Free Talk Live

With cigarette prices up and the number of smoke-friendly places down, the black market for loosies is now thriving on the streets. Rarely does a minute go by without a customer stopping just long enough to pass a dollar bill to Lonnie Loosie, known to the police by his given name, Lonnie Warner, 50. “The tax went up, and we started selling 10 times as much,” Mr. Warner said.

On Monday state police in Kentucky, one of the 19 states that have banned salvia, arrested Jo Ann Warner, owner of Dusty's Adult World in Mortons Gap, and charged her with 23 counts of "prohibited practices concerning substances that simulate controlled substances," a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail for each count. Here the government takes a law that should not exist and kicks it up another nonsensical notch, criminalizing not only consensual drug transactions but actions that resemble them.

The major record labels are known for their harsh stance on copyright infringements, which in an ironic turn of events is now costing them millions of dollars. Revealing a double standard when it comes to ‘piracy’, Warner Music, Sony BMG Music, EMI Music and Universal Music now have to pay Canadian artists $45 Million for the illegal use of thousands of tracks on compilation CDs.

Ryobi was sued by a customer who injured his hand while operating a table saw. The plaintiff contended that, had Ryobi included a competitor's patented "Stop Saw" technology, the injury would've been prevented. Ryobi wanted to include that technology, but the competitor refused to license the technology at a price Ryobi could afford to pay while still selling a competing product. Thanks to patent law, Ryobi gets to pay anyway, and a "citizen" has a permanently damaged hand.

This year saw the birth of a new, private bus company in Detroit, and it’s called the Detroit Bus Company. The owner and founder, 25-year-old Andy Didorosi, was a guest on Mitch Albom’s show today, where he stated that his company is “trying to change what people think about buses.” In other words, his company does not tool around the city in monstrous, shabby, dirty, disgusting cages on wheels that are driven by 400-pound, sedentary maniacs who have nothing to lose, especially their union-protected, government job.

Websites that link to pirated music and movies or sell counterfeit goods could soon be blocked in America.

The Center for Copyright Information (CCI) is part of the group's controversial "graduated response" effort: a partnership between Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, the MPAA, RIAA, and others that will enforce copyright claims against customers by serving them with warnings and escalating penalties.

FZ talks about classical music, nuclear war, how business will prevent wars, distribution deal with EMI, lawsuits against Warner and CBS, hatred in the rest of the world vs. non-hatred in the US.

Note: Submitted Digg link because this system won't accept youtube URLs.

Firearms seized by the Tippecanoe County Sheriff's Office during the past decade could help pay for new protective vests for deputies.Sheriff Tracy Brown said his agency expects to dispose of 141 confiscated firearms sometime later this year through a Lafayette-based company called Certified Firearms Solutions.After the firearms, which have been confiscated as a result of arrests or other law enforcement activities, are sold to the company, they will be dismantled. Any still-working parts can be sold to firearms manufacturers for cash, Brown said.