Suppose you owned a house, spent a lifetime paying for it, and decided that it was too big for you and you might rent it to a family who can use the space. You charge enough to cover the taxes, maintenance, residential insurance, and part of the rent for your small apartment. You find a family that is willing to pay your rates, and explain the lease. You do a background check and interviews and they seem ok. They sign the lease, thereby agreeing to your terms, and in exchange you let them live in your place. A few months later you house has completely burned down. It turns out that they have been going to visit grandma every weekend and they have been renting out the house Friday and Saturday nights. The insurance company, who is always looking for any loophole, says that it does not cover subletting and will not cover the claims. You sue and eventually get some of the money back, but have lost everything in the process. Where is the crime here. Of course, if you own your place, you can probably let it out for a several weekends a year and be ok. You could also negotiate with your landlord and pay additional fees so you could let it out. But doing stuff with things you don't own is not a great expectation.

I know. They must hate tourists because prostitution is illegal, and I am not going anywhere where there are a whole four hours a day when a bar must be closed. I suppose that is why so many people go to Illinois and the like for vacation.

When I was in school, the MS stuff was available for the cost of the media. I know that people say MS gives away programming tools, but really, they don't. I have tried to program with what MS gives away and it is crap in comparison with something like Eclipse or xcode.

Now, it is true that with xcode you need a Mac, so add $1000 for the programming bit. xcode is also much more complicated that it needs to be for the purpose of teaching.

There are cheap ways to teach kids to program. For way under $100 you can give a kid an Ardiuno kit, then she can use sketch of process to code it. As mentioned, python can be used for free. I suppose we need something like codeschool for kids to get them started.

Using industry estimates, i calculated that it would cost a few billion dollars to equip the next several years of commercial airplanes, not counting the current fleet. This money to prevent an expenditure 2 order of magnitudes smaller that might only occur every 10 years. It is risk assessment. And there is no way to know if it would have been any more effective than the current system. It would be just as meaningful to say that we should put a battery in the black box that lasts a year, or has a much stronger transmitter.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.

In the Larry Flynt case the naked women were deemed to be adults who allowed their image be taken and printed. He likely did the paper work for releases, and photographed the women overtly and with full knowledge that the images would be published. Honestly the freedom of speech that was being protected in that case were of the women, not of Flint. A negative ruling would have meant that an adult women, or in the case of hustler many men, would no longer be able to expose herself or be penetrated for compensation.

So the cases are not really comparable. In revenge porn the images may not have taken overtly. In revenge porn the woman might not have agreed to have the images spread beyond the local area. Furthermore, it might a violation of copyright. If the victim did know that she or he was being filmed, there is no guarantee that victim was not in fact the one who made arrangement for the film to be made and in fact the person with copyright. The person who releases the film may just be an participant who did not own the camera, or set up the production, and therefore has not right to communicate the film to the public.

So to be clear if a person arranged to video themselves masturbating or having sex with partner(s) that are aware the video is going public, then stopping that would be a violation of free speech, but otherwise not. If we did accept your argument, then we would also have to accept that it would be a violation of free speech to film film young girls in a dressing room or to take covertly film women going up an escalator so we can see up their dresses. In both cases, this is not acceptable, and the former is is not only because of age issues.

There is no good streaming option, and really there is no paid digital video ownership option that is reasonable. If you buy a video, and Apple or Amazon, or whoever, does not want to support the streaming anymore, you no longer are able to use the bits that you own. Most boxes that you put on your tv are either tied to a vendor so options are limited or are not so options are limited.

Honestly a box that can hook up to the cable, steam all common formats from a personal external hard disk, and can steam most paid services still wouldn't be any good(is there box close to this, maybe TiVo?) because the cable company can pull the service at any time or streaming might change and there is no guarantee you can upgrade.

All parties are so focused on maximizing revenue, by forcing a separate $100 box for each service, by renting DVR for cable, that the entire service is writing it own doom. We have been down this road before with DVDs. The copy protection and high price and ads that could not be skipped meant I stopped buying DVDs years ago, and never will pay a blue ray. That is money they left on the table.

We also saw this with CDs. Huge prices, the exec must have thought they came when the profits rolled in, then technology meant that all the CDs could be copied, and it all fell because there was no strategy to deal with the new reality, and only legal hoopla to try to stop it.

At some point bandwidth will be fast enough, even with the obstruction of the major ISP, and enough people will be willing to take a risk, that if there is not a streaming option the video will feel the same loss of value of the audio industry.

From their website

"USAID is the lead U.S. Government agency that works to end extreme global poverty and enable resilient, democratic societies to realize their potential."

So things like anonymous communications that allows the citizenary to communicate without their government surveling them can be considered part of that mission. USAID is actually directed to promote democratic governements. It is like the old Radio Free America. They do not actively undermine governments, but they do put propaganda on the airwaves that tell the people of those legitimate governments to rebel.

Of course all this falls apart when we note that US is no longer recognizing anonymous and free communications as a fundamental right of the citizen. This is a bit hyperbolic, but a lot of our taxpayer money is being spent collecting open communications and attempted to minimize anonymous communication.

I would look at it differently. Sponsors who in the past have worked with show that find women who are willing to have sex with a stranger chosen by the sponsor, or a group of people fighting against each other to win an contest with no real consequences, or, at the most, skilled workers competing to create something that is not going to be technically evaluated, ie does not have to pass a machine, such as cooking.

So there are things that can be done with people who have more freedom in their process or end product. It was a failure of the sponsor to understand the process. More than likely, the sponsor has some money tied up in this process, perhaps more than any other agent. Due to the sponsor incompetence, that money has been lost.

It may be that this means any such venture in the future will be unlikely. It may be that some more competent sponsor will understand the special circumstances and manage to create a profitable venture.

What Apple can learn is to manage expectations. Pebble lost credibility because they promised a lot and then could not deliver. Even now the website has been revamps to encourage orders and development rather then detail what the watch can do for the consumer. For instance, it focuses on Apps that communicate with the pebble, but not what the Pebble can do out of the box. I don't fault Pebble for this. Pebble was crated when Apple had almost all of the market share, but Apple has never played well with third party hardware who tried to do something beyond the scope of what Apple wanted. OTOH, even Samsung has not been able to come up with a watch that plays well with it's own products.

Recall the iPhone has never worked well as a a phone. That is why it is now a mobile device that happens to let you make calls. I miss my Razr which was a great phone, but little else. I guess I don't miss it that much.

We can expect that the watch will not be that great as a watch. It is kind of like the ipod Nano, which was a good watch but could have had more faces, and was not at all stylish. We can expect something that is a passable watch. What is going to be critical is the communication with the phone. And hopefully one full day, at least 18 hours, of battery life with heavy usage of the apps. This is the one thing that is still wrong with the iPhone.

One technical problem with ST is that there is so much magic. The transporter, the universal translator,the communicators that always work, the warp engine, etc. All these are so the story does not get bogged down in what is essentially a space opera. But there is so much magic that creating suspense, or dealing with certain human situations, such as the difficulty of communication, is hard to create.

Bad segments, the The Motion Picture, do a bad job in dealing with the magic. Good segments, like Darmok, use the strength as a weakness. The society has become so dependent on the universal translator doing the brunt of communication, that they have lost the ability to interpret and comprehend. Picard had to relearn that skill in order to save the day.

It is perhaps indicative that geeks, who do not always value the process of communications, do not appreciate this episode.

the fallacy is comparing ride share services with Taxis. They are different. One is regulated service provided to make sure that public can be assured of a higher level of transportation than fixed rate public transport, the other is an ad hoc less regulated service akin to hiring a limo. I am sure no one here would make the argument that Uber is a ripoff because it costs more than a bus?

There are two problem with the ride share services. First is liability. Those who provide the service are often do not commerical insurance. Therefore any incident that occurs during commercial operation may not be covered. Likewise, companies like uber is only really responsible when a passenger is being transported, otherwise they would be open to huge liability. The limits of liability when a driver is simply logged on is minimal. To make it work, service like Uber should either require commercial insurance, or for a few provide required ad hoc insurance anytime a driver is 'on the clock'.

Second is safety. Taxi service is one of the most dangerous jobs out there. I don't know of any significant incident yet, but it is just a matter of time. At some point a driver is going to die, there is going to other lawsuits, and the model is going to be tested.

That said, there should be a new model in which taxis can vary the fee structure, compete on service, and provide to specific needs.

I find for each local field, the employees tend to come from a very universities. The reason for this, I guess, is not only chauvinism but also because graduates of a certain university speak a common language. Therefore, if the objective is not just becoming educated, but rather trying to use a degree to make more money, look at the local colleges, look at which graduates get hired.

As indicated elsewhere in the discussion, online universities appear to be best for people who already have a job but need a sheet of paper to advance. If no one in your area is hired new employees from SHNU, the time spent there will not be profitable.

It would be better. It works for copyright because there is no process to go through.

The patent system is broken because it is becoming like copyright, in the sense the no physical object or specific implementation is needed, but there is still an expensive process to get a patent. If it were simple as saying, hey everyone can use this but if you do and make it public all improvements have to be made public as well, that would be great. But there is no way to enforce that. The only thing to do is hope the patent office honors prior art.

But others are right. We do need foundations that are dedicated to paying for patents that are then openly licensing. Of course the foundation would then need armies of lawyers to defend the patents.

The real fix is severely limit the things that can be patented.

These people control Sunglass hut. They not are able to integrate the glasses into current and future products, they are able to provide a retail channel to market and promote them. They are able to provide incentives to specifically push the products to customers. This solves a problem with the original Android phone, in which end users had no way of interacting with the physical phone. Most who bought it did so soly on the Google name.

Of course, at $1750, which is basically what they device with frames costs, it is going to be a hard sell. Persols of Maui Jim will run $300. Integrate the Google Glasses, and you end with $2000.

This has little to do with manufacturing cell phones. There are only three companies making money on cell phones, Apple, Samsung, and MS through royalty payments by most Android Manufacturers.

It is more a matter of what is legal. User can't really be allowed to change how cell phones work at this level. Such things can cause interference.

What Ubuntu can do, and what Google was supposed to do, is provide a way for users to modify and update their open source phones independent of their carrier. This should not be something that is prohibited, and where Google lost in their open source push. Apple bypassed the carriers by working with a desperate ATT and then using power built up over time to push the way into other more reluctant carriers.

This should be what Ubuntu should do. Find a desperate carrier. Sell quality phones. You are right that the fanatics will cause problems. But the others will do worse.