First of all, if your employer is acting illegally, then your real problem is that the rule of law has broken down in your shithole country. If that's truly the case, then you should move to another country without money or belongings and claim refugee status.

Of course, that's not really the case, now is it? Yeah, I didn't think so...

"Well, move!" you say?

Before you say I should work harder...

Before you say I should negotiate better...

I'm not going to say any of those things. What I am going to say is that you should cut costs. You say you spend $170/week, but only get paid $176/week? Then you can't afford to spend that much! If you're living by yourself, get a roommate. If you already have a roommate, get another one to take your bed and sleep on the couch. Or move out and borrow a friend's couch. Or sleep in your car. Or if you don't have a car, find a homeless shelter. And then eat nothing but ramen and/or whatever other food you can source for $1/day. After a few weeks of that, you've saved a couple hundred bucks. Congratulations, you now have savings, and now you can afford to move to get that $700/week job in the other city.

I really don't care how little you get paid! No matter how little it is you should always save some of your income, even if you're homeless and panhandling, because that's how you get yourself into a better situation. I'm not saying it's easy; I'm saying it's necessary. If you ever want to get ahead, you literally have no choice but to do it.

It's one thing if you have a nice pad of savings and can afford to say no to an offer. Not everyone is so lucky.

Luck has nothing to do with it. If you don't have savings, it's because you fucked up by spending too much of your income.

The only exception is if you're 15 years old and it's literally your first job, and in that case it's probably appropriate that the offer is for minimum wage.

If you're still using a media center PC I would suggest getting an Amazon Fire or other small Arm box. Ours handles everything just fine.

O RLY? How, pray tell, does an Amazon Fire or whatever run my TV tuner cards (which is the primary purpose of an HTPC)?

Keynesian economics is the primary fraud that regards deficit spending as a good idea, and I'm certainly not going to cripple my mind by taking an economic course that promotes Keynes' hoax.

During the financial crisis, America instituted Keynesian policies (e.g. "quantitative easing") while Europe instituted austerity policies. Considering the results, it's hard to argue that the Keynesian policies didn't work better.

So why can't Android just use fucking Samba?!

No, it's not the same story. The story now is about what Sourceforge did after that (i.e., locking the GIMP-for-Windows developer out of his account -- despite the fact that he had not "abandoned" it as Sourceforge claimed -- and distributing the crapware-bundled installer anyway).

Stories about that have been getting submitted over and over again since at least yesterday. Dice (which owns both Sourceforge and Slashdot) is suppressing them.

The parent post should not be off-topic. We don't have a choice except to talk about this on unrelated threads, precisely because Dice is suppressing stories about it!

While it may give grammar nazis fits, a slightly non-standard use of commas could eliminate the ambiguity in the original headline:

Billboard, Advertising Banned Products In Russia, Hides If It Recognizes Cops

don't have a magical fix. My latest pet theory is that, at a Federal level, there should be a specified number of politicians. Rather than state-by-state, gerrymandered-district-by-gerrymandered-district, shit should be direct. Is there 3% of the US population who are pot-smoking tree-humping eco-dweebs? Then 3% of the politicians should be from the Nature Molestin' Party. Sure, we wouldn't have the 'hope and change' of meaningless party swaps over individual seats. We might get locked into some terrible shit if the majority of the country are, in fact, clueless assholes. But it'd be better representation.

A much "simpler" change (in terms of concept, not ease of execution) would be to go re-learn the concept of Federalism and take a bunch of power away from the Federal government and give it to state and local ones. The less the Federal government has responsibility over, the less harm unaccountable Congresscritters can do.

Hey, at least I, for one, had learned my lesson by 2012.

Nah, I'm not nearly rad enough to drive an AMC Pacer. My car is just a nice, low-miles Miata.

Also, these days, Vanilla Ice is a general contractor / house-flipper. Not a bad gig, to be honest -- once I'm making enough money I'm maxing my tax-deferred investments, I indeed might try acting like him.

You poor, naive fool! A Charter merger with Time Warner would inevitably degrade Charter's customer service to Time Warner's level, not the other way around.

My 25-year-old Mazda* has a tape deck, and I'm perfectly happy with that. (Okay, I do have a minor quibble that there's no line-in port, but that's no big deal. At least it doesn't have a CD player instead; if that were the case then I'd actually have to get an aftermarket stereo.)

(*Don't knock it; it's very much on the "classic sports car" end of the spectrum, not the "old junky econobox" end.)