The dividing line is pretty clearly that something one says (or in this case, does) is objectively verifiable, whereas one's thoughts are not.

No you didn't. You speculated about two situations which might have occurred which might have harmed the prosecution's case. For all you know, the police came to Duffy's place to investigate and he broke down blubbering and confessed everything like the anonymous coward he is.

I don't have to imagine. I can read the fucking headline and see that the guy was jailed. The defense was clearly not very successful.

I don't understand where this tripe comes from. For my professional and academic activities, I use C (~1973), Perl (1987), Java (1995), and C# (2001). The youngest of those is 10 years old. What languages are using now that weren't around 5 years ago, and what were you using 5 years ago that has since gone 'out of fashion'? What does it mean to be 'out of fashion'? That they aren't in use? Or that Web developers no longer use them?

I don't know where you live, but in Canada universities train Engineers too.

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/18/paul-allen-compares-working-with-bill-gates-to-being-in-hell/ :

Karma-whore some more why don't you? As if anyone ever got modded down for flaming religion on Slashdot.

The timing on this is crucial. If you ask too early, women will conclude that you are a creeper. That may seem harsh, but women on dating sites deal with a creeper or two every day, so it's unavoidable.

Ridiculous. You "re-negotiate" your salary every time you ask for a raise. If your company won't give you a raise, then you should look for work elsewhere. And if you can't find work elsewhere, maybe you should consider forming a union so you have some negotiating power. The shareholders who own your company pooled their resources to increase their leverage, why don't you?

True, but corporations can do the exact same thing to their employees. They can, and they quite frequently do. Why not protect yourself from that?

I'm not the OP, but he's pretty clearly not making an argument about which pats of the total compensation are fixed and which are not; but rather that it doesn't matter whether your compensation is entirely in the form of salary, or partially salary and partially 'benefits'; a cut is a cut, and is grounds for "re-negotiation" using any (legal) means at your disposal.

Of course you didn't--it's not your salary that's being cut. If your employer planned on cutting your salary, and you had the leverage to prevent it, would you use it, or just meekly take the cut?

You know, if you switched to running companies into the ground, you could probably make 10 times your current pay.

Perhaps not. But I don't think the average office suite is as pompous as the average LaTeX user either, so it's still unclear whether intelligence or pomposity is the greater driver of Latex usage.

My brother is doing a PhD in history, and neither he, nor anyone he knows, has any idea what Latex is. But this is Slashdot, so there are good odds that you think Math and Science are the only worthwhile intellectual endeavours

Format copying. The bane of my existence.

I use Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Alt-Shift-F10, then select whichever option (Keep Text Only, usually) from the drop-down context menu. That key-combo (Alt-Shift-F10) is used in Office, Excel, and Visual Studio; and probably others as well.