Ahhh you're Greek - Greece has been dealt an extremely raw deal and the EU knows they have Greece over a barrel. They can claim they didn't know that the Greek government wasn't being forthright with numbers - but they knew. Oh how they knew; I empathize with your situation.

As for waking up to European directives - that's already the reality that we live in. The UK had to change warranty laws around (the consumers did not necessarily win there), The Netherlands suddenly had to declare downloading (of infringing content etc.) as illegal after a ruling on interpretation of the laws (whereas before that was legal), and is having to lubricate matters in order to charge foreign drivers a sort of tax for driving on German motorways; their original plan was already shot down as it singled out foreign drivers: now they actually plan on taxing everybody, but Germans can get the money back via a sneaky construction.

It's mostly the bad effects that we notice, however - many cases of collusion have also been addressed by the European Union, not going bankrupt just for placing a 10 minute call or 1MB data download when across the border is something that has been addressed by the EU, etc. Some of these may have also naturally evolved, but the EU nudging doesn't hurt.

I'm on the fence on whether on the whole the EU has been a net positive or negative, but from your perspective I can well imagine that there's very, very little to be positive about.

Extremely off-topic, but just to touch on the 'who decides' - those with deep pockets, of course. That's not me - it might be you, but I suspect not :)

Let's face it, we can ask the same thing about our national governments, regional governments, municipal governments and local pseudogovernments.

That's something that always strikes me as hilarious about U.S. politics. Case in point: same sex marriage. Several state legislators are arguing the case that the Federal Government should have no say in this and that it should be up to the people whether or not same sex marriage should be allowed. But when they say "the people",they really mean that it should be up to the states. Imagine if Travis County, TX (home to Austin, TX) made much the same argument that the state shouldn't have a say in this, that it should be up to the people voting in county level politics. The state would smack that down in a heartbeat - while letting counties having free reign on various other matters.

So, really, which government decides anything in Austin, TX? Travis County? Texas State? The U.S.?

It's not much different in the EU - the EU just has the additional hassle of the law of the handicap of a head start; cultures progressed quickly but individually here, so now a bunch of legislation that really should apply to all European countries instead has to trickle down through each nation's own legislation, bubble back up to the EU when they hit a snag, come back down, etc.

We are indeed very good with bad ideas - but we do have a few good ones once in a while as well; executing on them remains a problem :)

Ah, yeah, got mangled in some editing around of my comment - that was supposed to come after the replacing of ads with other content :) Good catch, and good point as well :)

Seems tempting, but then you realize that they actually plan on taking money from the advertising companies to start allowing ads again:

The idea is to specifically target Google, blocking advertising on its websites in an attempt to force the company into giving up a cut of its revenues.

Also keep in mind that this almost requires them to play MITM with certs, inspect your traffic, etc. which can then further be monetized, and new content injected. Phorm comes to mind.

Add to that the slippery slope, and it should be evident to anybody that this is a bad idea - and one that has been struck down in the EU in the past already.

As much as people may dislike ads, having them blocked at the ISP level is a patently terrible idea. I, for one, am hoping the legal weasels haven't found loopholes that would make legislators nod in agreement that this would be a-ok.

Yeah, which is a good chunk more than $9 - showing that a lot of cost in a device is not really in the innards; and it still doesn't certify it for use on tests and all that jazz, where the true cost of graphing calculators normally referred to lies.
( There's certainly cheap graphing calculators as well - just can't use those in those situations. )

In defense of the calculator - it has an included screen, dedicated custom keyboard, custom slim case, battery life measured in months if not years, etc.

In non-defense of the calculator - most of its cost is not in the above, but in its certification for use in [school / university / industry] - even if not for itself, then its sibling product which is.. and when that product costs $NN, you can't very well start selling this one for $N without people cluing in.

Tuning is indeed important - as is balancing wheels; two fairly inexpensive steps you can take to get better efficiency out of your car.

But when I tried to look in the first-linked article for tuning.. I couldn't. It was stuck. I tried to click on the link for the study - I couldn't. It was stuck. I figured I'd wait it out.. that was a long wait.
By the time I could finally click the link for 'the study' (which is the 3rd link in TFS, for what it's worth, so just skip to that one), this is what the console showed:
http://i.imgur.com/n3wHVSC.png
That's 1,114 requests, 10.4MB transferred, taking 1.2 minutes. That's with ad blocking, without script blocking.

'ecosalon' should look in the mirror and consider how much energy is being wasted just by people loading that page - the useful content of which ultimately comes down to 10 small paragraphs of text.

I'm confused what dressing up cell towers as X has to do with the subject at hand.

Unless you want to make either A. the argument that if only cell towers looked like cell towers, you'd know when to turn your cell phone 's radio off (completely) so as to avoid being tracked; because you definitely leave your cell phone on if you can't see a cell tower, or B. the argument that people think their cell phones work via the power of magic if they can't see anything that looks like a cell tower; if they even know what those actually look like.

I don't disagree that this was provocative on purpose - the merits thereof I'll leave for some other day - but the situations presented aren't comparable.

This was a meeting held in some random location (a community center, with permission) - not inside a mosque.

Your freedom of speech expression apparently explicitly puts the BBQ in a synagogue. Unless you somehow got permission to do so, it's likely that you would be trespassing and - with the smoke from the BBQ - damaging property.

You could certainly hold your BBQ outside the synagogue, but then it would probably be just a BBQ. I'd imagine there's hot dog carts nearby synagogues in NYC, for example, without any particular issue.

Only if you don't count the $250 they already got for the ticket you bought. Their complaint (on that issue) is that you're buying a cheaper ticket than they wanted to sell you. Everything else is smoke and mirrors, which amount to "we want to sell the same seat twice, and we can't when you do this, and we don't like it even though we couldn't if you bought the ticket we wanted to sell you."

I'm not sure that makes sense, from the airline's perspective.

If you bought a ticket NY-LA, you essentially bought two seats; NY-Chicago and Chicago-LA.

If you bail in Chicago, then their desire to have been able to sell the Chicago-LA seat doesn't mean they wanted to sell the seat twice - they would just rather have sold the NY-Chicago and the Chicago-LA seats on separate tickets, for a higher price on both seats.

And yes, there's all sorts of collateral issues - both positive and negative. I'm sure the same applies when I buy a roundtrip ticket from B to A and back to B when I just want to go from A to B, because the roundtrip ends up being much cheaper than the one-way (intercontinental flight, early 2000's - no idea if it's still the case as I haven't been in a situation lately where that would present itself as a necessity)

I'm just paraphrasing the articles (had to click-through some). The first article summarizes it thus:

The âoehidden cityâ ticketing technique involves buying an airline ticket between two cities with a connection, but ditching the rest of the trip.

Which very much sounds like buying a ticket A-C, then getting off the plane after A-B and essentially discarding B-C.

That's very much different from buying tickets A-B and A-C separately with a price that's cheaper than buying a ticket A-C.

I don't know if both are colloquially called 'hidden city' or whether one of the two is termed incorrectly.

Wouldn't have hurt to put this in the summary - who RTFA?

Say you want to fly from NY to Chicago, and that'd cost $300. You can also get a ticket from NY to LA, and that'd cost $250. The catch? That flight from NY to LA also lands in Chicago.
So if you wanted to go from NY to Chicago, you'd be better off buying the NY to LA ticket instead, saving $50.

The airlines don't like this, because if you book NY to LA, they can no longer sell the Chicago to LA seat (except at last minute rates or more often push standby passengers onto that flight) that might normally be $150. So not only are they out $50 on you, they're potentially out an additional $150 on the unsold seat.
( They save a few $ in fuel consumption, food and beverages, etc. )

Presumably the solution would be to not make part-flights more expensive than full-flights to begin with, but I'm sure the bean counters worked out that this is still the more profitable route for them.

As for headline - yeah, it's only tossed out because it's the wrong venue.. there's really no winner or loser, other than the courts who wasted time on a case that they apparently shouldn't have spent any time on at all.

Ah, you're absolutely right - I stand wholly corrected - I thought they still came with the systems and were offered separately / for updates as well.

http://gizmodo.com/after-nearl...
http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/...
http://www.theverge.com/2015/4...

Tell that to Apple who have bundled far more stuff with OS X (not so much on the driver front, thanks to building their own hardware) than Microsoft ever has with Windows - even before they were forced to remove parts - and whose users are quite happy that it includes everything and the kitchen sink.

You may never use iMovie, for example, but there it is, included with your Mac, whether you like it or not.

For those who much prefer a lean OS, there's always Arch.