"... businesses are more responsive to their "constituents" then politicians are."
You're partially right here, but the main difference is (supposed to be) that business is responsive per the formula "one dollar, one vote" rather than "one person, one vote".

The US government has increasingly drifted away from the latter formula toward the former one, though.

Ditch the RIAA for real by going to ccmixter, jamendo, or any number of other sites and build up a collection of music that you can listen to without glancing over your shoulder every few seconds.

I just got this crazy idea for dealing with this problem:
When people make unauthorized copies of non-free material, prosecute them for doing that.
I know this goes against the legal mainstream (viz. find out what they used to do that and ban it); I'm just thinking out loud.

"Apple will follow suit eventually, they might resist for a while but with Android's rising market share and Google controlling Youtube, they're caught between a rock and a hard place and I'm sure they know it."

Or...

Watch this space for iTube?

fghfnh

gsh

Editors, can we get a story about the $75 trillion P2P lawsuit soon plz?

They're called "everything else you could do with your time other than reward philistine pig-headed execs who crank out noncreative garbage"
I'm just sayin'

pasted too soon

"Only the second of these four rights is widely accepted in the USA. In addition to these four pure privacy torts, a victim might recover under other torts, such as intentional infliction of emotional distress, assault, or trespass.

Unreasonable intrusion upon seclusion only applies to secret or surreptitious invasions of privacy. An open and notorious invasion of privacy would be public, not private, and the victim could then chose not to reveal private or confidential information. For example, recording of telephone conversations is not wrong if both participants are notified before speaking that the conversation is, or may be, recorded. There certainly are offensive events in public, but these are properly classified as assaults, not invasions of privacy."

Prosser, in both his article and in the Restatement (Second) of Torts at 652A-652I, classifies four basic kinds of privacy rights:

      1. unreasonable intrusion upon the seclusion of another, for example, physical invasion of a person's home (e.g., unwanted entry, looking into windows with binoculars or camera, tapping telephone), searching wallet or purse, repeated and persistent telephone calls, obtaining financial data (e.g., bank balance) without person's consent, etc.

http://www.rbs2.com/privacy.htm

"I'm more worried about the people that go to, say, local planning commission meetings"

Sorry, but um.. wasn't that the point?

Tons of people will go to the football games anyway. Stop paying someone to do what many will voluntarily do. I suspect the person being paid for that is someone who would be going anyway, and since she's the editor's niece or whatever she gets to draw a check.

Skip all that. Use the savings to pay people to attend the city council

I think you missed my point, there.
Of course there are things you can compare and contrast about the two badgers in your example. For example, one of them is ceramic.

Being-ceramic is an attribute you can define, because ceramic things exist and things that aren't ceramic exist as well.

Being-real/existing is a more difficult attribute to define, and logically impossible to define by empirical science. By *definition, the "control group" for the analysis of existing-things doesn't exist and thus its members' attributes are unknown.

Incidentally, this is why the Thomistic proof that you referenced is fundamentally flawed. It treats "existence" as a perfection/improvement alongside other attributes like "beautiful" or "intelligent". Which it isn't.

I'm no mathematician, but from a layman's perspective mathematic "proof" is always quasi-tautological. All you're doing is unpacking the meaning of known mathematical or numeric terms. Which isn't just a waste of time, 'cause sometimes one of the things you unpack is another known term that you didn't realize would come out of the original one(s).

"there's nothing more to life that what you can analyze scientifically" seems like an overreach to me, like saying that the terms of mathematical system X are the "real" or "only" ones. Mathematics never says this; it only ever says "Euclidean starting axioms imply x,y, and z. Noneuclidean ones imply, x,y, j, and w, etc."

'Cause that would seem to be an important preliminary to your definition of science?

The problem: existence is the thing that *everything that *exists has in common, and scientific articulation of its meaning would require a comparison between the things that do and don't exist. Which comparison it cannot make, because as you rightly point out scientific inquiry cannot be made into non-existent things.

btw the 'which' in "things which don't exist" is a funny word misusage in this context -- do you see why?

Turns out "the cloud" is just another name for "datacenter". Who knew?