The reality is that expenses are not linked to individual customers to provide service. If a cable company is servicing a neighborhood of 1000 houses, it cost the exact same if 10% are customers or 100% are customers. They will charge you up the ass because most people will pay for it but if you threaten to go elsewhere they will give deep discounts to keep you. It's called customer retention. It's better for them to cut a bill from $100 to $50 because $50 a month is better than the $0 a month.

It just goes to show what a monopoly they have because they could easily cut their prices in half, still be profitable and would have more customers as people would be more willing to keep cable tv as well as have phone and internet.

The MPAA doesn't care about right or wrong or looking stupid. They will stand in front of the exact same judge and argue the exact opposite of what they argued last time and do it with a straight face. There are no beliefs or moral guidance. No mission statement describing good things they want to do. The bottom line is making more money. They will campaign for laws that hurt competition or reduce their own taxes. They will destroy lives and anything that stands in their way to make more money.

Yes, fuck the religious people. When states and laws try to cater to religious groups, you create several different rules for different people just by claiming something is against your religion. Muslims don't have to wear helmets when riding motorcycles because they wear their turbans for religious reasons. Christians want to be able to refuse serves to gays. I though we were all supposed to be equal? Laws apply to everyone. Religion comes second.

Is that the sales pitch they use to keep selling Americans more tanks and missiles that they don't need?

"And here we have a gun with a knife taped to it.
We really have all the guns we need...
You don't want to appear weak do you?
I'll take 100,000 units."

I'm in the wrong business.

Holy shit! You can use the internet for research?

Yes clearly you're being an ass, but that's just because you really want to be. I never said I couldn't find one, I said I haven't seen one. The fact I haven't seen one doesn't mean they don't exist, but highlights the lack of public education and not my inability to so an internet search. Look at the links the replies have provided. Dry data and safety related. Yea, people that point lasers at aircraft spend a lot of time on sites like that.

The fact I haven't seen a video casually up to that point mean public awareness is incredibly low. What is needed is more public education. Education in schools, more news stories, even some safety commercials. I don't mean the level of drinking and driving safety but more than the next to none that we have now.

When a builder builds a wall, all the factors are known for what the wall needs to endure. Weight it must support, elements and temperature it will be exposed to. The builder should know how to mix mortar and the steps involved with building a wall as he has probably done it many time before. If bricks are falling out, he has made a mistake, too much water in the mortar, too cold to work, something a more experienced worker would not have done and known about.

When a developer writes software, all factors are not known. Each piece of software is unique and designed to meed the clients needs. When bugs are discovered, they are factors that were never originally considered possible. People with names longer than the character field, leap seconds, changing daylight savings hours, operating system changes, network growth, hardware upgrades. Regardless of the developers experience, no one will be able to account for these unknowns and how new code for new features will interact with older code. Bugs usually are not from screw ups but from changing factors beyond anyone's control.

No, not quite. Education is a better tool than disproportional punishment. Despite all of the stories and warnings, I have still not seen a video on the effects of lasers from the pilots point of view. People learn from experiencing the consequences, either personal or seeing other people. Telling people not to do something without an explanation isn't going to stop people from doing things.

A few dozen people are saving a few dollars! Better spend 10 million to stop it!

Except that it is not well intentioned. What they are doing is per-filtering people and anyone that says they would rate 5, they direct them to the rating site. Anyone that does not want to rate 5 they direct away from the rating site. Regardless what they may or may not do with user feed back, they are still artificially inflating their games score by hiding the rating site from anyone that doesn't want to give full ratings.

Those two are probably related. Statistics show crime drops as the temperature drops.

Goes to show the lawyer mentality. All that matters is that Edward gets a guilty plea. He gets that and it shows that he was right. Another mark in the victory column. The reality is only a complete idiot would even consider the offer made for more than a moment. It's basically the equivalent of being held at gun point and telling the gunman, "If you give me your gun now, I'll consider not shooting you."

Age discrimination is legal for many instances. We discriminate based on age for when you can get a drivers license, when you can consume alcohol, when you can vote and when you can have sex. Many places offer senior discounts that the young are not eligible for and if I was selling an adult product, I want to be damn sure that only adults will see my offers.

People have tried forcing people to buy their services before but you can't charge for a service someone didn't ask for. Well you can try but there is no legal power behind it. Things must be getting desperate over there.

No they are not, that would require change and as we all know, Americans fear change.

The boat license in Canada is mostly useless. It's a weak attempt to teach boaters some water rules and is a cash grab mostly. Once the license is issued, it's of little value. It lasts forever and has minimal identifying information so you can borrow a friends license if you don't have one. The police can ask if you have one but have no way to confirm that the license you present is yours.