He didn't "fight it for a while" though -- he settled before it had even been officially decided where they were going to fight it out *at*.

Wasn't there a South Park about that?

The usual argument for life+years is to encourage older creators who don't expect to live out the copyright term to continue to create so as to leave something to their next of kin. I don't know that I really buy it, or see how a flat number of years doesn't accomplish the same thing, though.

^ This. As well as synagogues, temples, mosques, hounfours or whatever word a particular group might use.

If a church is running some kind of charity/nonprofit that would be untaxed, then make them split it into a separate legal entity in the fashion that Planned Parenthood is split in order to deal with the Hyde Amendment (the part of Planned Parenthood that performs abortions is a separate legal entity with separate funding from the rest of Planned Parenthood because the Hyde Amendment states that no federal funds will be used to provide abortions -- that way PP can receive federal funds to provide the rest of it's services. Also note that means that the GOP push to defund PP has nothing to do with abortion, they're defunding access to birth control and medical care especially for poor women). Back on topic, require a similar split where the religious organization is taxed, but their soup kitchen (or shelter, or clothing bank, or what have you) remains tax exempted as a nonprofit charity organization.

Bonuses where I work are actually introduced as a sort of "market adjustment" -- our bonuses are calculated quarterly as a percentage of the profits of the company divided out per man hour across all employees, including salaried employees (who still punch the clock for purposes of calculating their bonus) but excluding upper management. Upper management does not receive a bonus. It's routinely on the order of $3-5/hour, unless we've had an exceptionally good or bad quarter.

Problem, the glimpse of the future would have to be expressed in a manner that can be understood by the locals from your home time.

So explain something like, "At some point in the future, all will have to carry a numbered marker in order to buy or sell things, and this marker will either need to be in hand, or you will need to remember it's number. This device will come from a blasphemous, heretical government and will bear their name and the number they assign" in terms that someone from early AD Roman Empire will understand, and do so without necessarily being put to death as a result. Now, run it through a few rounds of Telephone, then Google translate it three or four times between different languages. See how close the result sounds to what I started with.

Metaphorically it is. Most are right handed, so most will present this card with their right hand, and certainly much like SS, most will remember the damn number because of frequent use, thus having it in their head.

I honestly expect the genuine mark of the beast to be something like "CC companies merge, create global electronic currency system accepted as legal tender worldwide." You know, something like what "cred" was in Shadowrun.

If you think about it credit/debit cards already have the traits of the "mark" except for not being *required* to buy or sell just yet. Carried in the hand, card number memorized, carries a name of the beast (issuer) and the number of his name (phone # for the issuer).

Your last sentence describes precisely what I love about Demon's Souls -- it's a genuinely difficult RPG (albeit an action-RPG, but still). It's *hard*, but it's not grindy unless you are trying to unlock goodies that require specific world alignments, in which case you need a bit of grinding to get what you need to change the zone alignment to what you need. Even that is different than old school JRPG grinding -- you aren't grinding to be powerful enough to complete content, you're grinding to treasure hunt more thoroughly.

Less healthy foods tend to be cheaper than healthier alternatives (as in, not just HFCS vs other sugars, but in general). So any tax on unhealthy foods will be a regressive tax.

Of course, that is done under the guise of "respecting the agency of other people" and usually surrounded by statements like "we don't look for reasons to take offense", while doing more or less exactly that. Sort of like how certain pages centering around "discussion" of a certain topic have an established groupthink and more or less pounce on even a hint of dissent and look for excuses to ban.

Really? Look at "The City of New York vs Homer Simpson" -- it was off the air for several years, and was only allowed to return after an editing pass to cleanse it of offensive materials.

So, yeah....

It's not fairly allocating those costs with a simple per mile charge though. They'd have to include vehicle weight into the equation somehow, since heavier vehicles put proportionally more wear on the roads per mile driven.

So, let's look at what this means from an actual industrial point of view.

I work in a pipe fabrication shop (the IT guy, but still). We build piping to order for the petro-chem industry. We do this by welding straight pipe runs and fitting together in various combinations, because our in shop welds are higher and more consistent quality as well as cheaper than welding in the field.

We purchase our fittings and pipe from a couple of suppliers who buy them from upstream suppliers and/or manufacturers, and we sell to the likes of DuPont, Dow, and such.

So we buy a flange. It's made by an Indian mill. Their sales guy uses a pirated copy of Excel for his spreadsheets. The flange gets sold to a US supplier (say Wilson) who in turn sells it to us, who in turn welds it into a more complex piece and sells it to say Dow.

Are you saying Wilson should be liable for copyright infringement damages?
Are you saying we should be liable for copyright infringement damages?
Are you saying Dow should be liable for copyright infringement damages?

Herein lies the big problem -- using our little supply chain as an example, now Dow needs to perform a full software audit on everyone who sells them materials and tools of any kind, and part of that audit has to be that said suppliers are performing a similar audit on all of their vendors, and so on recursively until you get to the guys digging raw materials out of the ground. If anyone doesn't, they are opening themselves up to risk of lawsuit.

This is MS wanting to be sure they get their pound of flesh from someone when they catch copyright infringement, and if they can't get it from the infringer they want the right to do so from the infringer's customers. More importantly, most of these companies don't only supply one customer -- so does that mean that they get to claim full infringement damages against each company that buys from a company oversees that is engaged in piracy?

No, you have it all wrong -- you want to keep young males alive and healthy so they can pay into the system. When they cease paying into the system they are either old, unemployed, and/or disabled males, and need to be gotten rid of before they ask for too much back out of the system.

Social Security is an entirely reasonable system if you expect to pay out less than 5 years to any given individual -- when people start not dying when they're supposed to that changes entirely...

Heh. I thought Duke was juvenile when I *was* a teenager (OMG having a Voodoo was like night and day in Quake!), but it was silly and over the top and an excuse to blow up some aliens.

I'll still tell you to lighten up, because everyone is too PC about everything. Noone has a right not to be offended.

I'm kind of a strange beast politically though -- I'm pro choice (but oddly, anti-abortion -- it is a moral decision and should be placed in the hands of the individual woman, not the state; but that doesn't mean I personally *agree* with that choice, it just isn't *my* choice to make on your behalf), a moderate on gun control (we need to balance our fundamental individual right to bear arms against the crime problem, which means we need gun control that is as effective as possible at curtailing criminal use of guns while having minimal impact on legitimate ownership and use), feel strongly about separation of church and state and all that entails (government involvement with religion needs to be faith-agnostic -- if something is opened to religious displays by one faith, then it needs be opened to displays by any faith who desires to do so or to none of them), I think many entitlement programs should be turned into so called "workfare" -- as in you work for the state if you want your $ENTITLEMENT_PROGRAM_CHECK, there's always a park to help pick litter in, or a state desk jockey who could use an assistant, or worst comes to worst allow nonprofits to request workers from the program, I'm pro same-sex marriage (or rather, I think the religious and legal concepts of marriage should be separated entirely, the latter available to all couples regardless of orientation and the state having absolutely no involvement in the former -- what religious rituals you practice and/or who you are willing to practice them for is not a concern of the state), and of course think everyone has gotten way too whiny and PC -- you have a right to freedom of speech, you don't have a right to prevent others from saying things that offend you.

There needs to be a political party that is socially liberal, generally fiscally conservative, and doesn't fall back into wacko-land like Libertarians seem to with disturbing frequency.