The right to control your own body's count of infectious diseases ends when you associate with other people who may or may not be vaccinated, and thus spread the diseases to some of them. Similar to the fact that your right to punch into random directions ends when my nose is in one of those directions.

And yes, I meant to put "explaining" in scare quotes both times at the end there and neglected to do so. This is not some "smoking gun" that I have an ulterior motive to support Hachette, for all you conspiracy nuts out there.

Spot on. I take issue with Amazon's handling of this not because of anything to do with whether books are a "consumer good" or not, which they clearly are in the first place (they're sold at retail, buyer gains first sale rights concerning the physical object, sounds pretty much like a good to me). It's because it's anti-consumer. It punishes people who dare to buy from vendors or publishers which the marketplace provider has some sort of issue with. It's exactly like the fights between cable/satellite providers and distributors. The only thing they do is punish the people who enjoy the things they air. Exactly like those situations, we have public communication from each entity blaming the other and confusing the average person. I half-expect Amazon to start putting a little ad-size box on pages for Hachette books "explaining" to the potential buyer why they shouldn't even buy the book in the first place, and Hachette adding extra pages into Amazon-destined copies explaining how shitty Amazon is.

It's all a big dick-waving contest and doesn't help anyone but the one with the biggest dick.

But things that are considered consumer goods, like many technologies, are not completely fungible by that standard. Sure, you have devices that can serve the same purpose, but in most cases they're not really interchangeable without some major changes in what you're doing. You can't really replace a Wii U with an Xbox One and consider them "completely fungible".

The problem isn't misogyny itself, on an individual basis, any more than the problem is invidualized misandry. The problem is when such hate is institutionalized, and I think it's arguable that institutionalized misogyny is at its lowest point in decades. If you start trying to tell individuals what's right and wrong to think, then you are dangerously close to Orwellian thoughtcrime for my tastes. What matters is how people act, which is where any protections need to be placed.

I think that part is intended for works that have not been released yet. Notice it says "being prepared for commercial distribution". As in, leaking things early.

When you gain the power that comes with being a police officer, then everything you do when on duty and filling that official capacity should be open to public scrutiny. Since abuses of that power have very direct and damaging effects on the victims of said abuses, I feel that all officers must sacrifice some of their freedom, while on the job, in order to help protect civilian rights. Those who are good officers that go by the book in every situation (outside of emergency situations that can and do occur, that require nearly instantaneous reaction time) and don't abuse their power have nothing to worry about - if something bad happens that is questionable, having a record of it would also protect the officer.

Yes, I realize that's dangerously close to "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide". However, there is a difference between applying that to civilian individuals (including off-duty police officers) who have a very real right to privacy, and applying it to people who we have allowed to have legal power above and beyond what we allow civilians to do (for example, while civilians in many areas have the right to make a "citizen's arrest", they most likely do not have the right to use physical force to detain that individual, whereas the police do have that right). With power comes the responsibility to ensure that those powers are used properly, and having such interactions recorded as a matter of law protects the civilian and the officer.

I personally think this would be a good idea with civilians too, but the difference is, with officers (and other public officials with power above an ordinary civilian), those recording devices should be mandated by law and such footage available for review by any member of the public, but with civilians, the control over such devices (and indeed, the entire decision to wear them at all) should rest with the individual device owner. I really wish people would get over their Google Glass hangups and realize that, while in public, there is no right not to be recorded. Having a record of the day's interactions (that would automatically fade into the ether after, say, 24 hours, unless a segment is explicitly reviewed by the user and saved) would help prevent or at least reduce the "he said, she said" arguments that sometimes occur when a claim is made, because there is an impartial record of what happened (and in fact, in a society that doesn't have such a hangup about "public privacy", all parties would be recording, making for a way to corroborate what happened and have a fighting chance at detecting editing or other tampering).

So, in other words, never.

Yes.

This would effectively outlaw automation, given that the costs are not zero to operate such machinery. I can understand the argument that prices should be lower, but to say that they should be near zero is to argue that those who use automation heavily shouldn't be allowed to make a profit at all. I can't get behind that philosophically.

Pragmatically speaking:

Nuclear and wind power will likely never reach the public support necessary to eclipse the use of fossil fuels. Nuclear power because of the perceived harm, and wind power because "ohh those windmills are ugly and I don't want to see them".

That leaves solar+hydro. Since pure hydrogen does not occur naturally, that means it must be manufactured somehow, so you're basically reduced to solar power (unless you use fossil fuels to generate the hydrogen, which sort of defeats the purpose here). I don't think our solar extraction technology is quite efficient enough to cover all of our fuel needs, or we'd already be doing it.

As opposed to the release of massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere from animals exhaling?

I know this is possible with other devices as well, but I can stream 1080p content directly from my computer to my iPad and given that the total bitrate doesn't exceed my network capacity, there is no re-encoding.