Or just lower the QoS... routing data over satellite links instead of terrestrial ones, inserting lag or 'losing' packets.
There are many ways to make a service unusable without blocking it.
Making the service unusable is blocking it, according to the Report & Order, at para. 66:
We make clear that the no-blocking rule bars broadband providers from impairing or degrading particular content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices so as to render them effectively unusable (subject to reasonable network management). Such a prohibition is consistent with the observation of a number of commenters that degrading traffic can have the same effects as outright blocking, and that such an approach is consistent with the traditional interpretation of the Internet Policy Statement. The Commission has recognized that in some circumstances the distinction between blocking and degrading (such as by delaying) traffic is merely "semantic."
Wireless is a competitive market so carriers are permitted to do what they want with the presumption that if the customer doesn't like it they'll go to another vendor.
This is false in three ways:
First, the Open Internet Report and Order distinguishes between fixed and mobile broadband, not wireless and wireline; fixed includes many wireless services.
Second, mobile broadband providers are not "permitted to do what they want", there are several restrictions placed on them (there is a transparency rule, and and non-blocking rules applying to any lawful websites and to any applications which compete with the provider's voice and video telephony services.)
Third, and perhaps most critically to the point you are making, the FCC did not put looser restrictions on mobile broadband providers based on the market being competitive, but did so based on the market being less mature (see, e.g., Report & Order at para. 8: "Mobile broadband is at an earlier stage in its development than fixed broadband and is evolving rapidly. For that and other reasons discussed below, we conclude that it is appropriate at this time to take measured steps in this area.")
The FCC needs to grow some balls. I can't believe they put these rules through and harped about needing an open internet and then allowed the wireless providers to do whatever the hell they want.
They didn't.
First, the rules don't distinguish between wireline and wireless, they distinguish between fixed and mobile, which isn't the same thing. (See, e.g., 47 CFR Sec. 8.11(b), as added by the Report and Order, "Fixed broadband Internet access service. A broadband Internet access service that serves end users primarily at fixed endpoints using stationary equipment. Fixed broadband Internet access service includes fixed wireless services (including fixed unlicensed wireless services), and fixed satellite services.")
Secondly, they don't let mobile providers "do whatever they want", even though there are fewer rules for mobile broadband providers than for fixed broadband providers; not only are they generally prohibited from blocking access to competing voice and video applications, they are similarly prohibited from blocking access to lawful websites (47 CFR Sec. 8.5, added by the Report and Order, "A person engaged in the provision of mobile broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not block consumers from accessing lawful websites, subject to reasonable network management; nor shall such person block applications that compete with the provider's voice or video telephony services, subject to reasonable network management.")
The lawsuit (PDF), which was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, claims the rules are different for fixed line and mobile wireless broadband.
That's not a controversial claim, its a fact which is explicitly noted with a justification presented in the Report and Order.
(Report & Order, para. 8: "Mobile broadband is at an earlier stage in its development than fixed broadband and is evolving rapidly. For that and other reasons discussed below, we conclude that it is appropriate at this time to take measured steps in this area. Accordingly, we require mobile broadband providers to comply with the transparency rule, which includes enforceable disclosure obligations regarding device and application certification and approval processes; we prohibit providers from blocking lawful websites; and we prohibit providers from blocking applications that compete with providers' voice and video telephony services. We will closely monitor the development of the mobile broadband market and will adjust the framework we adopt today as appropriate.")
According to the rules, mobile wireless carriers are not allowed to block voice and other applications that compete with their own services, but other than that, they are free do to what they want.
On the other hand, that's not a fact, its a (demonstrably false) claim. Mobile broadband internet carriers are prohibited from blocking access to any: 1. lawful websites, subject to reasonable network management, and 2. voice or video applications that compete with the provider's voice and video telephony services, subject to reasonable network managements.
(Report & Order, Appendix A, provision added as 47 CFR Sec. 8.5: "[...] A person engaged in the provision of mobile broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not block consumers from accessing lawful websites, subject to reasonable network management; nor shall such person block applications that compete with the provider's voice or video telephony services, subject to reasonable network management.")
But a majority of scientists interviewed viewed both religion and science as "valid avenues of knowledge"
Here's a WTF moment.. While science converges to a view of how the world works (by observation, hypotheses and testing), religion just diverges and diverges.
Science only "converges" when you exclude everyone who purports to do science but is "doing it wrong".
If you do the same for any definition of the right way to approach religion, religion probably doesn't diverge either.
How can "revealed knowledge" even be called knowledge?
Because it has been tested and shown to provide value in some form for the person possessing it, pretty much the same way as the "knowledge" that sensory inputs have some relationship to an external reality can be called "knowledge".
What role does that leave God, though? How exactly would God have a hand in evolution?
To use an analogy that should be easy for Slashdotters to get: If I design and write a computer program and then, once I start it running don't do anything further to affect with the operation of the program, how exactly do I have a hand in the output of the program?
The problem with this way of seeing it is that if cause/effect works completely on scientific grounds and god doesn't interfere, then god becomes completely irrelevant and miracles don't happen.
If one has faith in a God existing outside of the universe of time and space who perceives the whole of the universe of time and space as if it was present before him even before/while he created that universe and defined the laws by which it operates, everything in that universe is part of one big miracle, whether or not the whole thing has an internal logic which can be discovered from within by empirical research.
The majority of SCIENTISTS do not have a problem with science and religion.
It is the RELIGIOUS people who have a problem with science. Because it contradicts their religion.
Plenty of scientists are religious people. And plenty of religious people, scientists or not, have no problem with science. Some religious people have problems with science (and some scientists have fundamental problems with religion -- e.g., Richard Dawkins), and those religious people fit well into a narrative that the media likes to portray, and suits the political interests a major faction has in treating many scientific findings as both "he said/she said" disputed factional claims and as threats to "traditional values", and consequentlythe conflict gets overplayed in the media.
Better would be "Predicted social media bubble fails to materialize". A bubble is defined by its inflation; a bubble that "pops" before it "inflates" never existed in the first place.
So what about Google+? Does the minor difference in features warrant changing off facebook? Probably not. Does it offer anything outstandingly new or innovative?
Video conferencing that comes with a platform for integrated applications, all tied into a social network (Hangouts with the Hangouts API.)
I would suggest that google plus does not necessarily have to beat facebook in terms of numbers in order to be a success. If you use the google search engine, gmail, or google maps, and have a google plus account, you'll get notifications about activity on google plus. Moreover, you are still a google user, and are sellable in terms of advertising.
More importantly, if Google can shift the field so that Facebook isn't the one-and-only social network, it wins even if Facebook still has more users. If its not a one-player market, integration through open protocols which Google can consume and integrate with search (something Google has been pushing in the social space long before it made a major push behind its own product, but which it hasn't been really successful with since there's little incentive where there is only one player that matters on the field) becomes more attractive.
(In many ways, this "win by keeping other products viable by preventing a monopoly in a market that would provide leverage against Google's interests" is what Google has sought to do with Android and the mobile phone -- and later tablet -- market, Chrome and the web browser market, and is beginning to do with Chrome OS and the not-so-mobile consumer OS market.)
But probably not in the way they wanted it to be. It was a success in making Facebook to improve their service. Facebook has now taken all the good things Google+ offered - including improving their games platform streams and just last week they added circles (and it goes both ways, Google+ also completely ripped off Facebook's look and feel)
Well, they've added some loosely similar features to G+'s. And, while I've been on G+ since it first became available for, well, geeky curiosity reasons, mostly, the most recent round of FB "improvements" combined with G+ going from limited preview to open beta resulted in many of the non-geeks in my Facebook network announcing they were moving to G+.
What's even more worrysome for Google, and not just for Google+ but their entire search engine usage and YouTube, is that this week Facebook will announce a huge upgrade [usatoday.com] with among others music and video services inside Facebook. This means less time spent on YouTube listening to music (yes, people actually do that, a lot) and more time spent on Facebook. When you're listening to music on Facebook, your friends also see what you listen to - a feature teens especially love. Google+ is missing these things entirely
No, Google (obviously) isn't missing video and music services inside the Google Accounts framework, nor are they completely missing social integration of those services through G+ (Facebook, for instance, has nothing paralleling the Hangouts/Youtube integration; then again, Facebook has nothing paralleling Hangouts, period.)
Now that Google opens up the beta it means they've lost the PR effect of being somewhat mysterious social network.
So what? Exclusivity is pretty much directly contrary to the point of Google+; its an unsustainable state. Any "mystery" from the limited preview was a side effect, the point was getting user feedback on core features and do some refinement and get a handle on scaling behavior before opening the doors to the whole world.
And frankly, it's quite dead there.
Any social network is quite dead when your the first of your friends to get on it.
Which is yet again another aspect that Google+ is missing - pages. And event planning, and countless amount of other features.
If you have a Google Account, you have event planning through GCalendar. True, its not integrated specifically into the + UI yet.
They had a good PR idea of keeping it mysterious in the beginning
That wasn't a PR idea. It was a side effect of Google's usual way of assuring scalability with large public web applications.
but I really wouldn't want to be the guy who decided it's a good idea to go compete against Facebook with an unfinished product.
1. Google doesn't really seem to believe in "finished" products, they are pretty much the prototype for the continuous-incremental-improvement model. The only time a product is finished is when its dead. 2. A social networking product isn't going to develop to a mature state without wide access, use, and feedback through use. Especially one that, while borrowing some existing UI elements, does things in a very different way rather than just me-tooing existing products.
Or ditch the "war on drugs" entirely... The illegal trade in drugs costs authorities billions, and fuels organised crime such as the drug cartels in mexico and other countries.
It costs taxpayers billions. It doesn't cost authorities anything -- in fact, often it rewards them, either directly in the case of outright corruption, or by providing a convenient excuse for liberty-destroying policies that aren't actually motivated by a need perceived by the authorities to deal with drugs, but merely justified by them (though, in the U.S., "terrorism" has displaced the war on drugs as the popular justification for such tactics in the last decade, often providing the excuse for authorities to assume powers that it they had failed to win on earlier attempts that used the drug war as the excuse.)
Yes and do you have any idea how many lives have been ruined by alcohol in the mean time?
Fewer, proportionally, than were ruined by alcohol and the alcohol trade and its effects during Prohibition.
The problem with prohibition was that nobody was following that law, for the most part not even the law enforcement being expected to enforce the law.
The problem with prohibition of alcohol was that there was sufficient demand for the product prohibited that its prohibition caused more harm by providing a high-value, easy-to-produce commodity that could not be legally supplied (and thus could only be supplied by criminals), thereby fueling massive organized crime syndicates.
It was not that "nobody was following the law"; plenty of people were following the law. There were plenty of businesses that didn't sell alcohol because it was illegal, and plenty of people that chose not to buy it because it was illegal. There were plenty who didn't, as well, just as with the present prohibition of selected drugs.
In this case, we're letting a minority group with little to no concern over the results of their actions undermine democracy because they feel they have the right to just ignore the law because it's inconvenient.
Uh, no, we're not. Arguing that we should choose, through the democratic process, an approach to controlling the ills associated with certain currently-prohibited drugs that would, based on past experience with another previously-prohibited drugs whose prohibition had undesirable effects very similar to those that are manifest with the currently-prohibited drugs at issue, produce better net results for society isn't letting anyone undermine democracy. (And, if it was, ending prohibition -- which had no such clear past referent -- would have been even moreso.)
There's little reason to believe that the other serious problems with drug abuse are going to go away just because the government bows to pressure and legalizes it.
There is certainly plenty of reason to believe that it will be much easier to address those problemsif, instead of public resources being directed to fight the manufacture, distribution, and sale of the currently-banned drugs, those resources are directed at dealing with the problems of drug abuse, and further additional resources are available because the destructive side-effects of the illegal drug trade which consume public resources are removed and the newly-legal drug trade becomes a legal, taxed part of the economy.
Much of the funding for public alcohol abuse treatment and prevention comes from alcohol users through special taxes collected on alcohol, while some law enforcement expenses caused by the prohibition of drugs is funded by drug users or sellers through civil forfeiture of property, its a very small share, and only addresses a small portion of the costs imposed by prohibition, and none of the costs associated with actually dealing with drug abuse itself.
I mean, that hasn't happened with alcohol, so I'm not sure why one would expect it to happen with drugs.
Sure, the problems of abuse haven't gone away with alcohol since the end of prohibition, but we've gotten much better at dealing with them since the government's efforts have been able to focus on the problems of abuse, rather than resources being sucked into the vast law enforcement problems created by prohibition itself.
The choices aren't between the problems "going away" and no effect whatsoever.
Give the TSA a break, they perform a necessary function. Sure there are bad apples, but they are there to keep you safe.
Whether or not that is what the government says the TSA is for or even what the TSA employees believe they are doing, people are quite within their rights to question whether they are actually doing that and, even if they are, if the value they provide in safety justifies the costs -- which aren't limited to just expenditure of taxpayer funds.
Isn't truth an absolute defense against allegations of libel/slander?
Actually, in the US, under the Supreme Court's free speech jurisprudence which restricts the actions for defamation, in a suit by a public official, falsity is a necessary element of the prima facie case for defamation rather than truth being a defense. So if the suit doesn't explicitly allege that the claims were false, the defendant ought to seek to have the case thrown out for failure to state a valid cause of action.
This doesn't mean that TSA employees are not people to.
People to what?
Oh, you meant "people, too". Yeah, they are.
And since someone is going to probably twist "they are just doing their jobs" into some ridiculous example of Godwin's Law, let's be clear: this is not the same thing as the Nuremberg defense. "I was just doing my job and following orders" has a very different meaning when one is being told to murder people than when someone is being told to do something to someone who knew what they were getting into and elected to go flying anyways.
Actually, no, it doesn't. Its not an excuse for the act in either case. You seem to be suggesting that attempting to fly when the TSA has adopted the procedures amounts to free consent (about which there can be a debate), but even if it were, the consent would be the (arguable) excusing factor, "just doing my job" would not be.
Sure, that would be more accurate, but make no mistake, these patents are Google's in every sense but the legal one.
There is no other sense other than the legal one.
Even if Google doesn't own them on paper any longer, Google is still using them to stage a proxy battle against Apple.
Not really. Apple is already in a war against the Android, which is owned by the Open Handset Alliance, of which both Google and HTC are members. Google isn't "staging" it, and its not a battle between Google and Apple, its a battle between Apple -- which wants to dominate the mobile OS market and extract monopoly rents from it -- and everyone in the Android ecosystem, who have a shared interest in commoditizing mobile OS's so as to preserve their ability to derive revenue from lines of business which would be marginalized if anyone monopolized the mobile OS market.
Lots of people want to make this a simple Apple vs. Google story, but Apple's relation to iOS and the various i-devices isn't parallel to Google's relationship to Android (for which Google is the primary developer, but not the owner) and is even less parallel to Google's relationship to Android devices. HTC is more of a direct competitor with Apple in the mobile market than Google is.
If someone has a data plan for $30 that is used to get data from the internet, from your computer via wifi(or tethering)..etc etc....how in the hell is this different than a text message...
It isn't fundamentally, from a user-experience perspective, for smartphones: in fact, if you have a smartphone, there's any number of apps and services that will let you use the data connection to send and receive text messages for free [including sending to and receiving from people who have only SMS service on their devices], e.g., Google Voice.
I'm very surprised that Google would spend so much money on defensive patents for Android. Android can't be generating that much revenue, can it?
Yes, it can, even if not directly. Consider how important the mobile environment is and the disadvantages Google's profit-making operations aside from Android would be if the mobile space was a virtual iOS monopoly. Google needs Android to stop someone else (the short-term threat would be Apple) monopolizing the mobile space and being able to charge rents to online service providers that want to reach mobile, like Google. It also is, much like Chrome is in the desktop browser space, a lever to move the mobile market, including offerings from other vendors, in a direction that better supports Google's online services (both current and what they'd like to provide in the future.)
The bright side is that the people who innovated to make the patents are being compensated for their efforts.
Are they, now? Please show me a list of wealthy inventors, and not just wealthy patent holders.
GP said "the people who innovated to make the patents". That's the clever patent attorneys who made new and clever arguments as to why the invention was worthy of a patent, right? So he should be pointing you to a list of wealthy patent attorneys, not wealthy inventors.
Grinding in RPGs does suck, but it's a result of the genre. It's replicating the feel of tabletop RPGs where you need to make gain experience and make your characters stronger before you can beat the more challenging enemies.
One might note that that's a feature that has progressively been less common in TRPGs, for much the same reasont that it sucks in CRPGs, even though TRPGs (with a good GM) have a much greater ability to mitigate the feel of boring-repetitive-grind when they do use that structure than CRPGs have.
Slashdot Mirror
Making the service unusable is blocking it, according to the Report & Order, at para. 66:
This appears to be allowed, although the transparency rule requires them to disclose exactly what they are doing in this regard and why.
This is false in three ways:
First, the Open Internet Report and Order distinguishes between fixed and mobile broadband, not wireless and wireline; fixed includes many wireless services.
Second, mobile broadband providers are not "permitted to do what they want", there are several restrictions placed on them (there is a transparency rule, and and non-blocking rules applying to any lawful websites and to any applications which compete with the provider's voice and video telephony services.)
Third, and perhaps most critically to the point you are making, the FCC did not put looser restrictions on mobile broadband providers based on the market being competitive, but did so based on the market being less mature (see, e.g., Report & Order at para. 8: "Mobile broadband is at an earlier stage in its development than fixed broadband and is evolving rapidly. For that and other reasons discussed below, we conclude that it is appropriate at this time to take measured steps in this area.")
They didn't.
First, the rules don't distinguish between wireline and wireless, they distinguish between fixed and mobile, which isn't the same thing. (See, e.g., 47 CFR Sec. 8.11(b), as added by the Report and Order, "Fixed broadband Internet access service. A broadband Internet access service that serves end users primarily at fixed endpoints using stationary equipment. Fixed broadband Internet access service includes fixed wireless services (including fixed unlicensed wireless services), and fixed satellite services.")
Secondly, they don't let mobile providers "do whatever they want", even though there are fewer rules for mobile broadband providers than for fixed broadband providers; not only are they generally prohibited from blocking access to competing voice and video applications, they are similarly prohibited from blocking access to lawful websites (47 CFR Sec. 8.5, added by the Report and Order, "A person engaged in the provision of mobile broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not block consumers from accessing lawful websites, subject to reasonable network management; nor shall such person block applications that compete with the provider's voice or video telephony services, subject to reasonable network management.")
That's not a controversial claim, its a fact which is explicitly noted with a justification presented in the Report and Order.
(Report & Order, para. 8: "Mobile broadband is at an earlier stage in its development than fixed broadband and is evolving rapidly. For that and other reasons discussed below, we conclude that it is appropriate at this time to take measured steps in this area. Accordingly, we require mobile broadband providers to comply with the transparency rule, which includes enforceable disclosure obligations regarding device and application certification and approval processes; we prohibit providers from blocking lawful websites; and we prohibit providers from blocking applications that compete with providers' voice and video telephony services. We will closely monitor the development of the mobile broadband market and will adjust the framework we adopt today as appropriate.")
On the other hand, that's not a fact, its a (demonstrably false) claim. Mobile broadband internet carriers are prohibited from blocking access to any:
1. lawful websites, subject to reasonable network management, and
2. voice or video applications that compete with the provider's voice and video telephony services, subject to reasonable network managements.
(Report & Order, Appendix A, provision added as 47 CFR Sec. 8.5: "[...] A person engaged in the provision of mobile broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not block consumers from accessing lawful websites, subject to reasonable network management; nor shall such person block applications that compete with the provider's voice or video telephony services, subject to reasonable network management.")
Science only "converges" when you exclude everyone who purports to do science but is "doing it wrong".
If you do the same for any definition of the right way to approach religion, religion probably doesn't diverge either.
Because it has been tested and shown to provide value in some form for the person possessing it, pretty much the same way as the "knowledge" that sensory inputs have some relationship to an external reality can be called "knowledge".
To use an analogy that should be easy for Slashdotters to get: If I design and write a computer program and then, once I start it running don't do anything further to affect with the operation of the program, how exactly do I have a hand in the output of the program?
If one has faith in a God existing outside of the universe of time and space who perceives the whole of the universe of time and space as if it was present before him even before/while he created that universe and defined the laws by which it operates, everything in that universe is part of one big miracle, whether or not the whole thing has an internal logic which can be discovered from within by empirical research.
Plenty of scientists are religious people. And plenty of religious people, scientists or not, have no problem with science. Some religious people have problems with science (and some scientists have fundamental problems with religion -- e.g., Richard Dawkins), and those religious people fit well into a narrative that the media likes to portray, and suits the political interests a major faction has in treating many scientific findings as both "he said/she said" disputed factional claims and as threats to "traditional values", and consequentlythe conflict gets overplayed in the media.
Better would be "Predicted social media bubble fails to materialize". A bubble is defined by its inflation; a bubble that "pops" before it "inflates" never existed in the first place.
Video conferencing that comes with a platform for integrated applications, all tied into a social network (Hangouts with the Hangouts API.)
False. You can join Google+ if you have a Google Apps for Domains (paid-for or not) account.
You can't join Google+ using a Google Apps for Domains account, which is completely different than what you said.
More importantly, if Google can shift the field so that Facebook isn't the one-and-only social network, it wins even if Facebook still has more users. If its not a one-player market, integration through open protocols which Google can consume and integrate with search (something Google has been pushing in the social space long before it made a major push behind its own product, but which it hasn't been really successful with since there's little incentive where there is only one player that matters on the field) becomes more attractive.
(In many ways, this "win by keeping other products viable by preventing a monopoly in a market that would provide leverage against Google's interests" is what Google has sought to do with Android and the mobile phone -- and later tablet -- market, Chrome and the web browser market, and is beginning to do with Chrome OS and the not-so-mobile consumer OS market.)
Well, they've added some loosely similar features to G+'s. And, while I've been on G+ since it first became available for, well, geeky curiosity reasons, mostly, the most recent round of FB "improvements" combined with G+ going from limited preview to open beta resulted in many of the non-geeks in my Facebook network announcing they were moving to G+.
No, Google (obviously) isn't missing video and music services inside the Google Accounts framework, nor are they completely missing social integration of those services through G+ (Facebook, for instance, has nothing paralleling the Hangouts/Youtube integration; then again, Facebook has nothing paralleling Hangouts, period.)
So what? Exclusivity is pretty much directly contrary to the point of Google+; its an unsustainable state. Any "mystery" from the limited preview was a side effect, the point was getting user feedback on core features and do some refinement and get a handle on scaling behavior before opening the doors to the whole world.
Any social network is quite dead when your the first of your friends to get on it.
If you have a Google Account, you have event planning through GCalendar. True, its not integrated specifically into the + UI yet.
That wasn't a PR idea. It was a side effect of Google's usual way of assuring scalability with large public web applications.
1. Google doesn't really seem to believe in "finished" products, they are pretty much the prototype for the continuous-incremental-improvement model. The only time a product is finished is when its dead.
2. A social networking product isn't going to develop to a mature state without wide access, use, and feedback through use. Especially one that, while borrowing some existing UI elements, does things in a very different way rather than just me-tooing existing products.
It costs taxpayers billions. It doesn't cost authorities anything -- in fact, often it rewards them, either directly in the case of outright corruption, or by providing a convenient excuse for liberty-destroying policies that aren't actually motivated by a need perceived by the authorities to deal with drugs, but merely justified by them (though, in the U.S., "terrorism" has displaced the war on drugs as the popular justification for such tactics in the last decade, often providing the excuse for authorities to assume powers that it they had failed to win on earlier attempts that used the drug war as the excuse.)
Fewer, proportionally, than were ruined by alcohol and the alcohol trade and its effects during Prohibition.
The problem with prohibition of alcohol was that there was sufficient demand for the product prohibited that its prohibition caused more harm by providing a high-value, easy-to-produce commodity that could not be legally supplied (and thus could only be supplied by criminals), thereby fueling massive organized crime syndicates.
It was not that "nobody was following the law"; plenty of people were following the law. There were plenty of businesses that didn't sell alcohol because it was illegal, and plenty of people that chose not to buy it because it was illegal. There were plenty who didn't, as well, just as with the present prohibition of selected drugs.
Uh, no, we're not. Arguing that we should choose, through the democratic process, an approach to controlling the ills associated with certain currently-prohibited drugs that would, based on past experience with another previously-prohibited drugs whose prohibition had undesirable effects very similar to those that are manifest with the currently-prohibited drugs at issue, produce better net results for society isn't letting anyone undermine democracy. (And, if it was, ending prohibition -- which had no such clear past referent -- would have been even moreso.)
There is certainly plenty of reason to believe that it will be much easier to address those problemsif, instead of public resources being directed to fight the manufacture, distribution, and sale of the currently-banned drugs, those resources are directed at dealing with the problems of drug abuse, and further additional resources are available because the destructive side-effects of the illegal drug trade which consume public resources are removed and the newly-legal drug trade becomes a legal, taxed part of the economy.
Much of the funding for public alcohol abuse treatment and prevention comes from alcohol users through special taxes collected on alcohol, while some law enforcement expenses caused by the prohibition of drugs is funded by drug users or sellers through civil forfeiture of property, its a very small share, and only addresses a small portion of the costs imposed by prohibition, and none of the costs associated with actually dealing with drug abuse itself.
Sure, the problems of abuse haven't gone away with alcohol since the end of prohibition, but we've gotten much better at dealing with them since the government's efforts have been able to focus on the problems of abuse, rather than resources being sucked into the vast law enforcement problems created by prohibition itself.
The choices aren't between the problems "going away" and no effect whatsoever.
Whether or not that is what the government says the TSA is for or even what the TSA employees believe they are doing, people are quite within their rights to question whether they are actually doing that and, even if they are, if the value they provide in safety justifies the costs -- which aren't limited to just expenditure of taxpayer funds.
Actually, in the US, under the Supreme Court's free speech jurisprudence which restricts the actions for defamation, in a suit by a public official, falsity is a necessary element of the prima facie case for defamation rather than truth being a defense. So if the suit doesn't explicitly allege that the claims were false, the defendant ought to seek to have the case thrown out for failure to state a valid cause of action.
People to what?
Oh, you meant "people, too". Yeah, they are.
Actually, no, it doesn't. Its not an excuse for the act in either case. You seem to be suggesting that attempting to fly when the TSA has adopted the procedures amounts to free consent (about which there can be a debate), but even if it were, the consent would be the (arguable) excusing factor, "just doing my job" would not be.
Its usually criminal, though usually as some other form of sexual assault and not rape, per se.
To use the law of one particular jurisdiction as an example, see Section 289 of the California Penal Code.
There is no other sense other than the legal one.
Not really. Apple is already in a war against the Android, which is owned by the Open Handset Alliance, of which both Google and HTC are members. Google isn't "staging" it, and its not a battle between Google and Apple, its a battle between Apple -- which wants to dominate the mobile OS market and extract monopoly rents from it -- and everyone in the Android ecosystem, who have a shared interest in commoditizing mobile OS's so as to preserve their ability to derive revenue from lines of business which would be marginalized if anyone monopolized the mobile OS market.
Lots of people want to make this a simple Apple vs. Google story, but Apple's relation to iOS and the various i-devices isn't parallel to Google's relationship to Android (for which Google is the primary developer, but not the owner) and is even less parallel to Google's relationship to Android devices. HTC is more of a direct competitor with Apple in the mobile market than Google is.
It isn't fundamentally, from a user-experience perspective, for smartphones: in fact, if you have a smartphone, there's any number of apps and services that will let you use the data connection to send and receive text messages for free [including sending to and receiving from people who have only SMS service on their devices], e.g., Google Voice.
Yes, it can, even if not directly. Consider how important the mobile environment is and the disadvantages Google's profit-making operations aside from Android would be if the mobile space was a virtual iOS monopoly. Google needs Android to stop someone else (the short-term threat would be Apple) monopolizing the mobile space and being able to charge rents to online service providers that want to reach mobile, like Google. It also is, much like Chrome is in the desktop browser space, a lever to move the mobile market, including offerings from other vendors, in a direction that better supports Google's online services (both current and what they'd like to provide in the future.)
GP said "the people who innovated to make the patents". That's the clever patent attorneys who made new and clever arguments as to why the invention was worthy of a patent, right? So he should be pointing you to a list of wealthy patent attorneys, not wealthy inventors.
One might note that that's a feature that has progressively been less common in TRPGs, for much the same reasont that it sucks in CRPGs, even though TRPGs (with a good GM) have a much greater ability to mitigate the feel of boring-repetitive-grind when they do use that structure than CRPGs have.