The airlines will simply insert a clause in the purchase agreement that says they can dock you the difference if you don't show up on the second leg.

That is very unlikely to survive a legal challenge, because although statistically people doing what you are doing may be costing them money, (difficult to prove, but plausible) they would have a very hard time proving that not providing YOU the service caused them additional expenses that requires recovery.

Just because it's included in the contract doesn't guarantee it's enforceable.

I've had my 5S for close to a year now and it has never actually crashed. It's rebooted for OS updates and for a few dozen dead batteries but that's about it. I *have* had to reboot it maybe a dozen times in all due to lagging performance though when it hadn't been rebooted in weeks. My desktop computer's the same way though. Every 2-3 weeks it just needs a reboot to clean house.

It'll sure make a huge cut in the bot accounts that are being used for scamming and spamming. Some of these scammers are probably looking at thousands of accounts used on a given day. Busting their "business model" is the best way to get rid of them.

The job of the FBI is to arrest people who commit crimes.

That's like saying my mechanic's job is to change spark plugs.

The FBI's main goal is to protect and defend the United States, to uphold and enforce the criminal laws of the United States, and to provide leadership and criminal justice services to federal, state, municipal, and international agencies and partners.

Currently, the FBI's top investigative priorities are:

Protect the United States from terrorist attacks (see counter-terrorism);
Protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage (see counterintelligence);
Protect the United States against cyber-based attacks and high-technology crimes (see cyberwarfare);
Combat public corruption at all levels;
Protect civil rights;
Combat transnational/national criminal organizations and enterprises (see organized crime);
Combat major white-collar crime;
Combat significant violent crime.

Assuming they list that in the traditional "in order of importance", then their main job is to "protect and defend the United States". It gets a little more specific below that, but nowhere does it even mention "arrest". The FBI's goals are much more general, they talk about "what we are going to do", not "how we are going to do it".

Law enforcement is a complex business and occurs at many levels. Education, intervention, protection, deterrant, punishment, rehabilitation, enforcement, investigation, infiltration, just to name a few. Steps that prevent crime at earlier stages (education, deterrant, intervention) usually have a bigger effect on criminal activity. Assuming you just want them operating in the USA, and the terrorists are getting their training abroad, your work starts as soon as the radical lands back in the states. The problem there is although they are plotting against the USA, they're still protected by its laws. So you either have to catch them plotting, or catch them doing damage. Obviously it's better to catch them while plotting, especially when they are suicide bombers that obviously don't concern themselves with getting caught after the act.

entrapment:
"Hey buddy, you look like someone that wants to kill people for jihad, would you like to drive my truck bomb?"

NOT entrapment:
"Hello there I'm looking to kill people for jihad, can you set me up with something?" "What did you have in mind?" "A truck bomb would be great, can you set me up with one of those?"

It can get blurry sometimes, but they follow specific rules set up around court cases that decided what was and what was not entrapment. "In criminal law, entrapment is a practice whereby a law enforcement agent induces a person to commit a criminal offense that the person would have otherwise been unlikely to commit." In a nutshell, if they suggest you break a law, it's entrapment. If you ask them to help you break the law, it's a sting. This wingnut asked for a truckbomb. He obviously was going to try to get one, one way or another, without the FBI's help. So it's not entrapment. He asked them for a rope to hang himself with, and they gave it to him.

And in this case, yes, he got arrested. Most of the FBI's enforcement work ends in arrest, but that only accounts for a small percentage of their total activity. But when they identify someone that's determined to do something dangerous (or substantially illegal), they're more than happy to play the role of an assistant so they can (A) have inside access for gathering evidence, and (B) prevent the attack.

People that are complaining that the FBI ought to find a different way to deal with wingnuts like this need to understand something. You can (A) prevent them from becoming a threat, (B) prevent them from acting, or (C) deal with them after they've acted. These radicals tend to get their training abroad, so (A) is out. I doubt you'd find them walking around with a basket picking up the pieces to arrest, so (C) is out too. So that leaves just (B), which is exactly what they're doing. "If you have a better idea, lets hear it, otherwise quit complaining".

"You don't ban something because a few irresponsible people use it improperly"

Well, if you have a thimble of common sense, you don't. Which is why our goverment does it all the time. It's one of their favorite passtimes.

Here in Iowa I can legally purchase any number of guns, shotguns, rifles, etc. But I can't buy a firecracker. Because it's too dangerous.

"The purpose of government is to privatize gains and socialize losses. "

That acutally sounds like a really good summary of modern democracy...

One wonders if they would feel less "threatened" if we made fun of female anatomy?

That's the first thing that occurred to me. Look at all the games that focus on female anatomy. Now you get an entirely different group of people complaining. The game devs can't make even 1/2 the people happy at any given time. So why bother trying? Novelty sells. Cash in on it.

there is some additional asshattery that allows them to tie the name up for a short period without actually having to pay money for it

This was called "domain tasting", and the guise it was made under was to "allow a customer to put up a web site under a new domain name to test it out and sample it to see if they wanted to purchase it". This is of course a silly concept, you don't need to have the domain name in its final form to decide whether or not your web page works. What it DOES do is encourage this squatter behavior.

When they first started allowing that, there were suddenly millions of domains in a continuous "sampling churn" by the squatters. ("In April 2006, out of 35 million registrations, about 2 million were permanent or actually purchased." ie 94% of active domains were being "tasted") Getting a domain during that period without paying a squatter hundreds or thousands for it was very difficult. They had five days to decide whether to purchase or not, but then could just immediately (within seconds?) re-request a tasting, essentially keeping the domain locked under their control until you paid them off.

In 2009 ICANN made changes to mostly eliminate the free tasting when done in bulk. This helped a lot but there was still a lot of squatting going on. They made one more tweak, and after that the tasting was down to under ONE PERCENT of what it had been a year before. They called it good at that point.

  But someone above mentioned such a squatter being actually owned by the registrar, which really "tastes like" fraud to me.

The standard procedure, as far as I know (not being an expert), is upon noticing the fire, the pilots would have shut down all the circuits on the plane in order to find out if one was responsible for the fire.

Being an expert on the subject of electronics, I can assure you that turning off the electricity that started an electrical fire will not extinguish said fire or provide any useful feedback unless someone is actually watching the "sparking and arcing" and notes when it stops.

(also, "shut down all the circuits on the plane" sounds pretty crazy for a variety of reasons)

If only Harrison Ford had been piloting the plane...

they'd have done SO much better with Launchpad McQuack... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Their angle was "in stock and in HAND today". They lost sight of that, their most valuable resource. instant availability. I dropped $300 on dx.com last month in a single order. That gets you a crapton of small electronics. But you have to wait for it. I'm still waiting on one of the packages to get here. Ignoring the fact that 80% of that stuff RS doesn't carry, if they did, it would have cost well over a grand.

I remember them putting out an open invitation for surveys last year, and I tried to explain that to them. But they were asking questions like "do you want more DIY stuff and kits". Those were radio shack's bread and butter earlier that they got rid of over time recently, but those actually needed to go away. I can get arduino clone boards for $16 that cost $65 at the shack. No one in their right mind plans to buy that locally. It costs way too much, and you don't need it today.

The classic view of modern Radio Shack being a battery store is actually quite keen. Batteries are the perfect example of something you need now. If they were to survive, they were going to need to identify and focus on items like that. Small items that they can sell at a modest markup that people need TODAY. Anyone that can wait for something will order it from China. But instead they listened to the people that were reminiscing about how they used to shop at Radio Shack, and though that returning to a 20 yr old business model that they'd left behind was a good idea.

It was not.

The problem wasn't that they weren't following the laws. The problem was what they were doing wasn't illegal in the first place.

It can be difficult to get the cops to follow the law. But it's often impossible to get them to "do the right thing".

So this is definitely a good step in the right direction. Don't complain just because we've gone from "impossible" to merely "difficult". Sometimes these things take awhile to straighten out. Be thankful we made some significant progress today.

Microsoft says there's no evidence these flaws have been successfully exploited.

"...so we're going to wait until the bot herders have sucked in a few million more machines before bothering to patch it."

WHAT is WRONG with you, ms?? If I'm reading that right, google is doing precisely what is necessary to light a fire under MS's ass to get the bugs fixed. It isn't really even that. They're basically telling us they don't consider it to be a big deal until it starts getting exploited. By making that comment, they completely justify (and encourage) Google's actions.

but that means you have to carry more fluid. Unless there's very little fluid normally needed, I don't see how ditching the pumps and motors saved enough weight to put enough additional fluid in the reservoir to matter. I see two lines on a weight graph, a horizontal one for the closed-loop, and a curved line representing the open-loop. At some point these lines cross, and the open-loop becomes a worse option. I'm just surprised that point isn't way earlier for them.

I don't understand how softare that's been around THIS long could still be pumping out "critical" security bugs by the dozen.