The typical phone and cable bill in the US includes on average a $4 levy by your local city/state. These are easy taxes for the localities to pass. Congress anticipated localities using "internet" taxes to try to balance budgets and banned them before many could pass them (even though a few got them passed before congress could act). This tax ban should have been made permanent years ago and waived those localities that jumped at the opportunity and put taxes in place. It specifically prevents cities from tacking on a $4 tax onto your internet bill and that's a good thing because those taxes are HIGHLY regressive and disproportionately harm the poor.

I'm one of those silly individuals that think nickle and dime'ing everyone with fee's and taxes on every little thing is bad tax policy. We need a straight up progressive income tax with no exceptions, deductions, credits or waivers. If they need more money let them raise the base tax. This BS where they tax every little thing and service is grossly unfair and tends to disproportionately shift the tax burden to the middle class/poor and excessively harms the poor. That $4 tax on your phone, cable and TV bill ends up being a 1% tax on the poor and 0.000001% tax on the rich. And when you add all the different $4 taxes on everything the poor can end up paying 10% of their income in taxes and fees on these utility taxes. The only "items" that should have taxes are those things that require a massive public owned infrastructure to build and maintain and those that use the system should be paying for it with a tax on the item that measures the use of that infrastructure such as a per mile tax on roadway use. Everything else should be a straight up income tax.

Apple colluded with publishers to raise prices. Because of their action the average ebook increased in price $5. Everyone buying ebooks at the time noticed this overnight increase that priced many ebooks more expensive then the printed version.

Price collusion is illegal under US law. In many many way's it's worse than a monopoly.

Regardless of what you think of Amazon and them being a monopoly, Apple colluded with publishers to raise the price of ebooks. It was anti-competitive at it's core and it's illegal under US law. Not to even mention that it cost the average US buyer $5 per book.

The only joke was that it took them more than 5 years to sue over it because everyone buying ebooks at the time noticed the dramatic $5 price increase in all books. After the Apple deal there were many ebooks that cost MORE than the paper book.

I don't think North Korea wants to abrogate sovereign power and put themselves under the jurisdiction of a US court, even if it's a civil trial. Most countries go out of their way to avoid giving jurisdiction to foreign courts by filing court cases in those courts.

Books are different than movies. You might be able to use someone's name and story if they are a public figure in a book but film is treated differently. The courts have basically said you need to pay someone to show them in movies (including even some cases where that applied to their likeness, this is the reason for disclaimers at the end of the movie that all the characters are fictional and not based on real people). This is similar to the reason in a lot of movies the bad guys are masked, the studios get to pay the actors less if their face doesn't appear in the picture (though this could be an actors guild rule and not a legal precedent, that I'm not sure of).

Now whether a video game is like a movie is another question that I don't believe the courts have really explored but if they treat it like a movie the person has to get paid if someone uses their likeness. I don't think public figures should need to be paid personally.

Television.

Doubt it, you think someone's going to get this information removed and not ask every search engine?

If this law were so bad you would see people stopping buying books but that's not what happens.

No you wouldn't. What you would see is people buying less books because the books they buy cost more. There is no way to prove one way or the other than such a result is happening.

But there is one absolute fact, that is that books cost more as a result of this law.

This law was enacted to protect small bookstores so that the long tail of customers still had access. Amazon provides that long tail service better than anyone else in the marketplace. So now the argument is that it protects the culture and small bookstore "experience". What it actually is for now is one of the infamous French jobs programs where everyone in France is forced to pay more for something by their government to protect an insignificant number of jobs. The reality is that it's quite possible that eliminating the law would create more jobs for authors and writers (at the expense of cashier jobs) by allowing French consumers to purchase more books for the same money. All market manipulations come at costs.

Amazon's bread and butter is the long tail. I'd be willing to bet more than 1/4 of their revenue is used, older and out of print books. You can buy nearly every ISBN in existence on Amazon.

Everything you claim about Small Bookstores serving the long tail better than Amazon is bullshit.

This is a French jobs protection program, nothing more. In the long run I would be willing to bet it harms more jobs than it protects. Just like most of the French jobs programs where everyone in France pays more for everything to protect jobs.

There is no stated guarantee that money donated will go to support SSL instead of OpenBSD. This fork is a fundraising drive by OpenBSD and nothing more.

Now that OpenSSL's problems are being fixed they can at least guarantee that the money donated will be spent on OpenSSL instead of some other operating system and with firm corporate backing and involvement the organizational problems (which caused the technical problems) will finally be fixed. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is stupid. OBSD's resources and effort will always be focused on OBSD first and foremost. People that intend to use Linux should recognize that and refuse to donate unless they commit that every dollar donated for LibreSSL is _only_ spent on LibreSSL development. Theo will never make that commitment because this is a fundraising drive for OBSD first and foremost.

People interested in GPL software should donate to Linux organizations such as the Linux Foundation that have taken responsibility for OpenSSL and will ensure that it's organizational and technical problems are finally fixed.

I'm willing to bet the guy wasn't buckled up. Even when cars are tore in half in crashes if the person is buckled in they are usually still attached to the seat (even though they are sometimes dead from the car being sheared in half).

There is like a 95% chance that if he was ejected that he wasn't buckled up (the seat itself would've had to been sheared to cut the lap belt). I bet the final investigation notes that he wasn't buckled in (there is no guarantee of survival if the passenger compartment is compromised by ripping the car in half but it's still not likely). Seat belts are seriously strong and secure, even if the car is ripped in half the lap belt should have remained secure if it was buckled because it's anchored to the seat itself.

I personally wouldn't be surprised if the cops find that he would have survived if he'd been buckled in.

Split any gas car in half and you will have a fire because the fuel lines will be severed if not the fuel tanks.

And all those stories are bullshit.

The simple answer is the electrolyte that failed was simply cheaper to produce. Most of the product failed out of warranty so it was never an issue for the capacitor producer. The good stuff, tantalum, is actually a conflict mineral (meaning the mine's production is used by non-state entities to fund nearly endless war often over control of the mine) and is super expensive in comparison to the dirt cheap (fails in 6months to 3 years) stuff they used. Don't attribute this to malice or sneaky corporate espionage when the simplest answer is that someone made more money using substandard product. Because that's the reality, some Chinese capacitor company laughed all the way to the bank then reincorporated 3 years later under a different name. Nearly a billion dollars in electronics were ruined by some guy trying to make extra money and the companies you purchased from didn't care.

I sincerely doubt the controls on that drone would work at nearly half a mile altitude in one of the most congested radio locations in the US. For one thing the GW bridge is NOT 2000 feet in the air and they said it was near the GW bridge. If "near" is 2000' feet away I'm smokey the bear. The pilots also said the drone did a mach 0.9 climb. Again bullshit. Every measurement they gave is suspect because of those two items. The cops lied on their police report and said the drone approached them when the reverse is true. For that reason every claim in the charging document should be thrown out automatically.

If these drone pilots (and I mean if, the police statements are lies and should be treated as such) violated FAA rules they should be punished by the FAA, not local law enforcement. My reading of the transcript says they wanted to punish these guys so they made something up probably not realizing the transcript would prove them to be liars. If the cops thought the guys were violating FAA rules they should have contacted the FAA and let them investigate and punish the drone pilots.

As it is the cops in question should be fired and charged for making a false police report.

20 years is a single generation. The F-16 was developed in the 60's, the F-18's were developed in the early 80's. Both are still in service.