There's a lot of push to get money out of politics, but just as much push by the people with money to keep it in politics. It's hard to change the system when the only way to get elected is to take money from 'somebody'; making most politicians at least somewhat complicit. This is the end result of unrestrained free market capitalism.

Also, if you're doing everything above board, the guy doing gig work has to pay self employment taxes. As a W2 the employer would be responsible for half of your federal taxes; but as a gig worker you have to pay both halves. That 30/hr starts looking more like 10/hr very quickly once you factor all the typical expenses and taxes.

This seems unlikely to replace batteries at the small scale. Even discounting the risks of puncture or leakage in mobile devices like cell phones or computers; the equipment necessary to compress air into containers can likely only be scaled down so far before it loses efficiency.

Plus every air compressor I've ever seen or worked with is pretty loud. Maybe there are ways to reduce the noise; but this ultimately seems like more of a large scale way to store energy produced via solar or wind power than a replacement for traditional batteries.

If you run a business/call center and have 100s of lines, you probably want to direct incoming callers to a single main phone line rather than to the desk of a specific call center rep. Especially if that rep takes a break or is off duty for a time.

Another example; I use google voice as my business phone line. It will ring to my personal cell phone when I'm out of office on the road. When I call someone back I don't want them to see my personal number, so google voice spoofs the caller ID to match my google voice number even though I'm calling from my cell phone.

So there are legitimate reasons to allow caller ID spoofing; but it should be more carefully restricted. Problem is there's no incentive from the telecom industry to do so; and the government hasn't forced it on them yet.

I mean, ideally setting a living minimum wage would be ideal; but this particular bill might be more palatable to the right. The concern that people would get fired is probably overblown. For one thing it'd probably be a protected clause like how you can't fire someone because of their race or ethnicity. Second if people need benefits they're going to claim them regardless; people need to eat and have a home. Thirdly chances are the government isn't going to be so granular as to tell big corporations which employees are claiming benefits, they just get a tax bill for the totals.

I would love to see that case get tried in court. Frankly Google has a better case against whoever created that video Trump tweeted than against Trump himself; since it's easy enough for Trump to throw them under the bus and claim he was misled by what he thought was a legitimate publication. I think Google would have a hard time proving significant damages and at most might get a public 'apology' out of Trump. It ultimately would probably waste a ton of money and go nowhere. I

While on one hand I agree with your point that not being accepted and not being able to afford it are different things; I will contest that anyone can reasonably afford to support a household and send a kid to to college on 56k no matter how cheap an institution they attend.

Eh, people should be backing things up regularly anyways; and even if it's encrypted you should be able to access it on a different machine if you have the encryption key/passphrase (which as a legitimate user you should, and if you don't then it's your own damn fault).

Absolutely correct, although I'd like to add to this that many cases of abandon-ware are situations where it's unclear who owns it. Generally I'd say the risk of repercussions of sharing abandon-ware is low; and ethically I think it is a moral imperative to share such content for the sake of our shared digital heritage.

Sounds like you could really use some time away from it all. Why not take a cruise!

Can confirm, but the volume license requirement is dumb. There really should be an LTSB equivalent that doesn't require 25 licenses.

Not that we shouldn't also be investing in wind, but really we should be renovating and expanding our use of nuclear power instead of shuttering it. I get that a lot of reactors are old and we shouldn't keep using old reactors; but properly managed nuclear power is by a wide margin the most scale-able alternative to fossil fuels we have. If we invested more heavily into it it could probably be a cheaper option too.

It is, and continues to be ridiculous how expensive phone calls to prison are. For something that so clearly has a strong tie to improving prisoner behavior it should be encouraged and probably free.

Time is not money, but there is a relationship between the two. Most people trade their time for money. If hypothetically these items can be obtained through the expenditure of time; it stands to reason that trading money for them instead is effectively trading money for time. Either way, I only have an issue with it if the loot boxes are really egregious or there's no alternative to the pay to win mechanic.

Intent, specifically Mens rea is an important part of the legal system.

Although what he ultimately did was illegal (obtained unredacted state secrets). He was not originally trying to obtain state secrets, nor could he have reasonably thought that what he was doing would lead to him obtaining state secrets. He had no reason to believe that the information he was able to access via that website, whether he did it via hyperlink or via a script as described in the original article would be anything other than the publicly available information released via the FOIA. Thus even if he ultimately performed an actus reus he did it without mens rea. I don't know what lead you to believe he broke the law, but everything about this case implies to me that this guy didn't do anything I (and fortunately the courts agree) think is wrong.