You don't have to hear and/or feel your phone notify you every 2 minutes of an email coming through, 99% of which is SPAM.
I already don't have to hear and/or feel my phone do anything when email arrives. Why would I want to? It's email, not voice.
So, the point remains, why have a spam filter on your email when the spam filter is so bad at detecting spam that you have to read all the spam to verify that it is spam? AND you have to do it using a web browser instead of your normal email client because the only way to mark something as "not spam" and get it delivered normally is via the web interface.
UPS and FedEx accept the package, they ship it around, and then have USPS deliver locally.
In this area, we still have UPS and FedEx trucks driving around. The way I learned about the UPS-USPS link was when I went online to UPS to track a package, and they were actually crowing about this new delivery option. Yes, they were proud to say that "we can't handle the package all the way to your door anymore, so we'll hand it to USPS for delivery!"
My first thought was, if I wanted USPS to deliver it, why wouldn't I just send it USPS to start with? All UPS is doing with this is flying USPS packages for them, essentially. And not even flying them -- the cheapest UPS rates are ground.
Not that I try to ship UPS anyway. They're the guys who hide packages so you don't know they've been delivered.
Thats great they got some new revenue, but even less mail then needs to be delivered, so the downsizing continues at an even faster pace.
Downsizing due to a lack of volume is fine. Downsizing because the volume is the same but the management can't handle the money well enough to pay enough people to deal with it is not.
Or just pay your kid or your neighbor's kid the $5 to sort your mail.
Or do it yourself for free. It takes me about 2 minutes to sort my mail once a month to pull all the bills and magazines out and toss the rest. If something goes missing in my mail, it's either because I tossed it out by mistake (my fault) or it wasn't delivered at all (major PO fail). If the PO starts throwing my mail away for me, then it will become routine for things to be thrown away by someone not the recipient. You don't want to create that mode of operation as the standard, you want missing mail to be the exception, not the rule.
As for automatically tossing all bulk mail, that includes those catalogs you really did want, and some of the other mass mailings. It will still not save them that much on delivery, considering the added costs to do extra sorting by recipient. (And there is no guarantee that the gift card will be first class.)
Couldn't they charge extra for weekend delivery to make it economical?
Since the postage is paid by the sender, how will the sender know that what he sends will be delivered on the weekend and thus require more money? And what is to stop the post office from simply holding on to all mail until Saturday so they can charge more for delivering it? Cut back on postal workers during the week, rake in the money on Saturday.
If you mean "pay more in advance for weekend delivery", then you'll simply create the same issue that exists in the overnight and two-day delivery system. That is, I've lost count of the number of times that I've paid extra to a company so they'll ship the thing I really need tomorrow by overnight express, and then find out that they weren't going to bother shipping it for a week anyway. In the USPS case, they'll happily accept money for weekend delivery, but claim that the parcel didn't get to the destination postal center until Monday so they couldn't have delivered it on the weekend anyway.
Charge $5/month to act as a spam filter. Plus they save on delivery by round filing junk mail for you at its origination point.
It will cost more because they'll have to manage the opt-in or opt-out selections for each recipient, and have many someones at each sorting center to actually sort the mail into "spam" and "not spam".
And this would create yet another spam filter that is not under the control of the recipient, meaning someone else gets to decide for you if you really did want that catalog or not.
Under email, it was bad enough that my local ISP did this, but they had a way of turning it off. Now they've outsourced all the spam filtering to google and I have to go read the spam email (at least the from and subject) to see if any real email got misclassified (and google is having an unacceptably high false positive rate, IMHO). What good is a spam filter if you have to go read all the spam anyway?
Imagine trying to find out where that $100 gift certificate that was sent to you via USPS and they filtered into the "round file" for you went to.
Napster's biggest problem was that it was not possible to control what got shared.
Of course it was. Find the offending site and issue a takedown. You can't copy over the net what isn't there, even if a convenient indexing service tells you that it is. Just like you can't ftp a file that has been taken down. It was not uncommon to find Veronica data that wasn't there, either. Or google links that are dead.
If Napster is bad, then Google is worse because they do it on a more massive scale. And FTP did it originally.
As an author, you don't see what you are losing, so you write it off as nonexistent. You talk about people in "developed countries" like they're always going to pay full price instead of taking what they can get for free when they can, and that's rather naive, I think. I, for one, don't always "would rather have the quick download from Amazon" (Kindle DRM/format is more limiting than I will accept for something I've paid for, so by asking me to pay for such limits Amazon is actually costing you -- and other authors -- sales.) Fraction of a starbucks? Free is free. I don't pay a fraction of a fraction for starbucks, either.
The fact that it is hard to calculate what you are losing in sales doesn't mean you aren't losing, and yes, you are losing potential sales when someone decides he likes your work by downloading a pirated version and then downloads the rest of your works in pirated versions. Of course, you give away those potential sales so you aren't actually losing them, but either way the money is not with the creator of the content, it's going to starbucks. Unlike you, starbucks doesn't think that they aren't losing anything if they simply give their product away.
Or rather, having a copy sent to you by a willing party.
So, a "willing party" is sufficient to override any express wishes of the copyright holder regarding distribution of his intellectual property for any period of time, even a reasonable seven years like copyright used to be? That's one opinion. No copyright at all, then. If someone doesn't want to sell you the book he's written (or won't license his publisher to sell it where you live, or the publisher acting on behalf of the copyright holder won't distribute it), you are free to have someone who does have a copy just send you one for free.
Can the "willing party" sell you the copy? After all, if he can give it to you and you are causing no harm to the copyright holder, certainly paying the willing party won't harm the copyright holder either. Why don't we all just contact the "willing party" who can provide us all free copies, if you can do it?
So, then, if I find a copy in the library, I can just carry it over to the Xerox (or Wang, or Toshiba) and copy it myself, because I can't get a copy from the original author? Even if he doesn't want to distribute it anymore?
It's about as silly as allowing someone to both have copyright and DRM.
Copyright means that the author has the right to determine the distribution of his work, which includes the right to say it will contain DRM when he does. He is the one who gets to define the license for his work. You don't get to say "I don't like your license, I'm going to ignore it". By doing that, you're defeating the entire concept of copyright. And then you claim that the author is defeating the idea of copyright because he's exercising his rights. But he's doing it in a way you don't like, so he doesn't get to have the copyright anymore.
This is all a wonderful academic discussion, but the fact remains, there are at least three options, not two. If you can't get it legally, then you can "move", "steal it", or "simply do without". Ignoring the third option makes it look like you think you have a basic right to have whatever it is you want even if the author doesn't want to distribute it the way you want it.
People jumped down Napster's throat because it didn't have substantial non-infringing uses. FTP, web browsers, Google, and other such technologies you and other commenters mention, have substantial non-infringing use.
So does Napster.
Napster had basically one purpose. That was to distribute MP3 files around the internet,
Actually, the one purpose Napster had was to index things that other people were making available.
They were making a valid point about how this would indicate we are not right in the middle of a goldilocks zone, which one would expect if creationism were true.
Why would you expect that? There is no reason, other than an attempt at trying to prove a scientific explanation for something by trying to put artificial limits on the metaphysical one. You can't disprove creation by saying "it wasn't done the way I would have done it were I God", any more than you can prove something was done using a specific scientifically supported method by saying "that's how I would do it were I Isaac Newton."
Considering the evidence we've been seeing recently for liquid water on the martian surface at some time in the past, it does stand to reason that Mars did at one point fall in the habitable zone.
Yes, Mars did have an atmosphere. Then some scientist tweaked his model which moved Mars to just on the other side of the tracks, and all the atmosphere vanished.
A long long time ago, in a galaxy far away, Veronica and Archie and WAIS and FTP and gopher and a bunch of other obscure Internet programs "facilitated piracy" by allowing people to download material that others had put up on the Internet.
But everyone jumped down Napster's throat for "facilitating piracy" as if Napster was doing something that nobody had ever done before. People were shocked, I say, absolutely shocked, to find out that you could use Napster on the Internet to download INFORMATION!
Some parents may deliberately do this in order to provide "teachable moments" for both their own children and people who interact with their kids.
Unfortunately, what is often taught from this is not that there are some racist people and that you need to work around them because you will never be able to force them to change, but that every bad thing that ever happens to you is because everyone who is different than you is a racist towards you and they need to be forced to stop. As in, the reason you weren't hired for that job is because the employer is a different color than you are, not that you didn't graduate from second grade, you smoke a rock as soon as you get up in the morning just to get your day started right, have 83 tattoos counting the ones on your face alone, and can't spell the word "I".
It's the same kind of lesson that the welfare system (and proponents) teaches: you can't succeed on your own, you need the government to give you things for free. (You don't need the baby daddy to stick around to support you, the government will do that. What do you mean the kid needs a father? That's trying to impose MORALS on someone!)
That leads to things like kerfluffles over the use of the word "niggardly", and "affirmative action" where the only reason one person was hired over another is fear of reprisals from a minority group and not because the person who was hired is more qualified for the job.
If anyone does really name their children based on trying to teach them about racism, then those parents should have made better use of birth control.
That's not true for all drugs. For example, ethanol intake makes me funnier, smarter, stronger, and sexier.
And I've noticed exactly the opposite. When I intake ethanol you are dumber and uglier. The effect is, of course, gender specific and not all effects occur, since most women get prettier the more I drink. Not smarter.
"Settle down Bob, this will all be over soon. There's no sense trying to chew through the duct tape; I used too much of it for you to be able to get away."
Sorry, your data has been contaminated by the lethal effects of the adhesive on the back of duct tape. The LD50 is pretty small, I know, since it takes very little duct tape when applied to cover the nose and mouth of a person to make them a statistic. At least in my experience.
You mean the myth that using fructose in place of sucrose makes no difference?
The simple fact that a simple sugar has already been broken down to a simple sugar means that it will flood the system much more quickly than a more complex sugar that needs to be converted before transport. If we don't need to pay attention to what the sugars are, then explain why cellulose (long chains of glucose) are indigestible, while simple glucose floods the system almost as soon as it is ingested.
Yes, sir, the metabolic paths for glucose and fructose are different, and flooding the liver with massive amounts of fructose rapidly does result in a different effect than a slower appearance of glucose. The liver and endocrine systems need time to react to the influx of the sugars no matter what they are, so a rapidly appearing slug of one kind of sugar can easily overwhelm the regulatory mechanisms of the body and cause harm where a slower appearance of a different sugar does not. That harm may only be an unnecessary conversion of sugars to glycogen and fat, but in the long term that results in obesity and that can be harmful.
You're talking to a diabetic who has monitored his blood sugar for years through all kinds of experiments with different sugars, who can tell you that the "glycemic index" and "sugar alcohols" information is a truly dangerous myth, along with the sugar industry shills telling us that there is no danger from HFCS. Yes, you're right that cutting sugar overall is a good thing, but trying to claim that if you are going to down a sugar laden drink that it makes no difference is just parroting the sugar industry media flacks. You'd point to data denying global warming or the link between smoking and cancer as being from an industry source, why are you so quick to accept data from the sugar industry?
Yes, as when the U.S. government "failed" by financing and building the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s to bring cheap electricity to rural areas throughout the southern U.S. that were poorly served or completely unserved by the private utilities of the day. That's just one example of government stepping in to do what private companies only interested in short-term profits would never do.
Yes, every time I visit the US and know I won't be travelling outside the Tennessee Valley where power is cheap and free and readily available, I always carry a generator so I can have 110AC. You won't find the luxury of mains power anyplace but in the Tennessee Valley, because there is no way for it to happen without the government doing it.
The government providing a free option does not mean that private options can't and won't exist.
While it may not mean that private options cannot exist, it certainly will mean, for all practical purposes, that they won't.
Why pay for a private service that you can get your neighbors to buy you for free? What company will make a business plan saying they're going to sell something that you can get for free*, and what investor will hand them any money to do that? Insurance companies are already ending some services because of Obamacare, and more will follow as it reaches full implementation. There's your example.
Like, what company in their right mind would start a bus service and charge money for rides when a city bus service exists and does it for free*? Oh, the private service may go where the public one doesn't?
Now think about how this maps to "free wifi everywhere". Even if "everywhere" doesn't really mean "everywhere", those places the free* stuff isn't will be the same places where the pay services are unlikely to go because the density of users is too low to support the service. And the pay service definitely won't waste money providing service where everyone can get it for free*.
The fact that you can get private health insurance in the UK and other places where you have socialized healthcare should show you that it's not all or nothing.
Perfect example. People buy private health care in the UK because the public free* health care doesn't work very well and their lives depend on getting health care. Mapping that into wifi, you won't have people buying wifi when they can get it free* because their lives don't depend on it, and they can use the free* stuff AND complain about how bad the government provided free* stuff is at the same time. It's the national pass time -- get free* stuff and complain about how bad it is.
At 700mhz I'm likely to find my cable modem to perform a hell of a lot faster than this free wifi option.
If your cable modem actually "performs" at all, I'd be surprised. I assume you're talking about the data rate in some really odd units (frequency vs. bps), but even so, less than one per second is VERY VERY slow.
* Free is really a dishonest way of saying it. You really mean to say "taxpayer funded", which means that even if it really is free for you, your neighbors ARE paying for it, even if they never use it. Someone is paying for it, and why shouldn't YOU pay for the service YOU want?
If my employer rang me up at midnight and said I had to come in for free, because I was still on the clock, I would not so politely tell them where to go.
If your employer calls you up and asks you to come in a midnight, and you do, you aren't getting paid any more than if you didn't. You don't get overtime. Your boss MAY let you take a day off, but there's no "time and a half". You telling him "where to go" will come up in your next performance review tied to any salary increase or contract renewals.
Otherwise I could stay home all week, do nothing and then say I worked an 168 hour week, I was never off the clock, right.
Some people do stay home for work. Telecommuting. You could certainly claim to have worked for 168 hours per week, but then as your boss I'd say you were the least productive employee I had and would be first on the list to be let go. It's your choice.
The point is that as a salaried employee, if you CHOOSE to do things for work, then those things belong to work. If you're doing something that is part of your job, or is done because you are being paid to do it, then it is part of your work and there is a very good argument that any IP rights belong to the people who pay you. As a salaried employee, you aren't paid for forty hours per week, you are paid a salary. That time you thought you were "off the clock"? Well, you paid a salary for that time, too.
Many teachers spend hours off the clock developing innovative ways to teach their subjects.
Salaried employees don't have a "clock" to be "off of." They wouldn't have created that system to improve their work if they weren't being paid to do that work in the first place. It is a logical argument to say that what they create as a result or effect of being paid belongs to the company that pays them.
Often times their work load is such that they can't possibly complete their tasks without the extra hours.
That's the problem with being a salaried employee and not a per-hour one. You don't have "off the clock".
I see silly things like this rule stifling creative thinking more than promoting it.
When it becomes and issue, I agree. But if it never becomes a issue, most people ignore it.
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You don't have to hear and/or feel your phone notify you every 2 minutes of an email coming through, 99% of which is SPAM.
I already don't have to hear and/or feel my phone do anything when email arrives. Why would I want to? It's email, not voice.
So, the point remains, why have a spam filter on your email when the spam filter is so bad at detecting spam that you have to read all the spam to verify that it is spam? AND you have to do it using a web browser instead of your normal email client because the only way to mark something as "not spam" and get it delivered normally is via the web interface.
UPS and FedEx accept the package, they ship it around, and then have USPS deliver locally.
In this area, we still have UPS and FedEx trucks driving around. The way I learned about the UPS-USPS link was when I went online to UPS to track a package, and they were actually crowing about this new delivery option. Yes, they were proud to say that "we can't handle the package all the way to your door anymore, so we'll hand it to USPS for delivery!"
My first thought was, if I wanted USPS to deliver it, why wouldn't I just send it USPS to start with? All UPS is doing with this is flying USPS packages for them, essentially. And not even flying them -- the cheapest UPS rates are ground.
Not that I try to ship UPS anyway. They're the guys who hide packages so you don't know they've been delivered.
Thats great they got some new revenue, but even less mail then needs to be delivered, so the downsizing continues at an even faster pace.
Downsizing due to a lack of volume is fine. Downsizing because the volume is the same but the management can't handle the money well enough to pay enough people to deal with it is not.
Or just pay your kid or your neighbor's kid the $5 to sort your mail.
Or do it yourself for free. It takes me about 2 minutes to sort my mail once a month to pull all the bills and magazines out and toss the rest. If something goes missing in my mail, it's either because I tossed it out by mistake (my fault) or it wasn't delivered at all (major PO fail). If the PO starts throwing my mail away for me, then it will become routine for things to be thrown away by someone not the recipient. You don't want to create that mode of operation as the standard, you want missing mail to be the exception, not the rule.
As for automatically tossing all bulk mail, that includes those catalogs you really did want, and some of the other mass mailings. It will still not save them that much on delivery, considering the added costs to do extra sorting by recipient. (And there is no guarantee that the gift card will be first class.)
Couldn't they charge extra for weekend delivery to make it economical?
Since the postage is paid by the sender, how will the sender know that what he sends will be delivered on the weekend and thus require more money? And what is to stop the post office from simply holding on to all mail until Saturday so they can charge more for delivering it? Cut back on postal workers during the week, rake in the money on Saturday.
If you mean "pay more in advance for weekend delivery", then you'll simply create the same issue that exists in the overnight and two-day delivery system. That is, I've lost count of the number of times that I've paid extra to a company so they'll ship the thing I really need tomorrow by overnight express, and then find out that they weren't going to bother shipping it for a week anyway. In the USPS case, they'll happily accept money for weekend delivery, but claim that the parcel didn't get to the destination postal center until Monday so they couldn't have delivered it on the weekend anyway.
Charge $5/month to act as a spam filter. Plus they save on delivery by round filing junk mail for you at its origination point.
It will cost more because they'll have to manage the opt-in or opt-out selections for each recipient, and have many someones at each sorting center to actually sort the mail into "spam" and "not spam".
And this would create yet another spam filter that is not under the control of the recipient, meaning someone else gets to decide for you if you really did want that catalog or not.
Under email, it was bad enough that my local ISP did this, but they had a way of turning it off. Now they've outsourced all the spam filtering to google and I have to go read the spam email (at least the from and subject) to see if any real email got misclassified (and google is having an unacceptably high false positive rate, IMHO). What good is a spam filter if you have to go read all the spam anyway?
Imagine trying to find out where that $100 gift certificate that was sent to you via USPS and they filtered into the "round file" for you went to.
Napster's biggest problem was that it was not possible to control what got shared.
Of course it was. Find the offending site and issue a takedown. You can't copy over the net what isn't there, even if a convenient indexing service tells you that it is. Just like you can't ftp a file that has been taken down. It was not uncommon to find Veronica data that wasn't there, either. Or google links that are dead.
If Napster is bad, then Google is worse because they do it on a more massive scale. And FTP did it originally.
The fact that it is hard to calculate what you are losing in sales doesn't mean you aren't losing, and yes, you are losing potential sales when someone decides he likes your work by downloading a pirated version and then downloads the rest of your works in pirated versions. Of course, you give away those potential sales so you aren't actually losing them, but either way the money is not with the creator of the content, it's going to starbucks. Unlike you, starbucks doesn't think that they aren't losing anything if they simply give their product away.
Or rather, having a copy sent to you by a willing party.
So, a "willing party" is sufficient to override any express wishes of the copyright holder regarding distribution of his intellectual property for any period of time, even a reasonable seven years like copyright used to be? That's one opinion. No copyright at all, then. If someone doesn't want to sell you the book he's written (or won't license his publisher to sell it where you live, or the publisher acting on behalf of the copyright holder won't distribute it), you are free to have someone who does have a copy just send you one for free.
Can the "willing party" sell you the copy? After all, if he can give it to you and you are causing no harm to the copyright holder, certainly paying the willing party won't harm the copyright holder either. Why don't we all just contact the "willing party" who can provide us all free copies, if you can do it?
So, then, if I find a copy in the library, I can just carry it over to the Xerox (or Wang, or Toshiba) and copy it myself, because I can't get a copy from the original author? Even if he doesn't want to distribute it anymore?
It's about as silly as allowing someone to both have copyright and DRM.
Copyright means that the author has the right to determine the distribution of his work, which includes the right to say it will contain DRM when he does. He is the one who gets to define the license for his work. You don't get to say "I don't like your license, I'm going to ignore it". By doing that, you're defeating the entire concept of copyright. And then you claim that the author is defeating the idea of copyright because he's exercising his rights. But he's doing it in a way you don't like, so he doesn't get to have the copyright anymore.
This is all a wonderful academic discussion, but the fact remains, there are at least three options, not two. If you can't get it legally, then you can "move", "steal it", or "simply do without". Ignoring the third option makes it look like you think you have a basic right to have whatever it is you want even if the author doesn't want to distribute it the way you want it.
Other than taking a copy of the information you expect should be available to you no matter what the author says about it.
People jumped down Napster's throat because it didn't have substantial non-infringing uses. FTP, web browsers, Google, and other such technologies you and other commenters mention, have substantial non-infringing use.
So does Napster.
Napster had basically one purpose. That was to distribute MP3 files around the internet,
Actually, the one purpose Napster had was to index things that other people were making available.
They were making a valid point about how this would indicate we are not right in the middle of a goldilocks zone, which one would expect if creationism were true.
Why would you expect that? There is no reason, other than an attempt at trying to prove a scientific explanation for something by trying to put artificial limits on the metaphysical one. You can't disprove creation by saying "it wasn't done the way I would have done it were I God", any more than you can prove something was done using a specific scientifically supported method by saying "that's how I would do it were I Isaac Newton."
Considering the evidence we've been seeing recently for liquid water on the martian surface at some time in the past, it does stand to reason that Mars did at one point fall in the habitable zone.
Yes, Mars did have an atmosphere. Then some scientist tweaked his model which moved Mars to just on the other side of the tracks, and all the atmosphere vanished.
They intentionally facilitate piracy.
A long long time ago, in a galaxy far away, Veronica and Archie and WAIS and FTP and gopher and a bunch of other obscure Internet programs "facilitated piracy" by allowing people to download material that others had put up on the Internet.
But everyone jumped down Napster's throat for "facilitating piracy" as if Napster was doing something that nobody had ever done before. People were shocked, I say, absolutely shocked, to find out that you could use Napster on the Internet to download INFORMATION!
Save the moral outrage about Napster, please.
People in such position have two options:
Option 3: not have the book.
Which God died and said that you have a moral right to take whatever you want if someone doesn't want to sell it to you?
When I meet someone I concentrate on their eyes,
So do I. I can't stand people with brown eyes. They're all criminals. And mother stabbers and father rapers.
Some parents may deliberately do this in order to provide "teachable moments" for both their own children and people who interact with their kids.
Unfortunately, what is often taught from this is not that there are some racist people and that you need to work around them because you will never be able to force them to change, but that every bad thing that ever happens to you is because everyone who is different than you is a racist towards you and they need to be forced to stop. As in, the reason you weren't hired for that job is because the employer is a different color than you are, not that you didn't graduate from second grade, you smoke a rock as soon as you get up in the morning just to get your day started right, have 83 tattoos counting the ones on your face alone, and can't spell the word "I".
It's the same kind of lesson that the welfare system (and proponents) teaches: you can't succeed on your own, you need the government to give you things for free. (You don't need the baby daddy to stick around to support you, the government will do that. What do you mean the kid needs a father? That's trying to impose MORALS on someone!)
That leads to things like kerfluffles over the use of the word "niggardly", and "affirmative action" where the only reason one person was hired over another is fear of reprisals from a minority group and not because the person who was hired is more qualified for the job.
If anyone does really name their children based on trying to teach them about racism, then those parents should have made better use of birth control.
That's not true for all drugs. For example, ethanol intake makes me funnier, smarter, stronger, and sexier.
And I've noticed exactly the opposite. When I intake ethanol you are dumber and uglier. The effect is, of course, gender specific and not all effects occur, since most women get prettier the more I drink. Not smarter.
know I won't be travelling
Crap. That should be "know I will be travelling outside", which started life as "won't be staying in".
"Settle down Bob, this will all be over soon. There's no sense trying to chew through the duct tape; I used too much of it for you to be able to get away."
Sorry, your data has been contaminated by the lethal effects of the adhesive on the back of duct tape. The LD50 is pretty small, I know, since it takes very little duct tape when applied to cover the nose and mouth of a person to make them a statistic. At least in my experience.
Put this stupid myth to rest.
You mean the myth that using fructose in place of sucrose makes no difference?
The simple fact that a simple sugar has already been broken down to a simple sugar means that it will flood the system much more quickly than a more complex sugar that needs to be converted before transport. If we don't need to pay attention to what the sugars are, then explain why cellulose (long chains of glucose) are indigestible, while simple glucose floods the system almost as soon as it is ingested.
Yes, sir, the metabolic paths for glucose and fructose are different, and flooding the liver with massive amounts of fructose rapidly does result in a different effect than a slower appearance of glucose. The liver and endocrine systems need time to react to the influx of the sugars no matter what they are, so a rapidly appearing slug of one kind of sugar can easily overwhelm the regulatory mechanisms of the body and cause harm where a slower appearance of a different sugar does not. That harm may only be an unnecessary conversion of sugars to glycogen and fat, but in the long term that results in obesity and that can be harmful.
You're talking to a diabetic who has monitored his blood sugar for years through all kinds of experiments with different sugars, who can tell you that the "glycemic index" and "sugar alcohols" information is a truly dangerous myth, along with the sugar industry shills telling us that there is no danger from HFCS. Yes, you're right that cutting sugar overall is a good thing, but trying to claim that if you are going to down a sugar laden drink that it makes no difference is just parroting the sugar industry media flacks. You'd point to data denying global warming or the link between smoking and cancer as being from an industry source, why are you so quick to accept data from the sugar industry?
Yes, as when the U.S. government "failed" by financing and building the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s to bring cheap electricity to rural areas throughout the southern U.S. that were poorly served or completely unserved by the private utilities of the day. That's just one example of government stepping in to do what private companies only interested in short-term profits would never do.
Yes, every time I visit the US and know I won't be travelling outside the Tennessee Valley where power is cheap and free and readily available, I always carry a generator so I can have 110AC. You won't find the luxury of mains power anyplace but in the Tennessee Valley, because there is no way for it to happen without the government doing it.
The government providing a free option does not mean that private options can't and won't exist.
While it may not mean that private options cannot exist, it certainly will mean, for all practical purposes, that they won't.
Why pay for a private service that you can get your neighbors to buy you for free? What company will make a business plan saying they're going to sell something that you can get for free*, and what investor will hand them any money to do that? Insurance companies are already ending some services because of Obamacare, and more will follow as it reaches full implementation. There's your example.
Like, what company in their right mind would start a bus service and charge money for rides when a city bus service exists and does it for free*? Oh, the private service may go where the public one doesn't?
Now think about how this maps to "free wifi everywhere". Even if "everywhere" doesn't really mean "everywhere", those places the free* stuff isn't will be the same places where the pay services are unlikely to go because the density of users is too low to support the service. And the pay service definitely won't waste money providing service where everyone can get it for free*.
The fact that you can get private health insurance in the UK and other places where you have socialized healthcare should show you that it's not all or nothing.
Perfect example. People buy private health care in the UK because the public free* health care doesn't work very well and their lives depend on getting health care. Mapping that into wifi, you won't have people buying wifi when they can get it free* because their lives don't depend on it, and they can use the free* stuff AND complain about how bad the government provided free* stuff is at the same time. It's the national pass time -- get free* stuff and complain about how bad it is.
At 700mhz I'm likely to find my cable modem to perform a hell of a lot faster than this free wifi option.
If your cable modem actually "performs" at all, I'd be surprised. I assume you're talking about the data rate in some really odd units (frequency vs. bps), but even so, less than one per second is VERY VERY slow.
* Free is really a dishonest way of saying it. You really mean to say "taxpayer funded", which means that even if it really is free for you, your neighbors ARE paying for it, even if they never use it. Someone is paying for it, and why shouldn't YOU pay for the service YOU want?
If my employer rang me up at midnight and said I had to come in for free, because I was still on the clock, I would not so politely tell them where to go.
If your employer calls you up and asks you to come in a midnight, and you do, you aren't getting paid any more than if you didn't. You don't get overtime. Your boss MAY let you take a day off, but there's no "time and a half". You telling him "where to go" will come up in your next performance review tied to any salary increase or contract renewals.
Otherwise I could stay home all week, do nothing and then say I worked an 168 hour week, I was never off the clock, right.
Some people do stay home for work. Telecommuting. You could certainly claim to have worked for 168 hours per week, but then as your boss I'd say you were the least productive employee I had and would be first on the list to be let go. It's your choice.
The point is that as a salaried employee, if you CHOOSE to do things for work, then those things belong to work. If you're doing something that is part of your job, or is done because you are being paid to do it, then it is part of your work and there is a very good argument that any IP rights belong to the people who pay you. As a salaried employee, you aren't paid for forty hours per week, you are paid a salary. That time you thought you were "off the clock"? Well, you paid a salary for that time, too.
Many teachers spend hours off the clock developing innovative ways to teach their subjects.
Salaried employees don't have a "clock" to be "off of." They wouldn't have created that system to improve their work if they weren't being paid to do that work in the first place. It is a logical argument to say that what they create as a result or effect of being paid belongs to the company that pays them.
Often times their work load is such that they can't possibly complete their tasks without the extra hours.
That's the problem with being a salaried employee and not a per-hour one. You don't have "off the clock".
I see silly things like this rule stifling creative thinking more than promoting it.
When it becomes and issue, I agree. But if it never becomes a issue, most people ignore it.