All AC postings start out at 0 until someone mods them up

"Content distribution" is just as valid an extrapolation of "content cartel" as "content production" is.

Haven't seen the movie, so can't comment on that scene. But the teachers in the book had "hooks" that let them move through zero-g without having to care manoeuvring like the kids (Ender comments that when he finally gets his own hook, he has ceased to need it, as manoeuvring in zero-g has become second nature for him) and they definitely do have gravity control (Ender mentions it - to Bean I think - when discussing how the battle rooms can maintain zero-g when still attached to the rotating space station, and hypothesises about its use as a weapon).

If he constructed his argument well, then he should have, too. Essay writing isn't about being correct - it's about how to presenting a premise, and defending it rhetorically. I've written many essays that I knew (and the marker knew) were "incorrect" in their premise, and received high marks because I argued well or cleverly.

Ender did.

Because the word isn't an innocuous curiosity of linguistic evolution; it's a deliberate construction of language to intended to manipulate people by controlling the words they use to communicate. Same as the current shifting of the word "terrorist" to mean "someone the government doesn't like", and a whole bunch of other examples.

Well, actually he's taking the Hobbit and a bunch of the historical appendices from Return of the King (which were fairly large in their own right) and making them into a trilogy. The other thing to remember is that the Hobbit targeted a younger audience, and was far less wordy and more direct. That means that more events are crammed into a shorter page count, and that cutting has a disproportionate impact on the story.

It's all related; Apple's iron grip on their ecosystem is what allows them to position their device as "premium" and charge so much for it. If they'd done what IBM/Google did, and opened their OS so that everyone could make compatible clones, competition would drive the price down.

The Miriam-Webster was the second entry on Google for "define wean", and the only one I checked. I went for it over the first entry, thefreedictionary.com, as I figured it was more reputable, although checking now, thefreedictionary has a similar definition: "To detach from that to which one is strongly habituated or devoted:"

The other top five definitions include:
- "to withdraw (a person, the affections, one's dependency, etc.) from some object, habit, form of enjoyment, or the like" (dictionary.reference.com)
- "accustom (someone) to managing without something which they have become dependent on "(oxforddictionaries.com)
- " to make someone gradually stop depending on something that they like and have become used to, especially a drug or a bad habit" (macmillandictionary.com)

All of which support my statement.

It's always easy to win an argument when you just make up your own definitions.

wean:
1: to accustom (as a young child or animal) to take food otherwise than by nursing
2: to detach from a source of dependence; also to free from a usually unwholesome habit or interest
3: to accustom to something from an early age

Obviously, it's the second meaning that's being used here, which does not necessitate any form of replacement. The distinction between weaning and cold-turkey in drug dependency isn't the presence or a substitute, but gradation. My wife was on some nasty anti-migraine medication that she had to be weaned off before she could fall pregnant. The weaning process involved gradually decreasing the dose of medication daily, until it fell below therepeutic levels, not by substituting another drug.

Fixed that for you.

15% (the difference between 33 and 38) isn't significant? I guess we disagree on what's significant. You still didn't address the rest of my post - there's countries on that list significantly (by any definition) higher than the US, with a far lower standard of living (Zimbabwe: 97%, Bosnia: 50%), as well as lower. Government spending doesn't appear to have a consistent correlation with standard of living at all.

Because "running out of money" and "inflating your currency into uselessness" have such different outcomes in practice. If you inflate your currency, then you are, to all intents and purposes, spending the buying power of anyone who holds your currency.

No matter what games you play with the means used to represent value, and the end of the day, there is a finite amount of value available at any given time, which means it can be exhausted.

I guess "debt-scare obsessives" being empirically wrong is why Greece is such a great economic state...

Not unless you lied on your application form.

It depends on what you mean by "privatization". From the articles the GP linked, the changes the Tories have been making don't create what you'd consider a "private health sytem" - that is, one where the end-user pays. Instead, they're restructuring the NHS model so that instead of the government running the program directly, they hire private medical contractors to perform the same task. This means they can hire multiple providers (generally in different regions), evaluate them against each other, encourage competition between them to lower prices, etc. It's a change to how services are provisioned, not to how they're paid, or to what services are offered.

Firstly, despite the changes their proposing, the NHS would still be a public system (that is, funded by the public, and serving public clients). Leaving that aside, if there's no public system, then obviously doctor's would train in the private system. I mean, you don't think there was no medical training before the establishment of publicly-funded medical systems do you? The US has only just implemented a public system, and they've managed to train doctors for quite some time.