That's really the core problem worth this ruling. The police had probable cause up the wazoo, but it's been turned into a test case for how far you can go to coerce consent.

The police absolutely were in the right to enter this apartment, but it was because they were responding to domestic abuse, not because arresting someone removes their right to deny warrantless search.

The only software recalls I've ever had on a car were efficiency fixes for the fuel map. While hypothetically the environmental damage done by millions of mistuned ECUs pushes us one step closer to environmental apocalypse, I don't think we can say it's directly killing people. Even the Toyota "stuck throttle" bug was more of a training issue than a software flaw (yes, the off sequence for the push-start is unintuitive in the heat of the moment, but shifting to neutral isn't). The one company that might have a potentially-fatal-but-purely-software issue is Tesla, but even their fix for charger fires was a hardware one.

He mentions that you can set up a fiscal year which deviates from the calendar year. He was unable to do this because he was already operating under an LLC and changing your fiscal year after you've set it is non-trivial.

I read the article, and he brings up some interesting points that even a business owner might find interesting about crowdfunding. Because your revenues are exponentially larger for a single quarter, your tax situation gets all screwed up and you have to be very careful on your estimated taxes. He also brings up some timing advice: since businesses are allowed to deduct the costs of doing business, you don't want kickstarter to cut your check on December 31st.

It's really the opposite of most business tax situations. Rather than paying for material, wages, and capital expenditure and then waiting for invoices to come back, you're given a huge amount of revenue and then have to try and get it off the books as fast as possible.

There is much rumor of the Paul family having racist leanings, but the best citation I have seen is an article written by a 3rd party published in a newsletter published under his father's name. Do you have an example of a more overt act or statement to support the allegation? As someone who does support their calls for fiscal restraint and reduced powers of government, but who also finds an equal treatment of all mankind to be a higher ideal, I am interested in evidence.

In all but a small number of "battleground" states, all votes are wasted votes because the entrenched party will take all of the delegates. Given that the winner is a forgone conclusion, you should vote for the candidate you like best overall without trying to metagame the outcome (since you can't). I bigger message is sent if the vote in say, New York, gets split 51/39/10 than 51/49. The traction gained by a (losing) showing by a 3rd party presidential candidate can be used by 3rd party candidates at the state level, where they actually DO have a chance of winning (it isn't even unheard of (though it is rare) for such a candidacy to be successful even for representatives at the Federal level).

So ... the right-wing, neo-con Republicans under Bush were known for domestic and foreign overreach in the name of perceived terrorist threats, massive spending to support corporate interests, and being general enemies of an open goverment. How do the ideas espoused by Libertarian candidates, such as Paul, form the "extreme" version of that? The closest I can see is that an anti-regulation stance might be seen as supporting established (corporate) interests, but I think that there are just as many cases of new regulation being used to do that as striking down old regulation.

There are plenty of points worth arguing against Libertarianism, but I don't think that "extreme republican" is one of them. While many (but not all!) of the libertarian-leaning members of congress are members of the GOP, and their views could be considered extreme (ie, differing from the norm) within it, they are not extreme (ie, exaggerated) versions of the central planks of that party.

The horrifying part is that the lies and the cheats are so egregious that they thought a prosecutor would balk at them...

I've actually been watching woot.com's sporting goods section for cheap scopes to use as a finder; there's much higher volume in accessories for rifles than telescopes, so it's more likely to find a deal!

A free market for credit reporting agencies would select for those agencies which best differentiate between real and fraudulent claims :)

Heated seats (or steering wheels for that matter) are a pretty terrible example, too. Locking out features of software works because you're trying to get the software to do something you couldn't figure out on your own. Turning on a heated seat just involves shorting around the box locking you out.

I think you've hit on the correct phrasing of the question raised in TFS: Are people who use the extra features are going to get screwed? Depending on how you look at it, either yes, they are, or no, people who only want a bare-bones car are finally off the hook subsidizing stuff they don't use. There's two problems, one a universal economic one and one practical:

Economically, the seller is partitioning their market which allows them to capture more of the surplus by filling the area under the demand curve with a stair-step market price line rather than a level one. The bare-bones people will pay less, but not save as much as the feature-users pay out in increased prices. The teller will be if people can be hoodwinked as easily with monthly car charges as they are with cell phones and cable (being a rational economic actor can save you a ton of money!).

Practically, cars are not like software. Carrying extra pieces of car around costs a lot more than having extra code sitting on disk. With fuel economy a feature of ever-increasing importance, the seller who gains 2 mpg by not including disabled hardware has a decent shot at the sale.

There is still room for novelty in solving a traditional, well-explored CS problem in the physical space, largely because the cost of operations is different. In a computer, quicksort is the accepted way to sort data without foreknowledge of how it is mixed. Sorting railcars using quicksort would be a terrible idea because you can't swap arbitrary cars in constant time (https://www.americanscientist.org/issues/issue.aspx?id=369&y=0&no=&content=true&page=5&css=print). In this case, Amazon may well have developed a novel caching scheme that is efficient in the space of their distribution network, which likely has a different topography than the memory of a 286.

At least in CT, the age at which you can practically operate a vehicle on your own keeps creeping up, and there are always new rules restricting the privilege (only during the day, no passengers, etc). Assuming that the rest of the nation passes similar policies (given that we never repeal such things it has to be a purely additive effect anyway), I would think it obvious that teens drive less on average, as teens can't drive as much.

Putting the home/end/etc cluster in upper right in the same configuration as desktop keyboards is one of the more intuitive pieces of design I've seen. I use home/end a lot while coding, and it took me about 5 minutes to adjust the muscle memory when I got my first Thinkpad (well, only Thinkpad; the T40 is built like a tank).