That should pretty much shut the whole thing down right there. The purpose of the in-vehicle entertainment system is to allow the consumer to make digital recordings of (non)copyrighted music for THEIR PRIVATE, NONCOMMERCIAL USE.

AARC are in the same class of bottom-feeding scumbags as SOCAN. I was personally threatened with legal action by SOCAN because we had not licensed out hold music for our phone system, despite the fact that our music was carefully selected to be recordings from the public domain.

These lawyers should be disbarred, jailed and have all their assets seized for distribution amongst the artists whose interests they claim to represent.

Why doesn't Android have a permissions structure that allows the user to explicitly manage the permissions for each app?

  If I want to disable access to the contacts for any given app, I should be able to do that. If it breaks functionality of the app, then that is MY problem, but in most cases, it wouldn't cripple the app; I don't need my shopping list to be able to read my contacts and send premium text messages on my behalf.

So, after 7 years you have paid for 7 smart phones: 4 that you bought up front and then 3 more that you paid the provider for the service which includes the subsidized cost of the phone.

The idea that cell phones are sold at a deep discount is a total fallacy.

Cell phone providers set an arbitrarily absurd price that is two to three times the price that equivalent devices sell for in open markets so that they can make you think you are getting a really good deal, and so they can justify the price gouging for their services ("See Mr. Regulator, I need to charge these fees and maintain these contracts to cover the cost of the device!")

The service station maintains sets of pre-charged batteries, so when you pull in, all you do is swap out your batteries and drive away.

Dude, your country is fucked.

In so many ways.

Just plain fucked!

While other countries are examining alternative flexible educational systems and expanding the curriculum, you have education districts dropping fact and reason in favour of mysticism and fairy tales, and move towards a rigid one-size fits all model.

In much the same way that the passengers of the Titanic realized how fucked they were. You have nowhere near enough life rafts, and by the time anyone admits there's a problem, the life rafts will all be launched to carry away roughly 1% of your population.

What you really need is one of these:

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/S0hRzEi...

Alfalfa growers are now exporting some 100 billion gallons of water a year from this drought-ridden region to the other side of the world in the form of alfalfa.

I think your math is a bit off. California only produces about 7 million tonnes of alfalfa anualy. a tonne of pure water is about 250 gallons, so even if alfalfa were pure water, your math is off by a couple of orders of magnitude.

It's actually Sept, 8, 2014, but that's a simple enough mistake for an amateur.

I think you might be confusing patent and trademark.

You mean Apples and Windows, right? :)

The best 99 you will ever spend:

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=103&cp_id=10303&cs_id=1030304&p_id=5432&seq=1&format=2

While I certainly agree that kids at (for example) a birthday party do not need sugar to become hyperactive, there are other studies, and they tend to correlate well with what we know of metabolism and how sugar is metabolized:

Other studies show that since sugar is quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, blood sugar rises quickly, which can lead to higher adrenaline levels and thus symptoms similar to those associated with hyperactivity.

A study like this carries a lot more weight as it isolates the ingestion of sugar and objectively measures it's biological impact on the children, as opposed to other studies that do not isolate the various stimuli and only measure the results subjectively.

I have 3 kids under the age of 6 and I call a total bullshit!

There are many recent studies that try to dismiss a correlation between sugar and hyperactivity and most of them appear to be pretty flawed. One study states that the parents of the children in the study did indeed report that sugar correlated to hyper-activity, but dismissed that in favour of "clinical" reports--so in their normal environment kids become hyper after eating sugar, but when you put them in a lab they don't. Perhaps the change of environment has an impact on this? This study also compared sucrose, aspartame, and saccharin based on THE ASSUMPTION that aspartame and saccharin do not cause hyperactivity. But few if any of these studies administered the test dose on an empty stomach and monitored the biochemical response.

Other studies show that since sugar is quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, blood sugar rises quickly, which can lead to higher adrenaline levels and thus symptoms similar to those associated with hyperactivity. This fits much better with what we understand about metabolism and is not based on any assumptions or other external effects, such as change in environment.

FTFA:
a notice claiming that subscribers could face up to $20,000 in damages

Considering the law now features a cap of $5,000 for non-commercial statutory damages would this not count as extortion?