Some really odd responses in here, that make me question the honestly of the responses. For example, on 35% of Chinese respondents believe their government restricts access to the Internet?

Secondly, on the Snowden question, the question calls out for a "yes, I have" response. People don't want to admit to surveyors that they don't know something, so a good study will actually test whether they actually know about Snowden, or are just not willing to admit ignorance.

Finally, it doesn't say what the "steps" people took actually are, so it's very hard to say what impact Snowden's actually had.

There is a section asking about what people are doing differently on the net vs. last year (changed password, not go to certain sites, etc. etc.), but that was asked of all respondents, not just those who say they know of Snowden, so there's no output on what specific changes people made. Would be interesting to see the responses to that question separated between those who know of Snowden, and those who don't.

1. PC gamers are a much smaller, and techier, market than the market for movies or music. Hardly representative.
2. Even in the PC game sector, DRM, outside of a few egregious cases, doesn't seem to be much of a barrier to success (a la most games on Steam).

To flip it around, extensive DRM doesn't seem to hurt console game sales, which far outstrip PC game sales in both units and $.

Weird, because Amazon in the US sorts on price+shipping, not just on price. It works out to the same thing for some products (i.e. books), since shipping outside of Prime is a standard $3.99. It will, however, include Prime, so if you have a book selling for $0.01, with $3.99 shipping, that would rank below a book that qualified for prime with a price of $3.98.

In my experience (never driven in Oz, but in NZ, Continental Europe, the UK, and the US), the turn signal stalk is always on the left, for left-hand drive cars, and on the right, for right hand drive cars.

You're not alone. You're _definitely_ a minority. If the studios offered the content for free, but with current DRM, people would be lined up down the block. If they dropped the FBI warnings, etc. from the start of DVDs, sales would go up 0.1%.

Do you seriously think that a significant portion of Pirate Bay downloads are people who have purchased the content, and are just downloading a copy to get an unencumbered version? Honestly?

In most jurisdictions, it constitutes theft of services, in addition to (potentially) burglary (depending on exactly how you got in).

Problem is, people aren't identical. Take 1000 Macbooks, run the same code on them, and you'll get (almost always) identical results. You won't get the same asking 1000 people to interpret a law or contract.

Lawyers (at least good ones) attempt to deal with this issue by being as precise and comprehensive as possible. Often, they're derided for creating "1000 page contracts in legalese instead of a one page agreement," but 999 of those pages, and the legalese, are usually efforts to explicitly deal with the corner cases that can come up in a contract.

You're absolutely right, it's not a tragedy of the commons, it's a free rider problem. Brain failure last night. Still raises the question, what changes to our IP laws would fix that? In both tragedy of the commons and free rider problems, assigning excludable ownership fixes the problem, but would likely create others...

What aspect of current IP law do you believe creates this situation (i.e. the ease of free-riding on open source), and how should they be reformed?

This looks like a classic tragedy of the commons problem, in which case assigning ownership (i.e. eliminating the free-as-in-beer aspects of FOSS) is the relevant solution.

"Create a Basic Income (financed by the Fed at zero cost to taxpayers),"

How, out of curiosity, will this miracle be achieved? What magic wand will the Fed wave in order to create these resources from midair?

Now, there's a pretty decent argument for a basic income (from economists across the political spectrum, including Friedman, not generally known as a soft-headed liberal), but the money would have to be transferred from elsewhere in the economy via taxes.

Got any actual evidence for this claim? I see your unsupported assertion, and raise you a page of peer-reviewed studies.

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/q...

Yes, absolutely. That's why I made the "back in February" comment. They need to make a judgment call then about the most likely strains, and manufacture to that.

I've spent the last couple of days wishing for sweet, sweet death, and I did get my flu shot. Still 100% glad I got my flu shot, though. Basically, I was wearing a bulletproof vest, but got shot in the leg. Not the vest's fault. A group of very highly trained professionals made a judgment call back in February about what strains this year's flu shot should protect against, and they got it wrong. C'est la vie.

Thank you. That is helpful.

In the interest of sharing of information, and especially since so many here seem to think that the grand jury testimony is some sort of slam dunk, I'll mention some interesting points about it:

1) Grand juries almost always indict. They literally have a record of about 99.9% indictment. Many articles on the subject quote a NY judge who said that a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich if that's what the prosecutor wants. The strange (or maybe not so strange) flipside of that is when the defendant is a police officer. Grand juries almost never indict in those cases. Literally, about 99% end up without an indictment.

2) It is not up to grand juries to look at exculpatory evidence, or even hear testimony from the defendant. Typically they spend a few minutes looking at a small collection of evidence against the defendant, and then say "sure, sounds like he needs to be tried". In this case, however, boatloads of exculpatory evidence was introduced, and WIlson testified, contrary to normal grand jury procedures.

3) Although a ton of defense evidence was presented, the prosecutor did not cross examine Wilson. There are countless holes in his story that needed to be challenged (for example, why did he tell investigators Brown punched him ten times and then tell the grand jury it was only twice, or why did he tell investigators he didn't know what Brown handed to Johnson or make any connection to the robbery and then tell the grand jury that he pulled over because Brown and Johnson were suspects in the robbery and were carrying the stolen goods?). All of this, and more, went unchallenged.

4) There have been suggestions of other sneaky tactics that I'm not familiar enough with to comment on, but I'll provide this link as just one example.