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.

Yeah, because employees totally stopped using email because employers can and do archive it and read it when/if they want to.