1) Diesel enjoys great tax breaks all over Europe. If you gas up with diesel, the government receives a smaller share than with Gasoline. Diesel cars are a LOT cheaper to own and operate in Europe. From my experience with the EU, this may be mandated and thus may not be able to be fixed by individual states.
2) Gasoline cars are harder to repair at home and break down more often and sooner. Fixing a diesel, especially the older ones, is easier but that is a lot less profitable to either business or government.
3) Many people in Europe skip the Diesel taxes all together by (illegally) driving on "red" home fuel diesel or avoid the markup by having their own tanks of 'white' diesel at home. Truckers sometimes have a switch installed that allows them to temporarily switch from 'red' to a reserve of 'white' for check points.
4) You can make a diesel car (especially the old 70/80's VW, Mercedes, Jeep and other 'tanks') run on several kinds of oil including old filtered frying oil, skipping taxes and duties all together.

Depending on your local laws but if the company or a government inspectors hasn't complained about it in >24mo around here, then it's supposed to be 'grandfathered' in.

Because, that's what SPAM is intended to do, only a fraction of a percentage of the people have to give them money (even if it's as a joke, opposite research or any reason whatsoever) for them to be profitable.

These sites are literally auto-generated for any field you can think of (I work in association with physicists, biologists and neurologists, they have at least a dozen journals across these fields). I get daily spams from at least 5 of them. The websites are identical (replacing the $field), the journals look identical and they're auto-generated. It is potentially a one-person operation having these half-wit professors publishing close to $3000/month/journal + advertising pages for what is an entirely electronic "journal".

There are similar sites offering help writing your papers, offering help getting NIH/NSF/whatever funding. A small team could easily lift close to $1M/month in a self-enclosed, self-propagating ecosystem of 'products and services'; everything from the creation to the publishing of an entire study.

The problem is not necessarily that these people are doing that (after all, it's a great idea to create an entirely fake ecosystem), the problem is that our public resources (in the form of government and tuition sourced grant money) are being used to publish these professors in fake, non-peer reviewed journals. Universities and government institutions actually accept these fake journals as 'credentials' because being published in a number of official-sounding journals trumps quality research for the beancounters.

Ever been to DC? One could 'attack' the White House with an RPG, a short-range rocket or any number of short-medium range military equipment and do serious damage. The problem is there is not 'really' anything there to kill or damage, the true leaders are dispersed in offices on Wall Street.

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines has sought to ban land mines culminating in the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, although this treaty has not yet been accepted by a number of countries including the USA. Matter of fact, the US is one of the largest producers of land mines.

But, but, ... it's the CLOUD.

Off course you will spend more, you have to account for the overhead (sales, marketing, support) of the hosting companies and their profit.

Why do you bother voting, even if nobody voted, the results would be the same. Tom Wheeler was an executive for the same companies he is now supposed to police...

http://linux.slashdot.org/stor...

And self-defense against an oppressive government isn't?

The same reason they don't go after people that fake the e-mail headers to be referring to legitimate domains, including the USPS and their own (fbi.gov) I get on a regular basis. There is no profit for them to investigate and it only affects small business and individuals.

So... what's wrong with that? If I teach you how to shoot a person, is that illegal? If so, then you should close most shooting ranges out there.

Free speech includes speech that is against the establishment, and given the Founding Fathers of the US' viewpoints on thing, quite by design.

I see plenty of forks of open source software even small fish. Look at Linux, X, KDE, Gnome, Ubuntu. Heck, look at a random Github project and someone has forked it.

Pacific Bell == AT&T. AT&T is the Ma Bell of our century, they are practically Ma Bell since they've taken over all the Baby Bell's less a few small holdings except now they don't any oversight or requirements.

PostgreSQL isn't the only kid on the block anymore, there are some great implementations to be made in other engines that could outperform Oracle for specific datasets. The problem is that Oracle (as said) is easy to 'certify' which usually means a beancounter can check off a box that means absolutely nothing in the real world.

So the government receives $25.6M/year and spends $30M/year fighting out how to best spend it...