Before politics Doug Ford was known for helping run the family label business. Now as premier he is famous for producing stickers that don't stick and plates that can't be read. Given his background, you would think he would know better, or at least should know someone who knows better.

I recently tried selling a generic brand, unused toner cartridge for an HP printer I no longer owned on the classifieds site kijiji. It was taken down within a day for a "Verified Rights Owner (VeRO)" complaint. In no point in the add did I try to pass it off as a genuine HP cartridge, and the picture I used to post it certainly made clear who's sticker it had on it. I did mention it was for HP printers, which I seemed relevant. I tried pushing back, but was told that any reference to "HP" would result in take down. I guess I'm back to boycotting HP.

Are there any printer manufacturers that aren't evil?

Is it any surprise that a printer started RMS on his holy crusade? Too bad it seems we are losing that that battle so completely.

So some idiot bends his car because he was driving too fast. He is inconvenienced, insurance premiums go up, is late for work, etc, and just maybe learns a valuable lesson about driving defensively, all without endangering anyone else's life. Care to explain what the downside is?

I like you books analogy. It helps clear up what the intended meaning is.

Arguing the semantics of it, though, distracts from the real issue. It's all well and good to understand what the writers of the amendment meant, and to understand why they wrote it when they wrote it. The appropriate question should be: Is it still relevant today? Is it still serving its intended purpose. It was amended into the constitution. It can be amended out. It was not an infallible law handed down by God.

Today, the free and easy access to guns granted by that amendment is responsible for many times more lost innocent lives than it is preventing. Are the benefits of that freedom really worth all those lost lives? Is this what the writers really wanted?

To continue your analogy, what would be the proper recourse if people started using those books for something other than their intended purpose? If a bunch of teenagers started throwing their textbooks at each other in a classroom, the appropriate recourse is to confiscate their textbooks, not to blindly follow the constitution.

There's more to it than that. In most jurisdictions the taxi companies have been subject to more rigorous (i.e. expensive) standards than Uber has been following. For example, the taxi companies are regulated as to what what cars can be driven, the quality and inspection of those cars, insurance level, background checks, fee control, artificial scarcity of operating licenses (eg New York Taxi medallions) etc. All of these add to the cost of operating a conventional taxi business, and are things that Uber has been ignoring under its completely bogus "we are not a taxi company" claim. I am glad Uber is coming in to shake things up because a number of the above are simply there to protect a monopoly or outdated business model and desperately need revision. BUT Uber IS (or at least in just about every meaningful way behaves as) a a taxi company that is simply ignoring the regulations and is thus undercutting the competition and this is fundamentally not fair either.

Unlike a gun, if I'm cold and dead, you still can't have them. . .

Are you trying to demonstrate how much of a "consumer" you are? Your Android 2.2 likely does everything it did back when you thought it was all cool and new. Now you're lusting over new stuff just because it is new stuff (HW, SW, same thing). Buy quality, fix it when it breaks, keep it forever, and above all else, learn to enjoy what you have. Stop lusting over stuff. THAT is how you stop participating.

It sounds like this is modelled after the SETI@home project (which I think evolved into BOINC?), though maybe in reverse

Berkeley: Hello, world, you're wasting CPU cycles, do you mind if we use them?

Google: We've got a bunch of underutilized CPUs. Hello, World, how do you want to use them?

I suspect the Google model would work better for data that can't be broken into parallel tasks as easily, but overall it sounds like both approaches are designed for similar things.

I've had the same experience. I don't mind tasteful, appropriate ads. I recognize that they are a source of revenue for website operators, and thus potentially lower costs to me. I hadn't even heard of adblock until I started running into websites that would crash and hang at the point of loading the ad and some others were brought to a crawl, and now ABP just blocks everything by default. The advertises burned themselves. A few websites have presented "Please unblock ads on our site" pop-ups, and as long as the ads don't significantly detract from the experience I'm more than happy to do that.

It's not hard to image that the families thought they had done their fact checking. From the summary: "tens of millions of Internet users have free access to Wikipedia Zero, but cannot afford the data charges to access the rest of the Internet". So a person, who is saving every last bit of money they can (i.e. not paying data charges) gets a flyer that says: "attend our awesome business school", and they "fact check" using the only source easily available to them: Wikipedia. It's easy to critisize them from our priveledge position in the west, with dozens, if not thousands of independent sources freely and easily available to us, but the situation is different elsewhere.

Just switch to studded for the winter and leave them on until spring. Even on a snowy day, a good chunk of the road/path may be clear, and on a clear day you never know when you might hit a snow or ice patch that somehow finds it way in front of you. Carbide studded tires shouldn't wear down that fast, and other than being heavy and slow work just fine on bare pavement. I've been commuting on mine, on mostly bare roads, for a few months now and expect they last at least two seasons.

I miss the days when there were maybe two classes (eg the original pentium 1 through 4 vs celeron) of chip running with a few different speeds each. Now it's as if they want to make it as complicated as possible with an overabundance of options. X3 X5 X7 is at least some attempt at simplification for those that don't have days to spend poring over all the options and combinations of options currently available.

. . . then CHOOSE to live in a smaller house / apartment closer to where you work. It's what I did. Or CHOOSE the larger house in the burbs where cycling is impractical. 10 km is really not that far by bicycle, and creates a rather large area where I'm sure there are some affordable options.

"It's the weather. It's the market. It's the roads. It's the drivers." Stop making #!@# excuses. At some point own up to the fact that you've decided that cycling is not important to you. Thats fine. Just admit it and stop blaming it on everything else.

I live in London CANADA, which is in a snow belt. Maybe not as bad as Boston this year, but we get close on occasion. I probably average less than 15 days a year on the bus because of weather. Eveny other day I ride, and have been doing so for many years. Even in a snow belt there really aren't that many days a year that the main roads are snow or ice covered.

The roads I ride on are basically a single WIDE lane each way which I find is ideal, year round. The problem is NOT just the weather. People CHOOSE to live where there are poor options for cycling to where they work, and use weather as the excuse.

I'm in London CANADA, which is in a snow belt. I have a 5km (each way) bike ride to work which I do everyday the roads aren't snow covered. Usually that translates to about 10-20 days a year that I take the bus instead. I went with "everyday". With rounding that's probably closest to the truth. I'm relatively lucky in that my route involves primarily roads with wide lanes and few driveways or sidestreets. I've been keeping a log of our minvan (primarily used for getting groceries and running kids around) expenses. When I added it up I instantly scrapped the 10 year old mountain bike I had been nursing along for too many years and bought a new bike. It would be cheapear to buy a new bike every time the chain wore out than to commute by car!