UVB-76

This stop was part of their investigation. How else are they supposed to eliminate the seller from their enquiries into the stolen laptop?

A person can be lawfully detained with reasonable suspicion alone, and it sounds like the police had it in this case.

In the process of detaining someone, the police can use reasonable force. The use of Taser was probably not necessary, but it could well have been reasonable.

The article is silent on the robbery in which Derek's laptop was stolen, but if it were aggravated, and the police had reasonable suspicion they were detaining the person responsible for that robbery, then the use of force is all the more reasonable.

The police detained him, I suspect, because they were satisfied they had reasonable suspicion he was handling stolen goods.

He consented to a stranger searching his laptop, and the Fourth Amendment provides no protections against that.

He consented to the search of the laptop before being detained. He did not know it was an undercover police officer conducting the search, but that is not relevant.

He was subsequently detained, until such time as it became obvious he was innocent, and then released.

Police can detain with reasonable suspicion alone, and it is entirely likely they had reasonable suspicion in this case.

Because he was suspected of handling stolen goods.

Perhaps the cops were going after him for false advertising...

Edit: A point made in jest, but in all seriousness, if he had actually advertised it as a 14-inch model, it would add to a reasonable suspicion that the laptop was not his.

You see this all the time with stolen bicycles advertised online. You can spot the stolen ones a mile off, because the seller doesn't have a clue what it is they are selling.

Existing content is not being destroyed.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/12/government-to-f...

The license fee is so high because the BBC are throwing money at things like this.

BBC Good Food is a commercial offering from BBC Worldwide and is unaffected.

As always, if you don't perceive any bias, it's probably just because you have the same biases.

[1] http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files...

Totally objective news reporting is virtually impossible, and BBC News certainly has its biases.

That is not what is currently being proposed, however.

Even in the worst case scenario, they will certainly be archived and made available unofficially.

The real issue is that, until this point, virtually every British household has been forced (and enforced, by thousands of criminal convictions every year) to fund a bland, outdated, unnecessary recipe website.

The BBC does not exist to provide generic content that pleases the masses. The BBC should not be popular.

If a service is popular, it is likely commercially viable, and should not therefore be subsidised by the license fee.

Existing content is not being destroyed.

Of course it's a moot point because companies don't have citizens' best interests in mind. They want cheap labor, big markets, lobbying power, and regulations that raise barriers to entry for their industries.

On all of those counts, the EU is fantastic for big business, but not necessarily for ordinary citizens.

That an inevitable correction has been delayed by sustained government efforts does not make predictions of a correction any less prescient.

It's the best of a bad bunch.

I've spent most of the last five years hoping Apple are re-writing the thing from scratch, and have been neglecting any meaningful updates to the current fork in the meantime, but I'm losing hope.

As you mention, many people will be able to borrow against the value of the property to pay the taxes.

Unfortunately it is indeed a political problem. What the UK really needs is an enormous, publicly-funded house building programme, but that would of course harm existing homeowners.

Taxes on property transfers (capital gains, stamp duty, etc.) also create hysteresis in the market, which should be discouraged.

It's much easier to implement a council tax style system, with non-payment a criminal offence, and the ultimate (if extreme) threat of property confiscation quite practical to go through with.

Reduce payments for everyone in the existing bands, and hike the payments dramatically for the new, higher value bands.

As with income tax, have the most wealthy paying the majority of the tax.

This is a slightly less crude version of the 'Mansion Tax' Labour and Lib Dems have previously proposed.

If you own a £5m property which is appreciating even at an extremely conservative 2% pa (£100k), you should be paying a lot more than £2k pa in tax.

That's before you even get into the fact most properties are still banded according to 1991 valuations.