Yes, that is exactly how sanctions work.

Do they?

This is a classic way to get a proponent of X into trouble: get them to say under what circumstances X would be breaking the law, and assert they were a proponent of breaking the law. Another is ordering someone not to do something legal, then charge them with disobedience. A third is to ask them if they had (ever) broken the law, then charge them with lying if they had but the statute of limitations had run out.

All are hard to defend against, as they're constructed half-truths. None addresses the propriety, truth or desirability of the original action, only the consequent, so a court can sometimes be tricked into ruling narrowly on the second part alone.

A good measure of fairness of the tax is a comparison between road tax revenue (fuel tax, road tax, tax on new vehicles) and outlays on infrastructure. Over here in NL it's gotten a bit out of whack: revenues are 3 times the expenses, and that includes expenses on public transport infra. Filling up that 55 liter tank costs €95 or so. Then there's road tax, and if you buy a car you pay a special tax on top of the list price and VAT. For some vehicles the total tax can be as much as 125% of the factory price. And no, I did not forget a decimal point in that figure: a Mercedes G 350 is listed at €72.500 but the after tax sticker price comes to €166.500

Even in a country with good public transport, the truth is that most people still need a car to get to work. It's pretty much a necessity, but it is one that we have been made to feel guilty about, so the government discovered that they can tax the crap out of it and not expect much protest. Especially in today's environmentalist society.

Worse: the guy is probably going to face some flak from his superiors over this. His bosses and coworkers probably didn't think much about his shirt, if they even noticed it: it looks more like tattoo art than "pin up girls" and calling it "mysogenic" as one newspaper did is a bit silly. But now that the press is all over it, they can't let it slide. I don't know what is worse: people looking at everything with a magnifying glass so they can find something to feel offended by, or the people who take the "perennially offended" seriously.

Your whole post is reasonable and articulate, and written from an entirely US centric point of view. But taxis are regulated in most parts of the world (perhaps everywhere), and government isn't always as dysfunctional as in the states.

Lavabit is a bad example - the FBI only requested the private SSL key directly after the Lavabit guy refused to co-operate with a more tightly scoped warrant and claimed he had no way to intercept the data of just the user they were interested in (Snowden) ..... a claim that was manifestly false and everyone knew it. If he had handed over just the data of the one user requested, the SSL key would probably still be private. But after proving that he was utterly unco-operative and quite possibly untrustworthy too, the approach the FBI took was not entirely surprising. Additionally it did go through all the motions and there was plenty of oversight of the whole thing - a lot better than some silent interception.

Yes, if the NSA decided that the signing keys for cell tower certificates had to be handed over using some crappy secret national security court then there's not much the phone companies can do. However, it's still good enough to stop your average local police force who just can't be bothered justifying themselves to a judge and going through the overhead of a proper legal request ... which is what TFA says the driving rationale for these devices is.

Having a database of the cell towers a phone *should* see in a given region (it should be possible to crowdsource that) should make it possible to throw an alarm if a cell tower with suspicious characteristics "appears" at some spot.

There's no need for a free/open source baseband or really any technical changes at all to fix this at a technical level. Just disable 2G/GSM on your phone (not sure what the equivalent would be for Verizon). 3G/UMTS onwards involves the phone/SIM authenticating the tower cryptographically. That means - only way to create fake towers is to go get the keys from the phone companies. But at least the phone companies can know about it and mount a legal fight, if they so choose. It's not simply up to a donut eating agent to buy some cool hardware and charter a plane. Although in the USA that might not help much, such fights can go different ways in different jurisdictions.

The problem of course is that 3G coverage is usually not as good as 3G+2G coverage.

Yes, we certainly have been over this. All the windmills in the world amount to 4% of worldwide electricity output. How much more can we get? Not every place with people has year-round wind. So you need serious investment in transmission and storage, areas which are currently already strained under existing load. Can it be done? Unproven.

Do you ever wonder why with this completely paranoid culture we have today why no one ever really worries about getting into a random car driven by a complete stranger in a dark alley in a city in a major US city? Well, it's because the medallion that driver carries is worth several hundred thousand dollars in most cases.

It's because people who are in the habit of assaulting or raping random strangers who get into their cars are extremely rare, and hunted down by experienced law enforcement professionals with great efficiency. It has nothing to do with taxi medallions which 99.99% of people who take taxis cannot possibly authenticate as genuine, being as they are non-experts in taxi licensing. Indeed, most taxis I've been in have visible licenses that are so basic (just a piece of paper with a logo and a photo/name on it) that forging them would be beyond trivial. And if you're the sort of person who drives around trying to entice strangers into your death-cab then printing out a Photoshopped license isn't going to stop you.

Indeed it's only a few US cities that have this crazy medallion system. In most parts of the world taxi licenses are expensive but not THAT expensive. So it can't be medallions that keep people safe.

In general I'm not against carefully thought out laws that have strong and clear justifications for them. I am not some anti-government zealot. A good, solid piece of scientific analysis showing that the costs of such laws are outweighed by their benefits would convince me, ideally backed by studies between areas where taxis are unlicensed vs areas where they are licensed. But I've found that the lawmaking process is very rarely driven by any kind of scientific process like that.

Large is obviously to be taken in the context of global warming (how much more obvious can the context be?). Individual machinery is not large on this scale.

We've been over this. Cordemais produces at most 22.8 TWh per year assuming year-round 100% production with zero downtime. The 2006 report, page 9, exact same table, lists 60.5 TWh of coal-based production for the year 2006. Do I need to belabor the obvious and point out that 22.8 is less than 60.5? Cordemais alone does not produce more power than what the report claims for coal power stations. Give it up already, you're just flat-out wrong.

Automate basic jobs, so I can talk to humans.

I view this as an extension of using cruise control in a car, or an autopilot in a plane. Let robots do what they're good at, so humans can do what they are good at.

...laura

I think you vastly overestimate how many x86 apps can be rebuilt. Even Intel itself has to go to absurd lengths to engineer bug-for-bug binary compatibility into successive generations of x86 chips, precisely because it's so hard to get the industry to recompile. People always complain about Linux because it lacks Photoshop ... well, where is Photoshop for ARM? You speak of servers; where is Oracle's database software for ARM?

It's also not clear if Intel can succeed in making x86 chips save power. At least they're really trying now, which is more than they were doing before. But all that x86 instruction set baggage really bites them. It's something they can ignore in the server arena, but low-power is a different beast. Now I'm not saying they can't do it; Intel has great people and they do great things when they really try. But it will be hard.

I don't know what you're talking about but in the USA many public school districts are strapped for cash and the educational discount does not quite go all the way in making the Surface Pro price-competitive with Chromebooks (how can it?).