If you can get what you want from a letter, why bother with the lawsuit.

What could a letter get him at this stage?

He has a lawyer but he hasn't filed a lawsuit and demanded the recordings as part of discovery?

Is there some reason they wouldn't back up his version of events? It's not hard to imagine that many courts would award him significant damages if the story is true and many attorneys would take such a case on commission.

My experience as well. There are some organizations where "they said to do it, so I'm going to do it, I'm going to it as well as I can until the 5PM bell rings, because that's when they said I should leave" works really well.

"But that request is insane."
"Not my call."
"It'll do the opposite of what's intended"
"That's above my paygrade."

are the kinds of conversations I've had.

I've learned over time I'm not cut out for those places, but those places surely do exist.

Which is not a surprise because atmospheric models haven't been used for prediction for years

One should hope not - there aren't even any models yet that can predict basic temperature trends on any sort of fine scale.

Not that I'm complaining - aside from pushing for clean power, which will be cost effective anyway with the right technologies (sans government prohibitions) - other than protecting the real estate investments of the wealthy, the RoI on warming prevention is horrible, compared with other things to spend money on. Use the money to cure malaria first - it'll save far, far, more lives. I know, politicians don't like to hear the economics, but tough noogies to them.

Accurate climate models ought to be a laudable field of academic pursuit, but there's really not much urgent need for them.

6) the governments socialize the losses of GTAT onto all of the companies that GTAT owes money to. Had GTAT and Apple succeeded, all of the profits would have been private, mostly recognized in Cork.

Three cheers for corporate welfare!

well that really gets at the heart of the matter doesn't it? SpaceX is going to Mars, with or without NASA. Boeing is doing whatever somebody pays it to do.

Simply ask for permission without disclosing the nature of the study or the objectives.

Of course, nobody can be expected to use a free single-provider service and honestly agree to the terms of such use without fraudulently agreeing to a contract they have no intention of adhering to. Facebook is a human entitlement at this point, like water in Detroit. The courts should create an obligation on the part of the Facebook employees (enforced by the gun squad of the Marshal's Office) to provide that service to people, under whatever terms a random judge things sound good. That is, after all, the intent of democracy.

If a war criminal wants to give you a prize, the proper thing to do is to refuse it.

the primary point of CM is current OS support for "old" hardware - 18 month old gear abandoned by it's manufacturer. But even CM rarely extends beyond 3 yrs - I'd love to see a nonprofit that could keep up CM ports and see non-smartphone users get some of the social benefits without a huge monthly installment payment.

Facebook's most practical approach would be to punt to the courts. Would the courts allow "God's Fag Killing Machine" as a name change? That kid who was taken away from his parents for being named "Adolph Hitler [smith-or-whatever]" will be old enough to sign up for a Facebook account in a few years.

The bind they're in is that by not adhering to the legal regime, they're having to make judgment calls - so far they can sit on their terms of service and tell those who are offended by everything to take a walk, but just watch some court tell them people have a right to a Facebook account, and then they'll be in a world of hurt (in many, many ways).

Cis is just a term cooked up to pressure people that are straight up men and women to be forced to adhere to a pretty restrictive set of gender restrictions

That's a good point, despite the tone posting AC has given to your comments. I know people who are "mostly straight" - forcing them into a particular mold helps nobody other than the sexuality-OCD.

Also, I can't help but think of organic chemistry when people use these terms, but it's entirely the wrong kind of organic chemistry. IIRC there's no way to double-bond the identifying groups on a cis isomer, so even the weak-linkage arguments would fail as a metaphor.

Those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it....even if they have to force it down our throats.

Holder doesn't fail to understand it - he and his ilk are back for Round 2. They will persist until the liberty is removed, however many rounds that takes. Then they will move on to the next liberty that still stands. If they can't win at the Federal level, they will get it done at the State level (e.g. California's back door requirements for cell phones).

That's how government works; I guess your point is well-supported by the history after all.

billionaire computer science major Judith Faulkner

What? Who says things like that? Is there even any semantic meaning in context of the issue? </aside>

My understanding, especially from friends still-on-the-inside (of clinical information systems), is that EPIC's main product is a SEP field.

I used to work on what was once hailed as a model clinical information system, but it was killed by beancounter CIO-types, angling for bonuses on unspent budgets, and eventually they were replaced by the clinicians who just wanted something where they felt they could get features and reliability (internal requests for such were almost always turned down by management because of perverse incentives).

Not being qualified to make technical decisions, [as I understand it] the clinicians went for big & popular, as it was felt that at least that stood a good chance of being decent. But more importantly, the internal bureaucrats were always angling for budgets and lawyers while the outside vendor is able to offer relief from all of that for merely a mountain of money. Clinical functionality is somewhere down the list in terms of required features.

Something like Metropolis?

Metropolis was all about the imagery. No matter how good this Tetris movie is or is not, it'll all be about the fifteen minutes before - filling the theatre seats is going to be great fun!