I honestly would not put it past the copyright lobbyists to use this in their propaganda. You know, portraying someone who pirates copyrighted media as lonely, depressed, and hounded by the federal government until they kill themselves.
I spend more time in the web browser of computing devices than anything else. I don't think I'm unusual
You are unusual if you are talking about a smartphone. If people have a choice between an app and a website, they choose the app -- at the very least, it involves one less tap. Remember when we used to talk about having fewer clicks, and complained about websites that required two or three more clicks to get to the things we wanted?
corporations are just a bunch of people
A bunch of people whose operations are done using money borrowed from other people who want to see a return on their investment. A corporation cannot let values or anything other than a nation's laws supersede its profit motive without the consent of its investors, and it is naive to think that Apple's investors care about anything other than the return on their investment.
Let's put it this way: Steve Jobs admitted that the tantalum used in iPhones probably could be traced to Congo, where teenage soldiers are being ordered to rape women as a military tactic in a conflict that is fueled by minerals. Did Apple take some grand moral stance and spend money on either ending the conflict or finding alternative materials? No, Apple simply said that tantalum is needed to make iPhones and that they could not do anything about the conflict (despite being a corporation with enough capital that it could buy the entire region).
the complex reality and explanatory power of other motivations and causes
I call BS on that one. The only complication is in how corporations choose and exploit their markets, not in the purpose of their existence or of their ultimate goal. Apple is not creating computers out the goodness of their hearts. Apple did not sue journalists out of some moral obligation. Apple did not go after hackintosh makers for any sort of greater good. When Apple gives to charity, do they do so quietly, or do them make sure lots of cameras are around so that everyone knows about their service to the world (when/if you give to charity, do you then go around telling everyone about it?)?
It is kind of like saying that there is a complex reality to an army at war. Sure, different armies do things differently, and they are fighting for different reasons, but at the end of the day an army has a goal when it fights and that goal takes priority. Corporations are not all that different from a military operation: the people who work for them are trained to think they are doing something important, they are trained to think that they have an ethical obligation to follow orders, and at the top level there are people who direct operations to achieve the goal.
Apple and other technology companies that have been hugely shaped by one person
Apple was led to an overwhelming success by one ruthless person. Steve Jobs was not on some moral or ethical quest; he wanted to lead Apple to a great business success, and was willing to do whatever it took to make that happen. He berated employees if they were not perfect. He directed the company to patent everything, so that they could never be sued without having some counter-suit ready. He directed the company to go after anyone who stood in the way of the company's profits. It is as if he read Ender's Game and thought, "I bet Apple would be the most successful company in human history if someone like Ender Wiggin were to run it..."
Which of Apple's or Jobs' actions leads you to think otherwise? Frankly, which of the technology companies that was driven to success by one person suggests a different story? Facebook has yet to work on any sort of interoperability with any other system, and is increasingly aggressive about profiting from its userbase. Google does not stop short of doing business in countries where they are required to be evil. Oracle is as typical of a corporation as possible. Do I even need to mention Microsoft?
If by "forced," you mean "they were desperate for money but nobody would lend to them," then you would be right. AIG could have tried to issue some corporate bonds, but would you have been willing to buy them? Would you have purchased preferred stock? Would you have loaned them a single penny when they were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy?
If the shareholders think the deal was bad, they should sue the executives who agreed to it. Of course, they all know that the only remaining alternative was to declare bankruptcy, so what this really is about is a greedy attempt to get even more money.
There is a powerful platform that runs on every iOS device, and is not censored by Apple in any way: the web.
Except that mobile apps are much more likely to reach people than the web. Mobile apps require the user to do fewer things and can better take advantage of the client's hardware. Telling developers to just write web apps is telling them to wait in line while the VIPs get to just walk past.
liberal values
What liberal values? Apple has no liberal values, they are just like any other large corporation: money first, values never.
We don't need to do that; we still have laws, and we can still pass laws that rein in corporations. Not that the Democrats or Republicans are likely to do such a thing.
Now, if after passing such laws, the corporations continue their abuses, then we can talk about armed revolts.
If you are wondering why Fedora will provide information on its website about RPMFusion but not Livna (where libdvdcss packages are), you have your answer: it is illegal to even publish that information in the United States. So much for the first amendment, so much for freedom of speech.
Apple refused to allow political cartoon apps in the App Store, even in countries where such software is entirely legal. Apple has a history of bricking jailbroken iPhones. Apple sues reporters, sues hackers who figure out how to run Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware, and tries to exert the most extreme control possible over their customers' use of their products.
Meanwhile, Google allows you to use their search engine to find pornography, to find information on how to block Google's own advertisements, to find information on how to hack software released by Google to do things Google never intended, and so forth. Are they perfect? No, but did we really expect them to be? Frankly, Google has gone beyond what I would expect of a modern corporation in terms of user freedom.
So I guess what really matters is not whether or not people are being killed, but whether or not Apple's customers are being reminded of that killing on a daily basis.
the diagnosed rate of ADHD has been rising steeply
Yeah, but that is poorly controlled and does not really say much. It is equally possible that people have discovered that ADHD medications can give them a competitive edge in cognitive tasks, and are simply working harder to convince doctors to prescribe such medications for them or their children. For many doctors, coming into the office, staring out the window, and talking about how hard it is to focus on your schoolwork will be sufficient to get a prescription for Adderall or Ritalin.
It is still being debated amongst psychiatrists if the rise in ADHD diagnoses has to do with an actual rise in ADHD occurrence, or if it is because we are better at identifying the problem, or if it is just over-zealous prescription. I suspect that it is a combination of the latter two, but the data is still being collected.
On the other hand, it is hard to dispute measurements of the murder rate: regardless of whether or not murderers are being caught, either people are being murdered or people are not being murdered. Coupled with the fact that the murder rate not only follows the lead exposure curve nationally, but also follows it on a state by state basis (some states phased tetraethyl lead out more slowly than others), it is pretty hard to say that lead is not in some way related to violent crime, and is likely a causal factor.
In fact, fair use can include the reproduction of an entire copyrighted work. That is why judges decide these things; there is no hard-and-fast definition.
Had people simply refused to fly as long as the TSA continued to exist, the expansion would have ended. People kept flying, even when they could have taken a train or bus, and so the TSA never felt the heat, and eventually grew larger. People will not boycott sports events either, nor will they refuse to drive when the TSA starts creating highway checkpoints, nor will they refuse to go to malls when the checkpoints come there.
Boil the frog slowly is how the major parties operate; the major parties consist of politicians either too corrupt to stop or too inept to even realize what they are doing.
Talk about a slanted description. He set up video cameras and microphones in a theater. That is not wiretapping, that is copyright infringement in the worst case.
breaking and entering
Nobody is accused of that.
intellectual property
Propaganda term.
criminal theft
No such thing happened here.
he set up PayPal accounts
So?
accept payment for IMAGINE's releases
Did a judge decide that IMAGiNE was not engaged in fair use? See, long before our copyright system was hijacked and turned into a weapon aimed at the Internet, we relied on judges to decide if an act of copying was legal or not. You know, back when copyrights were meant to encourage industries that helped bring knowledge and entertainment to the masses, which is the only thing copyright was ever meant to do.
Why should he feel free to profit off the expenses paid by the movie theater for retail space, electricity, equipment, and movie fees?
Maybe because the movie theater is profiting from the work of the MPAA, which profited from the work of the artists who created the movie? What makes one of these enterprises more legitimate than another? He used technology in a way that allowed him to bring entertainment to people at much lower prices than movie theaters can.
even if the theater still has the item that is claimed to have been stolen, the defendant is stealing his for-profit content from the movie theater.
You must have spent a long time rewiring your brain to think that makes any sense.
One gets to set the price on the products one labors to produce
Since when? Oh, right, never, because someone has to be willing to pay the price you demand; the whole idea in capitalism is that no single person or entity gets to decide these things. The movie industry gets to inflate its prices because the government gives them assistance, and apparently that assistance now includes the use of prisons (which are supposed to exist to keep us safe from dangerous people, not to keep obsolete business models alive).
Copyright makes no sense in an age where people have the methods and apparatus needed to distribute information on a global scale in their house. Throwing people in prison for it does not change the simple reality that copyright is hopelessly dated and is in desperate need of reform (or simple elimination).
Invoices that you had to dial in to an online service to receive
Invoices with EBCIDIC encoding
Invoices sent as MS Word formatted files
Fly-by-night startup of the month's proprietary invoice system, that places contextual ads in your invoices
So really, be glad that the worst of your problems is that one company uses PDF, another encrypts the PDF, another encrypts the email, and another makes you go to a website on the Internet. We could live in a much worse world.
I have seen restaurants that send receipts via email, and have an entirely paperless payment system -- and as an added bonus, the Android device that is being used in lieu of paper will divide your bill in whatever arbitrary way you want. There are a lot more computers today than there were 50 years ago, and a much more robust communications infrastructure for those computers.
It will be a while before paperless business is common, but eventually it is going to happen. Printing things costs money, and a lot of businesses have computers that are underutilized (like cash registers); eventually, saving money will begin to outweigh the resistance to change.
Sure, but do we really need printed invoices in this day and age? Send the customer a digitally signed invoice by email (encrypted if the invoice should remain private), and save paper and ink. While you're at it, look into ways of reducing IT electrical costs.
I don't consider an alcoholic who can't ever drink again to be "cured" in any way, shape or form
That there are two categories of people -- those who abuse and become dependent on alcohol, and those who do not -- is itself a myth that has become widely accepted because of twelve step programs. There are some people who are simply never able to maintain the self control needed to drink responsibly; there are others who can develop that self control with the assistance of a psychologist; and there are some for whom alcohol abuse and even dependence is temporary and who overcome it on their own. The twelve-step philosophy begins by excluding everything except the first group, but tells people who are in the second and third groups that they, in fact, are unable to develop any self control. That is one of the reasons twelve step programs are so unsuccessful: they start by ruling out any possibility of a person actually changing for the better.
Yet every "recovered" alcoholic I speak to tells me they must abstain from any alcoholic drinks, forever
Then you have not met people who abused alcohol in college, then grew up and stopped abusing alcohol. I knew someone in college who used to get drunk every day, who was skipping his classes and generally headed down the wrong path; then he became interested in joining the NYPD after school, and found that he was indeed capable of having one beer in a night and that a bottle of whisky did not have to completely consumed in one sitting. Keep in mind that drinking to the point of neglecting responsibilities meets the clinical definition of alcohol abuse; yet that same person stopped abusing alcohol on his own. In AA terminology, he is a "dry drunk" -- in other words, despite the fact that he is not abusing alcohol anymore, despite the fact that he cleaned up his act and is living a healthy life, he is still not "recovered" according to the twelve steps (should you point out this obvious logical fallacy, you might be told that he was never really an alcoholic at all, despite meeting the clinical definition of alcohol abuse).
The (lack of) logic of such a "cure" is mind boggling to me.
Well, what else would you call it if a person once had a condition that negatively affected their life, and does not have that condition today? If a cancer is in remission for five years without any medical treatment, we call it a cure. If a person once abused alcohol but has since stopped, and is able to not abuse alcohol without having their hands constantly held, how is that person not cured?
A recovered addict, to me, is someone who can enjoy life just like anyone else, simply not having the obsession about alcohol, drugs, or what the heck ever.
I think you are looking at the problem the wrong way. It is not a problem for a person to lack the discipline needed to drink in moderation; the problem is when a person who lacks that discipline decides to start drinking, even though they know they will be unable to stop themselves. One does not need to drink alcohol to enjoy life. Let's put it this way: I know a rabbi who has an allergic reaction to alcohol, so he drinks grape juice instead of wine for religious ceremonies (and he is just as happy during festive holidays as all the people around him who can drink).
Again, the definition of substance abuse is a pattern of behavior where someone uses a substance in a way that is dangerous or to the point where they are neglecting their responsibilities (e.g. their job, their family, etc.). If the only way for a person to not abuse alcohol is to not drink at all, then that person is cured by not drinking at all. That is a fairly extreme case, of course; most people can learn to use alcohol in moderation and to develop habits that ensure they do not abuse alcohol (in the case of my friend in college, he simply needed a clear goal in life). If a person stops abus
Here's the problem: the law only allows relatively narrow bands for unlicensed use (courtesy of the ITU), and so getting "more channels" is not easy to do. You could mandate that the standard operate on more bands -- 900MHz, 24GHz, 60GHz, etc. -- but that will drive up the cost of the equipment.
Or you purchase repeaters (cheaper) or you purchase higher-gain antennas (even cheaper, but will probably only improve coverage on one floor), or you illegally plug your AP into a linear amplifier and hope the FCC never comes for you (and it is unlikely they will). I know someone who uses a repeater in his house; it is not all that uncommon nor is it difficult.
Well, if praying to deities (or doorknobs, or trees, or to the group itself) helped your family members overcome their character defects, great! On the other hand, the fact that the 12 steps begin by telling people they have no hope of self control is probably the reason 12 step programs are amongst the least successful approaches to substance abuse treatment.
Slashdot Mirror
I honestly would not put it past the copyright lobbyists to use this in their propaganda. You know, portraying someone who pirates copyrighted media as lonely, depressed, and hounded by the federal government until they kill themselves.
I spend more time in the web browser of computing devices than anything else. I don't think I'm unusual
You are unusual if you are talking about a smartphone. If people have a choice between an app and a website, they choose the app -- at the very least, it involves one less tap. Remember when we used to talk about having fewer clicks, and complained about websites that required two or three more clicks to get to the things we wanted?
corporations are just a bunch of people
A bunch of people whose operations are done using money borrowed from other people who want to see a return on their investment. A corporation cannot let values or anything other than a nation's laws supersede its profit motive without the consent of its investors, and it is naive to think that Apple's investors care about anything other than the return on their investment.
Let's put it this way: Steve Jobs admitted that the tantalum used in iPhones probably could be traced to Congo, where teenage soldiers are being ordered to rape women as a military tactic in a conflict that is fueled by minerals. Did Apple take some grand moral stance and spend money on either ending the conflict or finding alternative materials? No, Apple simply said that tantalum is needed to make iPhones and that they could not do anything about the conflict (despite being a corporation with enough capital that it could buy the entire region).
the complex reality and explanatory power of other motivations and causes
I call BS on that one. The only complication is in how corporations choose and exploit their markets, not in the purpose of their existence or of their ultimate goal. Apple is not creating computers out the goodness of their hearts. Apple did not sue journalists out of some moral obligation. Apple did not go after hackintosh makers for any sort of greater good. When Apple gives to charity, do they do so quietly, or do them make sure lots of cameras are around so that everyone knows about their service to the world (when/if you give to charity, do you then go around telling everyone about it?)?
It is kind of like saying that there is a complex reality to an army at war. Sure, different armies do things differently, and they are fighting for different reasons, but at the end of the day an army has a goal when it fights and that goal takes priority. Corporations are not all that different from a military operation: the people who work for them are trained to think they are doing something important, they are trained to think that they have an ethical obligation to follow orders, and at the top level there are people who direct operations to achieve the goal.
Apple and other technology companies that have been hugely shaped by one person
Apple was led to an overwhelming success by one ruthless person. Steve Jobs was not on some moral or ethical quest; he wanted to lead Apple to a great business success, and was willing to do whatever it took to make that happen. He berated employees if they were not perfect. He directed the company to patent everything, so that they could never be sued without having some counter-suit ready. He directed the company to go after anyone who stood in the way of the company's profits. It is as if he read Ender's Game and thought, "I bet Apple would be the most successful company in human history if someone like Ender Wiggin were to run it..."
Which of Apple's or Jobs' actions leads you to think otherwise? Frankly, which of the technology companies that was driven to success by one person suggests a different story? Facebook has yet to work on any sort of interoperability with any other system, and is increasingly aggressive about profiting from its userbase. Google does not stop short of doing business in countries where they are required to be evil. Oracle is as typical of a corporation as possible. Do I even need to mention Microsoft?
If by "forced," you mean "they were desperate for money but nobody would lend to them," then you would be right. AIG could have tried to issue some corporate bonds, but would you have been willing to buy them? Would you have purchased preferred stock? Would you have loaned them a single penny when they were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy?
If the shareholders think the deal was bad, they should sue the executives who agreed to it. Of course, they all know that the only remaining alternative was to declare bankruptcy, so what this really is about is a greedy attempt to get even more money.
There is a powerful platform that runs on every iOS device, and is not censored by Apple in any way: the web.
Except that mobile apps are much more likely to reach people than the web. Mobile apps require the user to do fewer things and can better take advantage of the client's hardware. Telling developers to just write web apps is telling them to wait in line while the VIPs get to just walk past.
liberal values
What liberal values? Apple has no liberal values, they are just like any other large corporation: money first, values never.
We don't need to do that; we still have laws, and we can still pass laws that rein in corporations. Not that the Democrats or Republicans are likely to do such a thing.
Now, if after passing such laws, the corporations continue their abuses, then we can talk about armed revolts.
Congress is not preventing the dissemination of the information
Really? Then, what happened here, when 2600 magazine was prosecuted for publishing links to deCSS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_v._Reimerdes
If you are wondering why Fedora will provide information on its website about RPMFusion but not Livna (where libdvdcss packages are), you have your answer: it is illegal to even publish that information in the United States. So much for the first amendment, so much for freedom of speech.
Apple refused to allow political cartoon apps in the App Store, even in countries where such software is entirely legal. Apple has a history of bricking jailbroken iPhones. Apple sues reporters, sues hackers who figure out how to run Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware, and tries to exert the most extreme control possible over their customers' use of their products.
Meanwhile, Google allows you to use their search engine to find pornography, to find information on how to block Google's own advertisements, to find information on how to hack software released by Google to do things Google never intended, and so forth. Are they perfect? No, but did we really expect them to be? Frankly, Google has gone beyond what I would expect of a modern corporation in terms of user freedom.
Can you show how those developers needed Apple to make that money i.e. that they would not have made that much without Apple's restrictive ecosystem?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_minerals
So I guess what really matters is not whether or not people are being killed, but whether or not Apple's customers are being reminded of that killing on a daily basis.
the diagnosed rate of ADHD has been rising steeply
Yeah, but that is poorly controlled and does not really say much. It is equally possible that people have discovered that ADHD medications can give them a competitive edge in cognitive tasks, and are simply working harder to convince doctors to prescribe such medications for them or their children. For many doctors, coming into the office, staring out the window, and talking about how hard it is to focus on your schoolwork will be sufficient to get a prescription for Adderall or Ritalin.
It is still being debated amongst psychiatrists if the rise in ADHD diagnoses has to do with an actual rise in ADHD occurrence, or if it is because we are better at identifying the problem, or if it is just over-zealous prescription. I suspect that it is a combination of the latter two, but the data is still being collected.
On the other hand, it is hard to dispute measurements of the murder rate: regardless of whether or not murderers are being caught, either people are being murdered or people are not being murdered. Coupled with the fact that the murder rate not only follows the lead exposure curve nationally, but also follows it on a state by state basis (some states phased tetraethyl lead out more slowly than others), it is pretty hard to say that lead is not in some way related to violent crime, and is likely a causal factor.
In fact, fair use can include the reproduction of an entire copyrighted work. That is why judges decide these things; there is no hard-and-fast definition.
Had people simply refused to fly as long as the TSA continued to exist, the expansion would have ended. People kept flying, even when they could have taken a train or bus, and so the TSA never felt the heat, and eventually grew larger. People will not boycott sports events either, nor will they refuse to drive when the TSA starts creating highway checkpoints, nor will they refuse to go to malls when the checkpoints come there.
Boil the frog slowly is how the major parties operate; the major parties consist of politicians either too corrupt to stop or too inept to even realize what they are doing.
breaking and entering
Nobody is accused of that.
intellectual property
Propaganda term.
criminal theft
No such thing happened here.
he set up PayPal accounts
So?
accept payment for IMAGINE's releases
Did a judge decide that IMAGiNE was not engaged in fair use? See, long before our copyright system was hijacked and turned into a weapon aimed at the Internet, we relied on judges to decide if an act of copying was legal or not. You know, back when copyrights were meant to encourage industries that helped bring knowledge and entertainment to the masses, which is the only thing copyright was ever meant to do.
Why should he feel free to profit off the expenses paid by the movie theater for retail space, electricity, equipment, and movie fees?
Maybe because the movie theater is profiting from the work of the MPAA, which profited from the work of the artists who created the movie? What makes one of these enterprises more legitimate than another? He used technology in a way that allowed him to bring entertainment to people at much lower prices than movie theaters can.
even if the theater still has the item that is claimed to have been stolen, the defendant is stealing his for-profit content from the movie theater.
You must have spent a long time rewiring your brain to think that makes any sense.
One gets to set the price on the products one labors to produce
Since when? Oh, right, never, because someone has to be willing to pay the price you demand; the whole idea in capitalism is that no single person or entity gets to decide these things. The movie industry gets to inflate its prices because the government gives them assistance, and apparently that assistance now includes the use of prisons (which are supposed to exist to keep us safe from dangerous people, not to keep obsolete business models alive).
Copyright makes no sense in an age where people have the methods and apparatus needed to distribute information on a global scale in their house. Throwing people in prison for it does not change the simple reality that copyright is hopelessly dated and is in desperate need of reform (or simple elimination).
Prison time for copyright infringement? Really?
Just another sign of how completely out of control the copyright system has become.
"digital" signatures don't cut it.
Probably because they are too hard to forge and are based on terrifying mathematics instead of "common sense."
the crappy (landscape only) monitors we have.
Really? I know people who rotate their monitors 90 degrees. This is a non-issue at this point.
Big $$$ to fix those issues.
No kidding. Major shifts in how people do things require major investments.
Can we all just standardize and get along?
You mentioned the relevant standards already:
Imagine a world where instead, you dealt with:
So really, be glad that the worst of your problems is that one company uses PDF, another encrypts the PDF, another encrypts the email, and another makes you go to a website on the Internet. We could live in a much worse world.
I have seen restaurants that send receipts via email, and have an entirely paperless payment system -- and as an added bonus, the Android device that is being used in lieu of paper will divide your bill in whatever arbitrary way you want. There are a lot more computers today than there were 50 years ago, and a much more robust communications infrastructure for those computers.
It will be a while before paperless business is common, but eventually it is going to happen. Printing things costs money, and a lot of businesses have computers that are underutilized (like cash registers); eventually, saving money will begin to outweigh the resistance to change.
Sure, but do we really need printed invoices in this day and age? Send the customer a digitally signed invoice by email (encrypted if the invoice should remain private), and save paper and ink. While you're at it, look into ways of reducing IT electrical costs.
That average probably includes people who work in offices where they print hundreds or even thousands of invoices per day.
I don't consider an alcoholic who can't ever drink again to be "cured" in any way, shape or form
That there are two categories of people -- those who abuse and become dependent on alcohol, and those who do not -- is itself a myth that has become widely accepted because of twelve step programs. There are some people who are simply never able to maintain the self control needed to drink responsibly; there are others who can develop that self control with the assistance of a psychologist; and there are some for whom alcohol abuse and even dependence is temporary and who overcome it on their own. The twelve-step philosophy begins by excluding everything except the first group, but tells people who are in the second and third groups that they, in fact, are unable to develop any self control. That is one of the reasons twelve step programs are so unsuccessful: they start by ruling out any possibility of a person actually changing for the better.
Yet every "recovered" alcoholic I speak to tells me they must abstain from any alcoholic drinks, forever
Then you have not met people who abused alcohol in college, then grew up and stopped abusing alcohol. I knew someone in college who used to get drunk every day, who was skipping his classes and generally headed down the wrong path; then he became interested in joining the NYPD after school, and found that he was indeed capable of having one beer in a night and that a bottle of whisky did not have to completely consumed in one sitting. Keep in mind that drinking to the point of neglecting responsibilities meets the clinical definition of alcohol abuse; yet that same person stopped abusing alcohol on his own. In AA terminology, he is a "dry drunk" -- in other words, despite the fact that he is not abusing alcohol anymore, despite the fact that he cleaned up his act and is living a healthy life, he is still not "recovered" according to the twelve steps (should you point out this obvious logical fallacy, you might be told that he was never really an alcoholic at all, despite meeting the clinical definition of alcohol abuse).
The (lack of) logic of such a "cure" is mind boggling to me.
Well, what else would you call it if a person once had a condition that negatively affected their life, and does not have that condition today? If a cancer is in remission for five years without any medical treatment, we call it a cure. If a person once abused alcohol but has since stopped, and is able to not abuse alcohol without having their hands constantly held, how is that person not cured?
A recovered addict, to me, is someone who can enjoy life just like anyone else, simply not having the obsession about alcohol, drugs, or what the heck ever.
I think you are looking at the problem the wrong way. It is not a problem for a person to lack the discipline needed to drink in moderation; the problem is when a person who lacks that discipline decides to start drinking, even though they know they will be unable to stop themselves. One does not need to drink alcohol to enjoy life. Let's put it this way: I know a rabbi who has an allergic reaction to alcohol, so he drinks grape juice instead of wine for religious ceremonies (and he is just as happy during festive holidays as all the people around him who can drink).
Again, the definition of substance abuse is a pattern of behavior where someone uses a substance in a way that is dangerous or to the point where they are neglecting their responsibilities (e.g. their job, their family, etc.). If the only way for a person to not abuse alcohol is to not drink at all, then that person is cured by not drinking at all. That is a fairly extreme case, of course; most people can learn to use alcohol in moderation and to develop habits that ensure they do not abuse alcohol (in the case of my friend in college, he simply needed a clear goal in life). If a person stops abus
Here's the problem: the law only allows relatively narrow bands for unlicensed use (courtesy of the ITU), and so getting "more channels" is not easy to do. You could mandate that the standard operate on more bands -- 900MHz, 24GHz, 60GHz, etc. -- but that will drive up the cost of the equipment.
Or you purchase repeaters (cheaper) or you purchase higher-gain antennas (even cheaper, but will probably only improve coverage on one floor), or you illegally plug your AP into a linear amplifier and hope the FCC never comes for you (and it is unlikely they will). I know someone who uses a repeater in his house; it is not all that uncommon nor is it difficult.
This is kind of like asking, "What is the point of having 100 megabit ethernet when hardly any ISPs have 100 megabit service?"
Well, if praying to deities (or doorknobs, or trees, or to the group itself) helped your family members overcome their character defects, great! On the other hand, the fact that the 12 steps begin by telling people they have no hope of self control is probably the reason 12 step programs are amongst the least successful approaches to substance abuse treatment.