Comment Re:First Amendment (Score 1) 131
You can shout "Fire" in a theater. There is no such prohibition anywhere. Especially if there is a fire. What you can't do, which doesn't fall into 1st Amendment arena, is causing panic without cause.
Congratulations, here's your medal for pedantic dickweedery. The example of shouting "Fire!" in a theater has always had the implicit assumption that there isn't really a fire. Everyone (except you, apparently) knows that, which is why nobody bothers saying it every time they bring up the example.
Comment Re: China is a totalitarian hell (Score 1) 142
Notice how you didn't say the People were in charge?
You mean Communism?
Comment Re:First Amendment (Score 5, Insightful) 131
The first amendment doesn't protect pyramid schemes, or robbing liquor stores.
Or, more to the point, bribery of public officials.
Comment Re:I've literally seen it done (Score 1) 80
He squints at me, looks me up and down for a long while, then says: "For you........ I give to you seven hundred and fifty swabs for two pieces of silver only.
And that's cutting me own throat.
Comment Re:I'm still wondering (Score 1) 224
Wait until you find out about corporate fiscal years.
Comment Re:I wonder how long till the CIA (Score 1) 122
Man, you must be fun at parties...
If any of us were fun at parties, we wouldn't be on Slashdot.
Comment Re:Ironically I was quite a trekkie until this yea (Score 2) 206
So many of the plotlines are just neoliberal both-side bullshit refusing to take an actual moral stance on anything.
To be fair, Babylon 5 did that once in a while too. JMS said that his job wasn't to answer questions, it was to start bar fights. Believers is the prime example, though it's probably one of the least liked episodes of the entire show.
Comment Re:Could get them users back (Score 1) 87
Comment Re: Induced demand is BS (Score 1) 149
How much more tax do I currently pay for mass transit I never use? $500 car tabs, anyone?
... This translates to $110 per year for every $10,000 of your vehicle's calculated value.
If you own a car that's valued at $50,000 after the year you buy it, you can easily afford $500 in tax.
Comment Re:I remember when the phone companies (Score 1) 38
That's the neat thing - they haven't stopped doing this! The subsidized phone price the carriers give you when signing up is priced into the service plan. If you don't upgrade again when you're eligible (perhaps because you're elderly and don't follow the promotions), that's now all gravy for the carrier.
Do any carriers still do that? I haven't checked AT&T or Verizon, but with T-Mobile you can buy a phone from them and they just add the price to your bill over 24 months.
I think T-Mobile has only done it that way for at least a decade. I know that when I bought my Nokia N900 15+ years ago, I switched to T-Mobile because they were already giving a $20/month discount if you already owned a phone.
Comment Re:Hard to see Meta Losing (Score 1) 81
Comment Re:Hard to see Meta Losing (Score 5, Informative) 81
The employees have to prove that their protected status was targeted to win, and that is a pretty tough sell IMO. It seems like the protected status was more of a side effect of "performance."
Not at all. If they use a metric of "Worked at least X hours in the past 12 months", and a person worked fewer than X hours because they were on parental leave, firing them would not be a "side effect of performance", it would be a direct violation of their legal protection.
Comment Re:Stop selling it to AI datacenters (Score 1) 83
At least if the manufacturers are the ones making the additional money they can invest back into production capacity.
Hahaha
Oh, you were serious. Let me laugh harder.