I cannot comprehend this entitled attitude. on cable tv you see ads. in a magazine or newspaper you see ads. before movies you see ads. during movies you see ad placements. so it's not like Netflix is proposing a crazy new concept

I cannot comprehend this apathy about the ongoing invasion of every bit of space and time by attempts at mind control. ("Buy! Buy! Buy!")

Once upon a time you actually could pick up some magazines and see very few ads, or even none at all. There were not ads before movies. Product placement was inconspicuous or non-existent. There was even less ad time on broadcast TV -- one guy estimates that the time spent on commercials more than doubled since the 1950s.

Ads as we know them are memetic toxins. Anyone unconcerned about them is unconcerned about their own mind.

The idea is that your device runs a calendar app and syncs with Google Calendar. You then get notifications regardless if you are online or outside a coverage area,

And through what magic does that sync occur if you are offline or outside a coverage area?

I'm not foolisbn enough to give an advertizing company my callendar, but I'm pretty sure that Google Clendar uses TCP/IP to sync. Which means you have to have data reception. Which is much less avaiable than SMS.

The school owned the camera he used. Therefore all work from that camera belongs to the school.

No. It does not work like that. If you borrow my guitar and write a hit song, it's your song, the copyright is yours. If you borrow my camera and take a Pulitzer-winning photo, it's your photo, the copyright is yours. Copyright goes to the creator of a work, not to the owner of any tools incidental to the creation.

and some other tiny details, such as not having a handicapped shower open to the public

What kind of business is required to have showers?

...then got stung again a year later because even though he had plenty of handicapped parking... and he only had one handicapped spot...

You have an odd definition of "plenty".

He closed up shop, and now has an antique shop in rural Texas, and making far better cash there.

If his problem in CA was with the federal ADA, that law doesn't change in TX. (The various fringe theories of some Texans notwithstanding.)

General skills, aka the ability to succeed in society without reverting to drug abuse, are considered when a company is hiring.

Chemcial tests can't tell whether a person is absuing drugs, only if they are using them. (It is a prohibitionist fiction that the use of certain drugs is inherently abuse.)

If the only way you can tell whether someone is using drugs is through chemical tests, ipso facto it is not affecting their performance on the job.

My small pocket sized wifi cellular router only costs $45 for 3 GB no matter how long it takes to use that 3 GB (no time span requirement, just however long it takes to use the traffic amount)...

Who??? Give! You can't tell us about that and not tell us where to sign up.

All well and good, but doesn't exactly solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.

Sure it does. (Not that one small pilot project solves the problem, I mean if the tech is scaled up.) It's carbon-neutral just like biofuels are, it does not add any net CO2 to the atmosphere: it only puts in what it took out to make the fuel in the first place. (I suppose your could even use it to remove CO2, to get us back to 350ppm via carbon sequestration -- make up a bunch of "blue crude" and then stick it underground, running an oil well in reverse.) The problem with greenhouse gas emissions is fossil carbon, which puts in carbon that was captured millions of years ago.

Except the Apps can't be installed if you refuse

Xposed Framework + XPrivacy. Boom.

What rational argument is there that makes it right to strip ownership from the copyright holder after a few decades? Does real estate become public domain after 100 years of ownership?

You have confused ideas with property. The only rational argument for using state force to punish people or make them pay for making a copy of a work is that doing so promotes the creation of more works. That excuse falls off rather rapidly once the author is dead.

A song is not real estate -- if I go into Bob Dylan's house it affects his life, if I sing one of his songs it doesn't -- and so your comparison makes no sense.

So, are you ready to demonstrate, how copyrights have sniffled the development of Jazz, Rock-n-Roll, or Rap, for example?

Famous Copyright Infringement Plagiarism cases in Music

Music Lawsuits: Blurred Lines Thoughts

HTH. HAND.

We trade "freedom" for "security" every day; it's called civilization

If you're trading freedom for security, you're doing it wrong. They are mutually dependent. You have both or neither, not one or the other.

What does it mean to not be free? It means you can't live your life as you want because someone -- the state, the group with a "monopoly on violence", where one exists -- will use violence to stop you. You don't have security when you are subject to state violence that restricts freedom.

And what is the reason we desire security? Because we can only live as we choose -- we can only live freely -- when others do not violently impose their will upon us. You don't have freedom when you are subject to violence that threatens your security.

The question then becomes, how do we organize to defend ourselves against violence, while at the same time not creating an organization that commits violence? The modern police state fails this challenge.

Israel didn't start it, Hamas did.

No. The UK started it with the Balfour Declaration, then the Zionist Organization followed by with an invasion. Arabs started to resist the invasion, and the cycle began, with many sins since then by many players. But the origin was British colonialism and Jewish millenarianism. And the recent and ongoing brutality has been primarily of Israeli origin.

Who are the terrorists? The ones launching cowardly, hidden attacks, or the ones defending themselves?

There is nothing "cowardly" about hiding. That's how you win a battle. It's why we invented camouflage. That's the same charge the British leveled against American colonial fighters, that they wouldn't stand out in the open wearing bright colors and be shot like Real Men.

And the Palestinians have been on the defensive since 1917, that's the historical fact.

To give an example, there are a number of women working in the games space who are targeted every time they express any sort of view. Some of these threats are simply extraordinarily disgusting.

"Targeted"? What exactly do you mean by that?

If you mean that people disagree loudly and vigorously when they speak, well, welcome to being an adult.

If you mean that people threaten them, an actual, credible threat is a crime. And in such instance Twitter should be forwarding info to help the police to catch the criminal.

But hyperbolic speech -- even speech you or I may find "extraordinarily disgusting" -- is not a credible threat. If you don't want to read disgusting speech, Twitter lets you block people. We've had the solution for dealing with asshats on-line since the glory days of USENET. It sounds like this: plonk.

Was Dr Martin Luther King Jr an SJW?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that while MLK was all about social justice, he wouldn't have been happy to be called a "warrior".

The term is well-known. Saith the wik,

In internet culture, the term has been used as a pejorative for someone campaigning against things they perceive to be instances of racism, sexism, homophobia or other social injustice. Frequently initialized as "SJW", it is used to accuse opponents of sanctimony, to insinuate pretense, as a pejorative, and as a general shorthand for a person believed to be overreacting to social issues. Although most commonly used to cast negative implications, some have attempted to reappropriate the term as a neutral or positive source of identity.

I'm all for social justice myself. But the fact that someone is arguing for social justice doesn't mean they have their facts or their reasoning straight. Heck, the fact that someone thinks they're arguing for social justice doesn't mean they are actually arguing for social justice, as opposed to riding a self-righteousness high.

You don't like it, then change the law. Don't go crying because the cop did their job.

In a sane society, it is the job of a cop to use the law as a tool to keep the peace and protect people's rights, not to enforce every minor idiotic whim of those mentally and morally twisted enough to secure for themselves a place in the legislature. Separation of powers has a purpose.