Hence the "when I can get away with it." I have some clients that are okay marking up a PDF, and I actually have some clients who are university professors who are okay with just editing a .tex file. One of the things I really like is the way I can keep track of dependent claims in a patent as the claims change. I can do it in Word (kind of), but it's kind of kludgy, and I have to remember to hit "Print Preview" before I send out a document so the numbers auto-update.

I hadn't updated it since leaving my previous employer. It's http://www.patcapgroup.com/crandall.html now.

Nonsense. Butterick has a very convincing argument. And now that you've seen his graphic, I challenge you to ever look at a document with two spaces without cringing. What's more, manually inserting two of any kind of white space character is ugly and hackish.

So you're saying that Goliath's mistake was not having a big legal team in $1,500 tailored New York suits?

Now that I'm semi-solo, I have a Git repository for all my client files. I wrote a bunch of LaTeX class and style files to make beautiful patents, pleadings, and contracts. I write patents in vi (well, Vim) when I can get away with it. But when I was at a big firm, I spent fruitless years trying to convince lawyers that there is a better way than using kludged, recycled Word files, or at least trying to convince them to use Word's style functionality instead of manually reformatting the same flipping document EVERY SINGLE TIME. All in vain. Heck, I'd be happy if I could finally convince other lawyers that underlining is not a legitimate typesetting operation and is an embarrassing holdover from the days of typewriters (along with two spaces after a period).

One thing I've learned about lawyers it that most old lawyers learned how to do something back in 1978 or so, and believe it is the One Right Way. Those lawyers learned the One Right Way from other lawyers who learned it in the 30s. If I were king of the world, I would force every lawyer in America to get a copy of Butterick's book Typography for Lawyers and Garner's Dictionary of Legal Usage, read them cover to cover, and treat them as though they were the inviolable word of God, handed down in stone from the peak of Mt. Carmel. I am so sick of looking at ugly legal documents.

As long as it's not something epically lame like Kirk falling from a poorly-secured railing while a rocket running on a solid rocket booster goes from an earth-like planet to its sun in a matter of seconds. Just to pick a potential scenario at random. That would be truly unforgiveable.

I've had the same experience with the Star Wars prequels. I showed the original (theatrical version) trilogy to my 5-year-old son, and he fell in love with them so much (indeed, he became obsessed with them) that I finally relented and ordered the prequels off of Amazon, just so he could see the rest of the story. And when I re-watched them with him, I thought, "These aren't nearly as disappointing as I remember them being." They're not as epic as the originals, but considering that they are, in fact, the fourth, fifth, and sixth entries in a movie franchise, they are stunningly good. Usually by the time you get to Whatever 4, it's just a self-aware, winking-at-the-audience parody of itself. (Granted, Anakin building C-3PO, R2-D2 saving the Naboo ship, and secret Death Star plans were nothing more than winks at the audience, but the prequels also contained their own new mythos that managed to expand on the original mythos while being kinda sorta consistent-ish with it.)

In fact, it is well known that only two Star Trek movies were made before 2009: Star Trek II and Star Trek VI. There was a bumbling comedy troupe of impersonators who made a Star Trek parody that they called "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," but I believe Paramount later sued them and at least forced them to take the "Star Trek IV" out of the title, but then Paramount decided not to make a IV, to avoid confusion. Why Paramount skipped odd numbers altogether is a mystery the world may never solve, as is they mystery of why Paramount never made a film with the TNG cast. Surely they could have come up with a decent script if they tried hard enough. Maybe they could have even included some heroic last stand for Captain Kirk, where he does something cool like he dies ramming a crippled starship into a fleet of Klingon battle cruisers or something. So much wasted potential.

Except the TSA has apparently deputized them, so they are government actors acting under color of authority.

I think the concern is that the TSA is deputizing valets to search cars without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion. You gave a valet permission to enter your car to park it, not a TSA agent permission to search it. If a government agent asks permission to enter your car (or house), the answer should always be "no." And as somebody pointed out below, if you happen to have a copy or the Koran in your car, when Sparky reports that to the TSA, they are almost sure to strip the thing down looking for the contraband they just know is there. It's still not illegal to be Muslim in America, but there are lots of people who consider it tantamount to being an admitted terrorist.

Umm... 2004 called and all that. Dick Cheney is no longer any part of the "state." He might daydream about being Supreme Dictator, but then the nurse has to feed him his porridge, and cold reality hits like a barrel of bricks. Sure, he called Snowden a terrorist or something along those lines, but that's just because nobody has been paying attention to him lately and he's lonely. The name you're looking for in 2013 is "Barack Obama." He's the one whose IRS is harassing political opponents today and whose NSA listened to your steamy conversation with your girlfriend last night.

I hear that they also have tagged recursive jokes as being a red flag for socialistic leanings.

Fair enough, and that's a legitimate point. But I still don't see how even a reasonable process identifies VLC Media Player as a pirated copy of Game of Thrones. On the other hand, maybe there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for how it could.

Dude, you just put your name on the NSA watch list. "Regicide" has been a trigger word since Obama's 2011 Secret Executive Order 489382.19, declaring himself King of the Union For Life, and secretly changing our official name to the Holy Obaman Empire. There was a challenge to it from Congressional Republicans, who preferred Holy Reaganian Empire, but the FISA court smacked them down and declared the order constitutional. You really ought to catch up on your Coast to Coast AM backlog one of these days.

While that's true, I also fail to see how their copyright in Game of Thrones lends them a good-faith belief that they own VLC Media Player.