And why should the people in the medium and far future have to suffer for your political weakness and unwillingness to commit the necessary evil? Why should people have to suffer under an unfair system forever just because you were too concerned with a few collateral consequences of breaking the whole system down? Your argument works both ways,

> We both think that it removes hands-on learning and frees the teacher from actually teaching anything (not a good thing).

Depends on what "teaching" is. If it's a teacher encouraging class discussion and collectively coming up with an answer to a problem, then yes, technology can't help that. But if it's someone just delivering a one-way lecture, then there's no reason why it can't be one person recording a speech and drawing stuff on camera and having the video copied a hundred million times and shown to every class that needs to see that material all across the world and reused again and again until the information ceases to be accurate.

Just wondering, if WoW is losing subscribes so quickly than what's replacing it? What are the upstart alternatives, and what's so good about them?

It's even better than you think. The fuel needed to accelerate a spacecraft to escape velocity (and the container to carry it) is very heavy (at an exhaust velocity of 4.5 km/s, fuel to get from surface to deep space (11.3 km/s delta-v) is nearly 10x the weight of the rest of the fuel and the payload), but with space elevators all the "fuel" is stored on the ground, so you actually need 90% less energy.

1. Not all of these services are of the type that the benefit is too distributed for it to be worth it for a single solely materially self-interested party to contribute. Roads could be paid for by billboards (tolls for anything but interstate highways are impractical IMO) and on the lower level by individual businesses that want to be accessible by the public and might also want the public to drive by them. Higher education used to be paid for by employers as on-the-job training before the system got turned upside down and we got a corporate welfare system where the government pays for training. Police and fire protection are obviously fairly private goods, etc.

2. Why do people not shoplift? It's obviously fairly easy, in many places you can just grab something on display outside and walk off without being noticed. Even though the act is unilaterally quite profitable, our society has so little theft (discussions regarding Wall Street and the government itself aside) that it's actually worth it for shopowners to leave their wares outside unsupervised! The same reasons why this does not happen could be turned around and used to encourage generosity, and, since with acts of generosity the perpetrator does not have an incentive to hide the act, the incentive of public approval would even be magnified in the other direction!

With the way things are going, they'll eventually remarket their games as a computer cracking hobbyist product: we sell you a nice shiny piece of DRM to break, and because we love our customers as a free bonus if you succeed you'll have a nice cute minigame at the end!

Economic calculation. The reason why no private venture went for this themselves is because all the private investors who are capable of acquiring $500000 capital in the first place were all smart enough to see that the risk isn't worth the reward here, so the business venture is not worth undertaking at all. That's the key - not all business ventures are worth undertaking, even if they make you feel warm and fuzzy thinking about them they might actually be huge wastes of money. If a government project fails, the taxpayers are penalized so there is no incentive for the government to maximize the benefits and minimize the wastes of its expenditure.

Two counts of broken window fallacy. Those $500,000 would have otherwise been spent by taxpayers, providing just as many jobs and giving $500,000 worth of useful goods and services to the taxpayers.

Actually, most free market fanbois I see would see the US defaulting on its debt and the general shit hitting the fan that follows as a confirmation of their beliefs - that our extreme levels of government spending are unsustainable after all.

Please don't. I'd like to have at least one terms of service agreement somewhere that's written by someone without experience in legalese.

So you need a bad law to protect you from other bad laws. Got it.

Could also be the birthday effect - a birthday that has four digits in it must begin with a one, and the second digit must be 0,1 or 2. Interestingly enough, under Benford's law the second digit is also significantly skewed toward lower numbers when the first digit is a 1, so to find out which effect is predominant we would have to look at the third digit.

Ok, now I'm curious, want to go and snoop on a few thousand PINs for us?

> So for an even better result you might try nonviolent games, free prostitutes, or marijauna (just tie the subjects down in case they experience an episode of reefer madness).

The existence of C does not modify the relative merits of A and B. You don't have an iron hand with which you can force people to lead the lifestyle you consider "optimal". For some individuals, the time use preference order is violent video games > violent crime > nonviolent video games, prostitutes and marijuana, and we do not have the power to change people's desires, so we have to work with what we have, and given what we have it seems that violent video games are beneficial.

> Thats a bit absurd, I dont know anyone who has thrown out their book collection after getting a kindle.

I did, my father is doing it slowly as he finds electronic versions of his.

And our federal government letting everyone who wants one get a mortgage gave us this.

Central planning: "You do this"
Regulated market: "You have to pay me 30% of your money, except those of you who are doing this, you guys pay 10%"

I take it you have not heard of the concepts of "lawful evil" and "chaotic good"?

Should we let that poor starving man and his wife die? Bleeding heart liberals say no, others say yes since otherwise we'll come back in 20 years and have their five starving children to deal with with the exact same problem.