U.S. courts are not fans of anything resembling a Bill of Attainder.

Thank you. That was my question and you answered it.

Don't you run into quantum limits at some point where the circle can no longer be perfectly circular causing further precision in Pi to fail to reflect the actual object?

I have no problem with Steam. Steam is both a publisher and a retailer. When you're talking books, the publisher and retailer between them keep north of 80% of the sale price with the authors getting less than 20%. And that's fine. It's competitive, and if you hate all the publishers you can even self-publish.

The difference between Apple and Steam is that Apple is a monopoly. If you don't want to use the apple store, there's no other legitimate process to sell your app to iPhone users. They can set any rates they want, they can refuse any apps they don't like and they routinely do so.

Hey, I saved $1000 bagging groceries to buy a hard drive for my Commodore 128, so I get where you're coming from. But that was in 1988. By '91 it was plain that except for game consoles the future held little room for machines that weren't pc compatible.

You bought an Apple II series machine in 1991. The answer must have been: yes.

The Apple IIgs was a fine machine... in 1986. By 1989 the whole Apple II series was on its way out, and it wasn't even a little bit ambiguous.

Then I guess I'm glad I refused the Thomas test and walked away.

I have a theory: if a company is arbitrarily rigid about something that's completely in their control, they'll be arbitrarily rigid about many things. That rigidity makes for an unpleasant workplace. So, during the application process it's worth identifying one thing about which they express rigidity and challenging them to modify it.

Before the pandemic, my test was usually to ask for a private office. Four walls and a door. They don't have to say yes, but the ones who offer a hell no have failed my test. I didn't even have to get that far with Canonical. They handed me a rigidity test on a silver platter.

This method has failed me only once in my career. In that case, the company simply lied to me: they made a promise that they never fulfilled.

I once applied to work for Canonical. Prior to offering an interview, they insisted I take the computer version of something called the Thomas International General Intelligence Assessment.

The problem with the computer version of the test is that they show you an image of something for a few moments, then they remove it from the screen and ask you questions about what you saw. If you're Aphantasic, as I am, the test is essentially impossible. I don't have a visual memory. My brain isn't wired that way. Remove something from my sight and the only questions I can answer about it are the things I happened to notice at the time.

I asked for an ADA accommodation. Maybe take the paper version test which doesn't have this problem. Not a chance. You take the test which every applicant takes or you don't get an interview. Period. Full stop. Goodbye.

That's my thought as well. The company with all its rocketry assets has $18M in cash, $17M in debt and they're buying it outright for another $17M. Unless their assets are pure vapor, that's a heck of a bargain.

Exactly right. Falling off the runway is almost always pilot error. Engines are a distinct part that is neither engineered nor built by Boeing. Tire problems are almost always a maintenance issue.

Correlation is not causation. Absent additional evidence, none of these issues should be attributed to Boeing.

Protectionism for Mexican farmers violates the free trade treaties unless they can come up with a plausible excuse.

Well that's stupid.

The entire history and purpose of "230" was to encourage sites to engage in moderation, alternatively favoring or suppressing different content, and to give them the freedom to do so without being treated anything like newspapers or other media.

I doubt that there's anything interesting that happened, and I certainly don't believe your take on it, but as a general rule there's nothing at all wrong with the government offering advice or asking people to do things and for people to agree or to voluntarily do those things.

For example: If the government puts out an Amber Alert, you don't have to read it, you don't have to watch for the child who has apparently been kidnapped, and you don't have to report sightings. You can ignore the whole thing and go about your day. You can even deliberately notice the kid and the kidnappers and not lift a finger. That's not illegal. You're committing no crime by letting kidnappings happen where you lack a duty to stop them.

But it's nice to help rescue children, so why not do what the government is asking you to volunteer to do?

Apparently the reason why is that you are opposed to anti-kidnapping, pro-saving-children government conspiracies of that sort.

They're almost always the same. If there are any that aren't, I'd be shocked. He occupies the same sort of 'designated target of hate' that the Rothschilds did. In fact, that's really where it all starts -- a couple of political consultants working for Victor Orban, the Hungarian dictator, decided that a useful political tactic would be to have an enemy to demonize, so they rather arbitrarily decided it would be Soros. Read all about it.

And so we wound up with Hungary being thoroughly fucked up, Hungary impairing the functioning of the EU and NATO, increases in anti-semitism and fascism, probably daily death threats against a guy who did nothing wrong, and all to score some cheap political points.

It's disgusting.

Still works fine, actually. And it's been closer to three decades now. 47 USC 230 is from 1996.