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while it may not have the exact same content as the paywalled link, it does provide information about it http://blog.chron.com/techblog...

Depends on where you look. Part of the heat has temporarily gone into the oceans. This becomes clearer when you separate the La-Nina years from the El-Nino years, and plot separate trend lines for them: http://blog.chron.com/climatea...

A boeing 747 uses 140MW of power during flight.

The wings of a 747 are about 525 m^2. The sun provides about 1367W/m^2. A solar panel will turn about 20% of that into electricity. So, the result is 143kW.

So, the best solar panels in the best angle from the sun provides about 1/1000 of the energy needed to fly the plane. The 143kW might power the air conditioner and lights, although that is not certain.

Just FYI, the parent is referring to Austin, TX. They had a huge population growth period but the city was under the mentality of "If we don't build it, they won't come." They were wrong, so Austin has something like the 4th worst traffic in the US and a cost of living somewhat like Atlanta.

They are already doing it.

Like I said, our cynicism is justified.

It's just a shame nobody makes a phone with 1920x1080 output on HDMI... oh, never mind. This post was meant for more than a year ago.
Article listing multiple phones with HDMI output in April, 2013

the Chronicle says 49 pounds, the Montgomery County Police Reporter says 29 pounds — either way, it's too heavy

Shouldn't they deserve a special exception from the FAA's weight limit? After all, everything's bigger in Texas.

I am hardly surprised that insurance companies do not like the situation of having any additional regulation imposed upon them and will raise fees or do anything else they can do to protest and to discredit it.

The sharp increases in premiums aren't due to some sort of tantrum that the insurance industry is throwing due to regulations. It's not like the Department of Health and Human Services or the state insurance commissions sprang up overnight due to ObamaCare. Insurance has always be highly regulated. ObamaCare is actually a massive handout to the insurance industry, due to forcing people to buy their product.

The main drivers for the insurance premium increases are:
1. Elimination of choice in insurance plans. People who previously paid for their own preventative care and minor health issues and only insured against catastrophic events are no longer able to do so. All of a sudden, these people are paying way more for their healthcare than they used to because they are forced to buy more insurance than they need or want.

2. Elimination of risk pools. People who generally take good care of themselves are now in the same risk pool as the alcoholic, obese, biker down the street. Guess who's subsidizing whose bad choices?

If you've even hung around the emergency department of a hospital, you will have seen where the real cost of uninsured patients was going. Suddenly this cost is transferred from the hospital to subsidized plans.

ObamaCare makes this problem way worse due to the Medicaid expansion. ER visits are free under Medicaid, so ERs are now seeing an increase in nonemergent use as a result.

Blue cross Blue shield has said that 80 to 85% of all enrollees had paid. http://www.chron.com/news/medi... My question to you is do you have any evidence other than speculation that the enrollment books are being cooked? Because even fox news cannot find any one who has hard evidence that the books are cooked and you and I both know that if someone came forward with that information they would be instantly famous.

It's pretty hypocritical to use iOS usage to illustrate "the economic divide", since "economic divide" and "inequality" is the rallying cry of the modern American left. Those wealthy iPhone users are also much more likely to be "liberals".

http://blog.chron.com/techblog...

What that illustrates again is that many so-called "liberals" are using the supposed plight of the less well off as a smokescreen to advance their own agendas.

They all have their problems, but not all are this bad. There are literally only a few cities that rank worse.

http://www.chron.com/news/hous...

Some people in Austin say it's not so bad, but it depends entirely on where you are trying to go to and from and when. There are a few routes that are sheer driving hell.

What time did NSW "nailed it"?

I will take "4:11 AM on Tuesday" for $200 please, Alex.

From what I understand, they upgraded to a warning too late by then (10am?). Most people already arrived at work.

Then they were showing up very early.

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PEACHTREE CITY GA / 411 AM EST TUE JAN 28 2014

IN MAIN BAND FOR THE AFTERNOON AND TONIGHT... HAVE SNOW/SLEET AMOUNTS OF 1-3 INCLUDING ATL METRO. [...] ALL THESE ACCUMULATION... OTHER THAN THE NW GA LIGHT BAND...WILL MEET WARNING CRITERIA SO HAVE CONTINUED WARNING AND EXPANDED THIS TO ANOTHER TIER OF COUNTIES INCLUDING ATL METRO AREA.

FINAL NOTE...WE REMAIN CONCERNED ABOUT IMPACT WITH ONSET OF PRECIP AROUND RUSH HOUR AND SCHOOL RELEASE. [...]

And that wasn't even the only forecast that predicted doom for Atlanta. The only forecasts which predicted clear weather came from a Ouija board in Nathan Deal's office.

You should check out http://climatechangenationalfo...

One of the key features of the Climate Change National Forum is the comment section. Below each entry, and above the general comment section, will be comments made by other contributors. Rather than presenting a unified face to the outside world, contributors are encouraged to question, debate, dispute, expand, and otherwise discuss other contributions. The public rarely gets to see scientists debating each other, outside of the fake debates that are set up by news shows. As scientists know, what scientists eventually tell the outside world in publications, presentations, and committee reports gives little or no clue (or even the wrong impressions) about how scientists judge scientific claims, evaluate evidence, develop hypotheses, and reach conclusions. I know of no web site, inside or outside of climate science, that allows the public to experience true scientific discussions on a regular basis.

- http://blog.chron.com/climatea...

I suspect it is part of the settlement with the company that got screwed when Houstonians said no to red light cameras AFTER the city implemented them without asking the citizens if they wanted them.

http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2009/12/houstons-snapstream-to-power-the-daily-show-colbert-report/

http://www.chron.com/news/us/article/Man-using-cluster-balloons-lands-in-Newfoundland-4811559.php

An interesting take on the Kosaka and Xie study.

Not very interesting:

Tisdale: Anyone with a little common sense who’s reading the abstract and the hype around the blogosphere and the Meehl et al papers will logically now be asking: if La Niña events can stop global warming, then how much do El Niño events contribute? 50%? The climate science community is actually hurting itself when they fail to answer the obvious questions.

On average (as Xie points out to Curry) La Niña / El Niño contribute nothing to global warming - they can't, they don't make heat, they just move it around.

Also check out what Tamino has to say about Curry's misinterpretation of the results.

And note that, at this time, it's simply a fit of data, it is NOT a model as it is much too new to actually have been used for a prediction. Unlike the other dozens and dozens of studies I linked to further up the chain.

Nope, it's a model.

Kosaka and Xie don’t have a tunable parameter. They used a full-blown coupled ocean-atmosphere climate model (GFDL CM2.1).

http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2013/08/learning-from-the-hiatus/

http://nomads.gfdl.noaa.gov/nomads/forms/deccen/

Yay for Fortran!

Like most things, it is a matter of how much is bad. Yes, holding your arms up for lengths of time leads to muscle fatigue, but that is something your body can recover from. After all, painters, electricians, and other craftsmen such as mechanics, spent a long time with their arms overhead doing precision work. Just some quick google searching yielded:

Common hazards for electricians

Multi-touch and Gorilla arm and how some companies are ignoring it

Skin problems in mechanics

What is bad about being a mechanic?

You'll notice a common trend in these articles. The only one that mentions arm fatigue is the one complaining about multi-touch surfaces. The rest have other issues from repetitive tasks (see the vibration issue from power tools, tied into the "Skin Problems" article) and assorted chemical/environmental problems. I tried searching a little harder for gorilla arm and injuries associated with it, but only came up with a couple multi-touch articles. It seems the only ones really complaining are those with a desk job.

Gorilla Arm: Painful? probably. Can we adjust to it? Almost definitely, if craftsmen can use their hands to carry and manipulate tools for 8 hours a day, we can move a non-existant cube from point A to point B every now and then. Life threatening? Not hardly. Also, people will naturally gravitate toward the right tool for the right job, or close to it. Once we figure out the hologram sucks for typing, the keyboards will get a new life.

What do you say to the families that depended on child labor to support the family?
They said they can't stay in business without putting the children to work. And the business feeds the children.

It's a bit of a strawman, but the parallels are there. It's bad for everyone in the long run to make put children to labor, it'd be a lot better for society to them to get some learning and not suffer the horrible abuse that historically came with child labor.

I'd say that if they were family owned businesses, and the children in question were from the family, that they are already exempt to a number of provisions of the child labor laws:

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/child-labor-laws-family-businesses-60987.html

Agricultural jobs (e.g. family farms) are exempt from all FSLA provisions completely, including the operation of equipment like tractors, and also if there are fewer than 500 man days of work performed on the farm per year, they are also exempt from minimum wage requirements.

Sure, your friend is employing 53 people. But in today's age, going without insurance means going without healthcare. Which means that everything that's serious is an ER visit rather than "hey you should have those pulled sometime in the next year".

That's not the same as "without healthcare". Also there is a significant resurgence in health co-ops in rural communities, as the doctors don't like managed care any more than the patients. This either means pay-as-you-go with no insurance involvement at all, or monthly payments to the co-op for the promise of some minimal amount of preventative treatment.

Which is really fucking expensive to everyone else.

On a per-item basis, rather than expensive all the time, with the payments largely going into the pockets of large insurance consortiums like AIG, whose executives are currently sitting on their yaughts lighting their cigars with $100 bills from the bailout money they've received.

It's understood that there needs to be the bottom rung of the ladder for the have-nots. They need their niche to fill, and, well, shitty jobs for them to do. But we don't want companies that grow off employing the bottom rung. If your friend is at the point where he's employing 50+ people, his company is big enough to start treating them like real employees.

He does; he pays a portion of the insurance costs for each employee. The mandate requires that he pay full freight, and requires that the plan cover certain aspects which means it's no longer employee cafeteria style, and the decision for "just major medical, large deduction", et.c, is out of their hands. Luckily this doesn't kick in for under 50 employees until 2015, and hopefully 2 years is enough to restructure the business into profitability. Or, since he's close to early retirement age, just calls it quits and shuts things down anyway. Where will those people get their insurance then?

U.S. unemployment rates are currently only trending downwards because people fall off the end of the unemployment insurance, and are no longer counted as unemployed. That doesn't mean that they have jobs. I know people who have basically given up looking for work entirely after a year of unemployment, and they aren't counted either. If we did our statistics the same way, we'd be in the same ballpark as European nations (e.g. France: 11.0%, Spain: 28.8% - source http://ec.europa.eu/ 2013 numbers).

I'm not saying "don't have universal healthcare"; hell, Nixon was the first president to try to get it enacted, and Teddy Kennedy said at the end of his life that his one big regret was not working with Nixon on getting it implemented. But I am saying that it needs to be a general benefit, not something tied to the employer so that insurance companies can continue to pro

Blame the banks for that. They're attaching fees to electronic transactions which are higher than for processing paper checks. In all likelihood their fees were a lot higher than $1 per paycheck. I had to pick the banks for my personal accounts carefully because many of them don't allow or charge you for using ACH to move money between your own accounts. Sure the employer can pick a bank which allows free or low-cost ACH transactions for direct deposit. But if the employee's bank refuses or charges a high fee to ACH money in, the business is SOL.

Yeah in general a business which can't pay up to a few hundred dollars extra per employee per year probably isn't on solid financial footing. But on principle, electronic funds transfers should be cheaper than a printed paycheck, not more expensive.

The seasonal flu vaccine is pretty useless in healthy people, can have significant to serous side effect, and probably is not worth the risk in the general population.

We can get flu shots for free at work. I used to get mine every year, but the day after I got mine last year, I came down with the worst flu I can ever recall having, and it lasted about twice as long as usual. No warning signs, either. I have a hard time believing that it was just a coincidence, and I think I'll just go without the shot, next flu season.

That being said, I resent people who apparently can't do basic maths getting in a lather and telling me that I shouldn't protect my kid from serious childhood diseases on account of a comparatively negligible risk of side effects, and--even worse--try to persuade the parents of my kids' friends not to get them vaccinated, either.

Overall, the vaccines are saver.

It depends on the vaccine, the disease and the patient.

The seasonal flu vaccine is pretty useless in healthy people, can have significant to serous side effect, and probably is not worth the risk in the general population. OTOH vaccines for polio, measles, and whooping cough are certainly safer for most folks than going unvaccinated.

If you're impaired, you're impaired. It doesn't matter the cause, nor some arbitrary tests. There are people that can drive fine at over 0.10, and there are people who are entirely dysfunctional at 0.01. There are also people that are wholly impaired at 0.00, generally these would be sleep deprived folks, some even on loads of caffeine or other uppers (witness all those single truck accidents - driver "fell asleep". Note that truckers can only drive 11 hours at a stretch according to federal law .

So is 0.05 ridiculous? Yes, for some it's too high. For the large majority of the population, it's ridiculously low. It's also gender biased. Women are more deeply affected by alcohol so should men be held to the same standard?

What's the real answer to this problem? Making a license a privilege, and losing one meaningful and a much more realistic option.

But at the end of the day, if those 503(c).4 organizations were breaking the law, then it's hard to say the IRS wasn't doing it's job by auditing them.

I agree for the most part, except for the fact that they weren't breaking the law!

From the following link, the IRS investigator Lerner had to say: "150 of the cases have been closed and no group had its tax-exempt status revoked..."

They "apologized". Well isn't that sweet?

You could, though, throw a piece of plastic packaging material out the airlock. I can think of no more appropriate way to declare 'humans are here, this is our planet now.'

That's so 50 years ago.

From the link:

Man's first act on the moon was to throw trash on it - Armstrong discarded a duffle bag with some junk in it.

and no horror stories? Ill give you one we covered here on slashdot

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Retired-Marine-sued-by-HOA-can-fly-flags-at-home-2078736.php

Okay, because you seem to be an idiot, I will demonstrate how to cut & paste. It is your job to skip all the intermediate redirect pages and get the real news article.

The following link, about a real civilian killing a real robber with his privately-owned gun, is about 1000 times more convincing than you frothing at the mouth and posting links to a page that purposely makes it difficult to follow the news links:

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Robber-gunned-down-on-Pasadena-street-4415402.php

The Aeros are most likely leaving Houston though :(

Beautiful, beautiful strawman. *golfclap*

While there are a few judges that cause problems, the judge isn't the one dragging people to court, the judge isn't the one deciding what laws you broke, the judge isn't the one lying to the court.

The real problem is the prosecutors, who are untouchable and not held to account for their actions when they railroad innocent people and obstruct justice, even when their obstruction allows the guilty to continue killing. They tell the court that their DNA evidence is incontrovertible proof of guilt when it matches, but when it doesn't there's no end of excuses how the "guilty" did the crime while leaving someone else's DNA... when they don't just order the DNA evidence destroyed before it can be tested.

http://www.newser.com/story/125261/mexican-helicopter-mistakes-airports-lands-in-texas.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023633/Mexican-military-helicopter-soldiers-lands-airport-Texas--MISTAKE.html
http://www.chron.com/news/nation-world/article/Mexican-military-helicopter-lands-in-Laredo-by-2082188.php
https://doctorbulldog.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/mexican-military-helicopter-spotted-flying-over-texas/
http://texasliberal.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/mexican-helicopters-flying-over-texas-would-obama-respond-to-mexican-invasion-with-use-of-force/
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread557760/pg1
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110905191138AAP32Xj
http://www.valleycentral.com/news/story.aspx?id=429229#.US-m5WJ2n4Y

BTW, the idea of a Mexican helicopter "mistakenly" landing 16 miles away from its target is utterly ridiculous. No competent pilot would ever make such a mistake; that's why they have GPS in aircraft now, not to mention basic navigational skills and fuel-burn calculations (plus the Rio Grande river, which is obvious from the air) rule this excuse out.

Actually your slant is misdirected. It's the cell providers who would brick a phone, and they can do so easily but have resisted calls to do so until recent pressure from certain congressmen and law enforcement brought the issue to a boiling point. It has nothing to do with 'Apple', other than the fact that those phones havea high market value, but rather there was nothing preventing a criminal from activating a known stolen phone on a providers network.

The simple fact is, that cell providers will happily continue to allow criminals to use your stolen phone, even knowing that it's stolen, because it's a source of revenue.

http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2012/11/finally-wireless-carriers-collaborating-on-stolen-cellphone-database/

You write this crap and you get modded "insightful"? Jesus wept! How is money earned here, spent here and taxed here different depending on the nationality of the person doing the earning/spending/taxpaying?

They are not paid the same or taxed equally. See the above links.

What is the basis of this claim? Given the current exchange rate (i.e. the dollar is worthless) I have my doubts about that.

a programmer working in India that does not have an outsourced job makes around about 8k USD per year. So if you could live like a king in your home country living with your family and friends vs living an average life in the US what would you choose? They ship the money back and pack in three to four people in just one apartment here in the states for a reason...it's not to afford a new car they all carpool in.

What are you waffling about? Our company is full of H1B people who are all on the road to citizenship. If you want to discourage them from staying here, then keep up the anti-immigrant xenophobic rhetoric.

Most of us here also know many non h1b programmers that are very good at what they do but instead of coming out of college and starting a job in the field they are stuck in another unrelated field or worse stuck in retail...construction work...flipping burgers. I've heard all the stories. We sell to these kids to get a degree in CS and you'll find a job but instead they hit this wall of must have experience to get hired. When was the last time you saw an entry level position open up at your company? I can't even think of the last time mine had one. The h1b workers I work with are also great people and hard workers. Some are average, some are below, and a few are great just like anyone in the states. The question is why are we hiring them? Just so you can keep your new h1b friends while our sons and daughters can't get a job if their life depended on it...which it does...

Right. Our company used to hire graduates from American colleges. They'd take three days to do something a European graduate could do in a few hours. Fix the education system and become competitive with the rest of the world. That'd be a better approach than lowering the bar for your own people and raising it for others.

Anyone coming from a first world country is not an accurate representation of how the H1B visa system is being used. See the links above. If a European graduate decided to up and move to the states you can bet his or her socioeconomic status is far above a huge majority of US college grads with a mountain of debt over their heads. It's like your taking someone that studied at MIT and comparing him with someone that studied at the local community college. I will admit there is a "problem" with our education system but that's hardly a discuss about h1b visas. My point is someone coming to the states from a 1st world country more than likely went to a better school and had a better background than most in Europe and the states.

Another think I would like to note: Companies no longer hire and train. They hire with experience. If you've ever noticed the contract companies you work with will team people from their company together. 1 teaches and trains the entry level guy that got hired on when the company he's now working for isn't accepting ANY entry level people or training anyone. So fresh new faces come in with zero experience and get trained...also get trained by myself. While we continually push away college grads from the states with the exact same experience...zero.

Just a little Econ101: salaries rise, and I don't just mean nominally through inflating a currency, when the productive capacity of an employee rises. Just legislating doesn't make that fact go away. I know very little of Mexico's situation, and from what I understand it's a corrupt a state as any, but it may be that they are placing more funding into training skills that are actually in demand.

Also, laws that push for higher minimum wages and more benefits hurts those who's productive capacity is too low to merit hiring them at that higher price point. If an employer can only get 3 dollars worth from an employee's labor, and the minimum wage including benefits costs him 4, he has to fire that employee.

Also, before you go on claiming that businesses can afford it, you must remember that, in the US anyway, many businesses operate at 5-10 percent net profit margins.

Tax code and loss due to theft or damage. - IANAL

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/tax-code-writing-off-inventory-22012.html

The more important and related story is that due to this, the EPA has suspended BP from any further contracts with the Federal government.

http://blog.chron.com/lorensteffy/2012/11/in-suspending-bp-epa-does-what-drilling-regulators-would-not/

I'm sure it will not be long before BP is crying about unions and regulation and it being too expensive to do business in America.

You got your second wish. The EPA denied BP the right to bid on oil contracts.

http://blog.chron.com/lorensteffy/2012/11/in-suspending-bp-epa-does-what-drilling-regulators-would-not/

Here's why the Windows ecosystem is broken by Dwight Silverman, Friday, August 24, 2007

FWIW, it's common for map makers and atlas makers to include some false streets and features. This is to enable them to prove that someone else copied from them. Perhaps this is one of those receiving publicity?

Like "Geek Street" in San Francisco, a spurious feature like this is known as "bunny":

http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1989_608868/phony-streets-protect-copyrights-on-maps.html

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mapmakers-sleight-of-hand-Cartographers-put-2889584.php

You honestly want UN control over the internet?
Because you just now committed a prison-able offense in India, which WOULD be enforced against you. You would right now be under arrest.

Under US control, exactly what has happened is what would happen. Nothing.
You are only NOT in prison right now due to the UN not having control over the Internet.

Speaking critical of the state is your crime by the way.
People are already in prison for doing far less than you just did.
http://www.chron.com/business/technology/article/Outrage-in-India-over-arrests-for-Facebook-post-4051877.php

Stop with the lumping, dammit.

http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/stories/hardaga.asp

http://www.chron.com/life/houston-belief/article/Exhibit-honors-Muslims-who-saved-Jews-1610225.php

I've seen many studies of fatalities in the U.S., and in other countries, like Bohlin's studies in Sweden, that report higher fatalities with higher speed. If I saw good data to the contrary, my belief would be shaken.

Bohlin had a graph of fatalities vs. speed, and it wasn't linear. It went up very quickly and it looked like a power function to me. Fatalities are caused by many mechanisms, and you have to sum them all. If you have a curve with a better fit, I'd be happy to use it.

As for the autobahn, you have to compare equal roads, and equal cars. I'm not convinced that Germany vs. the U.S. is a good comparison, and I'm not convinced that the autobahn is just as safe with unlimited speed as it would be with limited speed. And it looks like German traffic engineers aren't convinced either.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443589304577637773840176082.html
September 7, 2012, 6:24 p.m. ET
Toll Road Offers Fast Cash to Texas
By NATHAN KOPPEL

A 2009 report in the American Journal of Public Health found that higher speed limits adopted by states in the wake of the 1995 repeal of federal speed-limit controls had led to a 3.2% increase in road fatalities, or an estimated 12,500 more deaths from 1995 to 2005. "When you increase speed limits, you have an increase in the severity of injuries," said Lee Friedman, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and one of the authors of the report.

http://www.chron.com/news/nation-world/article/Green-light-may-light-up-to-cap-autobahn-s-speed-1475147.php

German authorities already have used speed caps to make the autobahn safer. Last year, after an 80-mph limit was imposed on the busy stretch between Hamburg and Berlin, traffic-related deaths fell from eight to zero, according to a government study.

not just government-ineptitude resulting in slow processing of a family's due payment, but willful disregard of the government's contractual obligations?

Never ascribe to malice what can be attributed to government incompetence?

Of course he can't show "willful disregard". The paperwork for disregarding the paperwork was misfiled and he's still waiting on the request for disregarding disregarded paperwork to be processed, but that's because it's his own fault for following the instructions printed on the paper that said to fill it out in duplicate and keep one copy, when clearly he was supposed to fill it out in triplicate and burn two copies.

runs into financial difficulty because of a failure to plan or a series of bad decisions

Yes, obviously its the family's fault, their bad decision was failing to plan for the VA to sit on claims for a year.

Close, but not quite.

A politician kissing babies is just one of those things. Political advertising campaigns are using pictures from sites like istockphoto.com while pretending that the people in the pictures have anything to do with reality.

Not that you know much about reality - or anything about critical thinking. Hearing you talk about critical thinking is like hearing Rick Perry talk about the biological sciences - the speaker has no credibility on the subject whatsoever.

And by the way, here is your lord kissing a baby. Here he is riding a tractor with a baby on his lap. Here he is holding another baby at a religious rally. And here is yet another picture of him with a baby.

Or were those photos just doctored?

Let me Google that for you:

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/03/02/feds-in-nj-26-arrests-made-in-325-million-counterfeit-goods-operation/
http://blog.chron.com/newswatch/2012/03/suspects-arrested-in-counterfeit-purse-operation/
http://www.nbc-2.com/story/14950996/2011/06/21/3-accused-of-selling-counterfeit-nikes-gucci?clienttype=printable
http://gucci.ezinemark.com/replica-gucci-handbags-low-quality-product-for-fashion-7d35cb4db7aa.html

Mostly about selling, but "...you could get yourself arrested, if you are spotted buying counterfeits."

This is only America, you know.

"What are you gonna do?"
How about ... nothing? It's not like the Austrian town isn't still there in its entirety.

Somewhat related - There's a golf course near where I live that re-created portions of famous golf courses from around the world, and got sued by several of them for this. And it was fucking ridiculous.
Ref. http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1995_1309260/lawyers-make-final-arguments-in-tour-18-lawsuit.html

The common misconception, often repeated, always wrong. The profits margins are much, much higher than that in most verticals, though I am sure there is one or two verticals in the industry that are suffering, but 3-4%, that is way low.

First, here are the facts:

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/average-profit-margin-restaurant-13477.html

Second, it makes no sense for profit margins to be higher, because then you'd see more people starting restaurants, driving down the margins.

They do not pay BECAUSE THEY DO NOT HAVE TOO!

Yes, and they don't have to because they can get lots of people willing to work for them for a low price and without health insurance. It's called a labor market and supply and demand.

Jay Lee is a tech blogger for the Houston Chronicle. He also has a little radio show on a public radio station.

He admits in his article that he was cranking out enough takedown notices to semi-automate the process. He perhaps should have known GoDaddy's policy regarding multiple sites registered to the same person. Though, I think it unreasonable for him to research which third party sites would be affected in the defense of his work. On the gripping hand, all the non-infringing sites were restored at his request once the problem was brought to light.

My own personal suspicion is that Ms. Shwagger was not the author of the websites and may have had little or no idea of the providence of the image in question. This does not excuse her alleged, abusive reactions to Mr. Lee. It may shed some light on why she thinks that she is the agrieved party in this matter.

I have not heard Mr. Lee espouse any political position on his radio show. Extrapolating from his positions on various tech news items addressed on his show, I suspect that he may actually agree with Ms. Shwagger's political views. Which makes her unfounded, partisan attacks all the more ironic.

http://www.chron.com/business/real-estate/article/Critics-fear-ruling-for-beach-homeowners-will-1717985.php

The gist is that in Texas people have the right to use any beach even if it puts them close to a house, up to the vegetation line. The problem is when the vegetation line is moved by a heavy storm. Apparently one woman ended up having her home move from being on private property to being on public property because of this vegetation line marking the end of the public beach.

http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2008/07/average-time-to-infection-4-minutes/

That's about XP, mind you. I can't find where anyone has done a similar test with Windows 7, but Windows 7 continues has had its fair share of buffer overrun issues that didn't require user intervention to be exploited.. Only a fool would think that the last patch cycle had finally fixed them all and perfected the OS.