Easy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

It's not just corporate greed; consumer greed fuels the race to the bottom of the price curve. Users apparently have no problem "paying" for a service with their and others' privacy or other intangibles as long as the service is free-as-in-beer. The whole vendor-customer structure has been inverted; Facebook's and Google's etc. users who might have been paying customers in a sane economy pay nothing so are now the product. Now half the "innovation" that happens in the valley is just new ways to get people's attention and sell them out to advertisers, and the more obvious a patent is, the more it's worth.

I wonder if there could ever be a sane market again where you paid what a phone costs and got secure communication without being tracked, or paid for email with built in PGP and avoided getting spammed and having your email property of and stored by your provider forever, paid for a social networking service without having your life exposed or your face secretly scanned and sold to the government. I think those times are gone.

What the hell does capitalism have to do with it? I hate to break it to you but capitalism is not the only economic system that allows some to sell something to someone else. I suppose you think it is also capitalism's fault that Chinese companies sell weapons to Sudan?

Sales tax is only 'regressive' if you measure the expenditure as a percentage of income, which is totally arbitrary. That phony definition plays on people's classism to sway them one way or the other. Sales tax when measured against the actual tax base is not regressive and in the US is actually more 'progressive' in that some goods you need to survive have no sales tax.

Note that FLAC was not designed to sound better than MP3s. (It can, if the MP3 encoding wasn't done correctly.) It was designed primarily as an archival format, the master copy from which you could encode to whatever format was practical for listening.

It didn't take long to realize that FLAC was easy to implement on devices, and memory keeps getting cheaper, so why not skip the transcoding step entirely? Not for quality reasons, for practicality. So now pretty much all software (except iTunes) supports it and many very good devices (except iPod) do too.

From the publisher's point of view, MP3 is as free and open as FLAC is. That's why a lot of them do sell FLAC. Like the Beatles (before they were even in the Apple store), the Rolling Stones and even Metallica.

better yet, grab a copy of the whole cvs repository from which you can check out any version:

rsync -av rsync://winmtr.cvs.sourceforge.net/cvsroot/winmtr/* .

P.S. the TSA was created by the Aviation and Transportation Security Act and signed into law by President Bush. I'll save you the one-word search:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Transportation_Security_Administration

did you even look? http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/08/24/full-body-scan-technology-deployed-in-street-roving-vans/.

hell, even https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=x-ray+van would do it.

"citation needed" does not mean "I'm too lazy to type 2 words into a search box"

Hopefully it turned out better for them than this.

It's deeper than that; I think there's a large contingent of the population here that would agree with Tertullian:

"Now, pray tell me, what wisdom is there in this hankering after conjectural speculations? What proof is afforded to us, notwithstanding the strong confidence of its assertions, by the useless affectation of a scrupulous curiosity, which is tricked out with an artful show of language? It therefore served Thales of Miletus quite right, when, star-gazing as he walked with all the eyes he had, he had the mortification of falling into a well... His fall, therefore, is a figurative picture of the philosophers; of those, I mean, who persist in applying their studies to a vain purpose, since they indulge a stupid curiosity on natural objects, which they ought rather (intelligently to direct) to their Creator and Governor." -- Tertullian, Ad Nationes II:4

The problem is not the card, it's the data and what's done with it. Somehow I doubt Congressmen have their personal and biometric data in some crappy insecure system, easily accessed, shared with any agency or corporation willy-nilly, sold to marketers, etc. like what is going to happen if this proposal goes through.

Fine, congressmen should get the cards first. If they still like the idea after 6 years, let them try and foist it on the rest of us.

bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.