Didn't know tablets could catch Ebola!

The problem is that recently the legislative body seems to be willing to grant those powers to the departments or even give them more and we are dependent on the judicial system to claw them back.

I agree that people have a right and a civic duty to vote. However I believe that if you force people to vote then it won't make them more inclined to research their candidates/parties in order to make what they feel is the best informed choice. They'll see it as a chore and take the path of least resistance.

I wasn't saying that compulsory voting would make people disenfranchised. I was saying that making disenfranchised people vote was a bad idea. Compulsory voting doesn't address the reason why people don't vote. Address those issues and then people might actually want to be part of the process again. Of course that's much more difficult than just passing a law forcing everyone to go to the polling station and it seems that politicians only want easy "answers".

The loony extreme fringes tend to balance each other out without the mandatory voting because they are motivated to vote. What the compulsory voting does is make the people that are too lazy/unmotivated/disenfranchised/etc to educate themselves about the issues and parties go out and vote for whoever looks the best or has the best sounding name. It's those people I really don't want voting. (Well, I'm not thrilled about the loony fringes voting either but you can't stop them from voting.)

So what would happen in the case of a company such as Tesla (don't know if it's public or not). It's worth about $40B so it would have a hefty tax bill but it doesn't have a lot of cash because it's spending a lot on R&D and building up manufacturing. How about companies that are just coming out of bankruptcy protection or financial difficulties? I'm thinking GM a few years when they were still worth a few billion. A big tax bill on their market valuation might have finished them off.

And how would you measure their market valuation? Averaged over a year? If it was based on one day a year then you would have companies announcing bad news the day or week before in order to drop the share price to try and reduce the tax bill.

Well subtle isn't one of the first words I think of when I think of Abbott.

Heck, lots of people post unauthorized images on Facebook. (Do people post videos on there? Haven't been on in years so I don't know.) Not exactly what they intended with the copyright infringement law but they should be careful what they wish for.

I have my domain hosted at freedns.afraid.org and haven't had any issues with them at all.

A free Prozac prescription with every car sold.

Make the fine based on the value of the vehicle at the time of the ticket. So a poor person who can't afford a nice car will pay a large fine and the rich person in a luxury car will pay more. Yes there will be some people that can afford to drive a fancier car than what they are worth. But at least you don't have to tie in the income tax system to every local police department. The officer would just have to look up the book value of the make and model of the car which could be automated when the license plate is entered. You would probably want a minimum fine for people that are driving clunkers that are only worth a couple of hundred dollars.

Aside from the fact that the doctors aren't allowed to harm a patient by their oath, the manufacturers of the drugs are mainly based in Europe and there are laws preventing them from selling the medications to be used for killing people. If the US used one of those drugs in an execution the manufacturer would be prevented to selling it to the entire US for all uses. So one execution would prevent operations until a replacement source could be found (not an easy task).

So when I'm home and leave the wallet in one place my phone is going to make an alarm when I move about the house as it gets out of range or am I going to have to carry my wallet around with me all of the time now too? Or is there an geographic area that it turns off? Because when I head up to bed and take my phone it's more than 20 feet away from my wallet which could trigger the alarm.

Probably not, more likely their building of solar and wind farms like crazy in the past few years in an effort to get to grips with their pollution problem. (In addition to bringing online new coal power plants to replace their oldest ones.) While they have been building some nuclear plants they have only just approved the first one since the 2011 disaster in Japan.

From the article is sounds like they are just looking at the number of flights and comparing it to the number of incidents in an area. There are lots of other items that they should be looking at in order to determine if the helicopters are actually doing something. Weather plays an important factor. Even what week it is can be important because maybe the weeks that had spikes in robberies and assaults were weeks in which people received paychecks or social assistance. Did they factor in actions by other groups in the police department when they were doing their fly overs? Sounds like they just got a few numbers that they can justify their program with and are boasting about it.

Well, the US was quite happy to use to claim that the coding style was similar so the North Koreans hacked Sony so they've set the bar so low for what "smoking guns" are going to be.