Tesla wants to open a store in New Jersey to sell cars in New Jersey. That's not interstate commerce, no reason for the Feds to get involved.

I go to my local pharmacy to fill a prescription -- it is treated as interstate commerce for the purposes of legislation. How is it different?

To make "storage/memory" as the words for "Hard-drive" & "RAM" guarantees confusion.

1. We already have logical terms that roughly distinguish the two functions: RAM and ROM

"ROM". You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

The Courts are supposed to weigh cases based on the facts and arguments presented, and not so much on their own personal experiences.

Conextual knowledge is usually required to make good decisions. Without that context, decisions are likely to be random. Yes, the lawyers should present information to develop context, but where to start? Do they have to start with 1 + 1 = 2 ? Obviously not. So what assumptions should they make about the knowledge of a judge? Probably they start with what a ordinary person would know; but if a judge knows less than an ordinary person?

Those fees are mandated taxes that they have to charge - much like sales taxes. Is the retailer/seller the one responsible for charging you the tax? No - they are simply acting as tax collectors for the various Governmental agencies that demand they collect said tax. I do not hold my motorcycle dealer responsible for the sales and license taxes that the State of California charges.

Your motorcycle dealer may pay property taxes on his buildings. Does he add that as a fee that he charges you? In the specific case I mentioned, a car rental service charged me a fee for the property taxes on the cars -- this is a tax, but the company must pay it whether or not I rent the car, so it is a cost of doing business, not a tax imposed by a government entity on my rental contract.

But back to phones, in a recent T-Mobile phone bill I see the item:

"Other fees and government-related Obligations"

This is explained as:
"These fees relate to your service. They may be imposed on us and passed through to you pursuant to your contract" This falls far short of a claim that the fees are merely a pass-through of taxes imposed on T-Mobile that are specific to the service that T-Mobile supplies to me.

The bill also includes an item "Federal Universal Service Fund". Once again, this is a charge imposed on the carrier. The FCC does not require the carriers to pass this charge through to end users. In other words, it is a cost of doing business. It is also predictable and applies equally to all states (so could be included for advertising purposes in all states).

Trouble with this is the carriers won't be able to run national ads with their pricing. Instead the price will have to be concealed until you're about to sign up. Some states (Nevada) you pay around 7%, whereas others (I think NY?) it's 25%.

If it were purely taxes that the company must collect and hand over based purely on what you pay, I could agree with that, but when it is nebulous "fees" that are really cost of doing business that the company incurs, it's not reasonable. Furthermore, some of the fees relate to Federal fees that are the same in all states.

In the example I was quoting (renting a car at an airport), the company has enough information to quote the exact price with all fees at the time of booking.

I don't understand how businesses are allowed to tack on fees to bills without disclosing these fees in their prices. Somehow they can't quote these fees when you are booking the service, but they can calculate them when billing for the services.

Some years ago, I rented a car from a large airport and one of the fees tacked on was for the property taxes paid on the car. Why don't they just tack on another fee for the property tax on their buildings, or their staff costs, car depreciations? These are all costs that must be paid by the business whether or not I had rented the car -- just like the property taxes on the car.

I am just waiting for prices for cellphone and car rental services to be $1 with the rest of the cost as "taxes and fees".

Perhaps the criticsm of the NSA should focus on the very poor use of resources. Billions of dollars are used to spy on US citizens with no benefits, while the administration appears to have been caught completely unprepared for the events in Crimea.

Perhaps a re-allocation of those resources would be beneficial to US interests.

Unless, of course, the real reason for the spying on US citizens has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with suppressing free speech and legal dissent.

Austin is still something of a deal, since compared to California, you get about 25% of your salary back through not paying income taxes,

California has the advantage that if you buy a house, you will get a much more expensive property and, over time the value of that house goes up, such that, when you come to sell, you will have a lot more profit on the sale than if you lived in Texas. You can then move to a cheaper state.

Of course, the above doesn't work if you retire in California.

If fact the negligence in this case was the fault of an external IT contractor who stored the captured data on the website CMS, after the requirements has been change to specifically exclude this feature because of security concerns. However the DPA doesn't take this into account. Data loss is an absolute offence, no negligence is necessary. If the organisation loses the data they are guilty.

If you are correct, then the BPAS should be able to sue the contractor, since it was the contractor's sole fault that the data was stored.

The papers are being deliberately mishandled by the teachers. It doesn't matter that the effect of the mishandling does not increase the marks *. The exam board should refuse to mark every one of these papers and blacklist the teachers from ever administering exams again.

* Note: as far as they know. How can they be sure that there is no cheating going on?

That's why T-Mobile can say "We're better than AT&T" or whatever on their ads. They don't need permission to use AT&T's name, they just can't use their name to refer to anything but the real AT&T.

The article refers to the UK and UK trademark law has restrictions on this. You can only name your competition if your are making an objective comparison. That's why when Pepsi made adverts promoting taste comparisons to Coca-Cola, they did not name Coca-Cola.

How dull do you have to be to pay someone to do this for you?

Very, since in the EU, users are prompted to do an automated install of an alternative browser on first use (except those times when the choice was "accidentally" missed out of builds of retail copies of Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8).

The Win8 phones are fine, and while they had a rough launch, their market share continues to grow

Yeah, except that the market share for Windows phones has stopped growing -- in fact it declined from Q3 to Q4 2013. What maket share Microsoft has is based on the low price products like the Lumia 520.

So what we have is a bunch of startups who think they know how to be like a bank, but are failing utterly.

Is this is a systematic flaw in Bitcoin itself, or Schadenfreude by companies who have yet to learn they are nowhere near ready for holding onto something like this?

There is another possiblity: that these exchanges are operating as designed.

Who can most easily rob a bank? The people running it, of course.