Don't really care what you think of HOAs. Not incredibly fond of them myself and I am on the board of one.

Point is, there are enforcement options that are more than just fines. They can work, if they apply the correct sort of pressure. Example being: I can't always force you to pay your dues, but I sure as heck don't have to let you use common area resources that those dues directly support. That might include a privilege you care about.

Same goes for government and utilities.

That is the crux of the issue. You can spend 1 trillion dollars on a campaign and that doesn't mean I'll vote for that candidate.

The real problem is that it *does* work for larger blocs of voters. But the money is only the means of taking advantage of that flaw, not actually a corruption of democracy or free speech.

Citizens United has zero impact on who I will vote for. In fact, it has zero impact on anyone who has a well formed political position that they have researched. However, we know that money means that people who get to vote, but who get their "facts" from TV ads, will be affected. This is unfortunate, but not the fault of free speech. It is a flaw of our democracy (and possibly every realistic democracy based in the current era).

You can't really say this isn't democracy, when the democracy is actually functioning more or less as designed.

Granted, there are different forms of democracy, but good luck finding one where someone isn't in power who doesn't represent the people exactly.

Democracy is useful only for legitimacy of government, not for coming up with right answers. If you want a *better* government, democracy may be some small part of it, but there is nothing about true democracy that prevents it from supporting an elected oligarchy. And that elected oligarchy, if the actual cheating and forced votes are kept to a minimum, is as much a democratic system as one that elects a great leadership team.

There is no system in existence that prevents the intelligent, the rich or the ambitious from obtaining power. There is only, perhaps, a system that is able to direct that influence to ends that are less bad than others.

Don't get me wrong. Borrowing and spending is a totally legitimate way of dealing with the issue... if you can do it without doing long term damage to your economy with it.

Economics comes down to hard and fast numbers for some things, but it is just as much based on the mood of the people and how and where they spend their money. If you can make them more optimistic, you can pull out of it, if your fundamentals are not completely devastated.

They are still required to act on it. There is usually an order to remedy the solution along with any fine. If they don't act they would face the same fines.

The real question is the second one you asked. If they can pay 5 mil a year and it costs 10 mil to fix the issues, then I'll take the fine every time.

If there was personal executive responsibility, then if I fail to execute the task, and then I get arrested for persisting... then 10 mil of Verizon's money is less important than staying out of jail. There is the other option that Verizon could be disqualified from things that give them the potential for much higher profits later. Otherwise, its all about the fines.

When someone doesn't pay their dues for our HOA, we don't just fine them or send them to collections. We revoke their visitor parking passes and their pool rights. We also slap liens on their property. Even that is usually not enough to get people to pay, but it may be enough to get them to increase the priority of who they pay first. Point being that there are things the FCC may or may not be able to do, but if they go to court they might be able to get other remedies.

Now, if the FCC does *not* have the ability to apply other remedies... then Verizon will just pay the bill and keep on keeping on.

Generating a different payment plan might be useful, although as you pointed out, nowhere near enough.

Unless they intend to get forgiveness... or default. I am not sure that Greece is "too big to fail" where they can do that.

Greece needs long term thinking. Austerity might well be a knee-jerk reaction, so hopefully they can reasonably do what you suggest, like changing certain parameters and becoming more efficient at collecting taxes. On the other hand, collecting taxes is not always so straightforward a solution.

Politically, the right solution is probably more obvious than it seems. What may be lacking is the will to execute on it. That's usually the case with politics.

I'm not going to judge based on what his last job was, if he's actually technically qualified to do this one.

I just wonder what their plan is. Austerity is not a happy thing, but it is definitely possible to make things worse. With their economy in its current state, the usual leftist option of borrowing and spending their way out of it may be very limited. Not to mention that it sort of got them there to begin with. And the people likely elected these guys because they want their benefits back, somehow. Sadly democracy does not always make for good economic policy.

It would be interesting if there was some clever model that could get them out of this mes.

Yes, and they barely ever used it.

If you're going exploring, let alone into battle, you start in the protected bridge, not in the pimple on the top of the ship that has arrows pointing to it that say:

"Please target disruptors here for maximum effect."

I don't argue the point too much. I know its a TV show, and it did look fairly neat. It just never made any sense for the sort of battles that Starfleet would frequently get into.

In a modern navy, your captain sits in CIC, unless he's interested in the more navigational aspects of what is going on. I guess having a CIC was too militaristic for Roddenberry, but it would have made more sense.

Alternately, the whole battle could have plausibly been executed by the computer and they could have decorated the bridge like a sitting room, but that would have completely disconnected the audience from the action. Not to mention the crew.

TNG was great, and I watched every episode I could. However, shows like B5 and DS9 were better for me, because I enjoy more fleshed out plots than 40 minutes can give you.

I agree that having TNG was a pre-req for the others because it showed that you could make money in first-run syndication. B5 and the other Treks rode that business model, and indeed, it allowed those shows to take the plotting further.

Dominar Rygel XVI would like you to know that he is nobody's puppet!

Good point. If her powers worked though deep space, she didn't need to be on the bridge, taking up space.

It would have been better if she had been some sort of Federation ambassador who was in charge of the mission, as opposed to the ship. That would have made more sense for her sitting on the bridge, but would have reduced Picard's role, which certainly would have changed the series considerably.

I suppose it doesn't really matter, because ST bridges make no sense even from an exploratory aspect. They might as well have had Troi up there, as well as a playpen with a bunch of little kids being babysat in the corner.

Well, the scouting was the "fleshed out" part. You don't create an actual war plan without doing your homework, and scouting your next door neighbor is probably easier than scouting anyone else would be.

Creating plans to invade or defend against other countries, even (currently) friendly ones, is the job of a military staff. It provides options for leaders, and good plans can't wait until two weeks before you realize that you need to go to war. If you've waited that long, you're screwed. Modern militaries don't operate without advanced logistics support and mobilization plans.

More to the point, it's good practice for those whose job it is to plan things. Its not exactly friendly sounding, but every country's military does it. The UK even had a plan for war with the US before WWII, although even then, the plan was "try to get the US population to lose interest in the war by holding out long enough to not be blockaded into starvation".

Just think of it as the US playing a friendly game of Warhammer 40K with their best bud Canada.

I'm well aware that PC doesn't equal Windows and nothing I said indicated I believed that. The point is that PCs still exist, and Windows still dominates them for anything but servers.

I'm a sys admin who uses Linux every day. I've had Linux desktops running on machines and in VMs for years. I have a bunch of Linux desktop VMs at the moment. Its better for development, but I much prefer Linux as the VM and not as my actual workstation.

Linux has done a lot of things well, but creating a desktop worth using regularly is one thing that seems to elude it for some reason. For what it is worth Win XP was "okay", but Win7 was actually pretty good. Even Win 8.1 is decent, if you can ignore some of the irritations. But I have yet to see a Linux desktop that even really compares to XP, let alone later iterations of Windows.

Aero is fine... if you can turn it off.

If you have the machine that can feasibly do all that fancy graphical shit, then why not? As long as they don't make you have to use it.

Sure, Windows isn't all over mobile, but most people still have PCs. Including the one I am typing on right now. It is still quite relevant. Until you end the PC, somehow, it will continue to be, if nothing else changes.

It is still by far, the best OS for business workstation use. And I say this as a UNIX admin who has been waiting for a Linux desktop worth using for the last decade. And its not half bad for personal use either.

Windows has come a long way, although not without its share of missteps. I'm actually okay with it now. I might not switch to a Mac even if someone gave me one. Although that says more about what I think of Macs these days than it does of Windows. And mind you, my first three computers were Macs.