He's modded funny because it's a (slight mis)quote from the Blues Brothers.

We do, the Eurofighter was a mind bogglingly expensive project and a fleet of Boeing aircraft would have been a much cheaper option but we went for the locally grown one.

And people say Americans don't get irony.

I don't think that there's any doubt that they are. Unfortunately, and I think most people don't really grasp this, being a patent troll in the United States is not just legal, it's extremely lucrative. That's why, while I certainly hope that Newegg eventually successfully appeals this case and continues defending against patent trolls, what we really need is better legislation to make all of this shit illegal.

This. Exactly. I'd rather pay Newegg a few bucks more knowing that those bucks will be spent fighting patent trolls than saving a few bucks at Amazon knowing that the reason they're able to offer prices a few bucks lower is because they sued some other company out of existence for having the audacity to put a button on their web page that charges your credit card and checks you out in one action.

Not surprisingly, the submitter grossly misrepresented what was said. In TFA, the Arial font thing was just a couple of lines in a much more troubling string of rants, stuff like:

- "it’s always awkward when I see one of my pervs in the parking lot after a hearing"
- he (the hearing examiner) “likes taking motions under advisement, but gets greater satisfaction denying them”
- On November 20, 2008, the day of the plaintiff’s hearing, the following comment was posted during working hours: “it’s always a mistake when people testify, because they get destroyed in cross examination”
- On that same day, the day of the plaintiff’s hearing, the hearing examiner also posted the following (apparently with reference to a different sex offender): he (the examiner) “hopes this guy doesn’t show up!!” which was followed up with “Tyson Lynch says yay!! He didn’t show up!”

...And so on. This is someone who is supposed to be fair and impartial, and the guy clearly has issues with the people he has a duty to work with.

So yeah, if I had a hearing before the guy that went south, I'd be trying to have it overturned also. I hope that the guy is fired and the people who did have hearings before him get new hearings.

We're going to have to start using a new theme. In Olympic Russia, games report on journalists.

That logic would be fine if all the OP wanted to buy is just a proprietary Amazon front-end, which means that the value of the device is significantly lower than what would justify the price. But assuming that he wants a "tablet" in the traditional sense of the word, a general-purpose device that he can customize to suit his particular needs that can be obtained from other companies at comparable prices and that can also run the same Amazon-available applications but also other stuff as well, then he is correct in that he should continue to avoid these.

I do have to make a serious response to this, though. You seem to be under the false impression that there were "original mandates" that limited the federal government. This simply isn't true. The current Constitution was written after the dismal failure of the Articles of Confederation, which established a federal government but explicitly denied any enforcement capabilities to it. It basically said that the name of our new country was the United States of America, and each of those states acted like little mini sovereign entities. As a result, when the federal government asked the states to pay their taxes, the states politely told it to go fuck itself, resulting in the Continental Army to fall apart and damn near resulted in the destruction of our new country.

So the founding fathers convened another Constitutional Convention for four months in 1787 to address these problems. They decided that the federal government HAD to have power, and that the new Constitution needs to be fairly open-ended to account for new legal needs to refine our government. That's why they put phrases in such as "promote the general Welfare" and left out phrases such as "and such is an exhaustive list of the only things this governmental entity can do".

While I would never pretend like the "founding fathers" were a monolithic hive mind in complete agreement on all points, and I do recognize that some of them fought to limit the power of government, those people were generally overruled or else had their concerns addressed by enumerating things that are explicitly denied to government, especially in the Bill of Rights ("Congress shall make no law..."). Most of them understood that we would be facing completely new and unforeseen challenges today than we were in 1787, and they deliberately avoided enumerating things that government could only do.

So there was never any kind of set of "original mandates" that government has grown past, other than a handful of don'ts, such as don't trample of free speech, don't establish a state religion, don't inflict cruel or unusual punishment, etc.

You're building an entire solar system just to power your house? You must go through a LOT of light bulbs.

And you honestly don't think this happens today? Seriously?

Make no mistake: There are death panels in existence right now, this very moment. They work for the private insurance companies, doing their damned best to figure out how to kick people off of insurance rolls and rescind coverage for whatever reason will legally scrape by. Or even illegally, if they think that it would be cheaper to fight the battle until you die than to pay out your claim. The big difference is that today, you frequently don't find out what's not covered until after you're sick and need the coverage.

You don't trust government, I get it, I really do. And to some extent, neither do I. But you know what I trust even less than government? For-profit companies with a perverse incentive to deny you coverage you're paying for using whatever underhanded tactic they can and an historical willingness to do so, especially when the people being denied coverage don't have time or the money for a protracted legal battle and are at a physical or mental disadvantage that directly impacts their ability to fight such battles.

So yeah, I'd take a single-payer system over the crappy system we have today any time. Ultimately, that is the solution to our health care system, not private insurance, not employer-paid insurance, not even Obamacare, although it's a hell of a lot better than what we had. Maybe one of these days if you have the gut-wrenching experience of watching your mother fighting her insurance company for payment of cancer treatments while suffering from the "downtime" effects of chemotherapy, you'll prefer the general incompetence of government over the outright malice of for-profit insurance companies. Personally, I'm nice enough to rather you use common sense to arrive at the conclusion that having for-profit insurance companies responsible for funding your health care is and always has been a dumb idea.

Bosom Buddies was a cute show and he was funny as Michael in Newhart, but he's not even British. What are they thinking! I know he has a little sci-fi experience when he played the dad in the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids the television series, but I still think they would have done a lot better if they'd gotten someone who had some experience with British television.

Don't forget, 20k of it was unusable, unless you swapped out the character bitmaps and the BASIC ROM banks.

Wish this had made the real news. We know this sort of thing happens, but airline industries are highly effective at having this never reach public discussion.