Completely relevant.
Facebook has no obligation to police content to comply with the laws of any nation except the USA.
Everyone else can fuck right on off. Let the government of Italy (try to) block Facebook if they're actually serious about it.

Leaving aside the international question, even in the US contracts entered into by a minor are considered invalid. Facebook does nothing to try to actively restrict access to legal adults even according to US law. There is nothing legally that Facebook can do to enforce an invalid contract such as their AUP. That is the angle the Italians are taking and to me it seems a valid one.

If they fly less than 500ft (and most do) then they are not in the Air Traffic space.

Which completely ignores helicopter traffic... (News, police, medical air lifts, etc...)

The alternative is to offer him the training he is supposedly lacking. If he refuses then that is grounds for dismissal. This is my biggest beef with the corporate world. They want you current but do nothing to provide you the necessary tools or the time to stay current.

Because it prevents the original owner from regaining control.

Your point fails because even on hardwired lines there are charges for the safety network (911 fees they are generally called). If you want to talk fairness then what you are proposing is the landline users pay for it when you don't have to. Doesn't sound very fair to me. And taking it out of the general revenue means those who don't use it (for whatever reason) are subsidizing those that do. Again, it doesn't sound fair to me.

The point is, there are inequities all over the topic of taxes. Whether it comes from general revenue or not. And these are services that have to be paid at some point. Cell phones have caused a special headache for emergency response (911) because of their mobile nature. Getting a true fix on them can be a daunting task and increases that cost. That is why the tax as you put it is higher.

On a side note, when was the last time you saw a pay phone in a city these days? Ever try to call 911 without using your cell? Trust me, it is one of the most challenging things to have to go through.

General revenue is also a tax. I fail to see the point of what pot of gold it is plucked from. It makes far more sense to me to have the users of that safety network support it.

Why should spectrum auctions (i.e. my cell phone bill) pay for a public safety network?

Because you are a member of that public. Go ahead and say that line the next time you need 911. Keep that line in your head the next severe weather outbreak happens and you need to take shelter. Keep that in mind after the disaster when you are trying to piece back together the remnants of your life....

What typically happens when you write to these asshats is they pass the letter on to a lowly state official to answer. I have answered many a congressional letters from the public that would have gotten them a faster answer had they contacted me directly. You see, once a congressional comes down we answer back to the congress critter who in turn copies that response back to the person. The same happens on the federal level. They pass it off to anyone else to answer, usually the same agency the person is whining about.

In short, when something happens the congress critter is the least involved yet seems to be the first that people whine to.

Whether short term or long term is irrelevant. when you go into debt you are running at a deficit. You are spending more than you have on hand. That is a deficit.

More than the over 5 months a year they get already? That is about how many breaks Congress takes a year. And they can ignore you just as well at home as in DC. After all, you aren't the big contributors to their campaign.

Everyone harps on about the Congressional budget. It is a document that means absolutely nothing. It doesn't have to be voted on by the house, signed by the president nothing. It is a wish list only. The House, Senate and Presidential budgets mean zilch. They are solely used to beat up the others with politically. It isn't like the budgets set around the kitchen table at home.

And while we are on the subject, if you have any debt whatsoever, you are running at a deficit. I argue there isn't a household in America that isn't running a deficit. Mortgages, credit cards, bank loans, student loans, etc are all deficit spending. The only difference is the size of income vs. deficit and the fact that every 6 months Congress goes through the pain of having to couple the spending they already did with the artificial boundary they setup known as the debt ceiling.

Today's Congress lives on crisis of their own making. And the effect on the very real economy is devastating. Everything from the current sequester to the debt ceiling is of their own doing. It is little wonder their popularity ratings are in the single digits.

If they were frivolous as you say they are then why did they get fired? She didn't fire him someone else did the firing.

Because if they don't she takes the company to court for "hostile work environment", "sexual discrimination" and any other thing she can throw to see if it sticks and gets her a big award. It is called lawsuit roulette.

Why Facebook was thrown into the mix I really have no idea because it is against their registration policy for anyone under 13 to have an account on there. Not that that stops those kids but it does give Facebook a bit of protection.

Look, you have these laws because in their absence businesses go hog wild and target them extremely hard. Ever watch children's TV advertising? So in a sense they are selling it to "Rapists-R-Us" when they sell the kids data to marketers.

But like you said, they only have power because you give them power. If people stop using those sites for that reason, the sites will change very quickly.

This, like all boycotts, are doomed to failure for two main reasons. First, it requires large groups of like minded people to be effective. 5 boycotting out of a hundred visitors has no impact. The larger more popular sites like FB are even more likely to avoid adverse impacts of even larger boycotts. Second, a boycott is useless unless the company knows why it is being boycotted. You not going to a site because of their tracking policy is completely unknown to them unless you make it known. And since you aren't going to their site because of that tracking policy they will never know. And even if they do know see the first reason for why they don't care.

The problem is that circa 1995-98, the average home PC simply wasn't powerful enough to handle this kind of sandboxing while maintaining acceptable performance. Windows 9x basically ran on bare metal (one bad app could easily bring the whole system down) and there was no such thing as security. It was crude, but it was the best you could do on a Pentium 100 with 8 megs of RAM (16 if you were lucky). A modern smartphone leaves these old systems in the dust. The Windows NT series has a Unix-style security model, though it was undermined by the need for backwards compatibility forcing regular users to run as administrator (UAC was a belated attempt to fix this). But this also means that NT needs a faster processor and a lot more RAM than 9x. The first home version of Windows based on the NT kernel was XP, and people were all up in arms about its "outrageous" system requirements back in 2001.

I argue it is a far different reason that has nothing to do with the hardware...

Microsoft's insistence on backwards compatibility is the culprit. They needed to maintain DOS compatibility or the businesses would have ditched them if Win 9x didn't. This is why even right up to Windows 7 you still have an emulated DOS environment. Machines have increasingly become more powerful yet Microsoft still has to maintain the old shit or lose market share with the businesses. This above all else is the reason you have the mess that is a Windows environment. throw in the constant threats of antitrust every time they try to add in security (mostly from the antivirus industry) and it really is a mess.