Yes, let's encourage people to take things from taxpayers for free because of a small number of dramatic and disturbing instances. And let's think through the consequences of applying a post-fire fine. Such a policy would mean almost everyone would forgo paying the annual fee, banking on the likelihood that they will not have a fire more than once every ten years, if that often. The revenue structure will collpase, and the district will no longer be able to afford to provide service at all, leaving even more people at risk or in the likely circumstance of paying even more for fire service.

Didnone of your parents teachyou the concept that choices have consequences? If you choose to ignore an affordable annual fee that helps keep your house safe, you have made a bad choice that has a dire consequence. Pain applied, mistake unlikely to be repeated. Lesson learned. Growth achieved.

Liberals, you have your hearts in the right place, but you've got an awful lot of it all wrong, I'm sorry to say.

Google Latitude. Decent privacy policy, requires a login to access your data, periodically emails to let you know its collecting data. And you have to actually install it to get it to work. And when you do ... you get information and features that you don't need to be a security researcher to figure out how to access!

It's a strange day when I am on the same side of an issue as Al Franken.

Mislead much, Consumerist? The linked story clearly states the sentence was for disorderly conduct AND drug possession, not for "unlawful yelling at a receipt checker."

Way to get your peeps all stirred up while simultaneously reducing what little credibility you have left.

Consumers Union should be embarrassed they bought you.

Oh, no, not another gloved Purell-spewing germophobic lab rat.

Please.

Go study babies and young toddlers for a while ... they crawl all over the floor, stick their hands in their mouths, then put their now-moist hands back on the ground and crawl some more, repeating the process ad infinitum. And let's be honest parents, how often do you wash their hands? Despite not having fully developed immune systems, such young children rarely contract serious diseases, and I feel safe in saying that most of those they do contract they get from their germy little friends.

If you have a compromised immune system, or you're already sick, it probably makes sense to take a few extra precautions, and that would likely include tossing food that falls on the floor. But if you're otherwise healthy, you're almost certainly not going to die, you're most likely not going to get sick, and and if you get sick, the most likely result is you'll poo a lot for a few days.

I suspect the doctor, and Consumerist, would contribute more to the progress of human health to promote frequent hand-washing and teaching people to avoid cross-contamination of food rather than worrying if someone eats something they drop on the floor.

The fact of the matter is that most home kitchens would come perilously close to failing a restaurant health inspection, and many would fail outright, and most home cooks have very little clue about food safety. Yet we all merrily cook up meals morning noon and night in places that are teeming with sometimes dangerous bacteria without giving it a second thought.

Android may have a sizeable market share for devices, but the device really isn't the point. It's simply a platform deliver content, and Apple has a dominant position in terms of that content. It is the largest music distributor in the country and in dollar terms controls a significantly larger share of the content market than any other company.

Nope. Apple's terms of service require that iOS consumers get at least the same deal offered consumers outside of the ecosystem. So distributors can't charge a premium to iOS users to cover the Apple tax and will instead either have to abandon the market or charge all consumers more. Because the iOS ecosystem is so important to a distributor's overall mobile strategy, most will be unable to abandon the market. They will, instead, charge all consumers more, although they may look to hide it in some inconsequential expansion of content or services.

This isn't about directly about profit for Apple. This is about controlling content distributors.

It's the same play Wal-Mart made in meatspace ... create a distribution system of such size and scope that it's impossible to ignore, then force the companies that sell into the market to submit to your demands.

The iTunes store is already the largest music distribution platform in the U.S. and the iPhone/iPad ecoystem offers the single dominant mobile distribution strategy.

Given that Apple already exercises a significant choke hold over the content distribution system in the desktop and mobile channels, it's not a simple matter for content distributors of opting out of the system to protect their profits.

So Rhapsody may make noises about quitting iOS, but I cannot imagine what that would do to their customer base. What will instead happen is that consumers will be forced to pay higher prices across all platforms.

That's the real play here ... forcing content distributors into a system that they cannot easily leave and then start bleeding them, the effect on consumers be damned.

When will people wake up to the fact that no matter how shiny and "magical" the iOS devices are, the content distribution system associated with the ecosystem is toxic to consumer choice, the geeks' vaunted grail of net neutrality and even the very fundamental concept of freedom of speech? Apple is, after all, quite happy to censor content it does not believe its customers want, regardless of what the customers actually think about it.

Let's contrast that to Amazon, which despite owning a closed book distribution platform in the Kindle, had to be literally shamed into pulling a book from the Kindle store because it believes in the right of consumers to make their own choices about content.

If Apple continues to grow unchecked, if its dominance over the mobile space continues to expand without limitation, it very well could become the gatekeeper through which all manner of ideas and information must pass, be sanitized and be approved, before reaching the screens of choice of the majority of the population.

My only hope, and it's a thin one, is that should higher prices emerge from this policy, as I believe they will, Apple may well face an anti-trust investigation by the government that could result in fairly negative consequences for the company.

Then again, we've seen how those sorts of things have worked out in the past (See "AT&T"). I don't have a lot of hope that things things would turn out any differently this time.

It may be Apple's app store, and they most certainly can do what they want with it, but there's a much larger issue here.

If Apple, which currently makes more than half of the entire profit earned by the handset industry, continues to spread its dominance in the mobile market, there is a very distinct possibility that it will be able to wield so much influence that it will be able to set the terms by which mobile content is distributed WORLDWIDE. Everyone would have to pass through the Apple Silo, reducing competition and choice in the marketplace. While Apple might, benevolently, hold down prices and continue to enforce its standards of taste and quality, it is without question that such a regime would cause a retraction in innovation and experimentation in content that is not only a question of consumer preference, but one of information freedom and, I'd dare see, democracy.

If Apple becomes the vertical through which virtually all "professional" and "amateur" content is distributed in the increasingly important mobile world, Apple then, by logical consequence, controls who can reach audiences, with what content and by what means.

I am constantly amazed that the casual supporters of net neutrality don't seem to understand that their beloved Apple is a HUGE threat to that very concept and could, if not hip-checked in a very strong way, end the internet revolution in pursuit of ever greater corporate profits.

That you like Apple products is fine, and if you think your only obligation in society is to buy things you like, then so be it. But please don't preach, then about global warming, or factory farming or anything else that gets you all bowed up. Because supporting the rise of a corporation to the level that it can wield sufficient leverage to control the information market in an unprecedented way is FAR more injurious than someone buying a Caddy or enjoying a steak.

I'd recommend that you read Tim Wu's excellent book, "The Master Switch" for an in-depth examination of these issues.

This is about akin to an auto show following an incident in which a drunk plows into a crowd of people, killing some of them.

Or home show the weekend after some fruitbat burns down his house and kills his family because they weren't all named Ralph or something.

In other words, the two have virtually nothing to do with one another.

The shooting was perpetrated by an obviously disturbed individual for whom laws had no relevance. The gun show was perpetrated by capitalist gun enthusiasts whose customers, overwhelmingly, follow gun acquisition and ownership laws and don't misuse their weapons.

The issue in the Arizona shooting is not one of gun ownership, it is instead an indictment of a culture in which no one, individuals, institutions, government or even parents, takes responsibility for getting disturbed individuals the mental health treatment they need.

Let's talk about that. Let's not spend a lot of time demonizing people who live within the laws.