The situations are not equivalent. Returning the movie after you watched it is like returning the steak after you ate it.

The only reasonable solution is to refuse eating a stake if you see it's not what you want, and to refuse buying the movie if you don't like the previews/reviews.

American population has trippled since 1900. By your logic, our standard of living should be 1/3 of what it was in 1900.

Your assumtions are flawed. It's not a zero sum game. More people means BOTH more workers AND more customers.

I am just going to whoosh myself...

You do realize that's exactly how all taxes work?

No, you just don't. If you did you'd understand how many people are required for this, and how much all this would cost.

Here's some hints for you:

1) How many piracy areas need protection.
2) How many ships have to be protected at the same time.
3) How long does each journey last
4) How many "spare" marines do we currently have
5) How many per ship are needed
6) How much do you have to pay for those marines to spend X days a year at sea; who pays for it all

Well yeah, no shit. That's because the Government also works on a "pay us whatever taxes we say, or we jail you" premise.

About 90 people out of 100 do not need or wish to pay for "cheap" 10 mbps broadband. Those who do should go out and buy it at the market rate, instead of forcing 100 out 100 people to pay the costs of this broadband through taxes.

Really, I am quite amazed that so many people here see nothing wrong with taxing everybody to pay for what only they will use.

You know, cops also are paid no matter where they are stationed, so why not put a trained cop in every car on the road?

Do you see any problem with your idea now?

So if you want the service so much, why don't you try to start your own company, and issue stock/bonds/etc. to cover the estimated costs of the project.

The liberal-asshole way of doing the same is to use the power of the government to tax everybody for something only you want.

You really would "agree wholeheartedly" with threatening to put me in jail (or worse) if I don't pay for something you want for yourself?

You present an unlikely scenario under which the unmanned aircraft fails, namely that 1) we use UAVs against a country that can jam GPS, AND 2) we still care about not killing the civilians.

Of course the truth is that condition (1) pretty much means NOT (2).

If we are at war with China and/or Russia, we very much want to kill everyone, civilian or not, and really don't care about the public opinion. Consider the thousands of nuclear warheads targeted on their population centers.

Well, the users are already paying to their ISPs for their bandwidth. Couldn't Youtube demand a cut of that, or at least get "free" bandwidth for better quality service to the provider's customers?

If the ISPs don't cooperate, Youtube could always downgrade the videos or display adds like "Your XX ISP doesn't want to play ball which might mean more costs to you. May we recommend this YY provider in your area?"

Who "they," the muggers or the cops?

Recycling nuclear fuel will not magically solve the 'hot' waste problem. You could re-use some of the material, but a lot of it has to be trashed.

Sure, in theory it is possible to convert almost all of the waste into stable isotopes. That will never happen though, as it would be so expensive that it'd be cheaper to get all our energy from solar and wind, or fusion power, or dyson spheres (you get my point).

One of the safest solutions I have read about involves a deep underground storage followed up with a nuclear explosion, creating a buttload of slightly radioactive rock deep down.

Terrorists can only target people or landmarks, by definition. Going after the infrastructure is counterproductive use of their resources, since they cannot damage a lot; the only way to have any impact is to try to terrorize the populace.

The truth is, one should not be worried about the terrorists at all because the probability and the extent of any actual damages in terms of lives or goods is minimal.

On the other hand, real militaries (e.g. those of China, Russia, USA) would go after the pipelines and the infrastructure since they can take out enough of it to matter.

Link? I am kind of curious what it looks like.

(By 'it' I mean both Counter-Strike matches and your servers melting down.)