Calls to mind the myriad stories we see here about some random hacker discovering vulnerabilities, reporting them, and then finding themselves on the wrong side of the law. Even if you do no damage, you're still breaking the law.

While Trust definitely lowers the cost of transactions between people/entities, I think that having a small amount of defectors is actually beneficial on a macro level. Without a couple people willing to take advantage of process flaws, it would be very easy for society to become stagnant and complacent.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't crush those defectors to dust when we find them, though.

Both political parties are willing to throw science under the bus when it suits their agendas. The more ideological the wing of the party, the more busses they find driving by.

By the same token, both parties are willing to embrace the infallibility of science, and the certainty of the consensus, when it validates what they already believe.

Science is in good company though; politicians will do the same with the Supreme Court, the Constitution, Religion, or anything else that they can get their hands on.

Ideally, the U.S. would have a population where there is enough charitable donations that our bureaucratic system isn't necessary. I'd much rather our system functioned on voluntary donations rather than compulsory payments/taxes.

Unfortunately, whenever charity and government bureaucracy collide, charity almost always loses. Bureaucracy is like a field of weeds that chokes anything else that tries to grow there. (Its for our own good.)

Right there, you hit on the head why I quite playing WoW.

With the Cataclysm expansion, everything felt like it suddenly got locked onto some rails that you couldn't escape from. Want to do a quest in Zone A? Well, you better have done the lead-in quests in Zone B, or they won't even give it to you. Heck, the quest giver might not even be "phased in" yet. Whole sections of the world are just "paused" waiting for you to do the pre-req quests.

Its a damn shame. Especially since, due to its MMORPGness, I can't even go back and play the game I used to love.

When I was in grad school, in many classes we were allowed to use the internet on tests, as well as our notes, any spreadsheets/programs/scripts we had pre-made, etc. The caveat was that the tests were structured in a way that if you didn't already know what to do, you wouldn't have enough time to look it up and still finish the test. Googling things takes time. And the test really only provided enough time to actually do what you already knew.

You can also use random variables for each test, or groupings of tests, to prevent direct copying of answers. With a time limit, cheaters would have to wait for someone else taking the test to find the correct answer, send it out, and then modify it to match their own variables. If they can do all of that in a crunch, chances are they understand it pretty well on their own, even if they are lazy.

And how many people here actually produce something physical?

Unless you're working on the assembly line, chances are you mostly just move numbers around in a computer. Those numbers may mean something to you, but they're still numbers.

Maybe you re-configure something someone else made. Run some cables, perhaps? Assemble components? I suppose you could call that "producing a physical product."

The reality is hardly anyone, especially in high tech, actually makes anything anymore. The lack of a direct physical product from your own hands does not mean you aren't a productive person, or making contributions to society.

As someone who has read resumes and done some hiring, its not that you see an overqualified person as a threat; you see them as a very expensive potential asset that is way overkill for the job you need done, and a unwise use of your limited budget.

You get the exact same issues when choosing a new platform for some internal project: do you go with the $1000 option, that does exactly what you need and nothing more, or the $100k option that does what you need as an configurable module in an expandable architecture (blah blah)?

If you don't need something, than you won't want to pay for it. Simple as that.

Considering that Pirate Bay and the like are able to GIVE them away to "customers" and still make enough money to be wildly successful, I would say that its very much something that can be done.

It just may not be something that can be done the exact way they would like to do it.

And what would be the point of pulling it over? Give it a stern reprimand before sending back on its way?

Unless the cop plans to either (1) Inspect it for malfunction/damage, or (2) Impound it, I don't see any reason to physically stop the vehicle. A properly tagged vehicle should provide all you need to issue a citation; no curb required.

I have been looking forward to going digital with my library for a long time now. I almost went with Kindle, but the cost of buying a another device always held me back. A free app for reading books on a device I already own, and the convenience of the app store to purchase at? YES PLEASE.

Then I saw the prices. Just skimming a couple classics, I was shocked to see the digital sticker prices consistently 30% HIGHER than a physical copy from Amazon. Sometimes it was even higher than the MSRP of the same book (you know, that price you never pay because everything is always on sale?).

I went from being a fanboy who couldn't wait to line up to take it, to a hater in about 5 minutes. Its not the actual sticker price that bothers me. Its the blatant gouging on something that costs less than ever to distribute, and can't be resold or lent out to a friend/family member easily. I'm not paying more something that actually does less, per my own personal usage scenario.

I call Shenanigans.

I lived in the 2nd poorest nation in the western hemisphere for a couple years doing peace corp work back in the mid-90s, and the average city dweller was still living in half-shanty/half-cinderblock with non-potable water and power tapped off the power grid with strands of barbed wire. They were lucky to bring home more than $10/month (no rent to pay, since everyone "homesteads", and you can eat a "decent" meal out for about 25. Everyone was sick, all of the time, but grew up that way and didn't even know it could be better. Average life expectancy was still under 40.

Yes, you could go to the local clinic with a bag of stool and they would analyze it for $2. You could then even buy some anti-parasitic horse pills (incredibly bitter tasting) to clear out the infection of the week for another $2 or so. But when you're only making $10 a month, you can't afford to that sort of medical attention for something so commonplace as a parasitic infection. You needed to save that money for the big expenses, like when you accidentally whacked your leg with a machete and needed to get to the hospital and get it sown back together again.

The disconnect between our standard of living in the 1st world is so far removed from the bottom, its not even comparable. I had plenty of money while I was there, but we still had to have american doctors flown in anytime someone got really sick. If it was actually something serious, we'd have to fly back to the states to get treatment.

Of course, the average city dweller in that country couldn't get to the US, even illegally. If you were very "rich" you might be able to afford a coyote to smuggle you into LA or Houston, but it would cost you everything you owned, and then you would be here illegally and on the run -- some of my friends went that route, unfortunately. If you were very, very, very rich (i.e. top .1%) you could afford to bribe to local officials enough to get a visa, you could afford the plane tickets, and you afford to immigrate to the US.

Typically, I saw two patterns:

1) Immigrant realizes how expensive the US is, and how hard they'll have to work, and how low they'll be on the totem pole compared to back home. They work for a year or so, amass a "huge" fortune, and then immigrate back where they retire.

2) Immigrant works his butt off and sends home every dime he can spare to eventually bring over his family legally, one at a time.

The only ones I heard of who never came back where the ones who fled as refugees during the wars, and had to cut all ties or die. They typically got some sort of US Government sponsorship when they arrived and so did pretty good, but everyone they know back home is probably dead anyway (I went back a mere 3 years after the fact, and several of my local friends had died during my absence just of "natural" causes/accidents.)

The average joe there would KILL to flip burgers here in the US. And they would live better off that money than they do at home, and with money left over to send home. In one city I lived in, the job everyone was fighting over was to make cigars by hand in the local sweatshop. It payed nearly a $1/day to make cigars from the raw tobacco with your bare hands and tongue. There was a WAITING LIST for people to work there.

Burger King isn't just a step up from that -- its a whole different ladder on a different floor of the building.

Not all Malls are Shopping Malls.

And private entities do not mean that it is For Profit, a corporation, etc etc.

There are lots of Malls that are public, unregulated "forums" with walkways, gardens, and yes, shops. Most are owned by an incorporated entity, but some are held by trusts, non-profits, etc. In some cases, sections of the mall are sublet to private businesses and are less public.

Having done sales for a couple years before discovering I was completely unsuited to it:

Customers don't know what they need. They don't know what's possible, they don't know what future challenges they will face. Sometimes they don't even know the current challenges they face. And so they sure as hell can't communicate them to you, as a sales person.

For a while I tried to only sell people what I thought they actually needed, and I discovered that more often that not, I was not selling someone something they really needed because they didn't know how to ask for it. One of the things I learned was that marketing spends a tremendous amount of effort generating leads (i.e. potential customers) and then qualifying the heck out of them (i.e. making sure there is a really good chance that they actually could use their product). Even in retail, by the time the customer walks in the store, or onto the lot, tremendous effort has been made to winnow out people who aren't likely to need the product.

Now that I'm on the other end of things, its frustrating dealing with sales reps who think they know better than I do about whether or not I want a product. Frequently, I'll have a potential vendor "drop" my company because we don't fit their sales pipeline model and have been disqualified (i.e. are not their "target market"). So it swings both ways.

The only way any government can provide the legitimate service you have described is through the monopolization of coercion. In other words, the sovereign government is the only entity that can coerce a private individual into doing something they otherwise would prefer not to do. Why is this essential? Because its the only way that the government can protect one individual from any other group/persons who wish to violate that individuals life, liberty, property, associations, etc. In the event that a person or group attempts to coerce another person/group, the offended party can appeal to the government, who then exercises its monopoly and revokes the ability of the offending party to coerce the offended (via prison, fines, etc).

In many ways, the only role of the military is to prevent coercion from extra-national parties -- often through coercion. In the end, the only way to prevent coercion is through coercion.

Which is why coercion doesn't mean much if any old person just up and exempt themselves from it whenever they want. Governments may opt to allow citizens to secede, but is by no means required. A government that doesn't have the ability to hold its citizens to the rules isn't actually a government -- its just an academic exercise.

The real question of governments is to what source the government makes its rules about who/what/why it coerces, or does not coerce. In the US, we rely upon separating powers between branches of the government to limit their capacity to coerce without conforming to a publicly accepted consensus. In the end, the only reason the constitution has any weight at all is because the public accepts that it does, and the current system does not allow a single branch to usurp power without assistance from the other branches.