Did you ever consider it in terms of strategy? Companies try to use strategy instead of lazily waiting until the last minute to passively react the way so many individuals do.

It's trivial now but that could change. They are taking steps to keep it trivial and/or to make it more so. If they neglected it entirely, it might become a very large, entrenched, difficult-to-eliminate market by the time they get around to reacting to it. What would really entrench a used-games market with no artificial restrictions? That's easy: for it to be common and perceived as normal by the average customer, something they come to expect, something they would be outraged about if it were taken away.

The game companies don't want that to happen. They're smart, so they think of these things ahead of time. They're greedy control freaks, but they're not stupid.

Do yourself a favor and apply this strategic view to every action corporations and politicians take and to every word they say. The world will become mostly predictable then.

That old statute outweighs the Fourth Amendment? Interesting.

The drug-dog loophole certainly is convenient.

What is a trained drug-sniffing dog, if it is not a (living) device for the sole purpose of performing a search? Using a dog to search your home or your car is not fundamentally different from the cop just using his hands and his eyes to search the same places. Yet the dog gives a cue and *poof* there goes your Fourth Amendment.

Of course they have to have such a loophole to keep up the War on (some) Drugs. A war on drugs (really a war on personal freedom) simply couldn't be conducted by the federal government under a reasonable reading of the Constitution. So we're losing some of our more precious rights and freedoms in exchange for being able to ineffectively tell other people how they should live. What a bargain.

They always told you to make backups, but you never listened. Damn, what a tragedy.

Yes, because if the standard were the other way around, people would have too much privacy and obviously that would bring society to its knees!

I think the difference is that the case law pertaining to your dwelling was established long ago, back when people thought the USA was special, back when the USA would ridicule many other nations of the world for treating their citizens more like subjects who had no rights, only privileges. Electronic communications were invented long after the US government became something much more sad and typical, interested only in the expansion of its own power via the flimsiest claims to legitimacy.

<sarcasm>Because as we all know, anyone familiar with people like Thomas Jefferson would immediately understand that the Founders really did mean only physical hardcopy paperwork. Obviously, these men who wanted The People to be respected and left alone by their government when it came to things like postal letters and private notes definitely wanted The People's privacy completely trampled should any new medium of written communication come along. Duh.</sarcasm>

Just think, some of the Founders were opposed to having a Bill of Rights at all because they feared that other rights not specifically mentioned in the Constitution would be overlooked!

It seems that a key tenet of authoritarianism is the assumption that privacy is not legitimate.

Without the information provided by putting that into practice, it would be much more difficult to micromanage daily life. An income tax in particular is a control freak's wet dream: it provides both carrots and sticks that can be used to manipulate behavior. Unlike impersonal excise taxes or sales taxes, where the only relevant information is a dollar amount, an income tax inherently requires getting to know the mundane details of a person's life. You have to know who they are, what they do, what they've been up to lately, and you need invasive powers to make sure they aren't cheating or otherwise lying to you.

There is a reason why the Constitution had to be amended to allow for an income tax. As far as I know, that reason wasn't because the Founding Fathers never heard of such a concept.

There is plenty of blame to go around.

What I don't understand is this idea that the Fourth Amendment applies to one communications channel (say, postal mail) but not other communications channels (e-mail) that achieve the same transfer of information. I say the burden of proof is on those who assert this. What's the rationale here?

Sadly, taxes have had no real relationship to the government's need for revenue (spending, interest on dets) for a very long time now. I don't think that necessarily argues against your idea, but it does complicate it.

Most of the unreasonable bullshit comes from trying to make a crime out of things that are not crimes (what consenting adults do). It leads to laws that would be unenforcable without this police-state mentality. Rather than admit that such laws are inherently flawed, and repeal them, the government would rather expand its powers.

Yes, and it was a lament.

But really, how much rapid progress would you have expected from an organization which believed (at the time) that an effective way to spread the love of Jesus was torturing people to death? I mean, I've read the Bible and the words of Christ -- I couldn't find "hold an Inquisition" or "torture your neighbor" anywhere in it.

Then I submit that they were not really so willing to accept new cosmological theories.

The correct way is according to the evidence. The correct schedule is according to when advancements are made and new evidence is discovered. Anything else is unwillingness and refusal.

Jeopardy... I never did understand how "Popular Culture" belonged with things like History, Astronomy, and the like. Because people who learn about astrophysics are truly concerned about what Snookie is up to these days? I say leave that kind of information where it belongs: among the small-minded.

Seemed like a poorly-executed ratings grab to me.

Having to take them is not the same as being limited by them.

Someone who really understands the subject matter can pass a standardized test on that subject. But someone who was only taught to the test may have difficulty actually practically applying what they were taught. (The bureaucrats that were mentioned earlier and the politics involved with the school system are certainly not helping things either).

The shortcomings of rote memorization become apparent once someone who learned that way has to think abstractly and apply what they know to a real-world problem. Abstract reasoning is important, too. It just doesn't fit the "cog in a corporate machine" philosophy for which most public schools prepare their students. There is a reason why the politicians and other power elites don't usually send their children to public schools.

It does make sense that people who want to be lazy about one thing that's relatively easy to do correctly might also be lazy (or procrastinate) on other things that are easy to understand, such as due dates.

We increasingly live in a society where avoiding the slightest effort anytime one can get away with it is viewed as some kind of luxury lifestyle. If these people wind up paying more, not to punish them but because they genuinely are bad risks, that's fine with me.

Furthermore, you haven't contributed anything of value to this thread. So then, did you have a point or are you merely trying to disrupt other people's discussion?