There is a difference between what may be theoretically possible for some people to do and what is actually practical for most people to do.

However, if you cannot debate with someone who might suggest that your recommendations may not be practical for a large number of people without resorting to name calling like "fool", "sheep", or "moron", then we are probably done here.

It was introduced in 2010, and my understanding is that it passed in December 2011.

Why in the world is the above completely baseless comment modded as informative?

Interesting, maybe... but in the same sense that anything which might be different can be interesting.

That doesn't make it true, however. I'd dare say that the above poster cannot cite any reliable sources that actually back up what he was saying. I'd be admittedly curious to know where he had heard it, however.

Your information is grossly out of date. For over the past 4 years now, all carriers in Canada must unlock a cell phone that has been fully paid for upon request free of charge. Bill C343, look it up.

Your information is false. Carriers in Canada must unlock phones for free. The bill, C-343 if you want to look it up, was enacted into law in Canada in late 2011, and requires that consumers be informed of the existence of any SIM lock on a phone before the sale of such a phone is finalized or before any contract around the phone can be entered, and that the companies must unlock such phones, free of charge, upon request either when a consumer has purchased a phone outright, or else any contract they were on that was directly tied to the purchase of the phone has expired or has been paid off.

Previously, it was not uncommon for providers to charge for performing this service, but they can no longer do so.

Of course it's *POSSIBLE*.... just not necessarily practical. Particularly when you want to do things like eating, or just continuing to have a place to live.

For people who have developed enough social and networking skills that they can successfully make a living being self-employed, of course they can walk away from a job at anytime, even without being independently wealthy, because they have something else to fall back on without facing the risk of destitution.

I would disagree with the assertion that the lack of ability to do such a thing makes me a sheep.

It must really be nice to be be so independently wealthy that you can just choose to walk away from a job if you happen to disagree with your supervisors over matters of programming style.

Obviously there are some philosophical differences that you might have with your supervisor that could justly warrant leaving your job, but such issues are generally less technical in nature and tend to tread more in the domain of being treated with respect and fairness.

But if you are so inflexible in coding style that you are unwilling to adapt to whatever the person who pays your salary is going to expect, then you are probably going to have to be self employed, because I can't imagine that you'd be very happy in almost any other situation.

Not that there's anything wrong with being self-employed but being self-employed requires maintaining a list of clients that are willing to pay you to get a job done, and not all people who might happen to be pretty darn good at programming have all of the social skills necessary to be able to successfully maintain such a list.

You'll have to excuse me if I don't identify with your assertion. Doubtless, you would probably categorize me as a fool.

It's more likely that they would sue for property damage and lost revenue resulting from it.

How do you do that when neither you, nor the court are in space to force them to return to earth and face such penalties?

Obviously as long as there is a need to keep coming back to earth, this is probably not going to be a problem, but if space exploration, including company operations held in outer space, is supposed to continue, we are eventually going to be going out there and not coming back anytime soon that would make any sense to deal with from a legal perspective.

Yes, that's what I imagined they must have meant....except such channels don't exist side by side, at all... they coexist in the same region of a single fiber.

... interactions that occur between different optical channels as they travel side-by-side over an optical cable...

I thought one of the major advantages of optical was that there WASN'T any interactions between adjacent fibers, unlike copper cable, where the charge of electrons running in one line can interact with the charge of electrons running in another line, and produce some interference.

Or are they talking about different communications channels on the same channel on the same *fiber*? Because that's an entirely different matter, and I can understand how interactions can happen there.

How you interpret my comment as such may not be as relevant as how someone else interprets it who *could* imprison me for making such a comment.

The fact that there might not be anybody who is able to do that in this particular forum is wholly irrelevant.

If the school is correct in assuming that the child who said it ever genuinely believed that they could actually carry out such a threat, and not simply said while they were playing make believe (which has been alleged above, but is not definitively proven), then there is no reason that the consequences for saying such a thing should be treated with any less severity than if the consequences were more plausible. The issue at stake is not the feasibility of the threat, it is the making of the threat in the first place.

Of course, if the school is wrong about that assumption, then there's no doubt the school's reaction is out of line. The kid's father clearly believes it was just make-believe, but as I said, there is no obvious indication in the story that the child ever actually didn't intend to do what he was saying, despite the fact that he would have clearly lacked any ability to do.

If you leave your house and go on a 2 year trip around the world it doesn't mean you lose your property rights to it, or maybe it does in your mind?

No, because the civilization of which I am a part remains there, to protect my rights on my behalf in my absence. If the country of which I am a part dissolved, then yes... my property rights would disappear unless the country which took mine over respected my claim to the property that I alleged to own.

Without a presence of civilization, including such things as law enforcement, there is no ability to protect property rights.

If they had no intention of returning to esrth, sure....

I have no problem with companies having property on the moon, as long as they realize that they have precisely zero ability to actually enforce any property rights or hold anyone personally accountable for violating any such rights unless there is somebody who is personally there, or at least until they personally return to the earth.

In general, such ownership rights should immediately dissolve when nobody who represents said ownership is living there, only becoming permanent once large enough permanent settlements are built on the moon that a 24/7 law-enforcement infrastructure can be implemented to enforce such property rights.

Until that time, if you mess around with property that belongs to somebody else on the moon when nobody who represents them is there to physically stop you, without authorization from the company that owned it, you would probably encounter a lot of difficulties when you returned to earth, unless you happened to live in a nation that didn't respect the laws of the country that the company belonged to anyways.

The entire notion of property is a consequence of civilization, and if you don't have a civilization living there, then you can't really have any permanent property there either.