Governments never tolerate competition.

This order does not include suppressing Google search results on "how to change DNS servers."

"The computer is your friend" is the tag line for the Paranoia roleplaying game. Which used to be comedic fiction, but these days, looks frighteningly prophetic.

More so a failure of parenting. Kids see their parents spending more than they have, and grow up to be just like them. Schools certainly don't help, but the main responsibility is the role model of the parents.

It's a mixed bag. Their main source of income is fees to merchants, but credit card companies make billions in interest every year, and billions more in late fees.

Which is to say, you're right they don't much care, but they really don't prefer you pay it off every month, or that you don't do so.

If you follow the rules, you generally win chargebacks. But you do have to follow the rules.

Yes.

This case is about whether or not a work qualifies for copyright at all, and not, in any way, about who owns it. The statement (up above, if you bother to look, and you won't) "The law makes no provision for granting copyright for something whose "author" can't die." is flat wrong.

You are - I'm guessing deliberately, because you're dick's too small to admit you're wrong - confusing authorship required for a copyright to exist, and who owns the copyright. They are not the same thing. If you don't know that, you're stupid. If you do, you're dishonest. Either way, you're still wrong.

There's plenty of stuff that bad in California, too. Go read up on the corruption of LAPD, including racist gangs among the officers.

It isn't how bad the crimes are, though, it's the blatant way they literally brag about the corruption (like what's being discussed here). California's political corruption is on a par with Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, and the Daly Machine in Chicago, only on a much larger scale. They brag about it because they know they can, and are proud of it.

That's exactly what it is. Different motive, though just as malicious, and in the end, it's all the same thing.

I had the exact same thing happen, except my hosted server is pretty robust. It would have handled one bot crawling the site, but not three or four at the same time.

At least all but one of them obeyed the robots.txt. The remaining one will never access my server again.

(I also had to block every Chinese IP address I could identify, but that was actually a malicious DOS attack.)

Only more practiced at it.

As opposed to the widespread riots, burning police cars, buildings lit on fire and looted, and an outright declared rebellion in 2016 when Trump won the first time?

When it comes to rioting to protest an election, the right are amateurs compared to the left.

No need. The union bosses have had direct access for decades. He would never have been elected without backing by at least the teacher's union (the biggest, richest and more powerful in the state) or the prison guard's union (#2 in all respects). That's how it's been for decades, and will remain for the foreseeable future.

California has similar laws. They don't apply to Democrats. Just ask the Democrats.