That said, the result of violation of these limits is not generally criminal. If I take a picture of cirque du soleil, for example, I will be asked to stop or be ejected if I do not. Likewise, if I am recording a soccer match, and that is the only way to catch a goal, the rules might be that I delete the recording or be ejected, and if I am always doing this the league has the freedom not to sell me or ticket or let me in if I get a ticket.
So under the terms of service, the solution is to ban these people who post goals from attending the game. Claiming the activity itself is illegal is silly. The best the league can hope for is that a person who has been banned might get arrested for trespassing if they ignore the ban and it can be proven they were aware they were banned.
So MS Surface is a good product, but it is expensive for what it is. To make it look cheap they compare it to a 13" Macbook, but the reality is that if is priced evenly between a 11" and 13" Macbook, so is not aggressively priced.
For better or worse, the reason that consumers buy MS Windows based PCs is because they are aggressively priced. A laptop can be had for 1/2 the price of a Mac because the laptop can have lower specs because MS Windows can run well on lower spec machines. I am not going to run on an I5, but there are many who that is fine and they can get a cheaper laptop than Apple provides, and get service from a third party that caters to end users.
It is going to be a while before the culture shifts to MS being a seller of premium consumer product. This will happen, if MS is serious about being such a firm, but that opens up the business market. Already MS is talking about only supported one version of IE, which means that business is going to have the headache of rolling out frequent updates. Apple is teaming with IBM to get point of use applications on iPad, which will significantly reduce the cost of supplying business rule applications to worker bees. Firms can already create custom apps on Android devices to serve the same purpose. MS Surface should be a way to counter these losses on the desktop. Instead they are produces commercials to make the MS Surface seem fun, and charging extra for a keyboard.
A case can be made for a trimester year round school situation in which students are required to attend two per year. Two in a row can be missed with permission, and missing three is equivalent to dropping out of school. This could be beneficial in many ways, but would be complex.
A big problem with the proposal is simply costs. Right now there is a lot of stuff that happens in the summer. Some of it is paid by school budgets, some of it is paid by external grants, some of it is paid by the teacher. The fantasy is that we can increase the school year with no significant costs. This is not true. Over the past 20 years teacher pay has gone up considerable, and a lot of that cost has to do with simple additional time the teacher is required to work. This is the same in any situation. If you are paid hourly, i.e. required to be at work at 7 and work until 3, if they ask to work until 4 every day then that should come with additional pay. This is what has happened with teacher, the additional few weeks and time per day has increased pay about 15%. If we go year round the pay will increase another 20% at least.
There will be other costs. Training will not happen during the off time, so staff will have to hired to cover classes. The argument cannot be made that personal business can be handled during breaks, so teacher will have to take days off during the year, a practice that many teachers now try to avoid. This again will require additional staff hire. To give you an idea of this additional cost, say a school has 60 teachers, which is a small school. Two weeks of training and two weeks of personal time is 20 days. For all teachers that is 1200 person-days, let round it up to 10,000 person-hours. At minimum wage, rounding up again, is $80,000 per school in class coverage costs. Not all of this is new costs, but it is significant. Add a half million for additional pay, weekend costs to maintain the school that is now down over break, and one is looking at a cost per student going from around $7,000 to around $8,000.
In social sciences reproducibility is possible. For instance in epidemiology databases are crunched using well known statistical methods to determine correlations, then further science is applied to determine is these correlations might be causative. If a second party cannot do an equal statistical analysis and get similar results then the results are not valid. If a second party can go through the process of collecting the data and find systematic errors, then the results is not valid. This is in fact a big problem with education research. When subject to the process of real science, much if not most of the research has been shown to not meet those standards.
So social science research can be scientific, but there is a second issue. We expect research to be predictive. It is said that field such as astronomy are as unscientific as social science. But in astronomy there is an element of application. The results are used to predict other finding which then can be confirmed. This is the element that makes fields such as physiology less scientific.
In any case,Apple is absolutely wrong here. If this were a convenience feature it would be easy to add in a setting like they do with so many other features. For instance cellular data roaming can be turned off. To make sure that Apps still have an opportunity to waste bandwidth there is an annoying reminder to turn the cellular data back on when accidentally using the App. If Apple wanted go, it could allow users to set the time interval anywhere from zero to 15, or more, and then allow the App to be as annoying as it wanted to get you to turn back to 15. As it is, the protocol is clearly meant to maximize unintentional in App purchases.
In the current system, information may be collected, and may be reliable, but it is not verified or acted upon. One can imagine where a driver gets a bad review, then creates a new account with a friends credentials. One can imagine a case where cars are not well maintained and cause an accident.
In fact the solution to this is very simple and should not raise the prices much if the profits of the service are moderated. Require each driver to carry commercial insurance and have a commercial drivers license. My father had one, so I know they are not difficult to get. The service could contract with an insurance company to provide a customized package. I think it is important for each driver to contract with an insurance company, not the service, because the insurance company will have additional checks and verifications. The policy can then be linked to the profile to insure that a driver is more likely to be who he or she says it is.
Right now these services are simply trading security for costs. For some this is a good tradeoff. But if the system of regulated cabs is dismantled without something equally secure we will simply see a period where people have no choice but to be insecure and then an expensive process where regulation, probably worse regulations, are implemented.
"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne