Is it also required by law not to offer a credit on your bill for switching to electronic statements?

So how should a U.S. resident reasonably act on this fact?

How would one go about including an "interbank-transfer" with a mailed greeting card?

Common cameras aren't "certified as an evidence gathering tool" either. Do courts likewise reject all photos of a violent crime scene that aren't taken with a "certified" camera? The commodity home movie camera Abraham Zapruder was using wasn't "certified", but his and other films provided evidence of how Lee Harvey Oswald murdered John F. Kennedy. And did any copyright owner decide to follow up on this dismissal by modifying one of the free software BitTorrent clients to get it "certified as an evidence gathering tool"?

The algorithm you describe is not compression, as there does not exist an input for which choice-of-algorithm metadata plus compressed data is smaller than the input data.

Any digital broadcast will include two things that are recognizable as a broadcast. One is a pilot signal, used to communicate the existence of a signal to the receiver. Another is forward error correction, used to reconstruct a signal partially obscured by noise. Analog television included both: the pilot signal was the sync pulses during horizontal and vertical blanking, and the error correction was the presence of a double sideband in the bottom 1 MHz of the video.

I'm not sure you understand. Prepending the order to the compressed data would still increase the length of some files.

(In before whoosh.)

Of course it's possible. JPEG encoding has three steps: cosine transform of each block (DCT), then quantization (where the loss happens), then coding. In JPEG, the coding involves a zig-zag order and a Huffman/RLE structure, and this isn't necessarily optimal. A lossless compressor specially tuned for JPEG files could decode the quantized coefficients and losslessly encode them in a more efficient manner, producing a file that saves a few percent compared to the equivalent JPEG bitstream. Then on decompression, it would decode these coefficients and reencode them back into a JPEG file.

For the same reason as the Let's Play takedowns. Sega DMCA'd videos containing footage of the Shining Force games (but later issued a non-apology). Some publishers, such as Nintendo, might instead choose to put a Content ID* claim on videos containing "images or audio of a certain length" (such as a game's title screen or cut scenes), diverting ad revenue away from partners.*

* YouTube terminology used. Feel free to substitute.

Then they'd have to compete with their MVNOs and T-Mobile USA, all of which have been itemizing the hardware and the service for years. Prepaid MVNOs have always sold the phone up front, and even before T-Mobile branded itself "the un-carrier", it had the SIM-only "Even More Plus" plan that offered a discount for bringing a compatible phone or buying one up front.

Because of this comment. I asked about being able to try an AOSP phone before I buy it, and someone replied that I sounded like an entitled whiner.

So can Verizon and Sprint do voice and SMS over LTE with a carrier-neutral LTE phone, or would I have to buy a carrier-endorsed CDMA2000+LTE phone for that?

Very few phones work on both CDMA2000 networks (Verizon and Sprint) and GSM networks (AT&T and T-Mobile), and they're hard to find in U.S. stores. Mail order doesn't let you hold the phone and get a feel for its size, weight, screen, and buttons before you buy.

More than likely, a fully qualified domain name.

But how would you install a hosts file on Android? You can't do that with just an APK. The file is normally in a read-only system partition, and I imagine that most people who bring their own device aren't willing to wipe the device to install a rooted ROM.

Then your organization's IT department needs to learn about Group Policy and its counterparts on other common personal computing platforms.

Yes, for reasons of privacy from people in other departments who don't deserve access to particular pieces of information. For example, a hospital regulated under HIPAA wouldn't want a surgeon snooPING AS usual on the health information of patients who aren't hers.