Well, you have to figure the wage suppression was worth significantly more than $5,000 per worker, heck it was probably worth between 2 and 4 times that per year and the case involves at least a half decade of bad actions, so make it 10k per worker per year and that works out to ~3.2B.

In this case, I believe that the lawyers are putting their interests above that of the clients. An average person in the class is making well over $100k. For that person, which is better: $5k guaranteed or a 25% chance of $50k? Obviously the latter. However, for the lawyers, the question is rather different. Get guaranteed $Millions now, or spend a lot more time and effort to get a $25% chance of $multi-millions? Most people would probably opt for the $Millions and that's what these lawyers are doing -- grab the easy guaranteed money and move on to the next class action.

It's essentially a loophole in the 4th amendment and its counterparts in those countries.

I don't believe it is a loophole. The NSA and it's supporters are using it for a bullshit claim that it's a loophole. As yet, I don't think the Supreme Court has weighed in on this question.

an entry that says "[Dealername] Added Value $500".

I remember seeing one car that the dealer was even more forward about markup. The item was "Additional dealer profit". The sticker was on a TC by Chrysler, which probably sat on the dealer's lot until the dealer realized that the "Additional profit" needed to be negative in order to sell the car.

Not really. Tesla doesn't really have the volume (or the low end offerings) to eat the dealerships' bread and butter(except possibly some relatively niche outfits

If you consider BMW niche, then yes.

If I walk round my office car park, I see more Teslas parked here than BMWs. Considering the number of years that BMW has been selling cars, that' s pretty amazing. In all fairness, I should mention that the Tesla factory is just a few miles up the road, so I live in prime territory for Tesla.

It's their fine work that kept the telephone under their control for almost 100 years.

While the attributes of AT&T have followed the name, the current AT&T isn't really the same company as the old AT&T.

If Google is considered 'external communications' and an 'overseas' company, then why is Google paying UK taxes?

The level of ignorance in that article is amazing. Google does pay taxes, but it also shifts the vast majority of income that is arguably earned in the UK to Ireland. Sales to British companies made by British salespeople, working in Britain, are reported as sales made in Ireland. That's the issue.

How many years of backups should they be required to keep?

How many years of records does the IRS expect taxpayers to keep? Imagine that you were audited and then the IRS lost the records of the audit and then audited you again. That would suck.

This appears to be slightly different -- if I understand correctly, the emails were downloaded to a PC (probably using POP3, not IMAP) and deleted off the server. Backing up every desktop system provides a lot of challenges. Backing up emails from a laptop that is rarely connected to the LAN is even more difficult.

Good. I don't want the local government running broadband. I want actual, real, competition.

Except that the real effect of limiting municipal broadband is the increase in prices. Cities that get municipal broadband see reduced pricing from private ISPs. Yes, everyone wants real competition, but just limiting what local governments can do does not in any way, shape or form provide more competition.

Because of the last mile cost issue, the only effective way to get competition is to separate ownership of the last mile from the rest of the infrastructure. Until that happens, municipal broadband may be the best fallback.

I'm surprised that spam is still a lucrative business model,

Some years ago, there was a suggestion that the people paying for the spam campaigns were not making any money, but the botmasters were. How did this work? As long as there is a supply of suckers prepared to pay botmasters for spam campaigns ....

Also, each customer getting the independent service at 20 Mbps will save $75 / month if they switch to Google.

In unrelated news, Comast increases its Cable TV service prices by an average of $75/month in the Porland area.

This is why the wealth disparity that the ultra rich work towards is so baffling.

I don't think that intelligence is the necessary attribute for acquiring wealth -- instead it is sociopathy. The ultra wealthy are only out for themselves and they don't care about the consequences, even the consequences for other rich people who are going to suffer from the starving people -- they have their private security.

On Windows, BitLocker is just as secure as TrueCrypt. Well, assuming there are no massive unintended flaws in BitLocker.

Just to clarify your statement above -- you are saying that neither TrueCrypt nor Bitlocker is secure on Windows and both can easily be compromised on Windows?

Does anyone now think that an NSL was not behind the shutdown of TrueCrypt? Really? The fact that the developers have not come forward and the hillarious suggestion to use bitlocker.

The results are likely to negative for the USA -- think of Americans travelling in Asia, with laptops on which the data is encrypted using systems which are likely to have backdoors.

That's why the defenders of the NSA are wrong -- even if you accept the privacy violations, the net result is reduction in security. Even without Snowdon, the information would have eventually leaked out.

Perhaps it depends on the person at Nominet who assesses the site, or perhaps the goalposts have moved. I once reported a site to Nominet for blocked Whois information because the site was promoting a product, although actual puchases were made through another (linked) site. Nothing happened. The site remained as "The registrant is a non-trading individual", even though it clearly was not.

I'm in the UK, and I use Domains by Proxy.

That's fine if you are prepared to pay the large cost for DbP and never want to change registrars. I had some domains at Godaddy with DbP protection. I found that to move to another registrar, I had to first remove the domains from DbP, thus making the whois information public for a few hours during the transfer.