While there were extreme options available to Google, such as law suits and massive lobbying, Google took a rather mild approach

Well, they could have taken an even milder approach... kept Google News in Spain, but only shown news from sites published outside of Spain. Sure, no more local news, much less news about Spain, and most of what was available would be slanted in ways the government and/or people might not like, but c'est la vie...

This is cool for a project I am working on. I plan to see if I can create a .com that will do business transactions. I need no latency but at the same time require ACID to ensure each transaction will be written to disk :-(

My Idea is to have no sql and sql databases where something like this will do the transactions to ACID.

Just because someone lives in any particular area doesn't mean that stories about other areas aren't of interest. The bigger the news event, the broader the distribution.

Not to mention that the insights on foreign news sources on local events can be quite... interesting. Everyone has their own spin, and usually the real story is in the intersection of as many spins as possible.

What tends to aggravate me more about Google News is how reporting on major international events gets diluted with "$event Victim Has Ties To $city" types of headlines. I assume Google News has some sort of "uniqueness" score to filter out all the wire service duplication which causes these one-off local interest types of stories to bubble up the rankings, but I never find them remotely relevant.

Yeah, that's kind of my sense. These lines are a *human* artifact, carved into the earth and left there for a thousand years. That's pretty much the definition of man despoiling the earth and it's not something I can see the hardcore environmental activist types having any qualms about trashing. They might not go out of their way to destroy it, but I can't imagine them feeling much remorse over it.

I think you may be confusing buggy whips with buddy whips.

In any case, as a software developer I can't see the appeal for a buggy anything. You'd think they'd have worked out the problems and released Whip 2.0 rather than creating a whole industry around a poor product. No wonder they went out of business...

One of the effects of drinking, is that it lessens self control.

Indeed and many other civilized countries show that it can be different. In the UK the police don't even carry guns. Their job is much less dangerous than the para-military job the police is in the US, obviously.

Violence and agression provokes reaction. The first job of the police should be to calm down and de-escalate, not behave almost like an army.
But most US citizens probably don't remember (and never look abroad for guidance) that it could be different.

If any cop that can be proven to have abused his power is fired, it will stop.
If the root of the problem here is actually not the policy, but the individual cops not sticking to the policy, firing is the only thing you can do.
If the root of the problem is in local politics indeed, then these people are lying and those have to be fired (and locked up).

But our body is our own. Period. We cannot cross this line. If someone conscientiously objects to a treatment, it is their natural right to decline it.

Fair enough.

So, how would you like to phrase the new law... ? "No medical procedures on any individual that has not reached the age of majority or is not otherwise able to give legal consent"?

That's the reductio ad absurdum way of saying that the line has already been crossed. Society inflicts medical treatments on people (mostly children) whether they like it or not, and it's done in the name of "their best interests". Now, whether it's the parents/guardians or the government making the decisions and whether those decisions are "best" for any given person is a whole other issue, but to suggest that it's instead an issue of control over an individuals own body is, in the context of childhood vaccines, pure nonsense.

Google is leaving russia due to data security and intrusive legislation that harms the internet, but sees no problem maintaining an office in the United States

Well, there's a substantial practical difference between closing a branch office of 50 employees and shutting down your corporate HQ and main data center.

But, more importantly, the consequences of calling out the US government for bad behaviour is tame compared to how Putin handles corporate dissent.

My guess is that "continuously living" is meant to exclude spores and the like, but it's unclear.

For most all other cases, reading documents, coding, surfing the web, portrait view is better. Think about the flow when you are reading, isn't it natural that you want to see more rather than scrolling up and down?

I'm with you on e-reading.

Landscape is vastly superior to portrait for coding--I always have multiple windows open side-by-side. Stacking them vertically makes line-by-line comparison more difficult. And you can easily have a web browser open on the right half of the screen for stackexchange/docs/whatever while you edit on the left half.

The oil industry wants you to burn petrochemicals instead. It is more profitable and less of it than Methane.

You are asking a group of people who believe the world is no more than 5,000 years old and there is no evidence (in their eyes a serious intellectual way) that humans evolved from primates for a straight answer why they do not believe? Especially since those that due are liberal which are obviously wrong all the time in their opinion just look at obamacare etc so there is zero credibility.

It is an embarrassment such a solid group even exists in my country! I just can not fathom this in the 21st century people who are afraid of change but they exist and are very gullible. The same political party also supports big business and oil and the other half who votes believe whatever they hear on Fox, Rush, and their church pastor who also gets his information from the same sources who are funded by the energy industry. In other words they perfect combo.

My point of this post is not to go offtopic but to point out it is political. Not scientific. You can't argue with gullable people who think facts are not fact. Only gut feelings.

FYI I am not bashing libertarians who may want to mod me down. I am bashing those in the same wing politically who are social conservatives.

SystemD was cool and innovative back then. It is now cool to hate and bash it 3 months ago from an article posted here.

Now you're a troll if you talk about benefits and insightful for stiring misgivings. It is political as no one gave a crap until recently