The ones who get elected will be the the ones that the holders of the information choose - they simply won't reveal their video rental habits or out-of-context emails.

So, if, hypothetically, some agency were logging all of the internet activity of everyone, they'd have a lot of power over anyone who wanted to do something that required public approval. At a minimum they'd probably be able to make sure that their agency survived despite scandal after scandal, including those which reveal the existence of this very plan, and even documented nefarious use of the collected information, whether for manipulating politicians, or more mundane extortion, or stalking ex's, etc.

A world in which people look past the weird habits of their neighbors instead of looking for a reason to feel superior to them is a pretty lofty idea to hope for. Possibly the only remaining option is to have enough competing organizations using this tactic that it affects everyone, eventually inoculating society from the tactic.

It seems ridiculous that copyright can be used to quash the existence of a version of a work that was once published, but that the creator decided he didn't like.

This. 1000x this. Laptop keyboards are often much better than regular keyboards in terms of minimizing the amount of effort required to get a word from your head into the machine. The only thing missing is for them to be full-size and ergonomic. (My preference would be a split keyboard where both units are separate bluetooth modules, or at have at least 6' of cord connecting them.)

membrane switches are like analog vinyl. Mechanical switches are the digital metaphor in this analogy.

Does parsing words so people will come to the wrong conclusions count as lying?

If 16 fps was acceptable to audiences, then it would have won. Edison wasn't some kind of irresistible force - he couldn't keep the country from using AC, for instance, and where he was able to establish DC, DC actually made sense.

Hang on..

Are you seriously suggesting that bubble sort is useful for N in the millions?

Movies don't look smooth. They look like a staccato of motion-blurred still frames. 24fps was simply the minimum (read: cheapest) frame rate at which most of the population would perceive as mostly motion-like. Motion blur helps, but it hardly makes up for the deficiency.

Technology has advanced quite a bit since the advent of motion picture cameras, to the point that the "film" is pretty far from the most expensive line item in the budget. Why not record at a more natural frame rate?

The conceit of the movie industry is conditioning he movie watching public to believe that 24fps looks "more cinematic." How convenient for them that it is also "less expensive." But how disappointing, too, when those hard to-obtain establishing shots from high over the countryside don't really show any of the beautiful detail to the viewers?

3/5ths was about proportionment of representation among the states, not the treatment of individuals. The problem was the existence of states where non-free persons were not eligible to vote, so any proportionment of representation made on their behalf was exercised by the free, land-owning male citizens.

If you think disenfranchisement is unfair, how do you feel about disenfranchisement that grants your own deserved electoral power to the very parties that are oppressing you?

3/5ths was a compromise, but its fundamental unfairness was not that it was too low, but too high. States with non-free populations should never have been rewarded with the ability to exercise electoral power of the people they oppressed.

Except that Sailing and Curling are both current olympic sports, Chess is apparently under occasional consideration, and according to wikipedia, even ballooning was once an olympic sport....

and magic blood that cures any disease or ailment including death from extreme radiation exposure, yet the episode wasn't about the ethics of a systematic rare-blood harvesting operation or the distribution of its products.

Fixed that for you.

You don't have to wait through all that crap. Most voicemail systems have a key assigned to skip the header and jump straight to the message. It's always a different one, though, as far as I can tell. Next time you're at the main menu of your voice system, try listening through to the end of the options and choose the help one if it exists.

They compete on price because that's all the information the aggregation networks have. I'm not in the industry, so I don't know if it's the aggregation networks' fault for not having more detail in the spec, or the airlines' fault for not releasing enough information, or what, but the problem is that when using one of the aggregators, you can typically only sort on price or time. Comfort details aren't part of the sorting metric, so the system doesn't optimize for them.

The money goes into the economy, but the resources and labor to build the thing do not. Still, it's his money to spend once people give it to him. If you think there was a waste, then you should be upset about Microsoft for spending as much as they did to buy a somewhat polished, but still fairly shallow indie game. Assuming they do nothing with it other than pass the cost on to you through higher costs for windows licenses.