like most things once it's a large scale business somebody is going to look to cut corners. You don't do it directly. You just cut everybody's budgets until it happens "out of sight, out of mind". Heck, you don't even need to cut their budgets, just don't _raise_ them and wait for inflation to do it for you. At 2-5% every year that's a nice profit margin increase.

So you don't check/change the filtration equipment as much anymore. Your guys are working 16 hour shifts for 20% less than minimum wage 5 years ago thanks to inflation and driving them to work more hours. Suddenly stuff gets into the water that shouldn't. Maybe a few people get sick, maybe a few over 50 die....

is Hulu is missing most if not all of the drama shows my kid watches. I couldn't care less about sports. But her not having TV made her stand out around her friends as weird. TV is a very social thing for girls.

. "Reusability is the critical breakthrough needed in rocketry to take things to the next level."

What an amazing unprecedented breakthough idea.

My kid hasn't made a phone call in years. Now if you broke text messaging There'd be hell to pay

The reason you think it is hard is because you don't have the dealer repair manuals. Spend a few bucks and you will have step by step instructions on how to fix just about anything on your new car. And yes you can order them. Just tell the dealer that tells you no to fuck off and go to another one for both the books and the car. It's amazing how quickly they will change their tune and order you the books.

Yes by all means let's keep it difficult to communicate with one another that always helps groups of people to get along.

"I'm sorry but I don't speak your Booga Booga language" says people all of the world when they encounter a frustrating situation with a person speaking a miss-matched dialect

It is time for the SciFi language of "standard/common" to get out there. We already have the communicators and they are finally getting close to flying cars. Standard would probably just be English, but people object to English purely for marking reasons. (Western culture coming to destroy our local one.) Call it something else and clean up the last of the junk letters/rules and make it a purely phonetic language and it'll be truly global in 20 years.

People can still have their local lingo, but it's time we moved on.

My year isn't starting out so well. So far only two people have bought Mars, Ho!. No best seller for me =(

Googling for it shows how useless Google is becoming; it's now completely disregarding any and all punctuation and spacing, as well as capitalization and word order like they've done for a while now. Searching for "Mars, Ho!" brings up a bunch of people and medical facilities named Marsho. Three pages in and no hint of any page with the words "mars" and :ho." Worthless.

Bing was better! Believe it or not, along with the folks named Marsho (people at MS are as stupid as Google staff... fucking morons) halfway down the first page was a NASA "Mars, Ho!" page, followed by my book. I think I'll change my default search engine.

Even the yahoos at Yahoo had better results, better even than MS's. The first result was, idiotically, Marsho Medical (look, idiotic seaqrch engines, there's a SPACE dammit). That was followed by NASA's "Mars, Ho!", followed by "images for", one of which was the book cover. Both Bing and Yahoo had the kindle editions listed on the first results, three pages down in Google and there's no hint the book even exists.

I'm kinda bummed... but I usually get the blues this time of year anyway.

True, but if you read the grandparent's link to Wikipedia it describes bluray players that can recognize the audio watermark and won't play the disc. According to the article all players released after 2012 are required to implement the tech. It's not much of a stretch to expect phones and mp3 players will get the same tech soon. It's like I keep telling my buddies: like it or not tech is gonna make crime obsolete, least the nonviolent variety...

Thanks, so far there are two. I think Patty's the other one, I emailed her.

Not "best seller" territority, unfortunately. =(

1) I didn't have to try to lose weight after stopping Paxil (it came off by itself), but if you're still taking them, losing weight may be impossible

2) Yes, attitude does affect quality.

3) Well, when it comes to other people, yes.

so we can make new works using them. You know, Disney didn't write the story in the Lion King, right? It's an age old story. They don't write _any_ of their own stories (even Lilo and Stitch was just something they bought because they thought they could get 626 toys out of it).

The idea was that copyright and patents encouraged people to share information so that it wouldn't be lost. The entire point was to get the works into the public domain at some point. We've turned it into a rent seeking scheme. If it started out this way we'd all be paying royalties to some Nords and a few Egyptians who claimed ownership of stone tablets from 200 B.C..

in order to qualify for the "Safe Harbor" part you have to take down the "infringing" content immediately. No questions asked. Only _after_ you take it down can the person who put it up apply to have it put back up.

It makes it really easy to get stuff silenced and much harder to get it back out there; especially for quasi-legal journalistic sources like leaks.

is that this is exactly the sort of overreach of intent that people said would happen with the DMCA. There's a lot of dirt in those emails on Sony (like them coordinating with Attorneys General to attack Google). Much of that information falls under what used to be freedom of press. The DMCA screws all that. Now anything you don't want making the rounds you just copyright and an ironclad and unquestionable law shuts it down instantly. I believe the phrase is "Chilling Effect"...