I take all my developers estimates and arbitrarily double them,. In my experience even experienced developers will hit something they didn't forsee, or have requirements changes forced on them.

They do pay a lot of money to organizations that question man made climate change yes. But then again, the flip side of that is the tens of billions of dollars that are invested in global warming being real and caused by man. Regardless of scientific merit I have always thought it odd that people think that 'climate deniers' are better funded than the groups supporting the idea.

Also... they are recording everything.

I assume you mean that the pro man-made climate change are the groups that get the funding. You must do because the amount of money spent by just the US Government (around $2B a year on just scientific studies alone, and growing) dwarfs that spent by the energy companies on research.

If you can be bothered here is the GAO Report and a much easier to read summary

Not saying the money isn't well spent, or that man-made climate change isn't happening - but its just plain wrong to say that Big Oil is outspending the poor universities when it comes to climate research.

The problem is that the media is motivated... to make money. You don't think all those adverts for Coal power on TV, or 'brand' ads about what a great company GE is are just for fun do you? The conversation goes like this 'well... we could spend money to investigate a story slamming a company that spent $50m advertising with us last quarter - or we could not, just re-print their press release about, and still be profitable and employed'. Sure, one or two reports might try to write it, but they would never get on air. You should try listening to the No Agenda show (just google it) for a great description of how it really works

This always drives me crazy... please show me any study, article or any bit of information that shows that oil companies are paying researchers any more money than companies that have a vested interested in climate change. You can't, because whilst you can find a lot of information on the Koch Brothers Funding Climate Denial, I bet you can't find anything talking about the funding that is provided from companies, institutions and individuals with a vested interested in finding climate change.

Or not... its a stretch to say its more extreme than it has been over the past thousands of years. http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2013/12/explaining-the-flaw-in-kevin-drums-and-apparently-science-magazines-climate-chart.html

Couldn't agree with you more..... http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2013/12/explaining-the-flaw-in-kevin-drums-and-apparently-science-magazines-climate-chart.html

I purchase it because you need Plus to get streaming on devices other than PC's, my Roku for example. Also, in a way I don't mind - $7 a month is nothing and if it supports keeping hulu and other streaming services around and I am happy to pay it.

Although I agree with you in the case of snap chat, normal people just don't think things through like that. I for one didn't know its not pushed to your phone until you read it.

The other thing is its not just police search warrants you have to look out for.

In many states a lawyer involved in a lawsuit (for example a divorce or child custody hearing) can issue their own subpoena for electronic records *without* law enforcement or the courts reviewing it. In this case its not evidence of a crime... but your ex wife might subpoena snap chat for all images sent to you and suddenly that secret picture your new girlfriend sent isn't so secret, and is being used in court against you. Its not illegal, but its not something you want to share.

That assumes all votes are made equal, which they are not. Because of gerrymandering in the US something like 80 or 90% of political offices are not competitive votes, which means that incumbents are always reelected and if you live in one of those districts, your vote basically doesn't count. What it means is that only votes in the primaries count, so you end up loosing the center since the only competitive vote is within your own party.

Yes or course there is. Lets say I have a customer in the US who has a colleague in the UK that also wants to buy my product, how can I put him in touch with someone in our London office without knowing their phone number? What if I want to grow my business in China and want to look at who the top sales guys are all over the world? Those examples are trivial but there are thousands more.

That sounds lovely until you realize that the EU classes everything as personal information. Its a mess as it is having to get permission from every employee in an EU country to be able to share basic stuff like phone numbers and office locations outside the EU. I can't imagine how complex it would get if you then had a tax liability on top of it.

What will end up happening is one of two things, people will only ever host data in the EU (since it costs money to take it out and the EU is a big market so screw it, lets just leave it there), or companies will never store information there.

Actually thinking about it this could be a genius plan, effectively forcing companies to manage their operations in the EU by applying an export tariff (which is what this tax would be) that is so complex to manage its just cheaper to move operations there

If you seriously believe its worth the banks time bothering to get the information, or you think that bitcoin in some way even registers as a competitor to the banks you are sorely mistaken. The *total* size of the bitcoin economy is something like 1.2b at current count - and the total *traded* amount by the exchanges is less than half that. The banks, even the smaller ones, shift more money around than that every few minutes, hell goldman make more *profit* than that in a month. The fed prints more US dollars than that every week! Yes, Bitcoin is an interesting thing for normal people to look at, and its ripe for small time day traders and startups to play with, and not to say that maybe in 5 or 10 years time it might be a huge success. But for now, no, its not a 'wet dream' for banks, and is certainly not enough of a market to make it worth them taking any kind of risk. The kind of money they could make would barely offset the cost of the lawyers, and would in no way come close to making it worth them risking their main business.

I think thats how Obama got his Nobel prize :-)

Google owns Zagat which might have something to do with that order.... that and the fact that Yelp said no to google buying them because they got a better offer from Yahoo.... probably just vengeance :)