Classic anti-competitive behavior. They'll never be able to defend this in court.

In New York there are so many illegally parked cops that there's a whole web site devoted to them.

http://nyc.uncivilservants.org/

Congratulations! Perhaps now you can buy a server, so I won't spend so much time watching my browser say "waiting for dynamic.fmpub.net"

Ha, the joke's on them! It's not even snowing in San Francisco!

This doesn't seem threatening. To me the letter just says that they have contracts with the state and they intend to enforce the contract. A threat would go something like "If you write anything about our voting machine we'll sue your pants off!"

It's hard to tell if the skin job on the left is a mannequin or what.

This is the kind of tech-wanking blog entry you get when you have an iPhone and a Mac and don't step outside the walled garden much. The Blackberry and several other models of phones were already doing cell tower geolocation long before Apple bothered to slap it on their iPhone. If anything, the article should be about how you get the shaft when you buy into the Apple/AT&T locked system, and you become accustomed to being glad that you get features at all. Meanwhile people using authentic open platforms have had these features for eons.

Based on my own experience, McDonalds has been doing this for at least 20 years.

The Bravia commercial _was_ for real.

JKWATSON, it doesn't mean anything of the sort. For example, nobody I know can click this link without getting the "sorry" page.

http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:view&num=100&hl=en&start=200&sa=N

This is not some link that I made up.. it's Google's own link to the second page of the results for this search.

My company was completely shut off from Google for one day with this nonsense (in English, not Spanish). I don't know what Google thinks they are gaining from this, but unless their operations are teetering on the brink of collapse it seems like they should try to be a bit more liberal in what they allow.

I don't see that, Punctilious Pig. The police decided the topless woman was an attractive nuisance, but they could arrest her because going topless was legal. So instead they decided to arrest the men. Seems simple to me.

Also, there's an easy rule-of-thumb that will help you get through life: if you read it in Reason, or you hear it from a Libertarian, it's probably exaggerated.

Incorrect summary. The woman is not a police officer, and she was in the park and topless of her own accord.

Look no further than the Mobiblu DAH-220, which is exactly what you describe: a flash drive that actually plays back in your tape deck. Even rewind and fast forward work.

@DCulberson, I'm not saying anything about myself. What I am saying is that contrary to popular belief, title is not absolute. Title comes up against custom in the form of adverse possession. If it has become customary for people to cross your land, or graze their livestock on your land, or raise a garden or even live on your land, and if that goes on for a long time, and if it's generally known that you are doing that, then the court will weight your interest against the interest of the title holder. I think it's a pretty reasonable balance.

Think of other situations. Suppose you have access to a road across someone else's land, and you customarily cross that other person's land to reach the road, and you do that for years. Suppose then that the land is sold. Can the new property owner cut off your access to the road? Probably not. A court can rule that you are entitled to an easement, or maybe even entitled to take possession of the property in question.

What these people did may not have been neighborly, but to portray it as a legal oddity is wrong.

I guess you guys attended all the libertarian property rights extremism seminars but skipped ethics class. A person obtains an easement on land through adverse possession -- a completely legal process -- and your reaction is arson. Brilliant.

The only weird thing about this story is that you think adverse possession is obscure or wrong. There are many good reasons why adverse possession, or squatting, exists. Among other things it prevents a greedy landowner from allowing a valuable activity to develop, then suddenly charging a toll for access, in the real estate equivalent of a submarine patent. It also protects valuable land from disuse, and protects the public's interest in access to public lands.