the world, but most of the rest of the world is well aware that mercantilist policies were followed for centuries before finally being abandoned over 200 years ago because of their downsides.
(**) It's hard to build or maintain "essential" infrastructure in a mercantile environment and the lack of maintenance of that infrastructure is starting to show across the entire USA, with money that should be going into education + R&D being diverted to military vanity projects which are unlikely to ever provide any economic or societal benefits.
"the math that we all were taught failed the vast majority of our generation"
The more pointed truth is that most teachers are crap.
Disclosure: My parents are teachers. I've circulated among the teaching community for decades. There are a few brilliant ones, some good ones, some effective ones, many substandard ones and a few awful ones - with about 2/3 being the latter two categories. Most of the teachers my parents worked with had trouble balancing their checkbooks (I know this because they'd often get me to do it) and couldn't comprehend simple interest calculations, let along compounding interest - which doesn't hold out much hope for more complicated activities. In addition most lacked any form of curiosity or basic problem-solving abilities.
Most elementary teachers come to the job from humanities-type backgrounds. Maths grads tend towards "harder" science jobs, which is likely to have a bearing on the personalities encountered. (Poor teacher pay across the board means most competent people will go where they can be paid more. Teacher salaries have declined in real terms by at least 50% worldwide since the 1960s, even more in countries such as the USA and UK.)
If a teacher comes to the subject with the attitude of "maths is hard" then they'll impart that onto the kids. One of the most important "fixes" needed in education is not to fix what kids are taught, but to fix (or remove) broken teachers and administrators.. The current structures mean that they're the ones most likely to stick around.
The whole thrust of common core (as mentioned) is best common practices.
Kids should be taught XYZ by ABC age, but what all these legislators (and a bunch of "teachers" who should be sacked) don't grasp is that the "best" method is _what works best for that child_
Different methods work differently for different children. Mandating any particular method is a guarantee that some will "fail", but it keeps jobsworths happy and as jobsworths invariably end up at the controls (they know how to work the system but not WHY the system is setup that way), the outcome is inevitable.
You can buy "radio controlled" clocks across the EU which rely on LF transmitters in Germany/UK/others.
These start at about $10 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
WWVB operates a transmitter at 60kHz which is receivable across the lower 48 states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and there are supposedly a large number of radio-controlled clocks available in the USA which utilise the signal.
There are known to be reception problems in the east coast of the USA (covered on the Wikipedia page) and NIST have attempted to (but been blocked from) setup an east coast transmitter. The NIST page advice should be noted. Modern houses with foil-lined insulation are effectively faraday cages at low frequencies and positioning of the clocks for best reception is important.
If you wish to improve the situation, mudge your congresscritter about it.
If you're using the book model, it's more like you're selling your annotated version without bothering to pay royalties back to the original author.
A lot of GNU authors were commercial or BSDists who were sick of seeing their work effectively pirated (either literally, or by having companies fold their BSD work in and sell it for profit). At least with GPL there's an obligation to pass an annotated copy back to the library if you start selling it and some teeth which make it painful enough for companies which won't play along to actually toe the line when caught.