With many drones disabling the GPS receiver is either [a] difficult or [b] strongly ill-advised (as it's used to make station-keeping in a breeze much easier and automatic as opposed to a constant fight against air current).

Re: Fire Departments

What happens today in the scenario you describe (where the neighbor's house is on fire) is that the subscription fire department comes out and provides preventative protection to your building so that it doesn't catch on fire in the first place.

Re: Roads

If you don't like the tolls on the roads you have to drive to get to work, maybe you need to move somewhere else. I live in a part of teh country where it's not uncommon for someone to own a house at the end of four to five miles of road where theirs is the only house on the road, at the far end. Why should everyone else be paying for upkeep on that road, subsidizing their choice to live in the middle of nowhere?

Re: A la carte tax and the military

Are you kidding? It'd be a GOOD thing if our military was pared down due to lack of general support for it. Here's the thing about Americans: When there is a genuine need to step up and take action, we are willing - nay, proud - to do so. But that happens ever so rarely (WWI, WWII), compared to the multitude of times where we decide to be Team America World Police, mostly because someone has to justify the hundreds of billions of dollars that got spent on this weapon system or that carrier group. Let the people who want to protect Kuwaiti oil pay to do so. Let the people who want to oust Saddam do so. And if those people aren't able to raise enough money to do so, then it's a "vote with your pocketbook" way of demonstrating that there isn't enough popular support for those deployments in the first place.

Speak for yourself.

I want services, and I'm willing to pay... for those services that I want.

I don't want to pay for stuff I have no use for. If you want to pay for those things, because you think you have a use for them, or because it warms the cockles of your heart to provide those things to other people, feel free to do so. But you don't have a right to make that decision for anyone else but yourself.

Now you can do that by having each person pay an "individually crafted" tax bill, but that's silly.

You can do that by moving everything into either subscription services (like a number of fire departments have done), or tolls (for using the roads).

I prefer the latter myself, but am open to the former if you can come up with a way to make it work.

I wish I had modpoints to give you for this.

The petition system is truly ingenious.

It's a way for the administration to line up 10-, 20-, 30-, 100-thousand people who think the administration is wrong, and then have delivered to them a customized message which tells the signers how wrong they are about things on a very specific topic.

The White House Petitions are designed to serve the administration, not the citizenry.

I'll take "Reasons why I'll never live in a house governed by an HOA", for $1000, Alex?

I'm happy to cede world dominance to another country. I don't feel like my "nationalistic ego" is so damned large that I have to sink the country's economy just to ensure that my country is 'running things' or whatever.

One of the key features keeping the classic alive is also potentially its use in cars. For the longest time, even when I had an iPhone, I maintained an iPod Classic, because its UI was much move navigable one-handed while driving, to drill down to find a particular playlist, or artist, or whatever. You could, by feel alone, figure out what you were doing in many cases, only glancing at the unit to determine when to hit the select button, etc.

It wasn't until I had a car which actually integrated my iPod into its in-dash entertainment system that I finally stopped worrying about that.

Tell that to BetaMax.

It'd be a pain, but the reality is that even if only a subset of people were to do it, it could get *really* cost-prohibitive for them to violate the license. :-)

But we're talking about a scenario where they use your content (pictures, posts, etc.) outside of the terms of license with which you licensed it to them (ad free, etc.)

At that point, they're distributing your copyrighted material without a license to do so. There is no requirement (that I can find, statutorily) to have registered the copyright. The copyright must simply be "valid" to be enforceable (which it is). 17 USC 504 is the relevant statute, and it makes no mention of a registration requirement.

You have the option of going for actual damages (generally, if you can prove that they are more than statutory damages), or you can elect to pursue statutory damages of between $750 and $30,000. If you show that they did so willfully, the upper bound becomes $150,000.

You own the copyright to any content you create.

If they distribute your content in violation of their agreements surrounding that, it's a technical violation of the DMCA, which has -- as we all know -- statutory penalties for such violations.

Ello's consideration is the content you're allowing them to reproduce.

The user's consideration is the site they're allowing you to use.

Not all consideration is cash.

It seems that it shouldn't be hard for a lawyer to craft up a change to the ToS for the site that:

- Grants Ello the right to use/reproduce user content (a normal everyday part of ToS), BUT
that right does not survive a change to either the corporate charter or the ToS without being positively re-affirmed by the end user.

In other words, Ello can use/reproduce your posts, like they need to.

- If they change the charter, users need to re-affirm "yes, you can continue to use my existing content"
- If they change the ToS to remove that language going forward, users need to re-affirm "yes, you can continue to use my existing content"

Combine that with some language about "no change to ToS or corporate charter can be binding without a 90 day review period for users", and you've got something with some teeth.

well, as noted elsewhere in this thread:

- The knockoffs *are* shit quality in this case, flaky as hell, causing FTDI to field calls for issues with hardware that isn't even theirs
- knockoff quality is "indeterminate" and -- worse -- without recourse (there is no way to trace back who did shoddy work and get them to make good on the problems they caused)