That's like the first the paragraphs, you should read the rest of the article. It's interesting and informative.

And is an interesting point that the stock market views yahoo as a negative three billion company with a thirty billion investment in Alibaba.

Because apple may have problems selling their devices when the public is informed of the horrific abuses (deaths, suicide, maiming, cancer) involved in their pretty products.

When opens users of iphones up to comments from others about how evil their phones are and how could they buy a phone built with such evil methods. And when they are made to think about how evil the build process is- some of them feel uncomfortable.

And because apple builds enough of the devices that it can be identified by reporters unlike many other essentially anonymous unknown products that are less famous.

It was pretty obvious what they meant even without looking at the hyperlinks.

I think you would agree that if a farmer is 20 miles from any other connection point that no company or municipality should be legally required to run that farmer a line and charge the same price as they do for a line in an urban neighborhood.

If we decide that we want to provide that as the federal government- cool. Tho it would be pretty damn irritating to find we are running subsidized internet out to some wealthy lady's wilderness estate because she put in 10 acres of hay.

There are alternative solutions (like satellite) but they are more expensive. And that's the trade off you get for living away from other people. You can't share services and costs. You don't pay city taxes.

Everything we decide to do is a trade off. Alaskan Fishermen who are maimed and even killed while fishing for us don't get inexpensive high speed internet either. Neither do game wardens living in remote lodges in national parks. And we don't provide any of them the same level of police, fire, and water service either.

It's not a question of saying they do or do not deserve it. It's prioritization of limited resources. Do you run high speed internet to Fred the Farmer for $20,000 or do you pave a street or buy a new fire engine or buy the new police cruiser?

Especially when changes in technology may allow Fred the farmer to have high speed internet for $120 a month in a couple years.

But if we had unlimited resources- sure. Give the farmer's high speed internet with no extra charge for the extra hardware they require.

There are restrooms and toilets on the star trek deck plans.

It's more the effect of social mores of the times (and even today-- you don't see people do stuff in the bathroom on shows like the Big Bang Theory tho they do talk about it occasionally).

If you can't trade your labor for food and people feel it's immoral to give you food, things will get very bad for a period of time.

Then, like the luddites (who saw they were screwed- requested training on the new machines and didn't get it), most of the losers will starve to death homeless and then 20 years later everyone will refer to them the way we refer to luddites today.

It's a fundamental challenge to capitalism.

In the short term- fewer jobs will mean capital requires even more hours of those who do have jobs and that means even higher unemployment.

I.e. if Comcast uses excess profits from everywhere else to provide ridiculously low priced service (aka walmart breaking into a new market until the competition goes out of business).. then Tucows can't win.

I think the lines need to be built by and maintained by one company or by the municipality and the service provided by competition.

There are good and bad points to excluding customers. It's ridiculous to run a 20 mile fiber to one person's house or even a group of five or six houses and charge them the same as everyone else. If they want cable- they should live with the rest of civilization.

OTH, left to their own devices providers will cut "less" profitable customers over "highly profitable" customers. Which doesn't work with something that is basically a public utility.

That's not how copyright works and I ask you to disclose that law. Anyway, Guardians of the Galaxy is less than $20 for a DVD, less than an hour's work for most people here, and is the mostly popular thing getting pirated. I seriously doubt you can stretch any law to mean "things have to be really cheap, like maybe just a buck or two, or you can take it without paying."

According to the FBI complaint against Benthall, he registered the black market bazaar's servers with the email address blake@benthall.net.

Lucky they had a mole on this inside, or they never could've taken down that criminal mastermind.

Piracy promotes ideas, innovation, allows good things to spread

I'd link to pirate bay if it wasn't down...they showed the top downloads and literally every single one was a commercial movie or game or TV show from a major publisher. The exact same sort of thing that is popular without piracy, only now you don't have to pay for that copy of "Guardians of the Galaxy."

The problem is that solar won't start off able to deal with 50 year events like utilities used to be capable of handling. I say used to be because these days they can't any more due to cost savings measures they've taken to increase profits.

For example- land lines used to stay on unless the line was cut down. After our last hurricane, the land lines went off after 6 to 24 hours when the batteries at the local substation ran dry--- these days any new lines are fiber optic (no copper- no power) and old lines are being replace.

Likewise- our electrical power used to be back up within a few days after a hurricane. I'm not sure what has changed but it was 2-3 weeks in many areas. I suspect cost cutting there too- less repair supplies kept on hand (don't want all that stuff sitting around causing inventory taxes), fewer staff retained (enough for normal times but no extra capacity), and less proactive tree cutting.

But hit solar with a 5 day storm- people die-- and a five or even seven day backup will come to be normal.

I don't know if wild Slashdot speculation that Microsoft might fundamentally change their business model to something word that everybody would hate is enough of a reason for them to move to an entirely new OS.

I see the mistake I was making.

Lol. It sort of made me feel better as I've been comparing my income to household income.

There is still a minor gap between our figures and then one issue with the data..

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

$27,500 to $29,999 52.16 Median income.appears about $29000.

The 80% level
$57,500 to $59,999 80.90 agrees with your figures

$100,000 or more 93.39 The top 6.4% make over 100k

--
Okay the problem.
This data which agrees with your figures includes "Of those individuals with income who were older than 15 years of age,"

So it has about 8 years worth of millions of young people who really not representative of people working for a living but rather working for a little extra spending money. It also includes millions of retired seniors with any income besides social security. Like the retired guy who works at my kroger two days a week.

If you look at actual prime working year people, you have two major groups
Overall median wage: 39,509 This is $10,000 higher than the figure above.
College Grad median wage: $56,027.

So it seems reasonable that among the "real" working population the 80% level is closer to $70,000.

This discussion has been pretty helpful for me.

I'm in a high income crowd and had crossed household income with personal income because we individually all make as much as households.

Personal income here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Shows median personal income is somewhere between $27500 and $29999.
$25,000 to $27,499 48.01 make less.
$27,500 to $29,999 52.16 make less.

And more to the point, in a greement with your figures...

$57,500 to $59,999 1,876 0.89 80.90% make less.

Of course, that's not correcting for age and includes a lot of 18-26 year olds who haven't started their first "real" job yet. But point taken.

He he. To those of us older folks, many today's ads feel like that.

At least they are not FIVE TIMES THE VOLUME any more. That was a pretty terrible 20 year period before that was mostly outlawed. They even sold sets that would specifically lower the volume if the signal coming in was too loud because of it (sort of an adblock of it's day).