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    How ISPs can sell your Web history—and how to stop them

    Actually, it can if you route all your mobile traffic through your home VPN. Example. Let's say you have a VPN that you contracted in Switzerland. You set up an incoming VPN on your home router. Configure your mobile device/laptop to use your home router as your VPN endpoint while away from...
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    How ISPs can sell your Web history—and how to stop them

    "B" is a good way of ending up on terrorist watch lists world wide.
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    Judge: eBay can’t be sued over seller accused of patent infringement

    Question is irrelevant. Repeat after me "Patents are not a copyright. Copyright is not a patent." Now write this 100 times after school.
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    Mayo Clinic under fire for prioritizing patients with private insurance

    Which is totally irrelevant. YOU aren't paying the bill. You pay the copay and the insurance company pays the rest. The insurance company is rich and that's why private insurance companies get priority over the government program which has rigid rules that are inflexible and won't pay for all...
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    Trump begins process to roll back fuel economy goals, automakers rejoice

    I think both sides (administration & environmental activists) are after red herrings here. The administration is assuming people are actually going to buy less fuel efficient cars and that fuel prices will remain at current levels to allow such vehicles to be accepted by the market. It...
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    Switching apartment metering shocks electricity freeloaders into conservation

    I've seen things like this happen with other utilities, personally. It's anecdotal, but I did once live in a townhouse complex where the natural gas utility is metered building wide rather than individually. Most of the residents are "good citizens", meaning they are reasonable in their use of...
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    Hacker George Hotz cancels Model S order after Tesla reminds him about IP theft

    The usual disclaimer, IANAL. However, I do have some experience with the auto repair business. Tesla may actually be on shaky legal ground with their "talk". It is in fact in many states required for car makers to release repair manuals, diagnostic codes, etc for 3rd party repair shops to be...
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    US wind capacity surpasses hydro, overall generation to follow

    "But as wind can be installed fast, more cheaply, and with far lower environmental impact, the reprieve is certain to be temporary." I think we need to be careful in making such broad sweeping statements on environmental impacts on newly deployed industry and technology. We as a nation made...
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    Famous patent troll’s lawsuit against Google booted out of East Texas

    Unfortunately, while not legally such, in practice true. All the patent lawsuits filed in the East Texas District have had a salutary knock-on effect to the local economy. It's like small towns straddling major highways with speed limits that drop so precipitously it's nearly impossible for...
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    Famous patent troll’s lawsuit against Google booted out of East Texas

    The problem with the US courts in general has been very firmly pointed out over the years, and a (perhaps apocryphal) quote by Andrew Jackson summed it up: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" The idea presented is, under the US system the police and armed forces fall...
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    House members: EPA officials may be using Signal to “spread their goals covertly”

    To Lamar Smith: Bullying people for doing their jobs makes you a jack ass. Don't be surprised if they start shutting you out of their conversations so they can get their job done without interference from political pricks like you with axes to grind on behalf of special interests and...
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    Tesla employee writes of low wages, poor morale; company denies claims

    Having worked on cars like this under warranty back in the late 80s and 90s when GM had several different models with this problem I can definitely tell you this is not an EPA problem. It's a problem with the quality of materials and preparation procedures. These days the paint on a car is...
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    Tesla employee writes of low wages, poor morale; company denies claims

    Musk trying to work with the current Administration is simply business politics. It doesn't mean he endorses the Administration's policies. It *does* mean he's trying to shape those policies in ways less detrimental to his business. Being against unionization of his facility also doesn't mean...
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    Tesla employee writes of low wages, poor morale; company denies claims

    Musk's claim that Jose Moran is a union plant rings true. My wife, who's a nurse, had something similar happen in one of the facilities she worked in Ohio (prime union territory). The national unions target a non-unionized facility (or group of facilities), and try to get ringers hired on the...
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    38,000-year-old carving includes enigmatic “punctuation” pattern

    From the spirit of the long dead artist(s): Seriously... we got bored just like you do...
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    How talking about song lyrics got patented

    Seems to me the "never ending stream of resubmission" to wear down the examiner could be solved with a similar feature from the US court system "dismissed with prejudice". If a patent is dismissed with prejudice then the core assertions of the patent aren't patentable to begin with regardless...
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    Netflix is so big that it doesn’t need net neutrality rules anymore

    I think Netflix is being short sighted even to its investors in this case. They are more or less correct that ISPs aren't likely to directly cause them issues because of their size and popularity. That is, they have the clout to negotiate deals for their own bandwidth. My concern is that with...
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    Yahoo board drops to five, Mayer is out, name changed to Altaba

    From my experience the reason a "a lot of folk have Yahoo! as their home page" is from scumware installs over the years changing people's search engine, home page, and other browser settings without their explicit permission. There was at least one "helper program" floating around out there in...
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    Screenshots leak of “Neon,” Microsoft’s next design language

    Says you. The southpaws in the world would like to tell you where to shove your right handed centric use scenarios like right handed control gestures on tablets - and having the X in the upper RIGHT hand corner on touch interfaces which is completely counter intuitive for left handers. I...
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    Screenshots leak of “Neon,” Microsoft’s next design language

    All I can say is that I hope it's an actual apology for how brain dead Win10's basic UI is even on a tablet. I have one and it's even more irritating (in either tablet or desktop mode WITH a full Bluetooth keyboard) than it is on the desktop! Luckily someone else bought it, or it'd have gone...