I think that at some point society becomes inseparable from the creative works that influence it. A culture becomes so suffused with references and allusions to novels, music, movies, that they become almost essential knowledge. At that point (and this is what the expiration of copyright is supposed to enforce), the rights ought to go to the public. This concept where copyright could last for 90 years is a pretty new one. It was supposed to be much shorter.

Today's myths and legends and fairy tales and other cultural keystones were someone's creative "property," once, and it would be bizarre if one were, say, prevented from reinterpreting King Arthur, Robin Hood, Beowulf, Shakespeare, the Bible, the Iliad, etc. etc. Some things from a century and less ago like Holmes, Cthulhu, Superman, Mickey Mouse, and so on could be argued to be getting pretty close to a level like that.

From a highway, I've walked to where there is no cell service

This is ten feet from a highway in any direction, if you have T-Mobile.

I've been replacing my burnt-out bulbs with CFLs (provided free by the power company) for about four or five years, and every single one is mounted either horizontally or inverted. Not a single one has ever died on me.

Browse this thread at 0 or +1. Slashdot is not a microcosm of the country, but what you will read is pretty much a good representation of what the majority of Americans believe.

Yeah. The summary just highlights the bizarre insulated bubble that so many social media enthusiasts seem to live in.

OCZ's SandForce firmware was junky for a while and caused all sorts of problems, but AFAIK that was sorted out quite a while ago. I bought a Vertex 3 a couple of years ago, and had some issues for the first week--updated the firmware to the latest and have not had an issue related to it yet. Aside from that, I don't know that they have any actual hardware-related reliability issues that don't plague all of the manufacturers.

With the recent "revelations" (they're not), it would be obvious that xkcd was pretty far off the mark here. The NSA is engaging in a far-reaching fishing expedition that is not practical to conduct with wrenches.

In addition to the very good points made by the other people that responded to your comment, that's not actually the average cost to go to a university. That may be the average cost of a private school or the average out-of-state tuition for a school or something, but if you go to a state-subsidized school in the state that you are a resident, it's probably closer to $10k/yr on average.

Sorry, I went crazy there and cited the Congo number. The DR is 140.

Check out the number of deaths per 100k vehicles at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate for a slightly different perspective. 6000 for DR, 8.5 for the US.

The postal service was spun off as a quasi-private organization a while ago. It's no longer viewed as a "necessity" that can be subsidized by taxes for the public good.

It is "supposed" to cover all of its own costs with its revenues from its services. Now, even though it's quasi-private, and is supposed to self-fund, Congress can and does continue its meddling, both forcing it to do things it can't afford and preventing it from saving or making money elsewhere.

So Congress passed a law requiring them to have such-and-such retirement/healthcare/whatever plans for its employees, which became a huge financial burden that the postal service can't quite cover.

So they say, "Alright, well. How about we get rid of Saturday mail? Then we'll be alright." And then Congress says, "NO! You can't cancel Saturday mail!" So the postal service says, "Alright, well we can do X other thing to save costs." And Congress says, "NO! You can't do that!"

Repeat ad nauseum. And so now you have the USPS hemorrhaging money, and the Republicans can hold it up and compare it to Fedex and tell the country how terrible government-run services are compared to the private sector, and therefore every other for-the-common-good service (such as community internet access, or single-payer healthcare, public transportation, etc) is evil and should be avoided at all costs.

There are a not-insignificant number of people that believe the USPS should not exist, many of whom you will probably run into in this thread.

The first story I saw on this subject talked to a scientist that said one of the most common prey animals for the sharks there is a large striped snake. This could end poorly.

Semantics. I just copied verbatim the response to the petition for Chris Dodd to be investigated. They'll use different verbiage, but the response will be essentially the same, plus some stuff about how we needed to destroy our privacy to save it, or whatever.

Let me save you the wait. "However, consistent with the We the People Terms of Participation and our responses to similar petitions in the past, the White House declines comment on this petition because it requests a specific law enforcement action."

I didn't mean to suggest that you are or would want to trick people into listening. I just meant, very seriously, that when a cliche is co-opted by one side of a factious argument or other, it becomes impossible to have an actual conversation using those cliches. To one side they're a rallying cry, and to the other side the words just embody everything they don't like about the first side. No information passes, except "I belong to group X."