I wouldn't give the people who invented the language much credit. They inflicted upon the Anglophone world their horrible spelling conventions that are the root of this particular, completely-unrelated-to-George-Zimmerman controversy.

You can be disbarred for it. It's also a criminal offense in many states, usually a felony which will result in immediate disbarment anyway. It's also a civil rights violation which makes it a criminal as well as a civil federal offense, the civil right being a fair trial. Fortunately for the AG, Mr. Zimmerman was acquitted. If he were found guilty and did go to prison, if it could be shown that that AG knew about this information and purposely withheld it, he could be sent to prison and Zimmerman would likely get a new trial.

Oh yes he can sue. He can sue in Federal court for being dismissed as a whistleblower. That is illegal under Federal law.

It is a federal offense to fire an employee for whistleblowing. I refer you to this for further information.

Actually, as I understand civil rights law (and I do since I've researched the topic in order to file one soon), not only does this IT director have a good Federal 1983 civil rights case against the state of Florida, he can and should sue the Attorney General in both his official and his personal capacity. Government employees usually have immunity from liability for their official actions but if they knowingly or should have known that their actions were illegal or unconstitutional, either a violation of statute or goes against well-established court opinions on the subject (case law), they lose that immunity and can be sued in their person capacity. That means that the FL AG has just opened himself up to being liable to have to pay damages to this guy. Now, usually, when a government employee is found to be personally liable, the government will pay what he has been ordered to pay... but it doesn't have to and sometimes when the action is egregiously illegal as in this case it refuses to do so. Ultimately, when the AG loses (which he likely will given the facts of the case in the article) the Governor will have him by the balls since I suspect that he will be the one who ultimately makes the decision whether to pay.

Well, there are worse things he can do in his spare time (something he has a lot of in a prison cell) than design a vacuum cleaner. While the world does not need another terrorist since the so-called Third World and American fringe element nut jobs are very good at making those, the world can always use another good vacuum cleaner. My Dyson vacuum cleaner is good but I need one that is powered by a tame black hole for better sucking qualities. Also, with a tame black hole, I won't need to empty the dust container. Perhaps he can design one, even build it, make a mistake and suck himself out of existence!

Aside from the fact that it exists and that it's expensive is the experience we had in the mid-1980's with it when I was an undergrad. It ran on a Prime minicomputer. Even though only students were banging away at the server, it crashed a lot. The computer operator in the mainframe fishbowl had to called to restart it. If it was at night when there was no operator on duty, no Oracle. A very reliable minicomputer running a then unreliable database server. I suspect they've fixed their problems since then.

Hey! I have an old manual typewriter (K-Mart brand but might be a Royal on the inside) and I'm not a hipster. For one thing, I wear my hair short and when I grew a beard I couldn't get rid of it quickly enough. Second, I'm a registered Republican.... (but I usually vote for Democrats). However, I learned to touch type (that's to type without looking at the keyboard) on a manual typewriter so, unlike most of you kids here, I know how to properly use it.

This idea is absolutely nuts. But if they're hiring park rangers I'll be in line!

No matter how deep a background check goes, no matter how thorough the inquiry is into a person's character, no matter how many interviews are made of friends and family, and no matter how many polygraph tests are performed, if a person is given a position that requires some trust there is always going to be a chance that this person is going to abuse the trust. Psychopaths and sociopaths the the scariest of these people because they have no problem with lying, are good at it because they are usually good at being manipulative, are often very well liked by family and friends, and can lie without end like a baby-kissing politician running for re-election and still pass a polygraph test.

Perhaps the problem is in the kind of people being sought for these jobs that require great trust. While a person needs to be squeaky clean to get security clearance, perhaps the squeaky clean requirement is causing the government to choose some from the wrong pool of candidates. My experience has been that you will have a better chance of finding an honest man (or woman) by looking at those who have messed up in his or her life, is genuinely repentent, and has demonstrated through years of clean and honest living that he or she is worthy of such great trust. The gratitude that comes from being given this second chance is an incredible motivator in steering a straight and narrow course through life.

Melville Dewey, the progenitor of librarianship in this country and the creator of the Dewey Decimal System for call numbers on books that is used throughout much of the world (including most public libraries in the English-speaking world), was an advocate for phonetic spelling. He often spelled his own name Melvil Dui. However, Dewey was kind of a harmless lunatic and, as I remember, not many took him seriously.

Honestly, can you imagine the difficulty that would be caused by having to learn how to spell words differently after having slogged through years of primary school learning how to spell them the "old-fashioned" way? It would be sort of like the revolution created by Kamal Attaturk created in Turkey by using the authority of the government to abolish the use of the Arabic alphabet for writing Turkish in favor of the Latin alphabet.

Anyway, this nut job who wants to create a whole new letter to replace an archaic one we ditched centuries ago because he's lazy should just go away and get a life.

And how many Americans give a shit about Canada, eh? All we want is your oil and natural gas in Alberta. ;-) You can keep the Mounties, Quebec, and the moose and mosquitoes. Oh, but send us your health care system. At least it works.

Today would be a good day to ponder another American Revolution, except that I'd rather not end up in Gitmo or some CIA black prison in eastern Europe being tortured. Besides, as history has shown, in nearly every case revolutions are revolting.

You Brits ought to be thankful for our independence. Without us you'd have been overrun by the Germans twice, be speaking their awful language instead of your own awful language but more flexible language, still bankrupt after two world wars, and would not have been blessed by the Pax American that followed. Given the alternative to a Pax Germania or a , the American version is much preferable I think.

So just what did we Yanks give you?
1. The computer revolution (although the Brits did contribute much in the beginning).
2. Peace.
3. Better tasting food (although an Indian or Pakistani curry blows everyone away).
4. Mark Twain, Steinbeck, Hemmingway, and Melville.
5. Winston Churchill (his mother was an American).

And what did the Brits give us?
1. Their language, complete with its idiotic spellings.
2. Shakespeare, Dickens, and Conan Doyle (well, that's a fair trade).
3. The Beatles (not so bad), Andrew Lloyd Webber (you should have kept him!), and Bob Hope.
4. The BBC World Service.
5. Downton Abbey.

I think you guys got the better end of the deal.

Unless my correspondents do as I do and keep most of the letters I receive.

In the days of yore when feather quills touched the surface of handmade rag paper people regularly did this. They also make copies of every letter they sent. That's why we have so many letters of people such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and his wife Abigail Adams. Even if the recipient didn't keep the letter, the copy survived.