Diameter, in km

Mercury ... 4,880
Venus ..... 12,104
Earth ..... 12,756
Mars ...... 6,794
Jupiter ... 142,984
Saturn ... 120,536
Uranus ... 51,118
Neptune ... 49,532
Pluto ....... 2,222

Pluto's diameter is half the diameter of Mercury. Should we also consider Mercury a dwarf planet? Can the Earth be considered to be in the same league as Jupiter/Saturn as they have 10 times the diameter of Earth?

The NFL just feels like a monopoly because the fans are very very picky.

But why does every pro football player have to play ticket-selling (i.e. commercial) matches under the umbrella of the NFL? ... that's pretty monopolistic. In other words, why should the NFL profit from every top-tier football player? Organizing matches is hard, but not as hard as being a good football player. If the govt. or whoever grants only one organization the power over organizing/distributing all football matches, naturally its prices are going to be sky high.

The player should have a choice of various organizations with different pay structures/benefits to choose from. Similarly, ticket buyers should have a choice of various leagues that have very, very good players. If league A is charging high ticket prices, the consumer can go to league B with cheaper tickets.

Whoever gave the NFL monopoly rights (resulting in price gouging tickets) over all football matches in the country is at fault. So the solution is to increase supply by allowing more associations to form alternative football organizations. This competition will likely reduce ticket prices everywhere even if their playing quality won't be as good as the NFL players.

But forcing the NFL to give their content away for free (i.e. abolishing the blackout rule) will mean fewer people will pay stadium prices and is unethical, unfair and communist.

Nope. He has to make an explicit effort to do that, unlike a mailman picking up mail just happening to read it.

Explicit? Really?? Their terms of use clearly state that they scan (and therefore read) emails. So they can legally read your email and do so frequently. Or did you think this email user was particularly singled out from tens of millions of users? This stuff happens to thousands of gmail users; this guy was particularly unlucky.

So some active effort is expended here as well.

Some.

Less effort is required by some admin at google. He just has to type:

$inbox jellomizer

or a similar command to open your jellomizer@gmail.com account

but if nearly everyone I try to communicate with is a normal person who doesn't think about these things, then most of them will be unencrypted.

You're underestimating the number of customers who want secure email. I would guesstimate at least 30% would easily sign up for such a service.

An active effort must be made for someone to read it. It's easy to just read a post card while picking it up.

Perhaps, but a postman's job is to process mail, not waste time reading somebody's postcard. So some active effort is expended here as well.

Yes. And then you have to get everyone else on board, or you're screwed.

Not necessarily true. If parties A and B have support for encryption system E, they can communicate securely. If they don't, they just have to use the regular, unencrypted email/postcard. So only a small population has to be on board.

Why are they surprised? They thought google scans their email to match ads to them. Surprise, surprise, that's just a ruse.

They will never reveal the true reasons why email is being scanned (violating constitutional rights, by the way), but we can assume it is to build a detailed profile/database of all its customers.

Functionally email is a postcard

No, it isn't.

Yes, it is.

The fact that it's possible for anyone to read it does not make it a postcard.

Not everyone can't read a postcard once it enters the mailbox, just the postmen and postal employees processing mail in between them. For email, google is acting as the postman/mail processors and can therefore read everybody's postcard (aka email).

If we had an electronic envelope (using encryption) for messages, then google's spying capability would be greatly/slightly lowered. The encryption should be reliable and be provided by a third party, not google.

What stops me from doing the exact same thing, but on a computer!

If you don't own the CD you're ripping, it's obviously illegal. I think a personal copy should be allowed as backup since music CDs do get lost or damaged. Some countries allow a backup (provided you own the CD you are ripping), others don't.

USA:

U.S. copyright law generally says that making a copy of an original work, if conducted without the consent of the copyright owner, is infringement. The law makes no explicit grant or denial of a right to make a "personal use" copy of another's copyrighted content on one's own digital media and devices.

Europe:

A directive of the European Union allows its member nations to instate in their legal framework a private copy exception to the authors and editors rights. ... In all but a few of these countries, the levy is excised on all the machines and blank materials capable of copying copyrighted works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

I pretty much only buy my music on CD's. I refuse to pay money for lossy copies of music. If I'm going to spend my hard earned money on it I want the real, all the sonic bits there, deal

LOL, CDs are lossy too because they have a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. In fact anything digital is lossy because it has a finite (lossy) sampling rate. You should buy vinyl for lossless.