Mozilla is whining anyway; when they switched search providers from Google to Yahoo I had to go through and specify it on EVERY INSTANCE of Firefox I have. Since I use --no-remote and segment my web browsing this was actually a royal pain in the ass. Granted, Google was the old "default," so I had never changed it, but it was still an undesired change in behavior. If they're going to whine about Microsoft doing the same thing then they ought to look at their own behavior.

Firefox is still my browser of choice for personal use but for others I've started to recommend Chrome. It's just less hassle to support it for your luser friends. The future of Firefox and Mozilla is not an encouraging one, which is a pity.

It's a bit hard to get outraged at MSFT when GOOG has been doing the exact same thing for the last three or four Android versions.

That's not destruction of property, that's maintenance of property. Want a better analogy than the soccer ball? If your neighbor parks in your driveway without permission you can probably have him towed. What you can't do is take a 9 Iron to his headlights.

No, that would still be destruction of property. The fact that it's on your property does not give you the right to destroy it. If the neighbor's kid kicks a soccer ball over your fence does that give you the right to slash it with a knife before you return it to them? Of course not.

Seems like those are applications that scream, "CHEAPER TO DO WITH DRONES!" to me. :)

My Western Electric Model 1500 begs to differ.

There's an easier way. Just put the phone in airplane mode. Problem solved.

(Some minor loss in functionality may occur, but you can never be too safe....)

You can get all of that stuff from alt.binaries.erotica.* without needing a YouTube account. ;)

In Common Law jurisdictions we have another principle that goes back for 800+ years: mens rea. Meaning that you have to have a guilty mind (i.e., intent) to have broken the law. Unfortunately this principle is being steadily eroded in favor of "strict liability" laws that require no intent, thus criminalizing more behavior and further expanding the power of the State.

Webster defines terrorism (emphasis mine) as "the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal"

The FBI also requires a political bent: "Appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping"

Swatting is not terrorism, at least in this instance. Not by the definition of the word or as it is commonly applied by western law enforcement agencies. *shrug* Sometimes an asshat is just that, an asshat, with no deeper motivation than the desire to be a dickhead.

No it's not. Terrorism is activity meant to terrorize an entire population and/or influence the public policy of a Government. Falsely reporting an incident does not rise to the level of terrorism and when people keep using the 'T' word to cover all manner of crimes that aren't terrorism they undermine the meaning and impact of the word.

If you can develop a working fusion engine you'll have so much fucking money that it won't matter. Seriously, you'll be able to swim in your money like Scrooge McDuck. I highly doubt that Boeing's patent is a deal-breaker for the person that's smart enough to solve this engineering challenge. "Aww, shucks, I was going to change the course of human civilization but now I've got lawyers and paperwork to deal with. Screw it, I'm gonna go watch American Idol."

Felony endangerment doesn't garner a 10 year sentence in any American State that I'm familiar with, much less in Canada. That's the whole point of this subthread, I was questioning the person that said "at least 10 years" for this offense. Adults wouldn't get ten years for doing it; a juvenile certainly won't.

If data gets too slow it becomes useless. In general I like your idea (use QoS to prioritize low usage customers ahead of high usage ones) and have advocated for it before, but I'm not at all certain you'd be able to price data at $30/mo in such a scenario. The exact economics of the wireless industry are not known to any of us outside of upper level management at the carriers, but what we do know is that data is the GROWTH market. Voice isn't dying, but it's less and less important to young people, and there's a limit to how much money you could raise by tariffing it at higher rates. The carriers are looking at tens of billions of dollars of CapEx to keep pace with the growing demand for data; they're not going to find that money by inflating voice rates.

That has happened here too (Columbine being the most infamous example) but as "active shooters" have become a bigger perceived threat the training of North American law enforcement has shifted towards a more aggressive response. That's probably for the best, dead is forever, ruptured eardrums and broken doors can be repaired.