It isn't stupid if their intention is to effectively use the onerous cost of defending the lawsuit to strong-arm the defendant into doing what they want.

WTF have your shares got to do with your desire to deliberately trash the life savings of millions of taxi drivers in the western world?. They entered into a contract with the government, if the government breaks that contract by changing the law then drivers should definitely be fairly compensated.

No they didn't. They bought a medallion off the previous owner. That doesn't mean they have any contractual arrangement with the government. So stop making up strawmen, and attacking others by claiming they are motivated by trying to ruin other people's lives when there is no evidence what so ever to support your hyperbole and lies.

If I buy shares in a Tobacco firms with my pension money and the government passes laws virtually taxing them out of existence it is exactly the same legally as the government removing medallion restrictions (in most cases).

There's some validity to the point, but given that this topic is about spying on French presidents I think the debate has been, and should remain, focused on the logic of spying between nation states.

That statement is just about directly opposite the established and well informed version of events that is almost universally accepted. The Austro-Hungarians was keen for a military conflict with vastly weaker Balkan opposition, but none of the world powers went into 1914 eager for a major conflict.

Spying between nations is a good thing, because it means everyone knows more about each others intentions and motivations.

Bollocks. There's been plenty of spying since pretty much the moment secrets have existed; it hasn't stopped war, and the idea that if that spying had simply been 'better' everything would be different is completely lacking a compelling case.

If we didn't have any spying then we'd have had no one claiming they had found evidence Saddam had WMD to justify the Iraq war; so explain exactly how the billions of dollars spent on spying helped us there.

Even if you could find theoretical examples to try and demonstrate spying stopping wars it'd be worth nothing. The existence of spying will always be accompanied by counter-measures and misinformation which inherently limits the quality of spying.

People are more cynical of the impact, I'm not so sure it has much to do with will power.

Personally I think Google's policies like this are harming them. I know that I think very hard about using Google related services (and a Google controlled URL would certainly count) because although I think they make a lot of very good things I have 0% trust that they won't completely re-arrange them or shut them down

The very fact you think Google is going to need to schedule production downtime for a change of this nature given the ridiculously large changes they regularly make without it just highlights your ignorance or reliance on hyperbole to try and make a point.

This isn't some either/or situation. Google wasn't put in a position where the two options were 1/ Have the site ruined by domain equating parasites or 2/ Automatically and irreversibly kick users who've been on the service for a decade off their URL.

This is a dickish policy by Google. If Google wants to automatically remove accounts pretending to be a brand fine, but that isn't what happened here.

For example, only the ones that actually mention vanilla bean or vanilla extract specifically actually even contain any vanilla, and many have so many stabilizers they don't even melt....and this wasn't "ice cream" it was just a single flavor they compared.

It's one of the things I've never gotten about America. Mickey Mouse has to be defended to ensure only the real Disney thing exists forever (it seems) but it's perfectly ok for something labelled chocolate to not be chocolate, or for something labelled as Champagne to not be from Champagne or even made using the correct method...

When other firms have decided that protecting their bottom line is best done by giving the government everything and anything they ask for I'm willing to cut them a little slack and give them the credit for fighting to protect user data even if, heaven forbid, that might be in their best interests.

That's exactly what it is; it's an idiotic position but a combination of Apple fanboyism and wannabe hipster disdain for Swift seems to be enough for some people to believe it.

Keeping her album out while allowing the three month test to move forward makes the project less likely to be successful and more likely for new and upcoming artists to lose their investment from allowing their works to be included.

Well you sure got proven wrong pretty damn quickly.

Apple wanted to give away someone else's product for 3 months in order to drive demand for its own product. It really doesn't take a genius to work out why the people Apple was trying to exploit didn't like the idea; to Apple's credit they caught on and changed policy pretty damn quickly.

I think you're giving yourself too much credit. Who sells CDs second hand: People who buy CDs, including people who buy them new; and what do they do with the money raised by selling music... at least partly use it to purchase new music.

You're the music industries worse nightmare in the same way the guy who buys 2nd hand cars, and indirectly keeps the new car and trade-in markets going, is Ford's worst nightmare: In. No. Way. At. All.

I always assumed the per user salt was purely to make using a hash table much harder (effectively impossible), in which case it would still be effective.

What happens if you lose the device? If it backs them up where does it back them up to, how does it get them to the backup and how secure is it? Without knowing a lot more I'd be equally, or more dubious, of claims that password managers on devices like phones are any more secure overall.