Well, the ISPs can prevent their customers from using lots of sites they don't like in the name of "protecting the children". The few people who either don't trust the ISPs to make those choices for them or who are child pornographers, etc. will circumvent it - but the ways in which they might do so may be easier for government(s) to monitor. As long as only a few people circumvent the restrictions, the signal/noise ratio is high, making monitoring of those means worthwhile. The Canadian gov't might even presume evil of users circumventing the blocking ISPs. And of course, no large business would ever abuse the privilege of controlling its customers' access to information...
It's kind of like a war - mine the easy way, put snipers on the hard way. Of course, this would be war on one's own citizens/customers, but that's a minor detail.
Well, they have been the buyer, not the buyee in their one deal since then and their price structure hasn't really changed (they don't really compete on price or minutes). The best to hope for was that Nextel's service would rub off on Sprint, but they could also have gone with the Dell plan (business and individual tiers of service). Based on the review, despite having merged with Nextel who was supposed to have good but expensive service, they haven't really changed. If there had been a time between 2000 and 2006 that they didn't suck, your argument would have more validity, but they have been fairly consistent in sucking, and so it doesn't.
Their unwillingness to serve their customers has been fairly consistent, and if they have held to that position for so long in a changing market there is no reason to assume they will treat their current customers any better. If you buddy is a liar now, and you find out that he was a liar in HS as well, it is less likely that his dishonesty is a consequence of the situation (and perhaps temporary) and more that it is a part of what he is.
I had Sprint in 2000 in OH - when they had 500 min. for $50. I had a StarTac and was near the OSU campus - someplace you might figure would be covered by cell. At one point, nine out of ten calls I made (and well over half) were dropped - I could receive but couldn't call. Between being put on endless loops to try and get help and having a website that would only load if you enabled all cookies on (and wouldn't allow access otherwise), I was told that I was in a "medium-coverage" area and that some drops would be expected. When I bought a Samsung phone, the drops went away, but their customer service was still abysmal. When my contract was up, I dropped the phone until I met my wife and needed another one - then I got Verizon, which despite their landline rep, has been good to me.
As a side note, cellular providers can't get away with dropping termination fees - otherwise they would have to charge up front for the phone (and people would expect to be able to use it with other providers) and they would have to compete with one another on price rather than offering periodic savings which lock in a portion of their market for two years.
People are fed up with ads, but making good ads is unpredictable and is likely more costly for advertisers; since the viewers aren't paying for it anyway, the advertisers don't care how annoying their ads are if they increase their profits. Now people can actually skip the ads via TiVo and its internet analogs. Advertisers will respond by either:
1) making better ads...oh, wait, they could have done this before, but it would cost more money and is hard to do consistently. Guess not.
2) integrating ads with content (sports events on TV have lots of "X scoreboard" and "Y events of the game") so that people can skip them only with difficulty - this works until the ads become annoying enough that people stop watching. Radio also uses the same announcers to deliver ad spots and the events/shows so that content and ads are hard to distinguish quickly, which works subject to the same caveats.
3) throwing money at Congress until it bans/neuters methods of avoiding ads. Nah, this would never happen.
I would have liked to think that if we were paying directly for programming, ads wouldn't exist, but their proliferation in user-paid media such as cable and video games suggests otherwise. Unless the viewers (and/or the customers of the advertised products) of content go away, the annoyance of ads is going to escalate. I don't think I'll be spending big bucks on a TV anytime soon.
I have had multiple Sony MiniDisc players - they have been improved over the years (higher capacity, Walkman-like waterproofing, still more capacity) but have never taken off. Why? One likely reason is that Sony made the format proprietary and encumbered so heavily that whatever benefit it provided in convenience couldn't keep up with the encumbrance. Microsoft has the Zune, and it has many of the same problems (they fragged their partners to create a player that wouldn't play the ironically named "PlaysforSure" standard, the wireless feature encumbered by DRM to make it almost useless, inability to use the player for storage, etc.). While I'm sure MS can improve the usability of the Zune, they can't allow people to do what they wish with it (because doing so would compromise the support of the music studios and might interfere with MS's DRM implementations) and MS's previous behavior doesn't lead one to believe they would support their customers well enough to make compiling music in whatever format Zune uses worthwhile.
You can make using a device nice and easy, but if you can't do what you want with it then it is dear at half the price. When a better option(s) exists, people are unwilling to buy what someone wants to sell them in preference to what they actually wish to buy and use. While MS has in the past tried to constrain others from selling what its customers want if it isn't what MS wants to sell, MS can't do that here because what people want (and not what MS makes) is driving the market. I don't see a way that MS can make the Zune make sense for users without losing the support of the studio and its own DRM people, and so I can't see how the Zune would sell even if it's made usable.
So, to pay for HD, Canadian broadcasters want to charge the people who carry their signal. They do realize that the only reason people to advertise on their stations is because they have a large pool of people to whom they can advertise - if they charge companies to carry their signal, some of them will stop carrying it, which lowers the reach of their advertising and thus their ad revenue. In addition, the HD crowd probably has a fair amount of money to spend and would be a desirable target for their advertisers, which might mean they could get more money from advertisers in return for access to an audience with more money.
As a side note, one might also ask what the broadcasters been doing with their money - considering the shift to HDTV has been in the works for years, one might have thought that they could have either saved money to buy the new equipment and/or gotten money from the gov't to buy it. Why aren't they prepared for it now?
Atheism asserts that there is no god/gods - a doubly unprovable assumption because of the inability of physical evidence to distinguish between atheist and theist theories of the universe, and the logical incapacity to prove a negative (by disproving an infinite number of theist theories). Atheism thus dependes strongly on faith, because its tenets can't be proven - to hold onto them thus requires something other than physical evidence. Naturalism has a similar problem with provability.
Rationalism would probably be the lack of belief, not either theism or atheism.
2) Strong atheism makes a claim that no god(s) exist. Theistic religions make the claim that a god(s) exist. While only one of these claims can be true, both are falsifiable (you can't tell between a godded and a godless universe based on physical measurements), the default is not atheism but lack of knowledge (because if measurements can't see god(s), absence of data doesn't mean anything w/r/t the hypotheses).
Strong atheism and theism make competing claims - because of the limitations of knowledge, lack of proof of one doesn't constitute proof of the other. They have to be proven on their own. Because of this, strong atheism has a bigger logical problem than strong theism because it is based on an assertion which can't be proven even if a measurement to determine the presence of a god(s) is available. I believe that this is why Dawkins et al. are dissmissive of the "weak theism" argment (the presence of god(s) can't be disproven) and place the burden of proof upon theists - they do not want too much attention paid to the unprovability of their own hypotheses.
Religion exists for one of two reasons. One, supernatural forces/powers exist and have power in the world. If this is true, then getting rid of religion (at least the correct one) would be ignoring something that is real. Usually the truth comes out eventually, and usually in the manner that is worst for those trying to hide it - so while trying to stop religion would mitigate current suffering it might lead to greater suffering in the future. Two, religion doesn't have any independent reality but exists because of needs within people. The question would then be finding something that would fulfill those needs as well without the consequent violence and ignorance, soemthing we have not really done. People have found nonreligious reasons to kill one another as well as religious (heck, most of the religious reasons for killing one another are pretenses for nonreligious reasons - the religious reasons help to recruit people to their side, which is bad, but the lack of thought is probably the root cause). In recent times, when humanity actually has gained the ability to delete itself as a species, nationalism rather than religion has led the way to destruction.
I don't believe that getting rid of religious belief would prevent humanity from hurting itself - it is our nature, not what we believe in, that leads us to continue hurting ourselves.
I'm not certain atheist would be an accurate term for either nation (I would suspect that the leaders think/thought that they are/were gods), but the lack of an afterlife prevented neither nation from killing large numbers of its own people.
There are lots of ways to regard your people as not human or at least not to merit treatment as such. Religions give access to some but not all of the options for doing so.
...they could have gotten it. Debates and advertising are for the most part about trivialities and smear campaigns, with not enough of an attention span to deal with the issues they raise substantiatively (when they are actually dealing with substantive issues and not lies parading as truth). In the US, politicians have focused on hot-button issues that can't be substantively addressed or debated. In either case, anyone that might ask questions that would demand substantive answers or offer solutions isn't going to be able to get their concerns heard by their government.
They have spent large sums of money to exclude any reasoned and substantive discussion of issues because such doesn't constitute good soundbyte. Now the same politicians complain that people bring up issues with either no solutions or no intention of solving the problem on the internet. They strived to change the political arena into a winner-takes-all, lowest common denominator game while they act in secret on behalf of political, corporate, or organized sponsors, and now that they have gotten what they wished, they dislike the game they have created, particularly when they lose.
The people want everything and want someone else to pay for it. Politicians have spent their careers telling the people that they can have precisely that, and now when said politicians might be held responsible for their dishonesty, they are unhappy at the complaints and wish the complaints would just go away. They had the power to do something about it, but chose not to, and now they can reap the whirlwind.
Send it to these people to recover? If so, you should check your credit card receipts afterwards, and hope there were no other embarrassing moments on your HD..
Or perhaps just skip a step and report your experiences on a blog; instead of wondering why you were stupid enough to do THAT, people will wonder why you were stupid enough to do that and write about it, although at least the experience won't cost you anything extra (well, other than your self-respect, but you weren't going to salvage that anyway).
You mean we're NOT in a competition to make health care unaffordable? Doh!
P.S. You'd think that a company selling healthcare (something on which people will spend any amount of theirs and others' money) could actually afford working generators and uninterruptible power supplies - if they can't afford it, then how does anyone else?
In the absence of copyright, only people who can either afford to make their works alone (primarily wealthy people) or people making small works could afford to do so. The absence of copyright makes the development of works other than by those for whom the payment is irrelevant (people who make things for noneconomic reasons) unlikely, because the time to develop the skill to make them (which is in part tied to the complexity of a work which is in turn tied to the size and resources required to make it) is unaffordable to most if not all. We know how not to make music or books because so many have made them (and badly); if others couldn't have afforded to do so (and in some cases do so badly), they wouldn't have, and so the few who could would be spending at least part of their time making things that didn't work because they don't have the experience to know otherwise.
While the skill to make large works can be sold, the cost to obtain those skills would be prohibitive, and so few would work to obtain those skills. The costs of learning those skills would be further increased by the lack of available works to learn from (not to many works-for-hire are likely to be published freely if their cost is high). Organizations are unlikely to pay for the development of those skills because they can't make money from them. How available were books (and literacy) when each one had to be made by hand?
Everyone needs physical goods, but if the people who find ways to make them better and cheaper can't profit from doing so, then most of them will not work to make goods cheaper but will do something else instead from which they can profit (the protection is patent law, not copyrights, but an intangible and copyable work is made in both cases). If goods are expensive, then the likelihood of people having lots of time to produce other things (intangible goods, and large works of art, music, or literature) is low - the works won't exist because they can't be produced.
I thought that correlation does not equal causation, even in the presence of a (potential) mechanism - people tend to come up with mechanisms to rationalize outcomes, but the presence of a mechanism doesn't disprove the existence of another mediator correlating with the variables of interest, or of a reversal of the arrow of causation, or of other scenarios. We prefer simpler theories over complex theories that explain the same things, but the desire for simplicity doesn't constitute evidence.
That being said (being a Democrat), I would have a hard time buying a causal relationship between political bias and economic outcomes of companies, or one exists, could be causal in either direction.
See the book Critical Mass (I don't remember the author's name) - I'm pretty sure India has had substantial rocket capacity for awhile, enough to deliver a nuke (or ten, though not on one rocket) to their bestest buddy neighbors, if required.
Space races are sometimes a cover for dual-use missile technology, but all you need for a nuke is a rocket that can get payloads to orbit, and maybe a little bit more - and they already have those. Going to the moon probably won't help their weapons programs, unless the increase in status helps their technological recruiting.
If the problems in Iraq are primarily due to Rumsfeld's tactical and strategic flaws, then this will help. If the war is a problem of the world not conforming to the beliefs of the NeoCon segment of the Administration (and the President's lack of questioning of the beliefs or his insistence on them), then Rumsfeld's resignation won't really help - if no one in power wishes to hear or deal with bad news, then nothing any Secretary of Defense says or does will be welcome.
1) You'll pay for whatever you government does, whether you agree with it or not. There isn't a box on the 1040 absolving you from paying taxes if you don't vote, nor one on the state forms either.
2) You may not know enough, but you may know more than lots of people who do vote; you could be really smart and be more highly aware of the limits of your knowledge than others, while some will be unware of their lack of knowledge and so be confident of their ability to vote.
Vote for what you think is best. In the long run, you would be served better by learning enough to feel comfortable with your vote - whoever is elected will be taking your money whether or not you vote for them.
When Sony infected already nonstandard, DRM-laden CDs with rootkits, neutered potentially useful formats with DRM, and saddled the PS3 with BluRay in order to attempt to use its leverage in the games console market to gain marketshare in the HD DVD (note space) market, its customers got the message loud and clear - they don't really matter. The people that make the content at Sony are the ones who mater, even at the risk of neutering Sony's hardware business.
The PS3 could be successful and have better buzz despite Sony's business practices and their arrogance and near-contempt for their consumers if the PS3 had been either cheap enough (no BluRay) or available enough (so retailers could be assured of selling systems and games for the holidays) - instead they managed to hose both their retailers and customers. And, of course, instead of making things better for their customers and retailers, they instead try to explain why it's all in their heads. Mmmkay.
How is a court going to review your imprisonment if they never know about it? The removal of habeus corpus is all about the removal of oversight - if you are deemed an unlawful enemy combatant by a tribunal or by the President, you will disappear. No court will have any power or knowledge to uphold or deny your imprisonment.
MCA2006 has relevance because it indicates that people in power in the US will abuse their powers if its people will let them, and with the internet that means that the whole world will feel the effects in their ability to access information. Of course, since the US is ill trusted by our allies at the moment, they really didn't need this to mistrust us anyway.
The will to power is present everywhere, and there isn't a reason to expect that the UN will be any better at avoiding its seduction. They haven't shown themselves to be trustworthy in protecting the rights they propose to safeguard nor do they necessarily have the will to stand up for those rights when it is unpopular, so it doesn't seem like they constitute a better choice to run the internet.
You're just unfortunate that your work requires really expensive software in a niche market, so there's little incentive for a random hacker to fix it, and few people with appropriate skills of those who use the software to fix it. A majority of people use Windows and Office, and a lot of them will be inconvenienced - at least some of them have the abilities to fix the software, and others will be important enough to have their complaints listened to.
When enough people have had the experience of not being able to do their work because of WGA/OGA activation errors, alternatives or hacks will appear. If enough businesses lose money because of lost work due either to activation errors or because someone figures out how to hose W/OGA and deactivate a million boxes at once, MS will have a problem. Note that in either of the last two cases, the presence of activation is a problem for legit users.
When cracked software is more useful than software out of the box (assuming, as likely, that activation can be hacked), the incentive to pirate (or to create an alternative) goes up, not down.
The unpopularity of activation, the large market (with the ability to come up with alternatives), and the likely presence of pirated software more useful than the originals means that either activation or MS will go away.
It's the fantasy of content and software providers everywhere to start providing "services" - the content they previously provided in hardcopy at similar prices but content over which the user has no real control, which can only be used in ways acceptable (or profitable) to the provider, and which can be revoked at any time. This assumes that the desires of the customer are irrelevant to their profitability, and that they will always have control over both their distribution channels and the legal apparatus that secures it. The fact that this model keeps failing in practice (like the use of lines from Penthouse fantasies for seducing women in real life) doesn't seem to hinder the CPs from its continued propagation. They must be hoping to find a market stupid enough to fall for it. Good luck with that.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the ISPs can prevent their customers from using lots of sites they don't like in the name of "protecting the children". The few people who either don't trust the ISPs to make those choices for them or who are child pornographers, etc. will circumvent it - but the ways in which they might do so may be easier for government(s) to monitor. As long as only a few people circumvent the restrictions, the signal/noise ratio is high, making monitoring of those means worthwhile. The Canadian gov't might even presume evil of users circumventing the blocking ISPs. And of course, no large business would ever abuse the privilege of controlling its customers' access to information...
It's kind of like a war - mine the easy way, put snipers on the hard way. Of course, this would be war on one's own citizens/customers, but that's a minor detail.
Well, they have been the buyer, not the buyee in their one deal since then and their price structure hasn't really changed (they don't really compete on price or minutes). The best to hope for was that Nextel's service would rub off on Sprint, but they could also have gone with the Dell plan (business and individual tiers of service). Based on the review, despite having merged with Nextel who was supposed to have good but expensive service, they haven't really changed. If there had been a time between 2000 and 2006 that they didn't suck, your argument would have more validity, but they have been fairly consistent in sucking, and so it doesn't.
Their unwillingness to serve their customers has been fairly consistent, and if they have held to that position for so long in a changing market there is no reason to assume they will treat their current customers any better. If you buddy is a liar now, and you find out that he was a liar in HS as well, it is less likely that his dishonesty is a consequence of the situation (and perhaps temporary) and more that it is a part of what he is.
I had Sprint in 2000 in OH - when they had 500 min. for $50. I had a StarTac and was near the OSU campus - someplace you might figure would be covered by cell. At one point, nine out of ten calls I made (and well over half) were dropped - I could receive but couldn't call. Between being put on endless loops to try and get help and having a website that would only load if you enabled all cookies on (and wouldn't allow access otherwise), I was told that I was in a "medium-coverage" area and that some drops would be expected. When I bought a Samsung phone, the drops went away, but their customer service was still abysmal. When my contract was up, I dropped the phone until I met my wife and needed another one - then I got Verizon, which despite their landline rep, has been good to me.
As a side note, cellular providers can't get away with dropping termination fees - otherwise they would have to charge up front for the phone (and people would expect to be able to use it with other providers) and they would have to compete with one another on price rather than offering periodic savings which lock in a portion of their market for two years.
People are fed up with ads, but making good ads is unpredictable and is likely more costly for advertisers; since the viewers aren't paying for it anyway, the advertisers don't care how annoying their ads are if they increase their profits. Now people can actually skip the ads via TiVo and its internet analogs. Advertisers will respond by either:
1) making better ads...oh, wait, they could have done this before, but it would cost more money and is hard to do consistently. Guess not.
2) integrating ads with content (sports events on TV have lots of "X scoreboard" and "Y events of the game") so that people can skip them only with difficulty - this works until the ads become annoying enough that people stop watching. Radio also uses the same announcers to deliver ad spots and the events/shows so that content and ads are hard to distinguish quickly, which works subject to the same caveats.
3) throwing money at Congress until it bans/neuters methods of avoiding ads. Nah, this would never happen.
I would have liked to think that if we were paying directly for programming, ads wouldn't exist, but their proliferation in user-paid media such as cable and video games suggests otherwise. Unless the viewers (and/or the customers of the advertised products) of content go away, the annoyance of ads is going to escalate. I don't think I'll be spending big bucks on a TV anytime soon.
I have had multiple Sony MiniDisc players - they have been improved over the years (higher capacity, Walkman-like waterproofing, still more capacity) but have never taken off. Why? One likely reason is that Sony made the format proprietary and encumbered so heavily that whatever benefit it provided in convenience couldn't keep up with the encumbrance. Microsoft has the Zune, and it has many of the same problems (they fragged their partners to create a player that wouldn't play the ironically named "PlaysforSure" standard, the wireless feature encumbered by DRM to make it almost useless, inability to use the player for storage, etc.). While I'm sure MS can improve the usability of the Zune, they can't allow people to do what they wish with it (because doing so would compromise the support of the music studios and might interfere with MS's DRM implementations) and MS's previous behavior doesn't lead one to believe they would support their customers well enough to make compiling music in whatever format Zune uses worthwhile.
You can make using a device nice and easy, but if you can't do what you want with it then it is dear at half the price. When a better option(s) exists, people are unwilling to buy what someone wants to sell them in preference to what they actually wish to buy and use. While MS has in the past tried to constrain others from selling what its customers want if it isn't what MS wants to sell, MS can't do that here because what people want (and not what MS makes) is driving the market. I don't see a way that MS can make the Zune make sense for users without losing the support of the studio and its own DRM people, and so I can't see how the Zune would sell even if it's made usable.
So, to pay for HD, Canadian broadcasters want to charge the people who carry their signal. They do realize that the only reason people to advertise on their stations is because they have a large pool of people to whom they can advertise - if they charge companies to carry their signal, some of them will stop carrying it, which lowers the reach of their advertising and thus their ad revenue. In addition, the HD crowd probably has a fair amount of money to spend and would be a desirable target for their advertisers, which might mean they could get more money from advertisers in return for access to an audience with more money.
As a side note, one might also ask what the broadcasters been doing with their money - considering the shift to HDTV has been in the works for years, one might have thought that they could have either saved money to buy the new equipment and/or gotten money from the gov't to buy it. Why aren't they prepared for it now?
Atheism asserts that there is no god/gods - a doubly unprovable assumption because of the inability of physical evidence to distinguish between atheist and theist theories of the universe, and the logical incapacity to prove a negative (by disproving an infinite number of theist theories). Atheism thus dependes strongly on faith, because its tenets can't be proven - to hold onto them thus requires something other than physical evidence. Naturalism has a similar problem with provability.
Rationalism would probably be the lack of belief, not either theism or atheism.
1) absence of evidence != evidence of absence
2) Strong atheism makes a claim that no god(s) exist. Theistic religions make the claim that a god(s) exist. While only one of these claims can be true, both are falsifiable (you can't tell between a godded and a godless universe based on physical measurements), the default is not atheism but lack of knowledge (because if measurements can't see god(s), absence of data doesn't mean anything w/r/t the hypotheses).
Strong atheism and theism make competing claims - because of the limitations of knowledge, lack of proof of one doesn't constitute proof of the other. They have to be proven on their own. Because of this, strong atheism has a bigger logical problem than strong theism because it is based on an assertion which can't be proven even if a measurement to determine the presence of a god(s) is available. I believe that this is why Dawkins et al. are dissmissive of the "weak theism" argment (the presence of god(s) can't be disproven) and place the burden of proof upon theists - they do not want too much attention paid to the unprovability of their own hypotheses.
You can take this with grains of salt, but...
Religion exists for one of two reasons. One, supernatural forces/powers exist and have power in the world. If this is true, then getting rid of religion (at least the correct one) would be ignoring something that is real. Usually the truth comes out eventually, and usually in the manner that is worst for those trying to hide it - so while trying to stop religion would mitigate current suffering it might lead to greater suffering in the future. Two, religion doesn't have any independent reality but exists because of needs within people. The question would then be finding something that would fulfill those needs as well without the consequent violence and ignorance, soemthing we have not really done. People have found nonreligious reasons to kill one another as well as religious (heck, most of the religious reasons for killing one another are pretenses for nonreligious reasons - the religious reasons help to recruit people to their side, which is bad, but the lack of thought is probably the root cause). In recent times, when humanity actually has gained the ability to delete itself as a species, nationalism rather than religion has led the way to destruction.
I don't believe that getting rid of religious belief would prevent humanity from hurting itself - it is our nature, not what we believe in, that leads us to continue hurting ourselves.
I'm not certain atheist would be an accurate term for either nation (I would suspect that the leaders think/thought that they are/were gods), but the lack of an afterlife prevented neither nation from killing large numbers of its own people.
There are lots of ways to regard your people as not human or at least not to merit treatment as such. Religions give access to some but not all of the options for doing so.
...they could have gotten it. Debates and advertising are for the most part about trivialities and smear campaigns, with not enough of an attention span to deal with the issues they raise substantiatively (when they are actually dealing with substantive issues and not lies parading as truth). In the US, politicians have focused on hot-button issues that can't be substantively addressed or debated. In either case, anyone that might ask questions that would demand substantive answers or offer solutions isn't going to be able to get their concerns heard by their government.
They have spent large sums of money to exclude any reasoned and substantive discussion of issues because such doesn't constitute good soundbyte. Now the same politicians complain that people bring up issues with either no solutions or no intention of solving the problem on the internet. They strived to change the political arena into a winner-takes-all, lowest common denominator game while they act in secret on behalf of political, corporate, or organized sponsors, and now that they have gotten what they wished, they dislike the game they have created, particularly when they lose.
The people want everything and want someone else to pay for it. Politicians have spent their careers telling the people that they can have precisely that, and now when said politicians might be held responsible for their dishonesty, they are unhappy at the complaints and wish the complaints would just go away. They had the power to do something about it, but chose not to, and now they can reap the whirlwind.
that the headline would stop at "Clear Channel Goes"
Send it to these people to recover? If so, you should check your credit card receipts afterwards, and hope there were no other embarrassing moments on your HD..
Or perhaps just skip a step and report your experiences on a blog; instead of wondering why you were stupid enough to do THAT, people will wonder why you were stupid enough to do that and write about it, although at least the experience won't cost you anything extra (well, other than your self-respect, but you weren't going to salvage that anyway).
We're Number 1! We're Number 1!
Huh?
You mean we're NOT in a competition to make health care unaffordable? Doh!
P.S. You'd think that a company selling healthcare (something on which people will spend any amount of theirs and others' money) could actually afford working generators and uninterruptible power supplies - if they can't afford it, then how does anyone else?
In the absence of copyright, only people who can either afford to make their works alone (primarily wealthy people) or people making small works could afford to do so. The absence of copyright makes the development of works other than by those for whom the payment is irrelevant (people who make things for noneconomic reasons) unlikely, because the time to develop the skill to make them (which is in part tied to the complexity of a work which is in turn tied to the size and resources required to make it) is unaffordable to most if not all. We know how not to make music or books because so many have made them (and badly); if others couldn't have afforded to do so (and in some cases do so badly), they wouldn't have, and so the few who could would be spending at least part of their time making things that didn't work because they don't have the experience to know otherwise.
While the skill to make large works can be sold, the cost to obtain those skills would be prohibitive, and so few would work to obtain those skills. The costs of learning those skills would be further increased by the lack of available works to learn from (not to many works-for-hire are likely to be published freely if their cost is high). Organizations are unlikely to pay for the development of those skills because they can't make money from them. How available were books (and literacy) when each one had to be made by hand?
Everyone needs physical goods, but if the people who find ways to make them better and cheaper can't profit from doing so, then most of them will not work to make goods cheaper but will do something else instead from which they can profit (the protection is patent law, not copyrights, but an intangible and copyable work is made in both cases). If goods are expensive, then the likelihood of people having lots of time to produce other things (intangible goods, and large works of art, music, or literature) is low - the works won't exist because they can't be produced.
I thought that correlation does not equal causation, even in the presence of a (potential) mechanism - people tend to come up with mechanisms to rationalize outcomes, but the presence of a mechanism doesn't disprove the existence of another mediator correlating with the variables of interest, or of a reversal of the arrow of causation, or of other scenarios. We prefer simpler theories over complex theories that explain the same things, but the desire for simplicity doesn't constitute evidence.
That being said (being a Democrat), I would have a hard time buying a causal relationship between political bias and economic outcomes of companies, or one exists, could be causal in either direction.
See the book Critical Mass (I don't remember the author's name) - I'm pretty sure India has had substantial rocket capacity for awhile, enough to deliver a nuke (or ten, though not on one rocket) to their bestest buddy neighbors, if required.
Space races are sometimes a cover for dual-use missile technology, but all you need for a nuke is a rocket that can get payloads to orbit, and maybe a little bit more - and they already have those. Going to the moon probably won't help their weapons programs, unless the increase in status helps their technological recruiting.
If the problems in Iraq are primarily due to Rumsfeld's tactical and strategic flaws, then this will help. If the war is a problem of the world not conforming to the beliefs of the NeoCon segment of the Administration (and the President's lack of questioning of the beliefs or his insistence on them), then Rumsfeld's resignation won't really help - if no one in power wishes to hear or deal with bad news, then nothing any Secretary of Defense says or does will be welcome.
1) You'll pay for whatever you government does, whether you agree with it or not. There isn't a box on the 1040 absolving you from paying taxes if you don't vote, nor one on the state forms either.
2) You may not know enough, but you may know more than lots of people who do vote; you could be really smart and be more highly aware of the limits of your knowledge than others, while some will be unware of their lack of knowledge and so be confident of their ability to vote.
Vote for what you think is best. In the long run, you would be served better by learning enough to feel comfortable with your vote - whoever is elected will be taking your money whether or not you vote for them.
When Sony infected already nonstandard, DRM-laden CDs with rootkits, neutered potentially useful formats with DRM, and saddled the PS3 with BluRay in order to attempt to use its leverage in the games console market to gain marketshare in the HD DVD (note space) market, its customers got the message loud and clear - they don't really matter. The people that make the content at Sony are the ones who mater, even at the risk of neutering Sony's hardware business.
The PS3 could be successful and have better buzz despite Sony's business practices and their arrogance and near-contempt for their consumers if the PS3 had been either cheap enough (no BluRay) or available enough (so retailers could be assured of selling systems and games for the holidays) - instead they managed to hose both their retailers and customers. And, of course, instead of making things better for their customers and retailers, they instead try to explain why it's all in their heads. Mmmkay.
How is a court going to review your imprisonment if they never know about it? The removal of habeus corpus is all about the removal of oversight - if you are deemed an unlawful enemy combatant by a tribunal or by the President, you will disappear. No court will have any power or knowledge to uphold or deny your imprisonment.
MCA2006 has relevance because it indicates that people in power in the US will abuse their powers if its people will let them, and with the internet that means that the whole world will feel the effects in their ability to access information. Of course, since the US is ill trusted by our allies at the moment, they really didn't need this to mistrust us anyway.
The will to power is present everywhere, and there isn't a reason to expect that the UN will be any better at avoiding its seduction. They haven't shown themselves to be trustworthy in protecting the rights they propose to safeguard nor do they necessarily have the will to stand up for those rights when it is unpopular, so it doesn't seem like they constitute a better choice to run the internet.
I wondering where luvmypres would get a job when the Netscape gig flames out. Now I know.
You're just unfortunate that your work requires really expensive software in a niche market, so there's little incentive for a random hacker to fix it, and few people with appropriate skills of those who use the software to fix it. A majority of people use Windows and Office, and a lot of them will be inconvenienced - at least some of them have the abilities to fix the software, and others will be important enough to have their complaints listened to.
When enough people have had the experience of not being able to do their work because of WGA/OGA activation errors, alternatives or hacks will appear. If enough businesses lose money because of lost work due either to activation errors or because someone figures out how to hose W/OGA and deactivate a million boxes at once, MS will have a problem. Note that in either of the last two cases, the presence of activation is a problem for legit users.
When cracked software is more useful than software out of the box (assuming, as likely, that activation can be hacked), the incentive to pirate (or to create an alternative) goes up, not down.
The unpopularity of activation, the large market (with the ability to come up with alternatives), and the likely presence of pirated software more useful than the originals means that either activation or MS will go away.
I think the correct title of the congressman is "Edward Markey (D-Ass)".
Then again, maybe ignorance of reality is a job requirement for his position - if not, how would Congress ever come up with a budget?
It's the fantasy of content and software providers everywhere to start providing "services" - the content they previously provided in hardcopy at similar prices but content over which the user has no real control, which can only be used in ways acceptable (or profitable) to the provider, and which can be revoked at any time. This assumes that the desires of the customer are irrelevant to their profitability, and that they will always have control over both their distribution channels and the legal apparatus that secures it. The fact that this model keeps failing in practice (like the use of lines from Penthouse fantasies for seducing women in real life) doesn't seem to hinder the CPs from its continued propagation. They must be hoping to find a market stupid enough to fall for it. Good luck with that.