Wait, are those states doing something to restrict what you can read? Or are they just choosing to not provide free of charge some books that many people would consider pornographic to children?

That is not quite correct. Having something like a std::vector<int*> is perfectly fine. That vector resizing will not change any of the pointer values or cause re-allocations, What you are probably referring to is something like std::vector<std::auto_ptr<int> >. Because of how auto_ptr works, resizing the vector will result in basically all your original items becoming de-allocated.

Just make the tax rate proportional to the company's total revenue, not profit. Personally, I would also tax the revenue not profit, too, and get rid of all those "it's OK to waste money because it's a tax writeoff" attitudes. And it would be harder to cheat. If taxes go up faster as the company grows, then companies will think twice about merging just to have a bigger bottom line.

But I doubt this will ever actually happen. Companies have way too much leverage over politicians to ever let this happen.

Citation needed. You're right that PNG is free, but I've never heard of patents on JPEG. And JPEG has been around for quite some time, so any patents that might have been on it when it was created have to have expired by now. Or they are invalid by the prior art of JPEG itself.

Maybe you are thinking of JPEG2000? I'm not sure if there are any active patents on it, but IIRC parts of the J2K spec are not free (though the base spec is free).

Or we could do that and prosecute swatting for what it is: attempted murder.

While I kind of agree based on the current outrageous state of policing in the US, in an ideal world calling the police should not reasonably be expected to result in someone's death, especially when there isn't any criminal activity going on at the location you pointed the police to. We need to start holding the police to a higher standard, not a lower one.

But definitely prosecute the fraudsters for wasting everyone's time.

Florida is forbidding schools to hold novels about American slavery or Women suffragettes, or any other discrimination found in US history. They're also reinforcing current discrimination by removing all references to LGBTQ sexuality and, of course, anything that 'I have more rights than you' activists such as Moms 4 Liberty considers âoepornography.â

What are you talking about? Florida is trying to prevent elementary schools from giving pornographic books to third graders (i.e, 8 year olds) and younger. Some teachers are overreacting (and then showing their overreaction on social media to get likes). Definitions of pornography can vary, I guess, but can't we all get behind the idea of not sexualizing 6 year olds?

There was also something recently about how an African-American AP course was more content about LGBT+ people. Interestingly, the AP itself apparently had the same concerns, as they independently decided to revise the curriculum. There is nothing (that I have heard of) about not letting schools talk about or have books about slavery or women's suffrage.

There are bad things that sometimes happen, but we cannot fix those things if people grossly exaggerate the issues.

I agree with your general concept, but when I hear "regulation" I think of a large bureaucracy devoted to figuring out and applying complex rules. I prefer an easier solution. Use the tax system. Specifically, make income taxes for companies more like income taxes for individuals.

First change would be to make corporate income taxes be based on revenue not profit. Except for a few things that are tax deducible, my personal income taxes don't change based on what I spend in the year. But just about everything a company spends money on reduces their taxes because their taxes are largely based on profit. This won't necessarily help with corporate size, but it will help with waste and with ways to hide money to reduce effective taxes and thus profit.

Second, make corporate taxes progressive, like personal taxes. So basically, two companies each making a billion in revenue each year would pay less than one company making 2 billion. This would help reduce M&A simply by the fact that the combined company's tax bill would be higher. So, mergers really have to make sense, they can't be just about getting bigger. Note that the actual tax rates and how fast they increase will be key to making this idea actually work. And no, I'm just a humble coder, I don't know what the rates should be : )

While these changes would be big, I don't see any reasonable argument against them. After all, these are the rules we apply to individuals, so if they are OK there, they should be OK for companies.

It is an interesting question as to how you define what is a single company. Could you take a large company like Alphabet and have them put each division into a separate on-paper-only "company"? My first thought is that any sharing of executives or board members means the two organizations are really one. Would that make SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter all the same company for tax purposes? Yes, but I don't know if that is really that bad of an idea. Maybe Elon should just work for one of those companies at a time.

I know that corporate lobbyists are powerful enough that this idea will never ever happen. But I can dream, right?

Apple has a monopoly on installing apps on iOS devices. No one else, even the owner of the device, is allowed to do it. This gives Apple sole discretion over which apps are allowed on the device, and costs developers by requiring them to pay Apple a yearly fee to even submit apps for approval for the store.

Apple uses that monopoly to take a large cut of money spent in those apps, at least for "digital goods". Apple prevents companies from doing their own payment processing so they can continue to collect this fee.

The solution would be to force Apple to allow alternative ways of installing apps (including alternative stores) and forcing Apple to allow apps to use their own payment processing if they choose.

Because most people object to the slaughter of 85 million people?

No, they don't.

People can justify lots of deaths, especially deaths of strangers or people who are hard to relate to.

Sure, right now, most people would probably object to the wholesale killing of everyone in Iran. But that's because we as a society can see ourselves in their position. With the right propaganda, though, I wouldn't be surprised if that could be turned. Note that both the propaganda and the killing would be VERY EVIL and I personally do not endorse either. I'm just saying that sadly, public opinion is very malleable, even for genocide.

It would be better to say that the slaughter of 85 million people is just wrong and shouldn't be done, no matter how many people support it.

Of course it is a classic money laundering scheme. It's great that you recognize it as such, but it was explained pretty clearly to you, in the context of of article about scammers. I'm not a scammer, but I imagine that the people doing this (the mules) didn't recognize it because

1) They aren't that perceptive, at least about financial matters (doesn't even mean they aren't smart in other aspects in their lives). Remember there are some incredibly dumb people out there.
2) They are blinded (maybe willingly) by the prospect of making money. Remember that there are plenty of thieves out there, despite the fact that they would not live someone stealing from them
3) They were lied to by the scammer. shocker. Maybe they scammer made up some story about their business being too small, liberal, conservative, whatever and being blackballed by the big bad financial industry. Who knows. See #1

Probably lots of other ways scammers recruit their victims. I wish more people followed the maxim "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is", but unfortunately, they don't.

You need to look at the per passenger pollution rate, not the total. Those big jets burn more fuel than a small plane, but they are usually carrying hundreds of times more people.

To put it another way, buses pollute more than cars, but that doesn't mean we should ban public transportation on the roads.

I'm not trying to defend Amazon here, but that has not been my experience. I frequently type the names of specific items and get a result page where the top items are what I need. Maybe it's because I search for a part number instead of "replacement battery" or something generic. Certainly if you go search for "laptop computer", you'll get a bunch of ads, but if you know what you want/need, it's easy to find it.

Of course, if you cannot find the right name for something, you're right you probably won't find it. That is a big disadvantage. And sometimes, you have to do some independent research on brands to know if what you're buying is any good. There are a lot of crap products on Amazon, and the ratings are generally worthless (sometimes you can find a good comment with real information on the quality).

Are the book names and/or author names you are searching for somehow generic?

I suppose it's possible that uBlock is protecting me from some spam (and if it is, I'd recommend you don't install it so I continue to be able to live ad free), but I do see sponsored products on Amazon, so it cannot be everything.

We are still waiting for Disney to follow through on its promise of an openly gay character in an animated movie.

Wasn't Buzz's (work) partner a lesbian in the recent Lightyear movie? I have heard one of the characters in the upcoming "Strange World" movie is gay. Though maybe you are looking for an LGBTQ character in a good movie...

I don't know why you think She Hulk was a failure

A lawyer show written by people who admitted they didn't know how to write law scenes? Even on the very unreliable RottenTomatoes, it only has a 35% audience score. Metacritic has it at 2.4 user score (out of 10). I suppose a lot of people were laughing while watching the show, but it was more laughing at how dumb it was rather than at any jokes in the show.

But making a show so terrible that people watch it to mock it probably is better than a "meh" show like Andor that very few people want to watch either way. Andor is somewhat interesting because it's such a deep dive into the characters, but so little ever seems to get done that it's quite a slog. Maybe it's gotten better in more recent episodes?

Just start the game an hour earlier. That's all that DST does.

Only when people start getting convicted of negligence for running hospital (or other) computer systems in ways that make them vulnerable to ransomware attacks will the epidemic of this ransomware attacks be solved.