You have a strange definition of "free". Publicly funded is better wording.

According to government numbers the NHS takes just over 18% of the income taxes, or about £1500-2000 or so per year depending on your income. It is also paid by other specific taxes (such as tobacco tax) and through general funds.

Thanks to the NHS guidelines, your wait time in the queue is to be no more than 18 weeks. Usually.

America pays more, but they can also generally see a specialist for any field within a matter of days or sometimes hours for non-emergency care.

And for emergency care. ... Many American hospitals are putting their emergency room wait times up in phone apps so you can compare wait times. I have heard it is common to see 5-10 minutes between entering the hospital and being treated for urgent situations. In contrast, I sat in a hospital with my daughter, her hand oozing blood after being crushed and having two broken bones and severe lacerations and soft tissue injuries, for nearly THREE HOURS before being treated. Watching her quietly cry the whole time I would have gladly written an American-sized cheque for £1000 to have her treated immediately.

Most notable is the last paragraph of the court's ruling:

Our holding today is limited—addressing the situation before us, rather than every one involving a self-replicating product. We recognize that such inventions are becoming ever more prevalent, complex, and diverse. In another case, the article’s self-replication might occur outside the purchaser’s control. Or it might be a necessary but incidental step in using the item for another purpose. We need not address here whether or how the doctrine of patent exhaustion would apply in such circumstances. In the case at hand, Bowman planted Monsanto’s patented soybeans solely to make and market replicas of them, thus depriving the company of the reward patent law provides for the sale of each article. Patent exhaustion provides no haven for that conduct.

If he didn't use the pesticide he probably would have been fine. Since various sources said about 90% of the beans would be GMO-infected he could simply have planted the seeds directly and would have had a much stronger defense.

And of course, the court left the more thorny issues open for a future lawsuit.

"I'm bipolar" is correct, just like "I'm diabetic", I'm depressed", or "I'm hungry" are all correct.

As for something better, software developers found it in the late 1990's. It is called Software As A Service (SaaS). It doesn't work for other forms of art, like movies and music, but it is extremely effective for software.

Consumers don't own a copy of the software behind Facebook or Twitter or Steam or Origin or Instagram or Google Docs or Office 365. Even though they don't own a copy, the masses are more than willing to invest fortunes on the platforms. Using them requires an Internet connection, and it requires that their servers are running.

When you start editing your documents on Google Docs or Office 365 you do not own a copy of the editor. You are relying entirely on software outside your control.

My company is just one of countless others that have made a hard choice; the choice to get Office 365 where they do not have a copy of the software. On the one hand this greatly simplifies our IT department's job, it is one less piece of software to install on thousands of computers, and it is far cheaper to license.

But the down side is we don't have our own copy of the software. If our Internet access goes down, Office is down. If Office365 servers have maintenance we are dead in the water. And most relevant: we are entirely at the mercy of the company for access to the software.

Services come and go over time. Usually they die when their customer base shrinks low enough. It is unlikely that Google Docs and Office 365 will suddenly stop services today, but we can be sure they will turn off the servers at the end of the product's life. That will be either when a new product is available or when most users have moved on. Anyone relying on their services at that time will simply be out of luck; whatever they had on the services will be lost.

This protects the interest of the creator --- they will get paid. And they can get paid on an annual or per-use basis.

It impacts the customer in that the consumer because, in order to keep their business competitive the vendor must continuously add features and functionality. But it also has the fatal flaw: the moment the creator stops supporting the product, they are left with a useless smart-client with no server.

I agree. Fortunately for me at least, I happen to be in the happy world where management supports us in realistic timelines and realistic scoping.

Spanning almost seven years now and well over a hundred assorted projects we have been overdue on projects two times total. One of those was during the exceptional case of a co-worker getting in a car accident and breaking 13 ribs, the other was an exceptional case where very serious external forces caused the design to shift mid-development. In no case has it been due to poor estimation.

We have come to learn the development cycle for our small teams:

• Before the project begins, we spend about 10% of the previous project time scoping and prototyping the next project. The usually three developers are each individually required to build the estimates for their parts of the project, and to collectively work out the details of how all the pieces come together. Accurate time estimates and prototypes are required from each developer.
• Now the project is officially started. This 30% initial development is where we implement the features required. Everything in the project is scoped during estimates so that this 30% of the schedule will meet our understanding of the product. The design is locked and developers are held accountable for meeting these deadlines. Since there are only about three developers on each project and each one is accountable for a specific subset of the work, we can lay accountability directly on the shoulders of that one individual. We also make a point of celebrating each developer's success of hitting their individual milestones, and the even bigger success of hitting a milestone early.
• The product owners are given a chance to review the implementation and also modify their design. The changes are estimated and must not exceed 10% of the total development time. Usually we limit them to about 5% of the total development time. The features are prioritized and work on until we hit 35-40% of the schedule (depending on if we limited them to 5% or 10% of the development time). This would likely be called alpha. Again the individual developers are held accountable for their estimates.
• The next 20-25% is bug fixes where new features are not added but product owners can submit bugs where existing features may be adjusted. We bring in our QA team and start testing. This is the tail end of main development. Many people would call this beta. This brings us to 60% of the development time.
• For the next 20%, no existing features may be adjusted. Individual bugs are still handled and occasionally a product owner may manage sneak in a design-by-bug change for an absolute critical change, but otherwise this is the final cleanup cycle. At this point we should be comfortable shipping the code. That brings us to 80%.
• For the final 20% almost no changes are made. Changes are reviewed by all of the developers, and must have sign-off by the developers AND by management before submitting to version control. Most of the development team moves on to prototyping the next project. (This is the 10% mentioned up top.)

When I hear about other groups hitting 60% or later in their development cycles and still not getting feature complete, I pity them. They have made the mistakes the original article warned about, and were probably driven to that madness by the poor management you mention.

Brilliant. Photos of themselves committing the crime, posing with the animals they released, posted publicly. How about they just turn themselves in to the police right now?

Restore the vote by eliminating gerrymandering.

Restore the courts by eliminating plea bargains by prosecutors. (Defendants can still plead guilty and ask for mercy from the court, not from the prosecutors.)

Restore accountability in government by reducing government immunity from lawsuits. Those who enforce the law should not be immune from it. Police officers who lie under oath should be jailed. Destruction of evidence, including failure to collect exculpatory evidence, and the failure of prosecutors to reveal potentially exculpatory evidence as required by the Constitution, should also not be prevented by governmental immunity and should result in prison time for any detectives and prosecutors involved.

This has been the case for centuries. It is not a new phenomenon.

Most artists are poor, or do not make their primary living wage from their art.

In fact the situation has IMPROVED over the last century with mass media, the ability to mass-produce or copy art, and digital works. At least now many artists are regularly hired by media companies and entertainment companies.

Art used to be something for the rich people. If you wanted to see art you needed to go to a gallery. If you wanted to hear art there were some street performers or you could go a concert. There were plays and musicals and operas, but if you were a peasant you might catch a street performance or save up for a poor seat at the theater.

This is a discussion of those in "high art", such as PhD in literature. Historically those who made a living in "high art" were born into wealthy families, educated by masters, and then either were supported by their family wealth or were hired to educate others.

Many other people had training in various arts, but that is just like the piano teacher around the corner or the dance teacher down the street. It is a skill they learn and a skill they teach, but it isn't the main source of revenue.

Okay, let's try this variation:

Me:Honey, I'm thinking I'd like to sign our daughter up for a Facebook account, even though she is twelve.
Wife: That's probably okay. All her friends are already on it, and she is very responsible.

Suddenly...

BOOM! Conspiracy to commit computer fraud. Which carries the same penalty of actually committing computer fraud. Which includes potential jail time for both parents.

Simply talking about breaking the terms of service caries the same felony punishment.

You must be new to the modern legal system.

97% of all federal court cases end with a plea bargain. Last year the SCOTUS ruled on Missouri v. Frye and Lafler v. Cooper, those bound it up even tighter. Go look them up.

Justice Scalia wrote on them: "the Court today opens a whole new field of constitutionalized criminal procedure: plea-bargaining law. The ordinary criminal process has become too long, too expensive, and unpredictable, in no small part as a consequence of an intricate federal Code of Criminal Procedure imposed on the States by this Court in pursuit of perfect justice. ... The Court now moves to bring perfection to the alternative in which prosecutors and defendants have sought relief. Today’s opinions deal with only two aspects of counsel’s plea-bargaining inadequacy, and leave other aspects (who knows what they might be?) to be worked out in further constitutional litigation that will burden the criminal process. And it would be foolish to think that “constitutional” rules governing counsel’s behavior will not be followed by rules governing the prosecution’s behavior in the plea bargaining process that the Court today announces “‘is the criminal justice system,’” Is it constitutional, for example, for the prosecution to with draw a plea offer that has already been accepted? Or to withdraw an offer before the defense has had adequate time to consider and accept it? Or to make no plea offer at all, even though its case is weak—thereby excluding the defendant from “the criminal justice system”?

He also wrote: The plea-bargaining process is a subject worthy of regulation, since it is the means by which most criminal convictions are obtained. It happens not to be, however, a subject covered by the Sixth Amendment, which is concerned not with the fairness of bargaining but with the fairness of conviction. The Constitution . . . is not an allpurpose tool for judicial construction of a perfect world; and when we ignore its text in order to make it that, we often find ourselves swinging a sledge where a tack hammer is needed.

As long as the background check was not through a credit bureau (they easily escape liability) it is even better for you to find out about issues like that.

You describe an ideal defamation case if you had the actual evidence. To falsely impute a criminal offense is defamation and damages are automatic; if you can show that the defamation also cost you a job or a job offer you could claim rather substantial damages against the background check company.

Do you still have the background check information? How long ago was it? If you still have proof about it or can get it from your employer, a visit to a qualified lawyer may be in order.

The low-court judge's summary-judgement logic was that copying data to a new hard drive makes a new copy of a work under copyright law. RIAA v Diamond had the appeals court look at that in depth, and they found that it does not.

No, actually, he didn't. That is another part of his (flawed) logic.

The 18 page ruling is pretty simple to read. There is a section on his preface, there is a section on his reasoning, there is a SINGLE LINE of his determination, and then there is the fallout from it. Here is the single statement that matters:

[T]he Court determines that the embodiment of a digital music file on a new hard disk is a reproduction within the meaning of the Copyright Act.

His ruling is very specific to a hard disk. So if they use SSD or an SD card array or any other storage medium they can play cat and mouse for a while.

But as mentioned, searches on his legal background show he has mainly worked with narcotics law and money laundering. He obviously has no clue when it comes to either technology or when it comes to copyright. I still think he ruled that way just to make the appeals court do his work for him.