Begging your pardon, but that's a sniveling shit-pile of an excuse for a company to hide behind.

The question isn't one of legal responsibility* and consequences. It's one of service and this sort of activity by companies, of charging people who they know are receiving zero services from them, is morally bankrupt If you want to run a business that provides a service, please do, but if you keep billing people for nothing, there's no difference between that and stealing. Even those few idiots still holding AOL stock should agree that never signing on new customers is not a proper business model (doubly so when your existing customer base is dying off).

One of my main objections to automatic payments and paperless billing is exactly this kind of prevalent attitude- that a company will take as much money from me, whether or not I'm actually using their service. Companies I can't trust will just have to keep paying for outdated collection systems. At the moment that's all of them, except for two publicly-owned utilities. You want to know why I might be more than happy to opt for a non-profit Internet service, or (Friedman forbid) government-run? This is why- because the private sector keeps proving it can't resist the temptation to rip people off,

* Yes, legally, the customer is solely responsible for terminating the contract, blah blah blah. But only a soulless lawyer will suggest that has any bearing on the correctness of such an attitude, and even he'll remind you that forgetfulness isn't a contract. One report on Brokaw and your revenue could plummet so fast that no judge could keep your business from falling apart.

Michele Bachmann has to prove how American she is somehow. What better way than max out the credit card on football?

"Thought"? No. You heard wrong. Israel isn't the "colonial" state the anti-Semites claim, and you should be more careful where you get your information.

Israel benefits from cheap Arab labor in agriculture, but that's pretty much it- only a few percent of the economy. Israel's GDP is heavily based on technology, for which the territories are useless. Tourism yields benefits to both sides depending on tourist site location, but primarily to Israel which controls the better and more secure accommodations in Western Jerusalem, as well as the Sea of Galilee.

Silly is how absolutely naive that was. Lying is the basis of advertising- an industry whose raison d'être is to make you buy something you wouldn't want to otherwise.

False advertising laws don't restrict lies, but only certain types of lies. The kind you suggested is not among those and easily circumvented using the word 'cool people drink X'.

Definitely- good point. Campaign finance is definitely an important place where Israel is a way more democratic nation than the US. "Citizens United" (our recent Supreme Court ruling on the matter) was a huge step backwards.

Another is the actual viability of new political parties. People here claim that if we didn't just have two parties, we'd suffer from the problem of minority rule Israel does, but we have that already, courtesy of the filibuster, anonymous hold, and other such undemocratic tricks.

Let me know when you're done moving the goal posts every time you're forced to retreat. I've got better things to do than debate a coward.

Only its defense, not its social policies which are entirely self-funded.

Federal aid is limited to military expenditures, and those must be purchased from the US. So it actually comes down to being yet another handout to the American military-industrial complex

PS- Be a dick if you like, throwing around words like 'utopia' to disparage that which you don't understand.

The definition of "product" in law usually doesn't include "happy feelings". It's limited to the physical goods being exchanged.

Again, depending on the actual laws in place in Israel, that distinction may or may not be sufficient to regulate this issue.

Models aren't the product, so I wonder if false advertising laws would even apply.