I would think it is reasonable enough to require that some negative thing happens to someone's health to call it a health impact. That's not moving the goalposts, that's going by the definitions of the words.

They are advantageous as long as most of the content producers are here. If not, they become a disadvantage.

That's the point where the U.S. throws it's weight around and gets others to agree to new terms.

So where's that health impact you claimed? Who got sick?

Except that it is much easier for a corporation to make profits disappear overseas on paper than it is for an individual. I cannot open a "Me Inc." in Ireland and pay Me 90% of my income as a licensing fee on me, the trademark and then deduct it from my taxes here.

They will do no such thing. The last thing they want is for the U.S. to reverse position on intellectual property and drive a worldwide shortening of copyright and broadening of fair use.

No seriously man. I wasn't saying it as an attack.

I'm saying it like- seek help. The views you are expressing are very far from reality. This is dangerous to you. You are thinking in a bubble isolated from reality.

Not joking. Not attacking you.

Good lord, you are serious.

You are being irrational. You need to get back in touch with reality before you do something stupid. I'm not trolling or sniping you. I'm serious.

Seems they could develop a way to non-invasively confirm pressure of the footballs that sits in front of cameras on the sidelines.

Some storage box that puts the football under a standard pressure and confirms the deformation is within the expected range. Or is 1 to 2psi too small to be noticeable that way?

Without the government, apple wouldn't be able to exist.

There is nothing to stop widespread theft of their IP by other countries (can you say "Patent protection for 0 years).
There is nothing to stop widespread copyright infringement of their products.
There is nothing to stop people from kidnapping and/or murdering their top employees.
There is nothing to stop people from attacking apple stores and destroying product.
The roads fall into disrepair.
There's no guarantee of the quality of gasoline in their delivery vehicles.

A functioning government is necessary for businesses to exist.

An increasing number of vehicles don't use gasoline or diesel fuel.
And many of the ones that do are getting higher gasoline mileage than they did 20 years ago.
We are going to have to increase the license fee and/or add in a mileage fee.

Corporations are just a structure the wealthy use to hide their wealth and income from taxation. If you are not going to tax corporations then they need to be disallowed from building up substantial piles of cash. It should all be forced to pass thru the corporation in a timely fashion.

No they don't. There's a huge deficit because tax income hasn't met the cost of running government for a long time.

And our government recently just dropped another 2 trillion dollars and took on another trillion in vet benefit obligations to fight a couple wars to benefit oil companies in the middle east.

I'm not sure how the currency risk works out in that area but I think it would have lost them a ton of cash lately.

Just like they tell you that you any time you think you might be being pulled over by someone who's not a real cop (say, an unmarked car), you can drive to the parking lot of a police station before pulling over.

Disclaimer: That only works if you are white.

there is a Flash exploit that STILL isn't patched, that only requires a user to visit a site with a bit of compromised embedded flash content like a banner ad, and BOOM, owned. You don't even have to click a link, just visit a domain hosting the content on a page.

I notice your account was created yesterday. Please let me be the first to welcome to you Slashdot.

Maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself, by way of introduction. Like maybe your badge number.

At least one of the customers that got called asshole did nothing more than insist on cancelling a premium option on their cable service. Her 'offense' was actually wanting the option cancelled.

As for the rest, for better or worse, these people are the only people reachable and so their job is to listen to the complaints. I do try to avoid screaming, but when I tell you there is no signal on the line at all anywhere on my street, I do not want to hear "reboot your computer" or I can't ping your modem, please be home between Monday and Thursday of next week so I can send someone who doesn't have any equipment to fix the actual problem (yes, paraphrased). Of course you can't ping my modem, your network is down. Apparently they haven't been provided any training at all and can't even look up other customers in my neighborhood so they can try pinging their modems.

Yes, it's the management's fault that they don't even have that very basic knowledge and necessary tools, but since they can't or won't put a manager on the phone (probably a matter of policy), all I can do is ask them to take dictation into a note on the account.

"Human Shield" has never been a pleasant job title, but it's the one that fits their role in the company more often than not.