Come on, the Internet is not a thing "paid for, developed and a thriving platform", it's a fucking convention.
Absolutely true! And if you want to roll your own internet, hey, we've done the groundwork, feel free to implement those protocols (hell, feel free to just take the already-implemented public domain code) and you can have your very own internet, domestically controlled. But as the real problem here, you don't want "an" internet - You want America's internet. You even say as much:
In France we were surfing on transpac and X25 before we joined the internet.
Before you joined the internet. Good choice of phrasing. But hey, now that we've kindly let you use it, can we just hand over the keys so you can run it, too?
If you really wanted to call it your own, then have fun surfing on your own web site.
You mean "web", not "site". And I can live with that - With the exception of the BBC, every single website I visit on a regular basis comes from the US. You, however, can't live with that, because most likely the majority of websites you visit (*cough* Slashdot *cough*) also get served from the US - Even the French language ones, just one more rack in a SoCal CoLo.
And honestly, I appreciate having you on the internet, I think it makes it a better place for both of us, sharing ideas across cultures like this. But at the end of the day, we own the ball, and we will take it home with us. And I consider it pretty damned insulting that the rest of the team has pulled a stunt like this, trying to "vote" the ball as no longer ours.
FTA: "In particular many attendees believed it was an anachronism that the US government got to decide which body should regulate the net's address system as a legacy of its funding for Arpanet - a precursor to the internet which helped form its technical core."
Yeah, that makes perfect sense, I can't imagine why the US didn't sign. "Hey, that thing you paid for, developed, and turned into a thriving platform for social and commercial activity? We don't like that you own it and we don't, so would you mind handing it over?".
One time a woman gets tasered and you go with the assumption that it wasn't a proper response. I have to ask, did you even RTFA and do any basic research or are you just reacting to the ridiculously sensationalist headline?
Well, when they already have her pinned to the ground - Damn straight "it wasn't a proper response"!
Cuff her and drag her to the car if she won't walk, but at the point they already have their suspect subdued, tazing someone amounts to nothing less than torturing them out of petty vindictiveness.
it's one agency allowed to centralize it instead of every little local agency keeping it forever.
You left out the part where they can then share that aggregated data (including 3rd party private commercial data - such as your credit card history or your medical history - otherwise unobtainable without a warrant) and share it with anyone. Not just other spy orgs, but whomever the hell they feel like chatting with.
Oh gee, forgot to pay use tax on that TV you bought in a neighboring state with no sales tax? No worries, they can forward that right off to your state's revenue service for processing all the appropriate fines! You work for a Catholic school? Hmm, pity how they somehow found out about that abortion. Hiding out from a psycho ex who consider restraining orders nothing more than toilet paper? Oops, he had some info the NCTC wanted, so they traded him a wad of info about you for it.
All fucking legal.
I'd rather have one agency with a long time limit than a hundred agencies with long time limits...
I'd rather have zero agencies allowed to completely ignore those pesky ol' constitutional protections regarding things like due process, search and seizure, and so on.
Figures, Best Korea would launch a satellite with a bad attitude.
Pity, Japan's having pitching a fit over NK's poor angle of attack, but y'all just need to get over it - NK clearly has no inclination to just roll over and take it!
You'd never do this on purpose, but its rather easy to accomplish in practice.
You have too much faith in humanity, friend!
I hate hate hate the exception-handling model of dealing with errors, because in practice, I've seen very, very little code that actually handles the error. People either:
1) Use far too coarse grained a "try" (as in, on the entire function), giving almost no possibility of knowing what actually happened or how to recover,
2) Use the "catch" just to tell the user "golly, it broke, try again later" rather than accidentally revealing the ugly (but meaningful) exception text,
3) Assume nothing in the "try" could actually fail and only do it to satisfy their company's code auditors, so the catch does... nothing, or
4) (My "favorite") - copy the entire body of the "try" into the "catch" and blindly do it again!
When used correctly, exception handling doesn't make your code cleaner, it reduces to a slightly more verbose way of checking return values. You should, if you want any hope of really dealing with the error, wrap every call in its own try/catch. I have not ever seen that done (and honestly, I can't claim I do it as religiously as I should either - I tend to trust my own code (big mistake), and only do that for external calls).
Then again, how do you handle the system volume suddenly vanishing out from under you? So, perhaps the coarse-grained "golly, it broke, try again later" folks have the right idea.;)
Don't forget that they have bills and salaries to pay. They can't sit back and live off a trickle of money, hoping it will grow at some point in the future. It's either make decent money or start laying off.
Any of which counts as Microsoft's problem why, exactly?
It is a new platform but Microsoft made certain promises to developers
So if I write Pong 2013 for Surface, should I expect the full marketing force of Microsoft to make sure my crappy app makes a certain minimum profit?
Microsoft earns its fair share of scorn. They don't deserve any here, however - Rubicon gets all the credit for backing a dead horse.
Declined to hear an appeal to a lower court's ruling that we couldn't sue. As the US has no higher authority to petition for redress - We can't sue, simple as that.
you have failed to actually list any of their worth.
I maintain that they have no worth. You've said nothing to counter that, but, as I obviously can't prove a negative, I guess that ends the thread.
Every single point I made (with the possible exception of the Russian government actually having control of their own intelligence agencies - I'd call that one open to debate) amounts to pure documented fact. Not speculation, not even stretching the data to fit an information vacuum.
You can list as many of the negatives as you wish but your argument has no merit if you only include those.
Remind me which branch of the US government controls the GCSB (in case you need a cite for that one, click on the FP link for this very thread) or the KGB? Or hey, we can throw the Mossad in there if you like. I could go on, they pretty much all have a list of publicly known sins a mile long. The US only dominates the list out of sheer volume, not as anything special.
We do have the right to [sue] AT&T et al, actually.
No, we don't, actuallydon't.
I am not really sure where the whole travel point is going as it is patently incorrect.
but before making idealistic declarations actually consider how it would be achieved and how little benefit it would be.
You mean, consider what it would mean if the CIA hadn't turned the entire Middle East against us by selling arms to both sides just for shits and giggles? If they hadn't run the world drug trade through the 80s, leaving all of Central America and most of Mexico under the control of the drug cartels? If they hadn't made the whole world hate us by running secret torture prisons through the 2000s (and probably still do it today)? If we didn't have to undergo irradiation by an unlicensed medical imaging device to board a plane just because the DHS think silly little things like auditable 3rd party calibration would give away too many of their secrets? If we actually had the right to sue AT&T et al (never mind the actual criminals in the government) for colluding with the NSA so they could illegally watch every bit we send or receive domestically?
Imagine if agencies like the GCSB had to actually obey the law? How, then, would they secretly get scum like Kim Dotcom, who poses a threat to no one except Hollywood, off for a bit o' the ol' waterboarding? If the KGB (yeah, sure they don't exist anymore) couldn't just go around assassinating political rivals with conspicuous, almost flamboyantly exotic poisons (then again, I suppose they do that more-or-less openly and with permission from their government, so, perhaps not the best example)?
Yeah... How little that would achieve. Why, Americans might feel safe traveling places more exotic than Western Europe and Australia, and where would that leave us? Why, practically anarchy, I say!
I didn't have a problem with him until I read his wikipedia page.
Complete jackasses still have a right to due process. And secret agencies that consider themselves above the law simply need to cease to exist.
Really, though, unless I missed something, his Wiki page has nothing all that damning. Some petty hacking, some (non-identity theft) carding, and a pump-and-dump on an already-dead company. Woo-hoo.
Except that he has a rare combination of tech savvy with business acumen, you'll find far, far more evil people going about their daily business of screwing the plebes in nearly every corporate boardroom in the world. Kim, at least, sounds like he just did it for kicks.
It's no joke, and it's happening all over the world, the scenario is converging for a catastrophic decline in fish populations.
Oh, come on, think of the bright side - This means great news for swarms of inedible poisonous jellyfish that can now thrive in the absence of their natural predators!
Argh! Slashdot ate my first try at a response here.
Anyway, I live in Maine, but it doesn't exactly count as an outlier in this regard - About a third of US states follow the basic minimum set of federal firearms regulations, and nothing more (though some have "more" in the opposite direction, such as "shall issue" requirements for CCWs).
The three day limit comes entirely from state law... So too does the need for any sort of permit (such as your FOID) just to own/use a firearm. You also don't need to "register" firearms by federal law.
Federal law really doesn't restrict much at all, and mostly just military-like functionality - No fully-automatics, no actually-effective suppressors, nothing over.50 caliber (with exceptions for shotguns), no short-barreled rifles or shotguns (not sure why a rat-shot pistol doesn't violate that), no ownership by convicted felons or self-identified drug addicts. Beyond that, just about anything goes.
Its more likely this is actually modelling the passage of a new batch of guns through the criminal underworld.
And then... These new guns dissolve into sea-foam after three or four uses?
I think you greatly overestimate the difficulty of getting a gun in the US.
You can literally pick one up during your lunch break, if you have a clean record. If you don't have a clean record, you need to go through all the trouble of buying from a show, or a third party (ie, private resale) rather than a licensed dealer. FWIW, a five minute Google search turns up about 1500 guns available through private sellers in my area (and though I don't live in NJ, I live well within a half-day's drive of it).
And going even further, the US only considers the lower receiver the actual "firearm" for regulatory purposes - You can buy everything else totally unregulated. And for someone handy with a torch, you can build a receiver yourself out of some pretty crude starting materials.
So, your entirely premise fails one simple test - It depends on not having guns readily available, which simply doesn't hold true.
This isn't a problem that differs in any meaningful way between 3D printing traditional 2D printing.
Absolutely true! But, perhaps, not in the way you intended...
In another 10 years, we'll all have our own 3D printers, just like with traditional 2D printing.
And FWIW, I don't know about Staples, but back before decent HQ color printers became ubiquitous, I never had any problem making copies of anything at Kinkos. Hell, I copied an entire textbook for one class (willing to buy it, but the college bookstore actually ran out, WTF?), and the clerk on duty showed me how to do it more efficiently.
So instead of $129 every 4/5 years, it's $25 each year. Yes, we're all being horribly ripped off.
Believe it or not, my time has value.
Aside from the hour or two it takes to do a proper install, then the day or two wasted trying to get all my must-have apps back up and running... Microsoft seems to have gotten obsessed with the "screw up the GUI as much as possible" across all its products lately. Vista, Metro, the god-awful "ribbons" in office... Each time I need to re-learn how to turn all that bullshit off, which can take weeks of half-productive time to get everything back to a usable state. And usually, you can't turn some of their new garbage off, so bam, stuck with something that doesn't work as well as plain old-school drop-down menus, forever.
So yeah, I would call that a ripoff. I care a hell of a lot more about my time, than I do about the cost of my OS.
But not before putting all links to Milorad Trkulja and all of his assets and associates on the Google search blacklist. Forever.
This. You want to sue Google to remove references to something vague involving you and a third party?
Google makes you vanish from the internet, forever and ever amen.
This asshat got his five minutes of Streisand fame by suing Google. Result? No one ever hears anything about him, ever again. Aspiring musician? Try "can't even get a job at Tesco because a Google search says you don't exist".
For groups designated as terrorist organization, "free speech" doesn't apply. It is illegal to provide a channel for such groups to communicate.
And how did it become illegal? Congress passed a law saying so.
But, funny thing about that, because "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press".
Who broke the law here? Not Twitter, not random spokesperson probably living in Western Europe, not even Hamas (well, not for their Twitter activity, anyway) - But the US Fucking Congress has broken the law by making such a law!
Of course, for the constitution to have any teeth, people would need to care, and no one does. So, would you like to join me for some liquid bread before the gladiatorial games this evening, Citizen?
most of this conflict is israel attempting to steal Palestinian land.
Most of modern history in the Middle East results from the UN sticking its fingers where they don't belong, randomly stealing a big chunk of land considered sacred to the natives, and giving it to Israel. "Aww, those mean Germans tried to eradicate you? Here, let's throw a dart at this map and give you... Hmm, yeah, I think I have a call on the other line, good luck with that new home".
Gee, wonder why they all hate us. Oh, right, for our "freedoms" - Like the freedom to not have someone randomly kick us out of our homes and give them to our ancient enemies.
They identify infrastructure that needs to be replaced/upgraded, go to the PUC with the list of improvements and petition for a rate increase to pay for them.
Natural gas occupies a somewhat unusual market position for a "utility", where it can actually compete purely on price against its competition. Currently, you see people changing over en masse because they can cut their winter heating bill in half. If that advantage were less dramatic (or even nonexistent), natural gas would all but vanish overnight ("Infrastructure upgrade fee? I call, a truck delivers it, end of story!").
Slashdot Mirror
Come on, the Internet is not a thing "paid for, developed and a thriving platform", it's a fucking convention.
Absolutely true! And if you want to roll your own internet, hey, we've done the groundwork, feel free to implement those protocols (hell, feel free to just take the already-implemented public domain code) and you can have your very own internet, domestically controlled. But as the real problem here, you don't want "an" internet - You want America's internet. You even say as much:
In France we were surfing on transpac and X25 before we joined the internet.
Before you joined the internet. Good choice of phrasing. But hey, now that we've kindly let you use it, can we just hand over the keys so you can run it, too?
If you really wanted to call it your own, then have fun surfing on your own web site.
You mean "web", not "site". And I can live with that - With the exception of the BBC, every single website I visit on a regular basis comes from the US. You, however, can't live with that, because most likely the majority of websites you visit (*cough* Slashdot *cough*) also get served from the US - Even the French language ones, just one more rack in a SoCal CoLo.
And honestly, I appreciate having you on the internet, I think it makes it a better place for both of us, sharing ideas across cultures like this. But at the end of the day, we own the ball, and we will take it home with us. And I consider it pretty damned insulting that the rest of the team has pulled a stunt like this, trying to "vote" the ball as no longer ours.
FTA: "In particular many attendees believed it was an anachronism that the US government got to decide which body should regulate the net's address system as a legacy of its funding for Arpanet - a precursor to the internet which helped form its technical core."
Yeah, that makes perfect sense, I can't imagine why the US didn't sign. "Hey, that thing you paid for, developed, and turned into a thriving platform for social and commercial activity? We don't like that you own it and we don't, so would you mind handing it over?".
One time a woman gets tasered and you go with the assumption that it wasn't a proper response. I have to ask, did you even RTFA and do any basic research or are you just reacting to the ridiculously sensationalist headline?
Well, when they already have her pinned to the ground - Damn straight "it wasn't a proper response"!
Cuff her and drag her to the car if she won't walk, but at the point they already have their suspect subdued, tazing someone amounts to nothing less than torturing them out of petty vindictiveness.
it's one agency allowed to centralize it instead of every little local agency keeping it forever.
You left out the part where they can then share that aggregated data (including 3rd party private commercial data - such as your credit card history or your medical history - otherwise unobtainable without a warrant) and share it with anyone. Not just other spy orgs, but whomever the hell they feel like chatting with.
Oh gee, forgot to pay use tax on that TV you bought in a neighboring state with no sales tax? No worries, they can forward that right off to your state's revenue service for processing all the appropriate fines! You work for a Catholic school? Hmm, pity how they somehow found out about that abortion. Hiding out from a psycho ex who consider restraining orders nothing more than toilet paper? Oops, he had some info the NCTC wanted, so they traded him a wad of info about you for it.
All fucking legal.
I'd rather have one agency with a long time limit than a hundred agencies with long time limits...
I'd rather have zero agencies allowed to completely ignore those pesky ol' constitutional protections regarding things like due process, search and seizure, and so on.
I've seen PR flacks spin before
Whoosh!
Figures, Best Korea would launch a satellite with a bad attitude.
Pity, Japan's having pitching a fit over NK's poor angle of attack, but y'all just need to get over it - NK clearly has no inclination to just roll over and take it!
A well written program doesn't NEED an error handler.
Okay, tough-guy... "The specified network name is no longer available". Explain how you avoid needing to handle that.
You'd never do this on purpose, but its rather easy to accomplish in practice.
;)
You have too much faith in humanity, friend!
I hate hate hate the exception-handling model of dealing with errors, because in practice, I've seen very, very little code that actually handles the error. People either:
1) Use far too coarse grained a "try" (as in, on the entire function), giving almost no possibility of knowing what actually happened or how to recover,
2) Use the "catch" just to tell the user "golly, it broke, try again later" rather than accidentally revealing the ugly (but meaningful) exception text,
3) Assume nothing in the "try" could actually fail and only do it to satisfy their company's code auditors, so the catch does... nothing, or
4) (My "favorite") - copy the entire body of the "try" into the "catch" and blindly do it again!
When used correctly, exception handling doesn't make your code cleaner, it reduces to a slightly more verbose way of checking return values. You should, if you want any hope of really dealing with the error, wrap every call in its own try/catch. I have not ever seen that done (and honestly, I can't claim I do it as religiously as I should either - I tend to trust my own code (big mistake), and only do that for external calls).
Then again, how do you handle the system volume suddenly vanishing out from under you? So, perhaps the coarse-grained "golly, it broke, try again later" folks have the right idea.
Don't forget that they have bills and salaries to pay. They can't sit back and live off a trickle of money, hoping it will grow at some point in the future. It's either make decent money or start laying off.
Any of which counts as Microsoft's problem why, exactly?
It is a new platform but Microsoft made certain promises to developers
So if I write Pong 2013 for Surface, should I expect the full marketing force of Microsoft to make sure my crappy app makes a certain minimum profit?
Microsoft earns its fair share of scorn. They don't deserve any here, however - Rubicon gets all the credit for backing a dead horse.
Reread your article bud, they declined to hear.
Declined to hear an appeal to a lower court's ruling that we couldn't sue. As the US has no higher authority to petition for redress - We can't sue, simple as that.
you have failed to actually list any of their worth.
I maintain that they have no worth. You've said nothing to counter that, but, as I obviously can't prove a negative, I guess that ends the thread.
Wow, you really eat this shit up.
Every single point I made (with the possible exception of the Russian government actually having control of their own intelligence agencies - I'd call that one open to debate) amounts to pure documented fact. Not speculation, not even stretching the data to fit an information vacuum.
Though, I suppose you might not remember the Iran Contra affair. You might not have flown in the past 10 years. You might not read Slashd... Oh... No, I guess you do. Huh, funny that.
You can list as many of the negatives as you wish but your argument has no merit if you only include those.
Remind me which branch of the US government controls the GCSB (in case you need a cite for that one, click on the FP link for this very thread) or the KGB? Or hey, we can throw the Mossad in there if you like. I could go on, they pretty much all have a list of publicly known sins a mile long. The US only dominates the list out of sheer volume, not as anything special.
We do have the right to [sue] AT&T et al, actually.
No, we don't, actuallydon't . I am not really sure where the whole travel point is going as it is patently incorrect.
Funny, the US Department of State seems to know what I meant. Perhaps you should re-read it if you didn't get it the first time?
but before making idealistic declarations actually consider how it would be achieved and how little benefit it would be.
You mean, consider what it would mean if the CIA hadn't turned the entire Middle East against us by selling arms to both sides just for shits and giggles? If they hadn't run the world drug trade through the 80s, leaving all of Central America and most of Mexico under the control of the drug cartels? If they hadn't made the whole world hate us by running secret torture prisons through the 2000s (and probably still do it today)? If we didn't have to undergo irradiation by an unlicensed medical imaging device to board a plane just because the DHS think silly little things like auditable 3rd party calibration would give away too many of their secrets? If we actually had the right to sue AT&T et al (never mind the actual criminals in the government) for colluding with the NSA so they could illegally watch every bit we send or receive domestically?
Imagine if agencies like the GCSB had to actually obey the law? How, then, would they secretly get scum like Kim Dotcom, who poses a threat to no one except Hollywood, off for a bit o' the ol' waterboarding? If the KGB (yeah, sure they don't exist anymore) couldn't just go around assassinating political rivals with conspicuous, almost flamboyantly exotic poisons (then again, I suppose they do that more-or-less openly and with permission from their government, so, perhaps not the best example)?
Yeah... How little that would achieve. Why, Americans might feel safe traveling places more exotic than Western Europe and Australia, and where would that leave us? Why, practically anarchy, I say!
I didn't have a problem with him until I read his wikipedia page.
Complete jackasses still have a right to due process. And secret agencies that consider themselves above the law simply need to cease to exist.
Really, though, unless I missed something, his Wiki page has nothing all that damning. Some petty hacking, some (non-identity theft) carding, and a pump-and-dump on an already-dead company. Woo-hoo.
Except that he has a rare combination of tech savvy with business acumen, you'll find far, far more evil people going about their daily business of screwing the plebes in nearly every corporate boardroom in the world. Kim, at least, sounds like he just did it for kicks.
It's no joke, and it's happening all over the world, the scenario is converging for a catastrophic decline in fish populations.
Oh, come on, think of the bright side - This means great news for swarms of inedible poisonous jellyfish that can now thrive in the absence of their natural predators!
You didn't like swimming, did you?
Argh! Slashdot ate my first try at a response here.
.50 caliber (with exceptions for shotguns), no short-barreled rifles or shotguns (not sure why a rat-shot pistol doesn't violate that), no ownership by convicted felons or self-identified drug addicts. Beyond that, just about anything goes.
Anyway, I live in Maine, but it doesn't exactly count as an outlier in this regard - About a third of US states follow the basic minimum set of federal firearms regulations, and nothing more (though some have "more" in the opposite direction, such as "shall issue" requirements for CCWs).
The three day limit comes entirely from state law... So too does the need for any sort of permit (such as your FOID) just to own/use a firearm. You also don't need to "register" firearms by federal law.
Federal law really doesn't restrict much at all, and mostly just military-like functionality - No fully-automatics, no actually-effective suppressors, nothing over
Its more likely this is actually modelling the passage of a new batch of guns through the criminal underworld.
And then... These new guns dissolve into sea-foam after three or four uses?
I think you greatly overestimate the difficulty of getting a gun in the US.
You can literally pick one up during your lunch break, if you have a clean record. If you don't have a clean record, you need to go through all the trouble of buying from a show, or a third party (ie, private resale) rather than a licensed dealer. FWIW, a five minute Google search turns up about 1500 guns available through private sellers in my area (and though I don't live in NJ, I live well within a half-day's drive of it).
And going even further, the US only considers the lower receiver the actual "firearm" for regulatory purposes - You can buy everything else totally unregulated. And for someone handy with a torch, you can build a receiver yourself out of some pretty crude starting materials.
So, your entirely premise fails one simple test - It depends on not having guns readily available, which simply doesn't hold true.
This isn't a problem that differs in any meaningful way between 3D printing traditional 2D printing.
Absolutely true! But, perhaps, not in the way you intended...
In another 10 years, we'll all have our own 3D printers, just like with traditional 2D printing.
And FWIW, I don't know about Staples, but back before decent HQ color printers became ubiquitous, I never had any problem making copies of anything at Kinkos. Hell, I copied an entire textbook for one class (willing to buy it, but the college bookstore actually ran out, WTF?), and the clerk on duty showed me how to do it more efficiently.
So instead of $129 every 4/5 years, it's $25 each year. Yes, we're all being horribly ripped off.
Believe it or not, my time has value.
Aside from the hour or two it takes to do a proper install, then the day or two wasted trying to get all my must-have apps back up and running... Microsoft seems to have gotten obsessed with the "screw up the GUI as much as possible" across all its products lately. Vista, Metro, the god-awful "ribbons" in office... Each time I need to re-learn how to turn all that bullshit off, which can take weeks of half-productive time to get everything back to a usable state. And usually, you can't turn some of their new garbage off, so bam, stuck with something that doesn't work as well as plain old-school drop-down menus, forever.
So yeah, I would call that a ripoff. I care a hell of a lot more about my time, than I do about the cost of my OS.
But not before putting all links to Milorad Trkulja and all of his assets and associates on the Google search blacklist. Forever.
This. You want to sue Google to remove references to something vague involving you and a third party?
Google makes you vanish from the internet, forever and ever amen.
This asshat got his five minutes of Streisand fame by suing Google. Result? No one ever hears anything about him, ever again. Aspiring musician? Try "can't even get a job at Tesco because a Google search says you don't exist".
Don't fuck with Google.
Pla, you are hearby notified of a gathering at LCZ's in Narragansett, RI on Wotan's Day the 19'th of December.
;)
Why, thank you! Yeah, I haven't checked my email much on Entropy these days. I'll check my calendar later and see if I can make it.
So, you think perhaps my handle gives me a bit of an apparent lack of neutrality in any I/P discussions?
If only your ignorant anti-semitic views were the truth.
Both sides of this dispute count as Semites. But don't let me stop you from an otherwise fine rant.
For groups designated as terrorist organization, "free speech" doesn't apply. It is illegal to provide a channel for such groups to communicate.
And how did it become illegal? Congress passed a law saying so.
But, funny thing about that, because "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press".
Who broke the law here? Not Twitter, not random spokesperson probably living in Western Europe, not even Hamas (well, not for their Twitter activity, anyway) - But the US Fucking Congress has broken the law by making such a law!
Of course, for the constitution to have any teeth, people would need to care, and no one does. So, would you like to join me for some liquid bread before the gladiatorial games this evening, Citizen?
most of this conflict is israel attempting to steal Palestinian land.
Most of modern history in the Middle East results from the UN sticking its fingers where they don't belong, randomly stealing a big chunk of land considered sacred to the natives, and giving it to Israel. "Aww, those mean Germans tried to eradicate you? Here, let's throw a dart at this map and give you... Hmm, yeah, I think I have a call on the other line, good luck with that new home".
Gee, wonder why they all hate us. Oh, right, for our "freedoms" - Like the freedom to not have someone randomly kick us out of our homes and give them to our ancient enemies.
It's not about clicking the ads, it's about the impressions. Oftentimes the ads are about increasing awareness of a brand's existence.
Free hint - If you use such aggressive ads that they make it through my filters and I actually see them, I intentionally won't buy your product.
Your move.
They identify infrastructure that needs to be replaced/upgraded, go to the PUC with the list of improvements and petition for a rate increase to pay for them.
Natural gas occupies a somewhat unusual market position for a "utility", where it can actually compete purely on price against its competition. Currently, you see people changing over en masse because they can cut their winter heating bill in half. If that advantage were less dramatic (or even nonexistent), natural gas would all but vanish overnight ("Infrastructure upgrade fee? I call, a truck delivers it, end of story!").