Very true. We know this because, if physics had a conservative bias, the ground would have made the apple pay to build a trampoline.

You DO realize you're basically doing the exact thing you're complaining about here right?

Except that it seems Youtube doesn't even seem to know what is legal and what is not. I don't post anything to Youtube myself but I know someone who posted a video capture their characters pvping in an mmo. A few weeks later they got an email saying it had been taken down due to copyright infringement.

I've heard of an even worse case where someone posted a homemade video taken outside somewhere and it got taken down for copyright infringement. In that case I believe it was the sounds of birds chirping in the background that did it.

Yes but wasn't it also supposed to be for a limited/reasonable amount of time? Couldn't copyright also be looked at as a kind of contract or agreement between content creators and society?

If so, it seems to me that this agreement has long since been broken and I don't think it was society that did so first.

In this case it might protect both. If all of the radiation and particles get deflected out of the path of the startship at warp then there wouldn't be anything to build up within the bubble (which protects the crew) and therefore also nothing to get expelled outwards when the ship leaves warp (which protects any nearby inhabitants).

.... and then selling the duplicate cars to try to put the car manufacturer out of business.

If you're going to do the analogy, at least make it complete.

If you'll look back at some of the discussions about copyright on Slashdot I think you'll find that a lot of people do find this form of copyright infringement wrong, even if they have a different view of "non-profit" copyright infringement.

Just my two cents, which you are free to duplicate.

This is interesting to me, especially the man-hours bit. A friend of mine recently brought up this idea in a discussion we were having about what a viable economic system alternative would be if someone like Ron Paul was eventually elected. The system he described still had government creating money (i.e. not based on gold) but it would be used to pay for public works (road improvements, parks, interstate mass transit, etc). Taxes would still be collected but the money collected would either be taken out of circulation or used in foreign trade.

So basically, all new money created would have real world backing of public works projects (also creating jobs) instead of debt and would therefore be available for use by everyone. The value of the money isn't just created on the spot with nothing of real physical value behind it. There are no shortage of projects that could be created so your economy isn't necessarily chained down or prevented from growing. The money comes out of the system in the form of taxes and/or foreign trade.

Honestly I'm not even remotely an economist so I don't know if this could even work but I do think it is an interesting idea.

I know I mentioned Tactical Voting the other day in another article and I know some of the responses indicated it's a very effective tool. However, I still maintain that if everyone who felt like you do on this actually just voted for who they actually wanted to be president, we might end up with someone in office other than the mainstream Dem and Rep candidates we always end up with.

Food for thought.

1) Politicians don't often win elections by reminding people that they have a share of the responsibility when something bad happens.

2) Teaching kids to expect someone to always intervene and to never rely on themselves is probably an awesome introductory lesson to always expecting the government to intervene and save them when they get older. Of course to do that, the government is going to need more money/power...

Should that matter in your decision on who to vote for though? Tactical Voting, I'm sure, doesn't help those better candidates increase their chances which is why it's pushed as the best option by some people. It's in the interest of both primary parties to encourage tactical voting because, even if you're voting for the rival party, you're still voting for one of the primary parties and NOT for a third party that could introduce unwanted variables into the political game.

Unfortunately, in some cases it's working. There are people I've met that either believe that third parties are fictitious or acknowledge they exist but still only vote for Rep or Dem because those are the only REAL parties and are therefore the only appropriate parties to vote for. They firmly believe that voting for anyone else is simply wasting a vote.

I think you mean an EPS meter.. or "Edits Per Second". I think that would take all of those cross-editing arguments on there to a whole new level.

Which one of those things is not like the other? The cell phone bill example, and imo its because its much more like the broadband issue we're discussing here than any of those other examples.

Drive until your gas tank is empty and that gas is completely gone forever.. it's a resource that can no longer be used by someone else. The same goes for food after being consumed and electricity.

Broadband is slightly different. If I use my current max (which is only the amount available that is not currently in use by others sharing the connection) for five or ten minutes to download a large file and then go back to my default level, that broadband is available for use by others. You could argue that those that use higher amounts more frequently are "hogging" the pipe but they WERE sold x amount of broadband per second with or without caps. It's not the consumers fault that the cable companies chose a model where they over-subscribe lines to save money. If they're paying for a resource they should be able to use it as advertised. Furthermore, are they really "hogging" it for extended periods of time? Most situations involving high bandwidth usage seem to be in bursts, such as downloading a file. I've never seen netflix use enough bandwidth to put a serious dent in what I've been paying for (10mb) and that, besides the occasional multiplayer game, are when I'm actually using substained bandwidth levels.

There is technology out there to increase bandwidth availability but upgrading and building infrastructure doesn't make them money so they don't want to do it. It makes far more business sense to yell at the top of their lungs that the sky is falling, that there is a shortage on bandwidth, so they should charge more.

If you're a government? The gun.

Shooters can vote.