It doesn't matter how they're cut, they just don't grow back.

Actually spinal cord nerves can regrow with appropriate treatment.

Where I live they haven't bothered to make any provision for back up power to the repeaters on their coax plant. Power goes out? Kiss your phone service goodbye, even if you've got the battery in your modem. They finally did upgrade us to DOCSIS 3, about eight months ago, so now our peak hour speeds have gone from atrocious to tolerable FWIW.

I don't think you appreciate the magnitudes involved. Picture the biggest forest fire you've ever heard of. Here's a dime store squirt gun and a canteen. Go put it out. Good luck, we're all pulling for you.

Now realize that it's nowhere near that easy.

A better approach is to make the copyright holder a legal steward of the work until it enters the public domain. That is, they have a legal duty to maintain it in the best possible form and make sure it gets handed off to interested parties when it enters the public domain. Failure to do so is a breech of the contract resulting in handing all profits from the work during copyright to the public (that is, a massive fine).

If the cost of maintaining the work exceeds the value, they may choose to terminate the copyright early, but must give sufficient public notice.

They're not. The GP obviously doesn't realize that Time Warner spun off Time Warner Cable quite some time ago.

I disagree. They aren't mutual, they are absolute opposites.

Absolute freedom is anarchy - everyone can do what they want, and nobody has security.
Absolute security is freedomless - one's actions are circumscribed in every possible way to reduce risk.

Of course, reality is always a compromise between such theoretical poles.

If you take as a hypothetical the TV show Lost: the characters in that drama had essentially no government, no police, and the freedom to do pretty much what they wanted. Concurrently, they had very little security.
Alternatively, if you have a society in which the government is expected to mitigate every risk, to protect from every harm, you have substantial security (ostensibly) but very limited freedoms (sacrificed on the altar of the "greater good" or "protect the children" or "fighting terror").

We seem to want the latter; we just spent 10 years at war and trillions of dollars over an attack that cost the US a (relatively trivial) 3000 lives. You say the modern police-state has failed? I'd disagree - we are getting *precisely* the state that we as a body public have voted for. I'm a libertarian, I truly would prefer a country with more freedom, cognizant that this means fewer safety nets, but I recognize too that I'm in a far minority, and will be outweighed by the masses that want single-payer health care, massive social safety-nets, and a society that weeps piteously over every sparrow that falls from their nest.

Read up on social contract theory, and then read John Campbell's Tribesman, Barbarian, and Citizen. (I found the full text of the piece quoted at http://www.baenebooks.com/chap... )

Knowing *nothing* about you beside the idea that you have been driving the same SUV since 1994, I'm certain that you are at least a couple standard deviations away from the center of the bell-curve of SUV buyers in 2015.

Would you provide it just run full speed until it burns out?

Actually, it wasn't my statement, but I did defend it as not too far from true.

Because many over 60 have very little experience with computers, you have more knowledge to backfill in order to teach them about computers (starting with de-mystifying the magic box). Again, not a question of intelligence or educability, just a matter of experience.

That will be true for many (more often than not), but clearly is far from universally true.

I have little doubt most of those things are magic to most people, but through using them for decades, they have learned to deal with them from a black box perspective. The 60 somethings who have recently found a good enough reason to bother with a computer will get there too.

Here in the old world (.fi) we have different bins for stuff like glass and metal.

Here in LA, homeless people go through our trash, extract the actually valuable recyclables, then take them to the recycling centers and make cash.

Even if you assume greater profits from increased monopoly abuse by a combined Comcast/TWC,

Comcast Profit Margin (Quarterly):10.86% for Dec. 31, 2014.

Apple Profit Margin (Quarterly):24.16% for Dec. 31, 2014

Google Profit Margin (Quarterly):26.28% for Dec. 31, 2014

Yeah. I know. I was there.

Try explaining that to some of my contemporaries...

I can see that, but that group was a small minority of people who are now 60+ years old. It's enough that one shouldn't assume a 60+ year old is a computer novice, but not enough to invalidate the claim that most 60+ year olds are less knowledgeable of computers.

Never traveling to Pakistan seems like a reasonable move. I'd place it along side avoiding gang ridden neighborhoods and other acts of common sense.

And more and more evident today add to that list:

NOT running from the cops.