Every corporation has a charter from the government...

And if the phone company is the only one allowed to lay phone lines to your house, I would call that a government granted monopoly.

You seem to be saying that employees and customers don't *already* pay for government services that businesses use.

drudge makes money by having outrageous headlines. "Spielberg picks Laurie to play Lincoln" doesn't make him any money.

Many schools have a rule that you cannot use work you did for a prior class.

Honestly, I think /.ers are hugely underestimating the draw of sports. ESPN has already made a huge investment in 3D. ESPN3D is a huge draw for sports fans.

It's going to take time to catch on though. HDTVs didn't take off overnight either.

Not all Americans get drunk every time they drink.

You are right about cigarettes though. Those who smoke, smoke a lot. The percentage of the population that smokes has been going down for the last few decades though.

I don't think that there would be a big increase in marijuana consumption after legalization. It's already available pretty much everywhere. Where I live, there is a huge drug bust every six months or so. They'll bust a truck just completely filled with marijuana. And my thought is always exactly the same. The drug cartels wouldn't send truck loads of marijuana if most of them didn't get through without a problem.

I personally don't smoke marijuana, but it's not hard to look around and see that prohibition is a failed policy.

We can't have secret treaties become law in democratic countries. It would be the end of democracy as we know it.

There's not enough data for that to mean much of anything. Additionally, the Republican party radically changed their platform with the Reagan revolution in '80, so any data before that for Republicans is especially meaningless.

Also, http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/10/republicans-democrats-and-stock-market.html

Seriously. I want to see the result for the past year. Or better yet, the past two years. Not everyone in the private sector gets a pay raise every year, even in good times.

*Yawn* go read up on federalism. Sadly, so many Americans know so little about how this country actually works...

Believe it or not many rural areas get by with volunteer fire departments that are largely funded through donations...

The early web game Stellar Crisis is still going today. The web's first multiplayer strategy game!

http://homeserve.org/sc/sc.php

I'll also note that this per subscriber fee is significantly higher for small ISPs. By about a thousand percent... as a result, small ISPs do not carry the service. If you *want* ESPN3, you have to switch to a big carrier, because you cannot buy an individual subscription to the site.

There's a separate fee for ESPN3 (previously known as ESPN360). Almost every provider provides ESPN on basic access, so that's not the issue. The issue is that ESPN is charging a PER SUBSCRIBER FEE for a WEBSITE to ISPs. This means that if your provider has ESPN3, you are paying for it, whether you want it or not. ESPN wants to turn the Internet into cable TV. That is the issue.

I prefer steam to non-steam pc games. I can install any steam game on my computer at the click of a button without digging around for a disc. Integrated friends list, achievements, steam cloud... I'll take tangible benefits today over the possibility that Steam *might* someday shut down. Steam has been around for, what, six years? It's not going anywhere...