I know it isn't quite the same, but it seemed like there was a run for a while where at least once a year there was a movie about the president of the United States getting trapped in a bunker.

Yeah, if the submitter/editor used the word, I expected there to be some specific reason for it. Then I got "schookids" and "the issues of day" and realized that it's just plain old stupidity.

I went in to Microcenter for the first time about a month ago. Damn, I wish I knew about it several years ago. They even had Raspberry Pis cheaper than the online place I bought one from.

And what regulations prevent it? The first two that come to mind are 1) the water is polluted enough to be dangerous, or 2) it's a drinking water supply. The first one is caused by lack of regulation preventing the pollution in the first place, and the second makes a lot of sense to me.

And people didn't quite understand how dangerous that polluted water was.

If those "economic and personal ventures" would poison a few thousand people, push a dozen species to extinction, and make a large area of land practically uninhabitable, then good, the EPA should be an obstacle.

You're right, of course meeting with legislators shouldn't be made illegal. What's happened is that the term "lobbying" has been misused to include all of the related activity that goes along with lobbying these days. Typically, very large campaign donations accompany corporate lobbyists.

There are also occasional favors that avoid the whole bag-of-cash problem.
Perfectly okay: A lawyer hired by a large corporation going to Washington and saying, "Hey, Mr. Senator, we should talk about this legislation that could affect the company that hired me."
Not okay: A lawyer hired by a large corporation going to Washington and saying, "Hey, Mr. Senator, we should talk about this legislation that could affect the company that hired me. How about we meet at a golf course in the Caribbean?"

I admit that I'm not completely up to date on land-line phone service (I haven't had one since college), but I was under the impression that most areas are like cable television, with only a single provider (typically the same company that provides DSL).

As for mobile phone service, if the companies had their way instead of the FTC stopping them, there would currently be only two providers, AT&T and Verizon.

Yeah, it's terrible when a bunch of politicians that don't represent you and meet in a far-away city try to control what you and are neighbors are allowed to do.

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

If you're talking about something like a natural disaster, then yes, you're right, and that's how it should be. Most people's Internet connections won't work very well without electricity anyway, and running water and drainage are far more important than your Netflix movies.

At the abstract level, I understand why people have trouble with the idea that whitespace is significant in Python (I'm one of them). But after using it for a few years now, I've realized that if you don't indent your code the same way in Python as you would in any other language anyway, you're almost certainly doing something wrong.

Yes.

Um, you might want to revisit at least one of these two statements.

Nope, Apple fanboys just have to buy a new device.

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Search Google for stuff like "silent mode" or "vibrate only". Apparently someone in the Android development team decided that nobody ever wants to set their phone to vibrate when they go in to a meeting.