Google maps on my Blackberry gets traffic updates. The accuracy seems to be about 15 to 30 minutes. The camera is the one thing I would not sacrifice as an inclusion in the phone - the lens is just far too bad.
Good post. There are a few points I'd like to address.
Laws vs rights: you're absolutely right on this. The law area that I was thinking about wasn't contract law though, it was asset risk. In a corporation, you're not personally liable for losses. This means that a loan taken out by a corporation can only be secured against corporate assets, unless otherwise noted in the loan. An individual taking out a loan though is personally responsible for servicing it. Almost any assets are fair game if the loan terms aren't being met. This in turn means that individuals are exposed to risks that corporations aren't - not to mention that the death of a corporation is merely a virtual death. In other words, corporations can be a lot more reckless in their actions than individuals - and that's the last thing you want when talking about elections.
The issue here then is that actions taken by individuals as part of a corporation carry different risks than those taken by individuals outside of a corporation. It follows from that the responsibilities and regulations should be different.
Regarding size of government - let me start by saying that Economists are the one group of academics that I trust the least. I normally avoid ragging academics for their eggheadedness, but any group that has a hard time figuring out why people walk on an escalator has some serious credibility issues with me.
Also, you're right that Somalia is an extreme example that isn't quite fair. I generally use that to point out that the discussion isn't that government itself is bad or that government should be in a continuous process of downsizing. Instead, government expansion - and contraction - should be put in the explicit context of what individual rights are being abrogated to further what social good. Both can be measured, though I would argue that a presumptive social benefit should require extraordinary evidence before an existing individual right is curtailed for it. YMMV on what extraordinary evidence means.
Lastly, I would have to disagree with your assessment of the US economy pre WW2. After all, it was the time of the great depression, and a time when minimal government intervention was tried. Some actually argue that it took WW2 to finally finish the Great Depression for good - and WW2 still stands as the greatest government intervention of all time.
As another - more realistic - counter example, consider Japan in the 50-70s, South Korea in the 70s-80s, and China 80s to now. There is fairly massive government intervention going on in China, and Japan and South Korea were often held up as examples of government intervention done right - specifically in the context of catching up to more advanced economies. Now, the US is the biggest economy in the world, but that doesn't mean that a) it will stay that way, and b) that the lessons learned by China, Japan and South Korea cannot be applied on a small scale to the US.
In short, government intervention works... it's been demonstrated. You just have to know when to do it.
So you're arguing that the result in NY was also about substance? You're tying specific events to the result while ignoring others. Not to mention that you're completely misrepresenting the poll movements and when they happened. I'll just assume that you're suffering from confirmation bias, and aren't just flat out lying.
Here's the difference: assuming for a second that your premise is correct (I don't), the news anchors made individual decisions to spin news in a certain direction. There was no overall conspiracy by all media to elect Obama - there was the random aggregation of a lot of individuals just happening to pull in the same direction. That's fine. What's not fine is the head of a corporation directing its resources towards the goal of electing a specific person. That's one person ordering others to influence an election in a specific manner, and probably over their own objections.
Before you even continue: no, this is not like buying ads or PACs. People join PACs because they agree with the stated goal. They freely organize. People make ads because they're in the business of making ads. Corporations are far more generic than that.
It really isn't. Sadly, unions have become little more than corporations within corporations. This is why I love right-to-work states, where no one can make me join a union.
You're trying to make the world into black and white. It isn't. There's a whole set of possibilities between "only individuals can talk during elections" and "the entity with the most money talks the loudest". There's a balance to be had, and this isn't balance.
Politicians die. Corporations don't have to. Politicians still have to count the votes of others. Corporations just count money. There's the difference that makes it flabbergasting that people still try to equate people and corporations.
Allow the power of corporations to grow without any check, and for the first time in human history human affairs will be governed with absolutely no regard to human welfare.
Well, I would disagree. It has happened before. It's just that there normally was a face to the government that ignored human welfare. Gengis Khan was brutal and certainly ignored human welfare. However - and this is a significant difference - what's new is that with corporatism, there is no face to a corporation that engages in cruelty. And as Penny Arcade demonstrated so succinctly, nothing makes people into bigger assholes than anonymity.
In other words, corporatism means everyone can be the biggest, cruelest asshole on the block. Lovely.
The reason that fascism bears no resemblance to WW2 Italy or Germany is because these states weren't fascist. Germany was an odd melding of nationalism and socialism, as was Italy. Spain under Franco was far closer, and is commonly referred to as a fascist state.
People seem to go on and on about 1886. Corporations are certainly not people strictly speaking, they are just groups of people. Those people have individual rights, and by extension, a group of people also has the same set of rights.
Groups of people get special rights when they are in a corporation. They lose those rights when they are not part of a corporation - i.e., when they go home after work. Furthermore, groups of people have access to resources as part of a corporation that they do not have as private citizens. It is ludicrous to argue that merely by being part of the right group of people, some people can wield far more influence over the electoral process than others.
Lastly, you completely underestimate how much government meddling is benefiting you. If you want to see a place with minimal government, go see Somalia. You'll understand that your fantasy of a small government is exactly that - a fantasy completely detached from reality.
Your problem is that the most significant predictor of success in a race is.... campaign money spent. Single anecdote not withstanding. Massachussets was an aberration, where one side decided it really didn't want to run a proper campaign.
You will not win every election by just plowing money into them, but you will win far more than you would if you wouldn't have plowed money into them. That's the problem.
You're barking up the wrong tree. This isn't about whether the constitution gives rights or removes rights. It is about what it means to the democratic process when someone in control of a corporation can marshal all the resources at their disposal to support or oppose a specific candidate. Their influence will be far greater than that of any individual, or even groups of individuals that organized on a political basis.
Imagine, for a second, the CEO of GE decides to screw his shareholders and board of directors, and to throw a billion dollars at the next campaign cycle. Yes, George Soros, Bill Gates and a few others can already do that. The difference is these people are individuals. The CEO of GE is a fungible position. Anybody (well, anybody with the right connections - see Carly Fiorina) can be CEO.
I would argue that one of the pre-eminent responsibilities of the government is to ensure that the process by which said government is established isn't subverted.
I can't speak about England, but your broad statement that this applies to all places with socialized health care is indeed nonsense. I lived in France for 18 years, and my parents subscribed to additional medical coverage. The doctors we had access to were nothing short of brilliant, and the cost was still less than in the US. I still can't find a dentist in the US who comes even close to the one I had in France, thanks to the additional coverage.
Please don't quote Wikipedia to support anything, you only demonstrate that you don't know what Wikipedia is.
Why on earth should a highly politicized healthcare system result in something better?
There aren't many places where a highly politicized system will come out ahead. In fact, Healthcare is one of the very areas where that's possible. Because while a political system may throw up political roadblocks to giving you healthcare, a for-profit system is incentivized to throw up as many roadblocks as possible. In other words, one system has a high probability of being a bureaucratic mess. The other system is guaranteed to evolve into one within a few quarterly reports.
This exists already. There are a couple of providers that offer that. Just be prepared for some eye watering costs when you go to the doctor a few times. And just pray that you don't need a specialist. I can afford it because I make significantly more than the average American. If I would make what I did 8 years ago, that health plan wouldn't be a plan, it'd be a big, fat reason to only go to the emergency room if I can't take the pain, or don't want to cripple myself for life. Guess who actually ends up paying anyway? Correct, the tax payer in that state.
Here's the justification for hurting you by taxing you to support a public option: you're already paying for it, and private corporations will only get on board if regulation is so tight that it amounts to direct government control anyway. Might as well streamline the process and take out the middle man.
As for the current bills, I hear ya. They suck, uniformly. Lastly, public options can be structured in such a way that pay-outs to smokers are minimized. After all, it's already being done by regular insurances. The big advantage of the public option is that in theory, you and I get to have input on what constitutes a rip-off by voting for the politicians who will ultimately vote on the bills. That's in theory, of course.
What if they have two sources: one that costs money to read, and one that doesn't? How much extra trust does someone have to have in the news source to actually pay money to read the entire thing? In other words - how much would Fox News have to charge before a conservative reader decides that he's better off reading the NPR article?
I think we're going to have a very interesting shake-up coming in the world of news organizations. My belief is that if they stick to news as entertainment, they're going to be eaten alive by free, ad-supported blogs. Their only chance is in 60 Minutes style in-depth reporting on a topic. Note: this is not a comment on how trustworthy 60 minutes is, but merely on its format and marketing message.
Well, he learned from Hillary's attempts to change Healthcare. Remember HillaryCare? Where Hillary basically presented a full plan to Congress and said "pass this"? It didn't work, and one of the main problems that people had with it was that it was Hillary's plan, with no input from anyone. Not only did this leadership approach make passage of Hillary's plan more difficult, it also tarred her for years to come. Now, is Obama's plan better? It's hard to say. The political situation is very different, his official role is very different - the only thing that is certain is that we are closer to making a change to health care than we were with Hillary's approach. Then again - close only counts in horseshoe and grenades.
Finally, I would also argue that the public option IS the fight over more affordable health care. Here's why: insurance works by taking money from people who didn't need a payout and gives to those who do. The more people are in the pool, the less insurance companies have to charge to cover their expenses - if we assume that operational expenses per customer are less than the premium, and expected payout is the same for each customer. But of course, it isn't. The insurance companies make sure of that by screening people for existing conditions and denying coverage as strenuously as possible. As a result, the tendency is for insurance companies to remove as many sick or potentially sick people from their pool as legally possible. The logical conclusion of this? HSAs with catastrophic insurance and a limit on lifetime payout. That's not health insurance. That's a tax-deductible savings account, where the health care you have access to is directly tied to how much money you make. If you're healthy, health care is affordable. If you're sick, health care is expensive.
There is exactly one way out of this: everyone in the country pays into the same pool, and everyone withdraws from the same pool. The public option. If you're worried about cost, put restrictions on what kind of care the public option covers. Make that an open debate for society to answer. The rich can then turn to private insurance companies or HSAs to set money aside for fancier stuff.
But make no mistake: you will not see an overall increase in access to health care (which is what affordable health care is really about) without the public option. You either have free market insurance companies which provide access to health care based on how much money you have, or you regulate the market to the point where you have a public option in practice, if not in name.
Troll? Really? Someone from Rambus must have gotten mod points. As far as I can tell, Rambus just got one billion dollars from litigating a situation that arose because they sat on patents that they knew were going to be infringed by the new standards being developed. And they knew about the new standards being developed because they sat on the standards board. As for their products, they sucked. No one outside of stupidly rich people, or people with very specific needs who were willing to deal with the Rambus memory drawbacks, bought their crap.
To me, that's the definition of a patent troll: you failed in the market place because you sold an inferior product, but struck gold in litigation based on deceit.
You do realize it is bad form to either cite yourself for support, or to cite one party in a fight as an authoritative source? You managed to do both. Congratulations.
From the press release: "Rambus is one of the world's premier technology licensing companies." It seems to me that even they see themselves as a licensing company, not an R&D company. They did develop stuff in the past, but it doesn't look like they plan on doing much in the future.
I think my hatred and position on this matter can be summed up quite easily: I dislike pricefixers, but I really hate people who abuse the standards systems. And Rambus definitely abused the standards system - they sat on the JEDEC board, full well knowing that the standards being developed were going to infringe on their patents. It is unfortunate that there isn't any legal action that can be taken against them on this matter - I'd love to see them crash and burn for this.
The summary is wrong. The article states that there are two quotas at work for all movies: how long they are shown in theaters, and how many foreign movies are allowed to be shown over the course of a year. Avatar stayed on screen for the normal time-period in 2D theaters, and is allowed to exceed the normal runtime in 3D theaters. In other words, the Hong Kong daily made some assumptions about why Avatar didn't exceed the normal runtime for foreign movies. The assumptions might be correct, but are unsupported by anything uttered by officials so far.
You're confusing patent protection and copyright protection. Copyright protection protects any and all original works. Patents protect a novel way of doing something.
As such, patios (and buildings in general) can and have fallen under the protection of copyright law. As such, there isn't much of a leap from allowing heirs of artists to enjoy the fruits of copyright law to allowing the heirs of patio builders to enjoy the fruits of copyright law.
Yes, it's stupid and will be the downfall of the particular society that goes that route, but it doesn't mean some short-sighted idiots would argue for it.
You're confusing the state of IP during medieval times (roughly 900-1300) with that during the Renaissance (1300-1500). Heck, even the ancient Greeks and Romans had prolific writers. But don't let ignorance get in the way of your point.
Is no one else concerned bythe fact that the average speed DECLINED by 2.8%?? Seriously? I mean, I understand our speeds suck. I get it. But they're now declining???? Yes, yes, lotsa people have internet on their phones. Average those in, and speeds will drop. But shouldn't there be an offset by all those new amazing DOCSYS 3.0 and FIOS technologies? I guess not. US connection speeds suck, and these people are proud that they're getting worse. Fuckers.
Note the part "where results differ". Bing and Google return a significant number of the same sites in the same ranking. But what Bing adds is stuff I don't need. Google's specific results, on the other hand, help me.
Slashdot Mirror
Google maps on my Blackberry gets traffic updates. The accuracy seems to be about 15 to 30 minutes. The camera is the one thing I would not sacrifice as an inclusion in the phone - the lens is just far too bad.
Good post. There are a few points I'd like to address.
Laws vs rights: you're absolutely right on this. The law area that I was thinking about wasn't contract law though, it was asset risk. In a corporation, you're not personally liable for losses. This means that a loan taken out by a corporation can only be secured against corporate assets, unless otherwise noted in the loan. An individual taking out a loan though is personally responsible for servicing it. Almost any assets are fair game if the loan terms aren't being met. This in turn means that individuals are exposed to risks that corporations aren't - not to mention that the death of a corporation is merely a virtual death. In other words, corporations can be a lot more reckless in their actions than individuals - and that's the last thing you want when talking about elections.
The issue here then is that actions taken by individuals as part of a corporation carry different risks than those taken by individuals outside of a corporation. It follows from that the responsibilities and regulations should be different.
Regarding size of government - let me start by saying that Economists are the one group of academics that I trust the least. I normally avoid ragging academics for their eggheadedness, but any group that has a hard time figuring out why people walk on an escalator has some serious credibility issues with me.
Also, you're right that Somalia is an extreme example that isn't quite fair. I generally use that to point out that the discussion isn't that government itself is bad or that government should be in a continuous process of downsizing. Instead, government expansion - and contraction - should be put in the explicit context of what individual rights are being abrogated to further what social good. Both can be measured, though I would argue that a presumptive social benefit should require extraordinary evidence before an existing individual right is curtailed for it. YMMV on what extraordinary evidence means.
Lastly, I would have to disagree with your assessment of the US economy pre WW2. After all, it was the time of the great depression, and a time when minimal government intervention was tried. Some actually argue that it took WW2 to finally finish the Great Depression for good - and WW2 still stands as the greatest government intervention of all time.
As another - more realistic - counter example, consider Japan in the 50-70s, South Korea in the 70s-80s, and China 80s to now. There is fairly massive government intervention going on in China, and Japan and South Korea were often held up as examples of government intervention done right - specifically in the context of catching up to more advanced economies. Now, the US is the biggest economy in the world, but that doesn't mean that a) it will stay that way, and b) that the lessons learned by China, Japan and South Korea cannot be applied on a small scale to the US.
In short, government intervention works... it's been demonstrated. You just have to know when to do it.
So you're arguing that the result in NY was also about substance? You're tying specific events to the result while ignoring others. Not to mention that you're completely misrepresenting the poll movements and when they happened. I'll just assume that you're suffering from confirmation bias, and aren't just flat out lying.
Here's the difference: assuming for a second that your premise is correct (I don't), the news anchors made individual decisions to spin news in a certain direction. There was no overall conspiracy by all media to elect Obama - there was the random aggregation of a lot of individuals just happening to pull in the same direction. That's fine. What's not fine is the head of a corporation directing its resources towards the goal of electing a specific person. That's one person ordering others to influence an election in a specific manner, and probably over their own objections.
Before you even continue: no, this is not like buying ads or PACs. People join PACs because they agree with the stated goal. They freely organize. People make ads because they're in the business of making ads. Corporations are far more generic than that.
It really isn't. Sadly, unions have become little more than corporations within corporations. This is why I love right-to-work states, where no one can make me join a union.
You're trying to make the world into black and white. It isn't. There's a whole set of possibilities between "only individuals can talk during elections" and "the entity with the most money talks the loudest". There's a balance to be had, and this isn't balance.
Politicians die. Corporations don't have to. Politicians still have to count the votes of others. Corporations just count money. There's the difference that makes it flabbergasting that people still try to equate people and corporations.
Allow the power of corporations to grow without any check, and for the first time in human history human affairs will be governed with absolutely no regard to human welfare.
Well, I would disagree. It has happened before. It's just that there normally was a face to the government that ignored human welfare. Gengis Khan was brutal and certainly ignored human welfare. However - and this is a significant difference - what's new is that with corporatism, there is no face to a corporation that engages in cruelty. And as Penny Arcade demonstrated so succinctly, nothing makes people into bigger assholes than anonymity.
In other words, corporatism means everyone can be the biggest, cruelest asshole on the block. Lovely.
The reason that fascism bears no resemblance to WW2 Italy or Germany is because these states weren't fascist. Germany was an odd melding of nationalism and socialism, as was Italy. Spain under Franco was far closer, and is commonly referred to as a fascist state.
People seem to go on and on about 1886. Corporations are certainly not people strictly speaking, they are just groups of people. Those people have individual rights, and by extension, a group of people also has the same set of rights.
Groups of people get special rights when they are in a corporation. They lose those rights when they are not part of a corporation - i.e., when they go home after work. Furthermore, groups of people have access to resources as part of a corporation that they do not have as private citizens. It is ludicrous to argue that merely by being part of the right group of people, some people can wield far more influence over the electoral process than others.
Lastly, you completely underestimate how much government meddling is benefiting you. If you want to see a place with minimal government, go see Somalia. You'll understand that your fantasy of a small government is exactly that - a fantasy completely detached from reality.
Your problem is that the most significant predictor of success in a race is.... campaign money spent. Single anecdote not withstanding. Massachussets was an aberration, where one side decided it really didn't want to run a proper campaign.
You will not win every election by just plowing money into them, but you will win far more than you would if you wouldn't have plowed money into them. That's the problem.
You're barking up the wrong tree. This isn't about whether the constitution gives rights or removes rights. It is about what it means to the democratic process when someone in control of a corporation can marshal all the resources at their disposal to support or oppose a specific candidate. Their influence will be far greater than that of any individual, or even groups of individuals that organized on a political basis.
Imagine, for a second, the CEO of GE decides to screw his shareholders and board of directors, and to throw a billion dollars at the next campaign cycle. Yes, George Soros, Bill Gates and a few others can already do that. The difference is these people are individuals. The CEO of GE is a fungible position. Anybody (well, anybody with the right connections - see Carly Fiorina) can be CEO.
I would argue that one of the pre-eminent responsibilities of the government is to ensure that the process by which said government is established isn't subverted.
I can't speak about England, but your broad statement that this applies to all places with socialized health care is indeed nonsense. I lived in France for 18 years, and my parents subscribed to additional medical coverage. The doctors we had access to were nothing short of brilliant, and the cost was still less than in the US. I still can't find a dentist in the US who comes even close to the one I had in France, thanks to the additional coverage.
Please don't quote Wikipedia to support anything, you only demonstrate that you don't know what Wikipedia is.
Why on earth should a highly politicized healthcare system result in something better?
There aren't many places where a highly politicized system will come out ahead. In fact, Healthcare is one of the very areas where that's possible. Because while a political system may throw up political roadblocks to giving you healthcare, a for-profit system is incentivized to throw up as many roadblocks as possible. In other words, one system has a high probability of being a bureaucratic mess. The other system is guaranteed to evolve into one within a few quarterly reports.
This is exactly what I want for myself.
This exists already. There are a couple of providers that offer that. Just be prepared for some eye watering costs when you go to the doctor a few times. And just pray that you don't need a specialist. I can afford it because I make significantly more than the average American. If I would make what I did 8 years ago, that health plan wouldn't be a plan, it'd be a big, fat reason to only go to the emergency room if I can't take the pain, or don't want to cripple myself for life. Guess who actually ends up paying anyway? Correct, the tax payer in that state.
Here's the justification for hurting you by taxing you to support a public option: you're already paying for it, and private corporations will only get on board if regulation is so tight that it amounts to direct government control anyway. Might as well streamline the process and take out the middle man.
As for the current bills, I hear ya. They suck, uniformly. Lastly, public options can be structured in such a way that pay-outs to smokers are minimized. After all, it's already being done by regular insurances. The big advantage of the public option is that in theory, you and I get to have input on what constitutes a rip-off by voting for the politicians who will ultimately vote on the bills. That's in theory, of course.
What if they have two sources: one that costs money to read, and one that doesn't? How much extra trust does someone have to have in the news source to actually pay money to read the entire thing? In other words - how much would Fox News have to charge before a conservative reader decides that he's better off reading the NPR article?
I think we're going to have a very interesting shake-up coming in the world of news organizations. My belief is that if they stick to news as entertainment, they're going to be eaten alive by free, ad-supported blogs. Their only chance is in 60 Minutes style in-depth reporting on a topic. Note: this is not a comment on how trustworthy 60 minutes is, but merely on its format and marketing message.
Well, he learned from Hillary's attempts to change Healthcare. Remember HillaryCare? Where Hillary basically presented a full plan to Congress and said "pass this"? It didn't work, and one of the main problems that people had with it was that it was Hillary's plan, with no input from anyone. Not only did this leadership approach make passage of Hillary's plan more difficult, it also tarred her for years to come. Now, is Obama's plan better? It's hard to say. The political situation is very different, his official role is very different - the only thing that is certain is that we are closer to making a change to health care than we were with Hillary's approach. Then again - close only counts in horseshoe and grenades.
Finally, I would also argue that the public option IS the fight over more affordable health care. Here's why: insurance works by taking money from people who didn't need a payout and gives to those who do. The more people are in the pool, the less insurance companies have to charge to cover their expenses - if we assume that operational expenses per customer are less than the premium, and expected payout is the same for each customer. But of course, it isn't. The insurance companies make sure of that by screening people for existing conditions and denying coverage as strenuously as possible. As a result, the tendency is for insurance companies to remove as many sick or potentially sick people from their pool as legally possible. The logical conclusion of this? HSAs with catastrophic insurance and a limit on lifetime payout. That's not health insurance. That's a tax-deductible savings account, where the health care you have access to is directly tied to how much money you make. If you're healthy, health care is affordable. If you're sick, health care is expensive.
There is exactly one way out of this: everyone in the country pays into the same pool, and everyone withdraws from the same pool. The public option. If you're worried about cost, put restrictions on what kind of care the public option covers. Make that an open debate for society to answer. The rich can then turn to private insurance companies or HSAs to set money aside for fancier stuff.
But make no mistake: you will not see an overall increase in access to health care (which is what affordable health care is really about) without the public option. You either have free market insurance companies which provide access to health care based on how much money you have, or you regulate the market to the point where you have a public option in practice, if not in name.
Troll? Really? Someone from Rambus must have gotten mod points. As far as I can tell, Rambus just got one billion dollars from litigating a situation that arose because they sat on patents that they knew were going to be infringed by the new standards being developed. And they knew about the new standards being developed because they sat on the standards board. As for their products, they sucked. No one outside of stupidly rich people, or people with very specific needs who were willing to deal with the Rambus memory drawbacks, bought their crap.
To me, that's the definition of a patent troll: you failed in the market place because you sold an inferior product, but struck gold in litigation based on deceit.
You do realize it is bad form to either cite yourself for support, or to cite one party in a fight as an authoritative source? You managed to do both. Congratulations.
From the press release: "Rambus is one of the world's premier technology licensing companies." It seems to me that even they see themselves as a licensing company, not an R&D company. They did develop stuff in the past, but it doesn't look like they plan on doing much in the future.
I think my hatred and position on this matter can be summed up quite easily: I dislike pricefixers, but I really hate people who abuse the standards systems. And Rambus definitely abused the standards system - they sat on the JEDEC board, full well knowing that the standards being developed were going to infringe on their patents. It is unfortunate that there isn't any legal action that can be taken against them on this matter - I'd love to see them crash and burn for this.
The summary is wrong. The article states that there are two quotas at work for all movies: how long they are shown in theaters, and how many foreign movies are allowed to be shown over the course of a year. Avatar stayed on screen for the normal time-period in 2D theaters, and is allowed to exceed the normal runtime in 3D theaters. In other words, the Hong Kong daily made some assumptions about why Avatar didn't exceed the normal runtime for foreign movies. The assumptions might be correct, but are unsupported by anything uttered by officials so far.
You're confusing patent protection and copyright protection. Copyright protection protects any and all original works. Patents protect a novel way of doing something.
As such, patios (and buildings in general) can and have fallen under the protection of copyright law. As such, there isn't much of a leap from allowing heirs of artists to enjoy the fruits of copyright law to allowing the heirs of patio builders to enjoy the fruits of copyright law.
Yes, it's stupid and will be the downfall of the particular society that goes that route, but it doesn't mean some short-sighted idiots would argue for it.
You're confusing the state of IP during medieval times (roughly 900-1300) with that during the Renaissance (1300-1500). Heck, even the ancient Greeks and Romans had prolific writers. But don't let ignorance get in the way of your point.
Is no one else concerned bythe fact that the average speed DECLINED by 2.8%?? Seriously? I mean, I understand our speeds suck. I get it. But they're now declining???? Yes, yes, lotsa people have internet on their phones. Average those in, and speeds will drop. But shouldn't there be an offset by all those new amazing DOCSYS 3.0 and FIOS technologies? I guess not. US connection speeds suck, and these people are proud that they're getting worse. Fuckers.
Note the part "where results differ". Bing and Google return a significant number of the same sites in the same ranking. But what Bing adds is stuff I don't need. Google's specific results, on the other hand, help me.