This may come as some surprise to Americans but in most countries it's illegal to advertise something that isn't true, doubly so if you know it's not true.

And what may be even more surprising is that you usually don't need to start a class action to get your refund (besides, a class action usually results in you getting about $3.50 back because the lawyers hoovered up most of the settlement, especially after the appeal).

This is just part of those evil "consumer rights" that Americans seem so dead against.

Why, has he run short on US taxpayer money to siphon off?

There's an old (native) American proverb, a man who chases two grifts loses them both.

And moves like this are damning evidence that they know it (the companies doing the polluting and the Republicans supporting them).

Shades of cigarette companies trying for years to use the courts to deny that smoking causes cancer.

They know the damage they're doing, they know that someone will have to pay the piper so they're getting in early to make sure it's not them.

I think the end game is not to isolate Europe from America, rather to ring fence American companies in Europe.

It's a particularly virulent delusion amongst many Americans that Europe is anti-business, nothing could be further from the truth as even the most socialist of European nations are very, very much free market capitalists... However we're stopping short of crony capitalism where business get to run the government and rightly so as the US is showing us how bad that's going.

Now Europe is happy for American companies to operate in Europe but they're expected to follow European laws and pay taxes in European countries. The major concern is that the US when it gets desperate will try to force those companies to put pressure on European governments. What will actually happen at this point is the ring fencing I mentioned earlier, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et al. are not going to pull out of one of the largest markets in the world, rather what will happen is that the European operations will be spun off from direct control of the American organisations, reducing the threat and limiting their ability to cause harm. American companies will do this as the alternative is to let European companies get the advantage. One of the huge drivers for this will be when American companies start getting locked out from European government contracts, US defence contractors are already feeling this pain and they're not explicitly locked out yet.

In many ways, Europe is already not waiting to see what American voters are doing and are preparing for a more European centric future. Trump bears most of the responsibility for this. If the US is going to sort itself out and rejoin the international community, the US will do it as equals rather than the leader. A phenomenal irony is that the one who ran under the tag line "Make America Great Again" has been the one who has almost eliminated the power it has gained since the 1930s. Right now Europe and Asian allies are all telling the Orange In Chief to go do one with his war, when I was a lad in the 90s this would have been unthinkable (then again, so would a war to keep people distracted from the president being a nonce or the president being a nonce in the first place).

It really started before Bush when organisations like Fox News became accepted as "news". Something that lies that brazenly taken by millions as fact for so long that they no longer recognise the difference between fact and fallacy. It's gotten so bad that many Americans are turning their back on Fox because it's not extreme enough any more. There have been several attempts to start similar organisations in other western nations, Sky News Australia as well as several in the UK (GBNews, TalkTV) but find themselves continually frustrated by laws designed to prevent the level of dishonesty and propaganda they want as well as the fact that both Australia and the UK have a public broadcaster that is highly respected, independent from government or corporate control and no profit motive. There's a reason every time a conservative government gets elected Murdoch et al. try to get them to destroy the BBC/ABC.

Pretty much this.

The people that didn't work in the office found working from home a harrowing experience as it highlighted to others how little they did. You can't wander round a virtual office wasting the time of others to look busy, you cant organise meetings to discuss the shade of grey on the office walls, you can't steal credit for the work of others as they were nowhere near you for you to overhear what they did and nor can you pilfer their ideas.

These people were desperate not just to get back to an office... but to get everyone back there so they could continue to hide amongst the productive.

This.

The UK (and most countries) have a right to privacy inside a court as confidential or damaging information may be discussed inside a court that may have no bearing on the outcome of case itself or even if it does, may be damaging or harmful in ways completely unrelated to the case if made public. Even with something as (relatively) trivial as commercial in confidence you should have a right to privacy in court. This is for civil law, the right to privacy becomes even more important with family law or criminal law.

On that ground alone, the book should be thrown at the guy.

Secondly, the point of testimony is to get the persons own words, not the words they were told by legal council. Cross examination is meant to trip up people trying to stay on a script rather than the events that actually happened, Having people give them "advice" on what to say in real time is a deliberate attempt to deceive the court.

This may be a boon in disguise.

My Facebook regularly gets inundated with "follow me" posts that are nothing but clickbait scam, so much so that I only visit once a month these days. If the cost of running this clickbait becomes too great, we'll see less of it. I may actually go back to using Facebook.

Lets be honest, not being able to do a convincing deep fake has never been a hindrance to parody, in fact with parody you want it to be obvious that you are indeed, taking the mick. This is why political satire tends to use caricatures (I.E. exaggerated features), making it indistinguishable it counter productive to parody and satire.

Most uses of deepfakes are intentionally to deceive. So it makes sense for a publisher to assume that all deepfakes are intents to deceive as parody and satire will clearly want to be identified as such by the audience.

Answer: install Linux.

Linux has become good enough that the average /.er should have no problems running a dual boot config on their gaming boxen without issues and most games will now run under Linux as well as they do under Windows. You can still dual boot for those few games that won't run under Linux (usually due to anti-cheat tools).

Just to be a pedant, terrorism is the use of threats, violence or intimidation to effect a political change. Which doesn't change the intent of your statement one iota.

That's the big difference a street brawl and terrorism, terrorism has a political goal where as street violence, even organised often has no goal, political or otherwise. Not that we should be lenient on violent thugs mind you, torching some cars and throwing bricks through some windows just because your sports team lost is still not on.

That video is 24 minutes long which would be difficult for people with an attention span that a goldfish would be ashamed of.

It is an interesting video though, for those who are interested. A good explanation of laws in the UK and US.

A quick explanation is that it's arrest for anything do do with the communications act, so that's any form of communication (post, telephone, television) and a small amount are via the internet... Beyond this only 12% lead to a conviction... of total charges, it's less than 10% for anything online.

I know a defence lawyer who deals with similar cases and you're not ever arrested for "making a tweet", you're arrested for things that would get arrested for doing things that would get you arrested if you did them face to face. Threatening, harassment, inciting violence does not magically become legal (and these are not legal in the US either) just because you did it online. "with a computer" is not a magic get out of jail free, if I were to beat someone to death with an IBM Model M keyboard it would still be considered murder (or at least manslaughter), just because I did it with a computer it inconsequential.

Now for the vast majority of cases she advises her client to apologise, that gets you out of a lot of trouble simply because it transfers the onus to prove your intent onto the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) so unless you've got a strong history of harassment, threats, et al. and I mean a strong history, a very strong history.

If anything the US is currently proving that we (the UK) need to take more actions against people threaten, harass, intimidate and abuse others regardless of the method they use.

This is another anachronism that doesn't exist in most countries.

I can count the number of cheques I've dealt with in the last 10 years on one hand and half of those were refunds for VED (Vehicle Excise Duty) from the DVLA when I sold a car.

Cheques are not that common, so uncommon in fact that most people just post them to the bank. You can also deposit cheques at any post office in the UK if you need the funds to clear quickly, no need for a crappy app or for the bank to dictate what you can and can't do.

Sounds like your country needs to fix it's banking system rather than this being a fact of life everyone needs to accept.

Erm... I already have 3. Banks where I can just use the website instead of being forced into a shitty app. It's standard operating procedure for banks in most countries as banks are responsible for security and can't legally transfer that responsibility to third parties. So a website controlled by the bank is the easiest way to do that.

It's extremely normal for banks to have requirements like these. Mine has informed me that my Android version is too old so I will lose access next year or so. They've been trusting this device, but it's now becoming a pumpkin.

Sit, beg, roll over... good consumer.

It is not extremerly normal for banks to dictate what I can and cant run on my own devices... It's extremely abnormal and would pretty much be illegal in the UK along with being terrible business sense because the minute banks threatened to cut off my access is the minute I switch banks, given that I can transfer the funds out of my account into another in seconds... they wouldn't even try.

"I don't even use cash" is just the latest "I don't even own a TV". Nothing but attention whoring.

Only a fool rejects a form of payment simply because they don't like it... only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of fools limits themselves to just one.

This is not true. The "cashback" comes from merchant service fees, meaning the merchant pays an additional fee for accepting the card, from which the bank gives you a small percentage of what they take. They've effectively got you paying for the bank to give you back some of your own money. Of course the merchant has to hide that 5-10% of the price is paying for accepting cards, it's enforced in contracts and Visa/MC have tried hard in some countries to get it enforced by law by limiting card surcharges and cash discounts.

The "sucker" is the person putting everything on the card to get back a small amount of what they've paid.

This is also the reason that if you've done a good job at negotiating a price, they won't accept cards or if you're buying 10s of thousands of dollar/pounds/euros of stock, again, no cards please.

There's a reason that most European cards don't offer "cashback" or at least not any meaningful amount, it's because the European governments have capped the merchant service fees as they knew they'd get abused. Australia and the US haven't and look what's happening there. I get more from the interest on my savings and that's only 2% from my regular savings account, however it comes with zero catches.