I've put LEDs in some of my outdoor lamps, but most of the indoor ones were replaced with CFLs years ago. They still do just as well as the day I got them.

I'll replace the CFLs with LEDs as they fail, but I'm not expecting that to be any day soon at the rate it's been going.

Prepaid debit cards, and burner cell phones, are only anonymous if you...oh, pay for them in cash!

Can highly respected "engingeering" school graduates also spell "engineering"?

Try spying on the US communications systems for the Russians, and see what happens when they catch you. Apparently, not OK with Americans.

It's OK If We Do It. America is the Shining City on the Hill, chosen by Providence to spread God's word and God's electronic eavesdropping to all the nations of the earth.

It's NOT OK with everyone else. And yes, they count.

Copyright, as in "intellectual property", is a notion that exploded from The Shining City on the Hill, namely Jesus's country, America. We've rammed each and every treaty down the world's throat for almost thirty years. Now that it's established, of course European copyright lords are helping seal us in with our cask of Amontlliado. But it is American in origin.

Well done, madam or sir. Exactly so.

They don't want to eliminate the internet. They want to turn it into a paid cable TV service with data for a fat extra charge. They want to own the internet, turn it into another corporate-owned asset. And they have won.

This is ME saying this, but in Betamax decision, the SCOTUS said that *even though* VCR sometimes infringed on copyrights, that the non-infringing uses outweighed the "bad" use. Yes, that makes little sense, but blame copyright laws for that. Change the laws, change the decisions.

"Is it one of those things, like sex and human organs, that you can give away for free but you can't charge money for it?"

You can't charge, either. You must remain a virgin until they license you to have sex, er, watch TV.

Um, Scalia tried that with Bush V. Gore. "Only applies to this one election." Bull.
No, it doesn't work like that, unless someone is crookedly applying law. Law is law, and they don't get to choose what the consequences of their STUPID decision is.

"Fair Use"? HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA! That was FUNNY! "Fair Use"!! Why, grampa here just peed in his Depends when he heard you mention that dead fish. Fair Use indeed. Whoo. Whee.

Those consequences were quite intended by the broadcast industry which sued Aereo. Only Scalia, amazingly, got it right when he warned they were after this endgame. Blind adherence to the tiny details of the law give us this stinking pile to live with, just as when they ruled that eternal copyright was fine as long as there was *some* time limit mentioned, even if it was a century, even if the limit would be eternally extended, as it just obviously had been.

The US writes all the treaties. Amazing how that works.

"How can the government of country A fine a company from country B any money when that company's dealing has NOTHING to do with country A in the first place ???"

Empire. Rules of an empire. We've thousands of nukes, hundreds of military bases in a hundred+ counties, and we create every single "treaty" that governs our actions. You are either a vassal, or a cooperating and subordinate power.

Americans are fine with this idea. They never leave home much, and even if they did, they would not mind the hate. We are the fhining City on the Hill, the Nation Favoured by Providence, the people chosen by God Almighty to lead the world to a perfect age, so that Jesuf can come back, deftroy the world, hurl the unbelieverf and the wicked into the Pit of Fire for ever and ever and build a new Fhining City of Gold for uf, the chofen, to live with Jefus forever, along with perhaps a few foreigners who listened to the Holy Word of America.

If you don't understand the news coming from America, the above is THE explanation. You need no others; it is not hyperbole. And it will get so much worse.