Pay for hire some musicians to write generic songs for the restaurant businesses and place those songs in the creative commons.

Generic rock as background music would be fine. If people are dancing to it probably less so. Don't think people dance to benny and the jets.

There are tens of thousands of songs now. If they want a particular song, perhaps they need to pay top dollar.

But that's their choice.

The article is unclear but it sounds like the DJ pays a fee to pay the music.

One would logically assume that fee would cover the restaurant who pays the DJ to provide music.

Why should the DJ pay a fee to play the music in a public place AND the restaurant pay a fee when the DJ plays the music in their restaurant. One or the other fee should cover the song.

It would be like paying for the meal- then paying a fee for having the meal on a plate- then paying a fee for having the meal on a table- and then paying an extra fee if the meal is eaten with wine instead of a soda.

If the DJ pays a fee, that should cover all music the DJ plays. The restaurant wouldn't logically have to pay another fee.

Computers (laptops, tablets) long ago surpassed the point where bench marks matter to most of us.

They are faster than we need them to be except for cutting edge stuff.

Of course each faction will tout a benchmark if it shows them in a good light or ignore it if it does not.

But it's meaningless noise. There are many other factors which have significant weight in the decision process besides performances on an arbitrary set of tasks.

You may not have noticed the small disagreement over oil security back in 1991 and 2003 but together they cost over 2 trillion dollars and 4000 lives. Lots of countries get invaded but the u.s. got involved because we needed a secure oil supply.

It's called "externalizing costs" and the oil companies are very good at doing it.

It is a subsidy even if some squirrelly alternate definition* of "subsidy" has been set up to show the oil companies have a smaller subsidy.

*
You know like "Binge Drinking" is now defined as 5 drinks in 5 hours. I don't know about you but I don't get above a .02 drinking at that rate. Personally I would define "Binge" drinking as drinking enough to get drunk- and then continuing to drink one drink an hour to stay drunk (and not pass out or die) for an extended period (5 hours would do then).

Money spent to help the oil industry is a subsidy even if you call it something else.

One thing to keep in mind is that hydro dams will be much more expensive to build the next time. They currently benefit from extremely low labor costs available when many were built. Dams (as well as bridges) are aging and will require replacement.

They'll be multi billion dollar projects this time. And even adjusting for inflation, they'll probably be five to ten times as expensive this time. A lot of people died building them the last time. Life was cheap as well as labor.

A trivial $$ gift compared to the gift we give every year (much less during the gulf war) providing "free" security to oil companies to protect oil fields, pipelines, and tankers. The annual ongoing subsidies dwarf solar subsidies. When you include the 2 trillion we dropped on the gulf war- it becomes obvious solar+batteries will reduce our dependency on oil. As a side benefit, it would also collapse the price of oil by surpressing demand for the most expensive oil (which sets the price for all the rest of the oil sold).

Which has the added benefit of hamstringing many facist and totalitarian governments with poor human rights records and religious extremist who use the money to commit mass murder.

Solar *isn't* the solution. Not ever. But even a small amount of reduction in demand and pollution by solar (say 10%) can make a huge difference.

Nuclear currently has the average failure rate of destroying a few hundred square miles of territory for several hundred years about once per 15 years. Nuclear is fine. Nuclear+human beings has a terrible track record. Humans do stupid things. They take risks. They cut corners. They under rate identified risks to avoid paying the full price of mitigation. It's becoming clear fukishima would have been as bad as chernobyl if the winds had been blowing the other way.

We massively subsidize all existing energy forms. And all of the new ones.

The good news is that solar costs are dropping like microchips due to subsidies creating demand. And batteries are improving about 5% per year.

Actually not. I have libertarian elements and was a libertarian for over a decade when I was young. I don't dislike libertarians per se.

I just recognized that some libertarian policies are illogical. The biggest being that most of the little people really need a strong government to protect them from powerful corporations and powerful people. No one else will. And even a strong government can only protect them until it is captured by the wealthy and the powerful. I.e. we need more poor congresspeople and senators to protect most of us. Instead we have a bunch of very wealthy people who lack empathy for most of the citizens. As the other poster said-- you are the one who brought libertarians into the conversation and I was responding to your post.

Now on your last point, we may have a strong point of agreement. When you include state and local taxes, the tax system is regressive. We take a much higher rate of state and local taxes from low income people than middle income people and a higher rate on middle income than on high income and a higher rate on high income than on the wealthy.

The details can be found in "Who Pays, a distributional analysis" and it varies by states with some states being more fair than others but on average the poor pay about 10% of their total income in taxes while the upper income pay about 2% and the wealthy typically pay 1% (even less in some states).

When you include social security premiums (which are essentially but not legally a tax), the total tax rate on the low income approaches 40%, on the middle income is a little over 50%, on high income is about 40%, and on the wealthy is about 18%.

Despite this, the wealthy pay most of the taxes.. because they have MOST of the wealth and income.

Why is this so? Because people keep voting for parties who openly say the wealthy is their base and the bottom 50% are all leeches and losers. There are some valid reasons for this-- abortion is a single issue vote for many people. And then you have irrational thinking like the unemployed 59 year old who was railing on talk radio against safety nets when per his own words, he was going to lose everything and be homeless in the next couple months. Why would a person be so against their self interest? Why would a person be so against protection from age discrimination?

I still disagree that it's theft. That's like saying copying copyrighted material is theft. It's not. It's copyright infringement. Electing representatives who pass laws about collecting and distributing taxes to pay for policies and programs they promulgated is not theft.

And, you really need to be more aware of how much government spending really goes to helping the lower income. It's amazingly tiny if you exclude the elderly and military veterans. Spending on the military (of which 10 to 20% goes straight to the wealthy's bottom line) is tremendous and corporate welfare amount to billions or even trillions of dollars (if you include paying for a war to protect the interest of the large oil companies).

You seem very passionate so I take it that you are young. I recommend you go back and study what our budgets are actually spent on and who benefits (it's almost always the top 1% with table scraps dribbling down to the rest). Then think about how a libertarian government is actually supposed to function while assuming worst intent by the powerful. I hope you will see it is in your strong interest to have a strong government to protect you from abuse.

And if you look at the budget figures you will see that social services spending is teeny. With oncoming roboticization and automation, we are going to need a strong safety net (perhaps even a basic income) because we have a paradigm shift coming that will make the luddite thing looks like a drop in a bucket. Even the chinese at current income levels are already being replaced by robots.

Libertarians engage in magical thinking that somehow the wealthy and powerful to not step on everyone, take everything from everyone, and destroy everyone else. It's not a practical system of government. It never has been. It's an interesting small element of a successful government but it's impractical and really immature wishful thinking.

Your statement that the money was "stolen" by use of government force is incorrect, self centered, and shallow.

You voted for representatives. A majority of representatives voted for a policy and the executive officers of several states and the national government approved those policies. You don't get a veto. It was- by definition- legal and fair.

The rest of your statement is a pointless insult that shows little thought and isn't worth engaging.

Providing a court system... stealing from other for personal gain using government force.
Providing a police system... stealing from other for personal gain using government force.
Building a road system... stealing from other for personal gain using government force.
Building tanks...stealing from other for personal gain using government force.
Building tanks and parking them immediately in the desert with no intention of using them...stealing from other for personal gain using government force.

My point... your point is not really as strong as you think it is.

You had a say in the matter. It was every election in an even numbered year since you started voting. I don't like a lot of stuff the government does using money it takes from me. But I live in a democracy, not a dictatorship of me.

Just had to add this bit from the article...

Lee also belongs to three stuntman unions, does all of his own stunts, once busted his face smashing head-first through an actual plate glass window for a scene, injured himself falling into an open grave while portraying Dracula, and once had his hand slashed open during a drunken sword fight with Errol Flynn.

At least one site begs to differ...

http://www.badassoftheweek.com...

His service records are sealed and Lee doesn't talk much about his service (when pressed on the subject, he reportedly asks his interviewer, "Can you keep a secret?". When they excitedly say yes, he leans in close and says, "So can I."), but we do know that by the time he retired as a Flight Lieutenant in 1945 he'd been personally decorated for battlefield bravery by the Czech, Yugoslavian, English, and Polish governments and was good friends with Josip Broz Tito, so draw your own conclusions.

I really liked the voicemail to text feature on my last phone. It allowed me to quickly scan and delete voice mails.

Voice is too slow. But voice to text was like emails.

The new BBC version is at least back in the right territory.

When I recently read some of the original three musketeers, I realized how much closer to the book and the characters those two movies were. I love those films and they are in my top 100 films of all time. I still watch them every few years.

Considering what a bad ass he was during world war 2, I'll let him decide what is a proper job for a man.

Whatever they are currently using- the new system should be different.

If windows- go with linux or apple.
If apple- go with linux or windows.
If linux- go with apple or windows.

Or even consider a less common OS which has a working email client and can compile libre office.