That was the year I launched an automated online auction web site. It may have been the first one? I've never really tried to figure that out but it was over a year before eBay.

Does it? It is a summary of a blog post by a person with a long history of legal analysis posts which links to the actual bill which you can read yourself. Astroturfing doesn't usually provide real, verifiable information from primary sources with established histories. The blog post seems very detailed and legally precise which also don't seem like hallmarks of astroturfing.

Just reading the bill itself, parts of it seem obviously ridiculous and the blog post does a good job of articulating the many problems with it. The only part that seems overwrought to me is the predictions of doom based on the idea that people might actually comply with the bill. As a legal analysis this makes sense but in real life I expect what would really happen is people only comply with the rules to the extent California is willing to force them to and since some of the things it asks for are impossible that will involve legal negotiations until people figure out the minimum necessary to get around the law.

As a developer the idea that I'd have to submit an analysis to California every time I want to "add a feature" to anything I put on the Internet does seem disturbing!

Seems legit to me.

My mom did this during the 80s by herself. She had a (very) little list of which deals she couldn't solve. I wonder how many other people have done the same.

She still goes through 20 deals every day but with the new version she knows she'll never finish.

On a complete tangent, reading this article is the first time I've noticed the ugly little details of the "felony murder law".

Under Florida law, individuals involved in a felony resulting in death can be charged with murder.

You'd think that means if you kill someone while committing a felony that you can be charged with murder. That seems somewhat reasonable, although I can think of cases where it would be excessive.

It turns out if you break into a house for a robbery and some other guy that came with you kills someone maybe somewhere else in the house and you didn't even know you can still be charged with murder.

Now, that seems pretty unfair but we find out in this story that they can go even beyond that. In this story a couple of kids break into a house and the homeowner shoots and kills one of them. They then applied this law to charge the other kid with murder!

That's pretty messed up.

why would you open yourself up to potential legal trouble

Unfortunately this line of thinking leads to life in general being a lot less pleasant that it should be in countries with this sort of attitude towards liability.

We end up with people making lots of regrettable decisions like "I shouldn't let anyone walk across my property", "I shouldn't let anyone use anything of mine", "I shouldn't help that kid crying in the middle of the road" just because there's a real chance that the government will ruin your life over it if someone gets offended.

Most people are nice and want to help others but we force them to close up and stop interacting with people out of fear of liability. It's sad.

People keep saying "Google wants" like Google is made up of a bunch of drones who were all brainwashed to think alike. Google has hired some of the smartest programmers in the world. Do you think they all just get hired and then go "yes master, I will try to increase Google's advertising capability"?

Yes, advertising is the core of Google's success but the majority of their services are created by geeks who just want to do something cool and found a job at a company that lets them do cool things without requiring everything to have an ROI. Many of their programs don't have any use to their advertising business. People keep asking themselves "why is Google doing this?" and since advertising is how Google makes money they always seem to come to the conclusion that whatever they are doing must boost advertising somehow. For the most part Google does stuff because the people working at Google sat down and thought "wouldn't it be cool if someone did this?"

The DNS service explicitly states that they are keeping information around on a short term basis just for debugging, performance optimization and spoof detection purposes and they are not sharing the data with the advertising team or any other Google program. This isn't making them money.

Where did you hear that REI got 250 million dollars from the government? I haven't heard of any retailers anywhere getting bailout money for that matter.

I think you just made that up.