These laws are toothless. "Must answer within 20 days"... or what? With no one held immediately culpable, the law is precisely meaningless.

Heard of anyone going to jail for this?

Heard of anyone paying a fine for this?

Even heard of anyone losing their job for this?

Compare: If you don't do something the government desires you to do, there will be consequences.

This is just like the constitution: "Highest law in the land" -- violate it -- as SCOTUS and congress have done over and over -- and the consequences? Nothing.

Just so you taxpayers know your place. The laws aren't for the government. Those are just laws "for show." The real laws are just for you. Because, you know, they care about you.

Seems like every Galaxy owner I've talked to has their own list of twenty things their phones does really shittily.

20 things? Wow... I've been entirely happy with my S3. My only complaint was the battery barely made it through the day, no matter how little I used it.

My new S5, solves that problem amply.

And really my only complaint about it, is a complaint about android in general... the UI is a bit schizophrenic (google vs touchwiz vs ??? ) and it shipped with two browsers ("internet" and chrome, two voice control systems, (google and s voice), multiple IM apps... messenger, hangouts, chaton, etc... so its a bit overwhelming.

As a linux enthusiast, schizophrenic ui, and overwhemling app redundancy is par for the course. After all, only on linux is "yet-another-X" a common naming pattern. :)

But i still see it as a flaw in the new user experience of the device.

I guess if i had to have another complaint about it, its that i don't much like or trust google*, and want to do more with the phone without being herded into giving google access to everything, and loading everything onto the cloud, but that's not a flaw of the phone.

* so what am I doing with android if i don't like google you might ask? Well... its simple...I see the walled gardens from Microsoft or Apple and they are even worse.

Work at McDonald's or Walmart (or more likely both) for a living and get back to us.

They buy what gives them the most calories per dollar, while also focusing on foods that require the least preparation time (since their work typically leaves them with little time to spare). End result: saturated fat, refined sugar and sodium, with very little in the way of necessary vitamins and minerals.

For most of the United States, owning a car is a necessity for both working and buying food.

Fb and twit were instrumental for on location reports during rebellions ... Saying otherwise suggests that you are ... ignorant.

Instrumental yes. In the same sense that Bic pens were instrumental in me graduating university. However, if there were no bic pens I'd have found something else to use.

Likewise, twitter was instrumental, in the sense that it got used, but if there had been no twitter, they could have just as easily organized from something else.

"It's 100 miles to Chicago. We've got a full tank of gas, a half pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses."

"Hit it."

And get uncensored news from buzzfeed

Don't get me wrong, Tor is a great enabler for countering censorship, etc... but advocating that these people need access to facebook and twitter? Honestly. Nobody needs that.

Anderson isn't aiming to supplant Bitcoin, or even challenge the money-exchange model that drives society. But he's hoping it will change the way people think about currency

Ah, so the whole thing's just a performance art piece, not a serious proposal. Good to know. Now we can just ignore him until he goes away.

There is such a concept as aiding and abetting, or being an accessory to, a crime. Many people have been tried and convicted who themselves did not directly commit a crime.

If you don't believe that concept is applicable here, I'd like to know why. If someone else believes it does apply, I'd like to know their reasoning as well. I don't see how "liberal" or "conservative" has anything to do with it. It's a question of ethical responsibility, not political ideology. By failing to understand that, you're handwaving and dismissing a valid and worthy question about the nature of pervasive advertising and its effect on the population.

Adblock doesn't block youtube videos. They are the ONE advertising seller that "gets it." All other ad sellers do not trust the content providers to host or to count the hits on the ads. So Adblock is effective. But then again, Youtube is an ad seller AND a content provider, so the trust is within itself. Heaven help us when content providers are trusted by ad sellers.

Ads and marketing in general have evolved from simple, respectful "hey, try this! It's good" into manipulative nonsense. Few people can see through it and the result has been devastating to them. It has shaped and certainly harmed the culture of the US and even results in violence in some extreme cases where people want things so badly they hurt and kill each other to get it. Though most will disagree exactly when things have gone "too far" few will disagree that they have.

When wages go down as prices don't, that's actual hardship. It's called "cost of living" rather than "cost of luxury" for a reason.

This is very true as people shop at Walmart, not because of the amazing people that visit there, but because they can get a lot of stuff cheaper. I won't complain about that.

What I will complain about is the outrage expressed by Microsoft sucking at the teat of government because they want to bring said cheap labor into this country while telling lies to the people and that same government. This is NOT a free market while these kinds of things are going on.

But if this senator is really upset, I wonder how much attention he will pay to various appropriations when it comes to alternatives to Microsoft?

This is all just a lot of saying what people want to hear and then doing nothing about it.

How many of us have tried to do something and wished we had (at least) a third hand?

I would pay a *lot* for a third hand, as I do a lot of my own construction work (building an interior into an old church we now live in.)

I can't even guess at the number of times I've had to wait until I had someone at my side to hold, turn, twist, drill, cut, brace, etc.

This stuff is great to hear. Love the idea of extra fingers.

Although it does put me strangely in mind of that scene in Heavy Metal where a robot, after having "done" a very sexy human female, spins his fingers around with a "whiiizzz", while commenting something on the order of "human woman love sex with mechanical assistance" lol