I guess the story is about greedy ISPs

What's greedy about it? A fundamental principle of international aid (and given that within the past six weeks I've been in the Solomon Islands, and on stand-by to go to Haiti, the Cook Islands and Tonga, to help with disaster relief I think I've got some clue on the topic) is that you try and spend aid money in the affected community. The people who live there and the businesses that operate there must remain viable once the relief effort is over, and that means keeping businesses alive until the locals are in a position to earn and spend money themselves.

Donating services is nice if the locals cannot immediately furnish your requirements, but as soon as there's local capability available for utilisation it is a failure of the aid system if that capability goes unused. It is not a good use of aid money to use donated services in place of local ones when carrying out relief work.

Not necessarily. Diplomatic privilege only occurs when a person's diplomatic status is recognised by the receiving nation. The Wikipedia article on diplomatic immunity is pretty good at explaining things.

A good example is diplomatic couriers, who have diplomatic passports but are still subject to the ordinary treatment. What is not searched is the diplomatic pouch. The document says as much, and says that the pouch must be in the courier's line of sight at all times while the courier is being processed.

Although heads-of-state are automatically entitled to a diplomatic passport, per the Vienna Convention, because they aren't technically an accredited diplomat with the receiving nation they aren't automatically entitled to the protections of diplomatic status. It's a courtesy, not a requirement of the Convention, hence the specific TSA exception.

What the heck is the security justification for heads of state, or their families to be exempt?

Two words: Diplomatic Passport. Followed by another two words: Diplomatic Incident.

We know that the US doesn't have much regard for the rights of plebes but, since the generally-accepted retaliation for mistreating foreigners with diplomatic status is other countries mistreating your persons of diplomatic status, they're going to try and avoid messing with heads-of-state if possible. It just gets ugly.
Also, the family members exemption (and yes, I have read the document) is pretty specific. It's not a blanket exception, but applies only when they're accompanied by the head-of-state in question.

umm, what? 19.5%+7.4%=26.4%. 17.1%+9.9%=27%. A bit shy of 30%, but not enormously. Your comprehension skills are pretty shocking.

Market cap means diddly, really. What matters is revenue and market share if you're talking about the size of a company. Market cap measures value as perceived by shareholders, not influence and sales. Nokia's 2008 revenue, in Euros, was higher than Apple's revenue in US dollars. And I doubt that even a worshipper of the iJobs would argue that Nokia is the unquestionable master of the cellphone world.

As much as anything AAPL is valuable because it's fashionable. It's visible, it has a brand, people want a piece of that brand. Nokia isn't fashionable, it's functional. There's no hype, there's no cult of Nokia, it's just there. Comparing the market cap of Nokia and Apple is a very desperate attempt to pretend that Apple isn't being taken to the cleaners by a company that does only communications equipment (vs computers, phones, media downloads...) and sells more of it than Apple does.

Oblig: you must be new here.

Yeah, coz the US is the only country in the OECD with "capable neonatal intensive care"? Get the fuck over yourselves! If you want to compare the figures with, say, the Philippines or Turkey on that basis, then go ahead. You'll be wrong, because infant mortality is recorded as a rate per 1,000 live births, but you can try and pretend all the same. However, don't try and pretend that your system is in any way superior to Canada, Australia, the UK, New Zealand, Japan... The simple truth is that your system is broken, and no amount of massaging of statistics will change that. You lead the world on cost, unquestionably, but the outcomes that are bought with that money are worse than the outcomes bought by all those nasty, socialist healthcare systems in other countries.

The mythical free market does not work when people have no choice but to participate. If non-participation is not an option, there goes your free market. It's not free, because you have no choice. Basic free market economics also requires perfectly rational, informed players, but as soon as a person's health is at stake they cannot, pretty much by definition, be rational. Medicine is a field where, unless you happen to be a specialist in a particular area, you will struggle to be perfectly informed. Even other doctors don't quality as perfectly informed about specialist areas, and once you get into advanced research it's likely that only some specialists could be considered to be perfectly informed. Information asymmetry kills the free market dead, and medicine is one of the most asymmetric fields of knowledge in existence.

There's also the small matter of a lack of interchangeability of products. If you have $5k and need a heart transplant, well, good luck with that. Nobody who can supply what you need is going to meet your purchasing power, and what you can afford isn't a replacement for what you need. That means that healthcare providers are price setters, not price takers, and the market has to come to meet them because they are supplying unique goods that come with a very high barrier to entry for competition - you can't just hang out a sign and advertise cheap heart transplants.

If you want to argue in favour of the utility of the free market, at least understand why it cannot work for healthcare. Free markets require behaviours and attributes of the players that are not available to the healthcare market.

Actually, injucted is valid. I've heard it used more than once by law lecturers while studying commercial law, which I figure is as much validation as anything.
And if you want even further confirmation, check out Google

No, it's not. Patent trolling is where your business model is entirely predicated on patenting the bleeding obvious and then suing companies that infringe your over-broad patent. The i4i case at least involved a company that had a relationship with MS and felt that their patent was being abused. They worked with MS, to develop a product, and then MS shafted them. That's totally inconsistent with the modus operandi of patent trolls.

Should the patent have been granted? No, probably not. But it was, and it wasn't applied for just so that the applicant could go and sue other companies.

umm, maybe because a phone that can't reliably make connections to anywhere is useless?

Really, think this one through. What're you paying the carrier for? Dialtone. Which means that you're paying them to reliably (for values of reliability that vary with carrier, but here in NZ they're all pretty damn good) deliver your call data to the recipient. Take away that service, and how do you ensure that, when you need it, you'll have the ability to make a call, or send a text message? What if you need to make an emergency call and there're no other phones around to hop your signal into range of a network interconnection point? Or if the only phones that are nearby are in transit, and thus you lose your signal mid-call because your multi-hop path back into the POTS network has irretrievably lost a link?

You might wonder what you're paying your provider for, but I guarantee that if they dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow, to be replaced by this conceptual system, you wouldn't last a month before you were begging for their return. And if you regularly make trips that take you to less-populated areas, I'd give you a week. This might work in the middle of New York City or some similarly heavily populated area, maybe, but even there you still need some way of interconnecting with both other mobile networks and with POTS. Those interconnects are what you pay your carrier for.

I know that Americans are wedded to their inefficient cars and all, but, really, is 300 miles considered a long distance off a single fill? Really? That's pathetic!

My 1996 Nissan Primera, which has four-wheel-drive just to increase its consumption, can get around 440km of urban driving off a single tank. On a long trip (such as Auckland to Wellington) I regularly achieve in excess of 600km from a tank. That's nearer 400 miles than 300. In an older car, with the extra drive-train losses from powering all four wheels. I'm not a particularly conservative driver, either, in terms of my acceleration habits - I don't exceed the posted limits, but I like to get there as quickly as possible.

Yeah. "Old tyre or leather thongs". That's called "Stopping my feet getting all cut to shit as I run across the rocky ground" not "I've got crap technique and use these shoes to try and compensate". Not even vaguely comparable. One has a function related in no way to the running, but in every way to the protection of the feet from the ground. The other is all about the running, and not just protecting the feet from the ground but also about protecting the joints from the impact of the feet impacting the ground. Do you actually not see the total lack of correlation?

Can't speak for Europe, but it's definitely the same in the UK (and countries that derive from its legal traditions, such as New Zealand). Can't recall the name of the case, but it was affirmed by a rock artist's manager who outed the artist's public sanctimony on drugs, sex, etc, as totally hypocritical given their narcotics-fuelled benders and various "immoral" carryings-on. Funnily enough the artist sued, and the manager was vindicated by proving that it was all true.