That's verbal. You can swear up and down that you phrased it "I won't even negotiate for less than $30k," and then refuse every offer they send you in the negotiation and you're fine because they don't have an actual record of what you said. If they email you an offer for $5k, and you respond with a "firm $30k," and it's all in writing because it's email, that's a much different legal problem. They have a Federal case should they choose to pursue it.

You can probably get out of the deal, but that's going to depend on the exact phrasing of the rest of your emails to/from them, and you're going to need an actual Federal contract attorney. The Judge might even buy "I was just joking" as a defense because both parties have to be seriously negotiating for it to be a real contract negotiation, but the judge might not buy that.

Not in the states. All you need is a way to prove that the guy agreed to do x in exchange for y, and that you successfully supplied y. Small claims judges deal with these situations all the time, because nobody has a lawyer go over their contract to pay some $160 a month to mow their grass. Paper is superior because you can show precisely what was agreed, and when; so there's never a dispute over whether it was $160 a month or $40 a week (which works out to $172 a month). In this case they have a written record via that email, so they've got a written record.

That doesn't mean he was screwed. This isn't a final deal with all the things negotiated, so he's still got the ability to demand extra things that weren't discussed and back out that way. But, having made that offer, he needs a legal reason to back out of it rather than just take the $50k.

The email could be seen as an agreement. He could probably have gotten out of it with a lawyer of his own handling the negotiations ("He said $50k, but he meant $50k and these other considerations..."), but he'd have to hire the lawyer.

Makes it easy for the techs. Can you imagine working at a Nigerian Congressman's office and having to explain to those first blocked numbers why they had to be first?

Overwhelming the Service Desk is actually probably the plan. Each extension would have come with lots of publicity about the plan, so people don't really have an excuse. Now your phone dies, you go to the service desk, and the tech makes you hand him your ID and tell him your number.

But I was always the history-obsessed kid. I was trying to correct them in the forums. Sometimes they took my suggestions in the next game (CK2 has Barons!), but not always ("Works as Designed" how I hate that phrase).

In terms of what happened, EU2 was actually better at this than EU3/4 because EU2 had events that would force history onto the game. You'd actually get the event chain that bent the cross in the Holy Crown of Hungary whether game conditions warranted it or not. EU3/4 are better at explaining how systems work because everything depends on the systems.

That's not hyperbole. They passed a 15-year-sentence last week.

Given that the most pessimistic assessments of Assange were correct, and Snowden relied on Assange, it's not surprising.

Jacobin is one of a couple of left-wing outlets (arguably) named after genocidal maniacs. The Young Turks is he other one, and they are clearly named after genocidal maniacs. The historic Jacobins got into a rather epic fight in the West of the country, the Vendée. By the end of the conflict a quarter of the population was dead, the region was renamed Venge, and the pro-French Republic apologists frequently resort to the "it was a Civil War, therefore genocide can't have happened" defense.

The only thing that surprises me about this story is your assertion that their comments section was ever sane.

They been around since forever. Lazy Game Reviews just did a review of one, altho his is terrible at high speed.

You want to know how many times they've sued somebody for reusing GMO? Once. In the entire history of Monsanto this happened one time, and then the people who don't understand how farming works added it to their Book of Grudges.

They have a patent on using their Soy seeds with Roundup. This dude bought food soybeans cheap, figured they'd basically all be Roundup Ready, doused the plants in RoundUp, and then boasted about it to enough people that the Jury did not believe his denials of ill intent.

How much do you actually know about farming?

Farmers stopped breeding their own crops long ago because it's inefficient. Seed corn, for example, requires more time in the field than food corn, which means you have to do your harvest twice. Then you have to store it all year, and if anything goes wrong you're buying your seed corn anyway. Other crops use cross-breeds, and if you re-breed cross-breeds you don't get a nice uniform crop, you get mutts.

Think about the number of theft-related rolls you have to pass to make a criminal scheme work. Stolen cards are a problem. You have to not be caught stealing the card, not get caught using the stolen card to purchase Apple shit, then not be caught stealing the car, not be caught fencing the car, etc. Even if each of these is a 95% of success you only have an 81% chance of getting all four, since you're gonna need a new Apple account.card each time you do it you're gonna be fairly lucky if you make it four cars.

And that's with a 95% chance of fencing the car. Bugattis don't grow on trees, the sort of person who reads the local ads for Bugatti is likely to be the sort of person who knows that exact Bugatti was stolen three days ago, and snitch to the cops. Which means the business model that works is going to involve stealing vehicles that the local sketchy pull-apart wants.

Prepaid cards might work, but if this becomes a problem Apple can simply tighten up the account requirements. Asking for ID would solve the problem, as would restricting cards to those issued by institutions that follow know-your-customer requirements. And keep in mind that the card isn't the only thing you need. Your Apple account is going to be talking to your electronics, likely including an iPhone and wireless internet, both of which had to be paid for....

Stalking is likely to be a much much bigger problem, and is in some ways harder to deal with because stalkers are not rational. In other ways it's likely the stalker used their actual credit card because they aren't rational, and it's going to be much easier to convince a Judge that your ex-Boyfriend is a creep if he's putting airtags in your book-bag.

"Being used to steal cars" does not seem to be happening, because pretty much every story I've seen indicates that the cars were not actually stolen. Some dumb kid got some airtags, saw a cool car, and left them on it. Stalking probably is happening, but Airtags aren't actually that useful for stalking, and it's a lot easier to prosecute the owners of an Apple account associated with an Airtag than it is to prosecute most stalkers.

Which means the Apple employee gets in huge trouble, is forced to narc on you, etc.

These are very easy cases for police to prosecute, assuming Apple complies wirth search warrants, so I predict that the fad of putting airtags in cars you want to steal will go away very very son.