I pray every night that god will smite the physical disk huggers... so that Netflix can shift their business to all streaming and actually improve the availability of streaming titles. It hasn't happened yet, but I keep praying.

You have the horse and cart backwards. Because of the first-sale doctrine, Netflix can offer a lot more movies on DVD than via Streaming. They would probably kill the DVD service if they could offer their full collection over Streaming. But the Movie Industry refuses to grant them sufficent rights (which makes sense... they want to sell DVDs too). And the OP probably would prefer to stream movies if he could.

Just another example on why it's better to buy then rent your media.

But there probably is less than a pound of it!

Err... not to the extent the law permits... to the minimum the law requires

But the two are related closely. In the US, metadata is considered the corporations, which obviously has no privacy right to the data. The idea is that the person has already disclosed that data. Hence, the government has a much lower, well non-existent, burden on law enforcement because they are asking for business records, not for personal information.

In Canada, it seems that just got inverted, so now it's private information vouchsafed to a company.

Bottom line, neither case seems to offer corporations a choice in the matter.

New accounts seem to require a phone number. Is there a way around that?

Someone who supports conservative economic policy but liberal social policies, in any other country, has a mainstream party to get behind.

I wonder why you would chose those two examples for this story. Rand Paul is socially conservative and economically regressive.

And at any rate, it's a bad choice for one reason: So do Americans. The Democrats gave up on any liberal economic policy back in the 80's

Sex is a lot more comfortable on a soft, roomy bed. And I don't want my car to smell like bodily fluids. I'm going to spend the time reading.

At ~1pW/cm^2, a 50x50cm verision of this will provide about 30mWh in 12 hours. Tiny cell phone battery. Heck, a tiny lithium coin cell will provide ~150mWh.

50x50x50 cm cube. Presumably they were able to fit (by your math) 5 plates in the cube.

I think you misunderstand the "Supreme" part of the "Supreme Court," and the legal doctrine of res judicata.

Thank you for some insight!

But no, we can't post anything that might hurt the feelings of both the left and right. Much better to make one happy and one miserable. Who cares if the truth is in the middle?

And you just disproved your thesis. The end result of a body that regulates a business sector is always that the regulators get in bed with the people they're supposedly regulating and work together to erect barriers to entry into their cozy little oligopoly. Throwing more money at them will not fix the problem.

That seems like a non-sequitur. The GGP was saying it's not Android's fault that bundling was abused - I was saying that it was because it was the predictable way, in fact the only predictable way, it would be used. The feature was added to be abused.

That's not saying Android is never to be used, or that there are not better and worse implementations. But it is calling them out that this one feature has no redeeming (to the customer) use.

but it's not Android's fault that someone got greedy.

Yes, it is.

Or rather, it's Google's fault because it let them.

Look, if this was an unforeseen action by a third-party, I would agree with you. But it was obvious that this was going to happen if Google enabled bundling software. They did, so they are just as much at fault as the assholes who do it.

In fact, Google intentionally enabled bundling as a service to those assholes, to encourage them to get Android phones out there.

"The government scares me less because they don't want to maximize the money they get from me."

What country do you live in, I want to move where you live because here in the USA the government thinks all money is theirs unless deemed otherwise.

In the US.

There's a fairly trivial proof that I am correct. See, the government has an army, a police force, the ability to have banks reassign/lock my accounts, and the ability to just print quintiillion dollar bills* and inflate my cash to nothing. They can have everything I own right now if they decide to, and I could not stop them.

But wait, I have stuff!

On the other hand, a publicly held company, given similar power over me, would take everything I have, and then brag about how they were increasing shareholder value. Hell, they may even claim that it was their ethical obligation to leave me with nothing.

And the historical record reflects that.

i>In theory, I have far more control over my government than my insurers.

You can change Insurers, but not really your Government.

So, you're one of those people who believes you can jump straight to a "free market solves all problems" in insurance? A field that both has incredible scale effects leading to a natural oligarchy and, by necessity, is highly regulated? Both of which lead to incredible barriers to entry.

Further, there is little reason for any insurance company to deny themselves this information. First, they seek an advertising, not informational advantage: they all use similar/identical algorithms from the same consultants already. Secondly, in addition to whatever you can gain from serving low-risk individuals who object to monitoring in the pool, would be more than offset by the adverse selection pressure that pushes all high risk candidates into that pool.

Lastly, while I questioned the free market claims, that was a precursor to saying that you are free to emigrate. But unlike a company, where your only choice is to patronize them or not (or there is no choice if you want to drive a car/survive an illness/etc. except for among near identical actors), in the case of a democracy, you can actively work to change things. I'd be hard pressed to find a boycott that worked "well", where I will define "well" as achieving a tangential goal in a timely way through the loss of income to the company. I distinguish this from modifying policies to avoid bad press by a boycott being published, to boost shareholder value by increasing intangible assets, etc. However, I can indeed point to many changes made to a democratic country because some group decided they cared about it.