Protip: If the new rule affects you, you are not an average New Yorker. You own a residence that you don't live in (how many "average" New Yorkers can afford a second home in NY?) and you are renting it out illegally.

This doesn't affect average New Yorkers, and it doesn't affect *law abiding* more-affluent-than-average New Yorkers.

At least some of those 10,000 currently-illegally-operating Airbnbs will probably be converted to long term rentals, providing housing for people who actually are average New Yorkers. Airbnb doesn't want this, and current slumlords don't want it either because it'll increase the housing supply and create a little bit of competition.

Grilled? That wasn't even close to grilled. It was a farce. A series of softballs that were already public information anyway. It only cost Facebook $27,000 in campaign contributions to the chair of the Energy and Finance committee Greg Walden (R-OR) to make it farce, where nothing interesting was revealed. And it only cost them a fraction of what these other companies are shelling out.

Just so ya know, this stupid law was passed in 1986, when a Republican was governor (George Deukmejian). But hey, I don't know why I'm bothering responding to a troll who does care about facts or reality.

Interesting that you bring that up. Remember the pathetic excuse for a Facebook hearing where they intentionally asked Zuckerberg really stupid questions that didn't get to the heart of the matter at all? That was chaired by Republican Representative Greg Walden (Congressional district 2, covering Central, Eastern, and Southern Oregon), Oregon's congressional delegation's only Republican. He set the strict rules for the hearing that were intended, and did so successfully, to make sure it didn't come out what data Facebook collects and how it uses it, other than what's on the surface that everyone who uses Facebook Pages to advertise already knows.

Oh, also, Greg Walden (R-Oregon) receives many thousands of dollars each from Facebook and Telecom companies, and is a leading figure in eliminating Net Neutrality.

So yeah - to be direct, the Republican congressman from Oregon would most certainly have not have let the cat out of the bag.

Election season is HERE! Today is Oregon's primary. There are 7 Democrats on the ballot vying for a chance to run against Walden in the general. There are some good people running, but only one of them actually has a chance to defeat Walden. If you're registered as a Democrat in Central, Eastern, or Southern Oregon (CD-2) fill in the bubble next to Jamie McLeod-Skinner's name and get your ballot down to the ballot box before 8pm tonight.

Ok, it's a very atypical example. However, a more typical example would be in lost work, lost time, potentially lost revenue, etc. Let's say you're going on a work trip and need your laptop. So best case scenario, you take your backup drives in carry on, and after they lose your luggage or destroy your laptop, you now have to run straight to a store, buy a new laptop, and restore your backups on to it. We all know it's rarely that simple too, depending on what it is you need. And how much time have you now lost?

Does it cost more than the laptop on every scenario? Of course not. Does it result in major fuck-me-over in a lot of scenarios though? Yes. Yes it does.

Haven't food companies been studying this and known it for decades? It's how they reach the "bliss point" - how much salt and sugar can they cram in a meal to ensure that you want to eat as much as possible. It's why you can eat 1000 worth of Hamburger Helper and still feel hungry.

Yeah, alt-right is a clever name to disguise their real purpose, and apparently these authors were duped. If you're going to pretend to be a journalist, do some f'ing research in to what you're writing about.

alt-right = terrorist hate group.

You must be new here...

Except people are very concerned that it will spread to the US. Also, there are NGOs that actually do care about Africa that plan on buying them and having a supply to prepare for an outbreak.

No, we don't. If it was by popular vote Clinton would have won. Gore would have won in 2000. The system you describe is not popular vote. Not even sort of.

Want to get into more semantics? Not everyone's vote counts the same. If it were popular vote, then my vote would count the same as somebody in Florida. However, being from Hawaii, it literally makes zero difference because our electors are going Democrat no matter what. As a state delegate, I got to participate in voting for our electors, but 99% of the state did not. In the general, if I were in a battleground then at least my vote would count some small percentage > 0. If it were actually a popular vote, then my vote would also count some small percentage > 0 regardless of what state I'm in.

No, but you need to be there. The other 3 can be whoever you want, as long as they're with you when you pick up the tickets.

That's how my local concert venue does it. You buy the tickets online with a credit card. The credit card holder must be there to pick up the tickets. It can be an inconvenience if you plan to arrive separately - but seriously, now that everyone has a cell phone it's not hard to figure out, and nobody really cares. The only time it's really a hassle is when parents are buying tickets for their kids.

You don't think a system at a university university with over 10k students streaming video over youtube, Facebook, netflix, etc, could handle a bunch of tweeting reporters?

Yeah, "they" can't do it, well, unless it benefits Apple's bottom line. You're forgetting about the DRM build in to their charging cables.

The burden isn't on the amount of data, but rather the absolutely horrible systems that doctors have to use. Every major EMR out there is a flaming pile of crap. The thing is, they really don't care about investing in improving usability. They get selected for contracts with hospitals and clinics based off a checklist of features along with getting to tell them that so many other places use it, and the initial deliverable isn't even usable. So then they charge big, big dollars for "implementation" to make it "usable," and what they end up with is something that works but takes an order of magnitude more time to use than it should.

I don't have a problem with that in and of itself, the problem is lack of clarity in the law. The point of patenting it is so they don't spend 13 years and millions and millions of dollars for me to then come along, copy what they did, and sell it and undercut them because I don't have to recoup all that R&D cost. This is the real reason they patent, but all the anti-GMO zealots claim they sue for cross-contamination or whatever, which is simply not true. But, there should be clarity in the law to make it explicit. Note that there are also a lot of hybrid patents, and were before GMOs too!

Such contracts were common practice even before GMOs with hybrids. And hardly anybody cares, because hardly any farmers save seed anyway, so that point is moot except for a very small minority. And, for that small minority, there are still A LOT of varieties they can purchase and save seed. Saving seed is very time and resource intensive, it's not just a matter of putting part of your harvest in a bucket, so it's cheaper for farmers to buy new seed, regardless of whether it's patent or contract encumbered, or GMO or conventional.

That's BS. Monsanto patented a "terminator gene" but never produced. As we see on /. all the time, there are all sorts of things patented that are never produced. So somebody at Monsanto had an idea, they patented that idea, and Monsanto never created it. Maybe they didn't create it for PR reason, or maybe it's because it simply wouldn't have been profitable. It costs a lot of money for R&D and for safety testing for a GMO (well over $100million for a single trait), and since farmers aren't saving seed anyway, what would be the point? It's also possible (this part is conjecture, I haven't actually asked a farmer about it) that wasn't even the motivation. A farmer who rotates crops, as many farmers do with corn and soy, doesn't want spilled seed from the previous crop to grow. If, for example, they plant corn and there's soy growing up from the last crop, they will have to apply atrizine to kill the soy, so a "terminator" seed might actually be desirable to the farmer.