Unlike the poor of many decades ago, today's poor seem to get sufficient caloric inputs. Far too much, in many cases. But they are eating the wrong stuff.

Don't start with the 'poor people can't afford healthy food'. For what they spend stuffing their faces with McDonalds, it is possible to eat very healthy. If one isn't lazy and makes an effort to select and prepare healthy food. So, poor people don't have the time to cook? Maybe, but try taking the pop and snack machines out of a high school and replacing them with healthy foods (thus eliminating the argument about preperation effort) and the fat bastards will raise hell.

Poor, fat people are going to be poor and fat. It's a part of their culture.

What's the best shot for drones? What choke gives the best pattern?

I saw the demolition robot in "I Robot".

Sorry sir. Did you say Evergreen Road or Place?

Obviously, the state not allowing itself to intervene is obviously not an exercise of the power of the state - it's an exercise in restraint of said power.

The actual discriminatory power in this case comes from the individuals and corporations that discriminate - if there are none willing to do so, or if there are few enough and their scale is small, then it's all of no consequence. Even if said discrimination is pervasive, it is still limited to what private entities can legally do - so it's a very far cry from what government-powered discrimination can do (for example, it is not legal for corporations in the USA to summarily round up their customers and murder them in gas chambers; or to incarcerate them because they married a person of a different race).

No what I was saying is the "terrorists we are used to" are generally fools the FBI setup to make headlines to justify their overhyped jobs. My particular favorite is the dude they approached asking if he could get a shoulder fired missile.

Over the months they watched him, he stalled and bumbled and utterly failed to do anything of note, except be told by contacts he had from previous legal buisiness that he couldn't get one. The entire time the only thing he did on his own was download a sales brochure off the internet to show them. Seriously....

they handed him contacts, they handed him fake papers, they handed him the missile itself..

What are they protecting us from exactly when they have to create the terrorists before they can find them? Its a bullshit jobs program from the TSA to the FBI.

But wouldn't such a determination be based on the specific facts and timelines, which, the court should be quite capable of determining without the help of advantageous timing by prosecutors to avoid their pervue....I mean I would think....or do you think the courts incompetent to make such a determination, hence we need this sort of secrecy?

I always see that, sometimes even on systems I co-administer and its like....really? YOu don't even change the fucking alias so someone can't just go "gee I wonder if phpmyadmin is installed?" and go to the fucking default URL.

I know its convinent as fuck but this is bad practice in production even if you are not running a multimillion dollar black market operation. If you are dumb enough to expose that to the internet, at least expose it with a URL you chose ffs.

What makes you believe that those are Cook's personal politics, and not Apple's corporate politics? If corporations are persons, then they can also have legitimate political positions.

Also, why do you believe that this is ruining the corporate image of Apple, rather than enhancing it?

From past experience (e.g. Jim Crow), we know that in some cases allowing people to discriminate results in discrimination so pervasive that it severely affects the targeted group - basically, they're unable to obtain the services anywhere, or they can only obtain them for significantly higher prices or significantly lower quality.

This is why there should be no deadline and no last appeal. There should always be room for new evidence, especially evidence of official misconduct.

Damn! I thought we had all the bugs ironed out of that command parser.

It is generally legal to refuse service to anyone, except for certain explicitly protected categories (gender, age, religion etc). The catch is that on the federal level, the said protected category list does not include sexual orientation. In some states, it is protected on state level. In some, it's not protected on state level, but is protected on the municipal level. The latter is especially common in large metro areas (which lean liberal pretty much everywhere) in otherwise conservative states.

So, basically, the reason why that law makes a difference is because it overrides various municipal bylaws prohibiting such discrimination, and carves out a religious exemption that pretty much anyone can arbitrarily claim in practice.

And yes, businesses can arbitrarily discriminate in other ways. They can refuse to serve intoxicated customers, for example, or people with mustaches (though in some cases discriminating based on some trait can be illegal if it is found that in practice it results in clear discrimination against some protected class by virtue of correlation).

They can be either, it all depends on how you set things up. If you have some notion of membership, and only serve members, then you can apply pretty much arbitrary filters for people wanting to become members, including those protected classes - i.e. it's perfectly legal to have a whites-only private club, for example (though of course you'll get a lot of flak in the media as soon as it comes out).

... police will announce themselves with, "Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!"

And to further clarify. The problem with exceptions is that as soon as you open the gates, you need some safeguards to prevent your exceptions from growing so numerous as to effectively render the right useless. Which means that you can just allow arbitrary exceptions for free speech, or vague blanket categories that are not protected. It has to be very, very narrow for the original right to remain meaningfully protected.

For example, by codifying the eligible exceptions into the same document that enumerates the rights, and asserting that anything that is not so codified is not an exception.

You missed my point. It's not at all clear why the display of a US flag in the context of Cinco de Mayo has anything to do with anti-immigration sentiment. I would argue that such interpretation, in the absence of any other context, is in fact rather bigoted itself (because it assumes that flag = hate).