Offensive Unit All Through With This Niceness And Negotiation Stuff is just a friendly neighborhood warship.

I've seen half-serious suggestions that, should Scotland gain independence and create its own navy, all its ships should be named after Culture spacecraft...

Can't believe I didn't mention the date. :-)

Perhaps you should have done more research than 5 seconds in Google.

Democrat donors are at the top of the list of reported donations because they are more likely to report their donations. The whole point of how the Koch brothers route their money, and money funneled through their network of PACs, "think tanks", etc., is to hide the fact that they are funding it, so that their organizations all sound like "independent" supports of the Koch agenda. So they route it through "non-profits" or by providing non-cash benefits (e.g. providing a free vacation / educational conference), and of course pumping a fortune into "independent" issue campaigns, which are unregulated and whose funding sources are largely unreported. And, of course, the un-reported money flow is much larger than the reported money flow.

And you really can't equate the two.

In terms of assets, the Koch Brothers have 20x as much as Soros. So that's not even close.

And in terms of tactics, the Soros' political donations are well documented and transparent - be is open about what he supports, and he lobbies and promotes it in an open fashion. The Koch Brothers' money flow is generally hidden, and goes to subversive organizations like ALEC that literally write legislation, give it to legislators, who they give free vacations and political donations to, and has them pass it, sometimes literally in the middle of the night behind locked doors so nobody can see what they're doing. So you can't equate their tactics.

All the law does is increase the cost/effort of reselling stolen phones. It's impossible, as with any security measure, to prevent anything 100% of the time. But if you make it more complex/expensive, it discourages the attack because criminals will move on to easier/more rewarding targets.

The law doesn't give the state the ability to do a remote wipe, it gives the *owner* that ability. See the difference?

CA is big enough that manufacturers will do what it takes to sell there. If they manufacture cars for CA, with separate *hardware*, then they can easily make phones for CA, where it's a trivial software configuration difference.

In the 'old days' hacking was about learning and proving coolness (e.g. by breaking into something and proving it, but doing no damage because that's not cool). These days much of it is about money. Either way, there's not much reason to go brick a bunch of phones randomly - you'd just piss off a lot of people, leading to arrests when the figure out who did it.

It's what CarPlay does. Which apps Apple approves is up to Apple, though they showed about a dozen apps on the web page and invited inquiries, so it doesn't feel like they're aiming at "a few carefully selected partners". The language on the page is about apps being well designed not to distract users from the road.

The Koch brothers get criticized a lot because they're secretive billionaires with a political agenda, who pump their fortune into the US political system through sneaky means on a massive scale, funneling their money through hundreds of "anonymous" groups so that it's difficult to trace, writing legislation to promote their agenda and businesses, and trying to get it passed when nobody is looking, and generally doing their best to subvert the democratic process. Oddly enough, the vast majority of Americans don't approve of their methods, and don't agree with their agenda, so their behavior generates criticism when it's discovered.

And don't think for a minute that Republicans don't expand government - when they're in charge, they expand the government, and run up spending and debt, faster than Democrats. They just like spending money on different things than Democrats - wars and tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, for example, rather than education and infrastructure. That and they like to regulate people's private lives a lot more than Democrats, while Democrats prefer personal liberties and regulating businesses.

It's not just dropping packages. ISPs can come up with all sorts of ways to distort traffic to extract more revenue, which can be far more subtle (and evil) than selectively dropping packages. For example, when customers try to go to Google, the ISP could send them to Bing (for a kickback), or rewrite Amazon affiliate tags so all Amazon purchases pay a percentage of the ISP. These aren't hypothetical - look at what wireless cell phone companies do to their customers and to content providers - it's a nightmare - and ask yourself why they haven't done the same thing to the internet? And if there aren't any rules enforcing good behavior, ask yourself how long those companies good behavior will last in the face of the opportunity for increased profits?

And do those arguing that they don't want the FCC "regulating" the internet, ask yourself what happens to the internet if there aren't any rules, but all participants start breaking everything possible in order to extract fees?

Note that the car companies care about compatability, and there's a while ecosystem built around using cigarette lighters into cars. That's why they're all over minivans - they're no longer for cigarettes, they're now the standard car power plugs. :-)

That being said, cars are starting to get USB jacks. That's a good thing. But car technology changes slowly, for good reasons - if they put something into millions of consumer cars, people have to live with it for many years, so they are cautious about making changes.

I'd think that as a part of integrating iPhones/Lightning cables into cars, Apple would have to commit to supporting the technology for 5+ years, with backwards compatibility, so that people could plug their phones 5 years from now into the car that they buy now and have it "just work". Both the car companies and Apple care about that. Google too, most likely.

Except for power, of course. Plug in a phone into a cable and it's got high speed data and power. Connect a phone via bluetooth and it's got decent speed data but a power drain.

Apps that run on phones are fantastic for in-car use: Waze, NextExit, GasBuddy, etc.

They just want to be on a larger display, and integrated with the driver's controls.

Which, amazingly enough, is what CarPlay does.