What's this socialist bullshit about providing a "free" knife? Use your shoelaces to strangle people, hippie.

Creating a PR incident like this will not go without notice.

Yes... but what will the effect be? Will people avoid Southwest Airlines? Can they (afford to) avoid them? Or do they simply avoid any criticism since they know that will invite retaliation?

I think the US is already past the tipping point, where stories like this won't cause a backlash so much as accomodation. People can only be treated as helpless subjects of the powers that be for so long before they internalize the attitude, after all.

You don't have to login to use a Chromebook, you can browse as a guest. As to your comment about compilers, MS offers Visual Studio Online Basic for free.

Except Google doesn't track apps for education users.

That's probably a good thing since students shouldn't be static consumers of information and tablets are really subpar for most kinds of content creation. Add in the fact that a Chromebook costs half as much as even an ipad mini and overall the schools are probably making the rational choice.

"it appears that the word wrack ... have been replaced by the word rack"

Just think of it as a jobs program/economic stimulus/enrichment of a random company on the public dole. It makes perfect sense if you buy into the economic value of the government scaling big bureaucracies that depend on a competent contractor to help them scale so big being beneficial to the economy. Just think about how much more beneficial it is, then, to have it done three or four times to get it right.

On the other hand, consumers could have spent that money rather than paying the government to pay those extra contractor costs. But then again, consumers tend to over-spend anyway and corrode the economy. Sometimes that's to the point that the government has to choose between bailing out the banks and bailing out the consumers. Then again, the government encourages that, too. And of course rather than bailing out the consumers they bail out the banks so they can create more consumer debt and start all over.

The main difference between big government folks and small government folks, you see, isn't that one thinks the government is well intentioned and the other thinks it is evil and needs to be kept in check. That's certainly a factor, but it's not the main one. The main difference is that big government people have an idealized concept of the government as a doer of good. Small government people are skeptical that anything too big and too detached from the lives of real people can reasonably accomplish good things for the majority of people on a regular basis.

Wasn't that the incident where they pressure washed the cages of the deceased animals thus flinging infected fluids all over the area?

Reducing cost through optimization of manufacturing can be more important than lots of original research, for instance the recent boom in photo-voltaic solar has much more to do with the plummeting $/W for panels made with decades old technology then it does with the constant stream of announcements that some group has eeked out .5% better efficiency out of cells made of unobtanium. I'm not saying that basic science research or materials science research should be halted, just that people who poo poo people making a better/cheaper widget just because it's not new and sparkly are missing the forest for the trees.

As to ending up in jail or dead, nothing I did was illegal. He brandished a weapon at me and I showed him I had a bigger one.

Escalating a fight when you don't need to is stupid and, in most places, illegal.

As to your second point, I looked for a point in it... and couldn't see an actual argument in it. Please rephrase.

Nuclear war is a bad thing, since it'll kill you. Promoting behaviour that leads to it is stupid.

As to your third point, I have millions of years of natural selection humming in my veins. I am not some skittish herd beast. I not a rat. I am not a rabbit.

No, you're just some dude with serious impulse control issues and delusions of grandieur.

I am a homo sapian. A man. I'm the ape that cracks atoms and marks his territory on the moon.

Claiming credit for other people's achievements is not the least bit impressive.

Come at me.

Why?

You are of the opinion that nothing bad happens to men and it always happens to women.

Nope. I'm just doubting the OP.

You are doubting the OP solely on the basis that the OP is a male, since that's the only information you have about him. That only makes sense if you're of the opinion that nothing bad ever happens to men.

ASCII is more than 30 years old, it's 51 years old, and I'd bet $10,000 that it will be readable by nearly every computer in another 51 years. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are also highly unlikely to be unreadable anytime during my lifetime since they've been in use for 21 years and are open standards with many real world implementations.

You're probably thinking of floating platform as something that moves around like a boat, more likely it's going to be a converted deep sea oil platform like Broglio Space Centre or Sea Launch.

That is how a man deals with a threat of violence.

If he wants to end up dead or in jail, yes. Smart people simply speed away from the dumbass who's chasing a car on foot, and maybe report him to the police.

Men don't ask for that. We protect ourselves. Up to the point of going to thermonuclear war. Literally.

And you see this as such a desirable result that not only do you not seek to change your ways, but you actively recommend others to embrace them?

Dude, Broforce is fiction.

Toughen up or bow out.

Grow up or die. Next crazy dude you humiliate might come visit you with ten friends. Natural selection only has so much patience for your bullshit.