It does happen every once in awhile. Like that guy who built a home-made armored vehicle and drove it through a few buildings in his town. In the end though, they're just remembered as some nut who went postal. Heck, even that expression itself is its own great example of how the most memorable thing about someone completely losing it and taking a few folks with them is the fact that they went nuts, not a clear recollection of whatever situation lead them to go nuts in the first place.

Write enough fiction and eventually some of it will come true. Just ask the writers for The Simpsons.

The ST:V episode Critical Care was a very thinly veiled metaphor for the USA's for-profit healthcare industry. People with a low Treatment Coefficient (another thinly veiled metaphor, this time relating to how valuable a person is to their society, i.e. how successful they are) are denied proper access to healthcare. That episode ends with the Doctor intentionally infecting the medical facility's lead administrator with a deadly disease and hacking the facility's database to give the administrator a low "TC", in order to convince him to provide healthcare for everyone, regardless of their "TC".

Of course, real life isn't going to have that happy ending. The news cycle will move on to something else and everybody will forget about this when the next rage bait story drops.

Presumably because Mr. Wright couldn't afford a good enough lawyer. IIRC, SCO claimed to own parts of Linux for a very long time and they attempted to use the courts to collect a rather absurdly large amount of money that they believed they were owed. This charade continued until SCO ran out of money.

I'd also venture a guess that it probably helps to have the protection of a corporate veil when you're being a giant litigious dick, too. A great example of this is the massive amount of court time wasted by the RIAA and MPAA chasing after people who may not have actually pirated anything. You don't see any of their lawyers being sent to jail for that.

Republicans scored a win this time around because the electorate was upset about expensive groceries, and possibly to some extent that the Democrats didn't have a real primary. The majority doesn't agree with the conservative platform, but that's where those checks and balances you should've learned about in civics come into play.

The hype over Starlink goes back a lot further than some Joe Rogan show from two years ago. By 2020, Musk had already come clean that Starlink was no threat to established terrestrial broadband providers. Prior to that though, Musk let speculation run rampant and even kind of encouraged it.

In SpaceX's own words: SpaceX’s Starlink is a next-generation satellite network capable of connecting the globe, especially reaching those who are not yet connected, with reliable and affordable broadband internet services.

Let's go back to 2018. The first post is someone saying it's time to short the stocks of Comcast, AT&T, and Spectrum. The next Score: 5 post is someone saying they hope it is cost effective enough to be a competitor to terrestrial broadband providers in suburban and urban areas. The hype train was still rollin' at this point. Granted, I'll give you that people expected the same sort of lighting in a bottle that Tesla captured with their EVs, not just, well, another satellite internet provider with some sightly less cumbersome antenna/modem devices.

This is why I just stuck with criticizing Starlink for having limited bandwidth and being more expensive than terrestrial broadband, rendering it not much of a competitor in places where there's other broadband options. Wouldn't ya know, that's still true! My father has Starlink because he lives up in the mountains of NC. It's slightly worse than Spectrum that I pay 1/3 the price for here in central FL, but for him it's way better than the 1 Mbps DSL which was previously his only other option.

Musk practically hyped up Starlink like it was gonna put Comcast out of business, rather than what it really is - marginally tolerable broadband for folks who live in the boonies, and for wealthy(ish) folks to install on their yachts and RVs. Although for the later unless you really travel off the beaten path, you might just be fine with cellular broadband.

How would've you secured the licensing deals with companies like Disney, et al., and afforded the upfront costs associated with promoting your products widely enough that they'd ultimately prove profitable?

It's not much different than the idea of running a legitimate MP3 store. The tricky part was getting the rights holders to agree to your plan, otherwise your "idea" is basically just a variant of that scheme by that guy who decided to set up a paid pirate streaming service.

Income tax isn't a mistake, because it has a lot of advantages over the idiotic FairTax scheme:

#1 Income taxes are progressive, because your total taxes paid are always proportional to your earnings, rather than how much of your income gets spent. To incredibly oversimply things, let's say you live here in central FL and your entire income for the year was $1,070. You go ahead and blow your entire yearly salary on an iPhone for $1000 and pay $70 in sales tax. That's 7% of your income in taxes. Now, let's say you're Elon Musk and you buy that same iPhone. I'm gonna defer to ChatGPT for that, and it estimates that the 7% sales tax on a $1,000 iPhone represents 0.000000028% of Elon Musk's wealth. For Musk to have paid the same 7% of his wealth towards taxes on iPhones, he'd have to buy 250 million of them, or roughly 10% of all the iPhones that have ever been sold.

#2 If you try to make a sales tax scheme more fair by refunding some of the taxes paid back to the lower income levels, you're back to the same amount of bureaucracy required to administer an income tax scheme, only now you also have to make people track every single purchase, as well as their income rather than just... their income.

#3 Encouraging people to hoard their income to avoid taxes is bad for the economy. You want people to spend their income, because that's what keeps the wheels of capitalism spinning. Psychologically, under an income tax system it's obvious that the money you get to keep after taxes is yours to save or spend as you please, and when you don't get a tax break for living on ramen rather than filet mignon, you might as well go for the steak if it's in your budget. If you think trickle down economics doesn't work now, just wait until the wealthy are actually incentivized not to spend their money.

#4 Lastly, it just makes the most logical sense that taxes should be based upon the benefits you've been deriving from society, rather than your level of consumption. If things are really working out for you and lots of money is coming your way, you have a moral obligation to pay some of that forward back to the society which made it possible for you to earn it in the first place, and whether or not you choose to spend that money is immaterial to that fact. Think of it like a buffet. You still have to pay up front, even if the only thing you're going to do is grab a bunch of food, bring it to your table and then stare at it, because that's food which is now unavailable for others to eat.

The competition sells ICE vehicles. Perhaps Musk truly believes that getting rid of the subsidies will force the traditional auto manufacturers to stay in their lane and not produce anything competitive with Tesla's EV offerings, but that ship has sailed, hit an iceberg and is now slowly sinking into the abyss. The traditional automakers already have EVs that are chewing away at Tesla's marketshare, and all things being equal after the subsidies are removed, that's still going to be the case.

The only thing ditching the EV subsidies truly accomplishes is making ICE vehicles seem more appealing, and again, Tesla doesn't sell those.

Considering that both major smartphone OS vendors have measures already in place to ban apps at the OS level (short of jailbreaking/rooting, you're not getting around it), I'd call it more frightening than hilarious.

I'm no fan of Trump, political megadonors, or even TikTok for that matter (I personally don't use it), but if Trump manages to overturn the ban then he's at least making the right call. The "land of the free" shouldn't be playing nanny with my apps.

It isn't different. The 1A is very clear on this, but our government is accurately described as a "backsliding democracy".

One platform is not necessarily equivalent to another. Why are you posting here on Slashdot when there are many other platforms you could be expressing yourself on? Hmmm...

The TikTok ban passed with bipartisan support. Can't put this on the Republicans - this is both parties collectively saying it's just dandy to deplatform the entire country.

You'd think with all the whining that came out of Republicans over getting deplatformed from pre-Musk Twitter that they'd at least have seen the troubling free speech ramifications of a ban, but never underestimate the Republicans' ability to be a bunch of hypocrites. And the Democrats? They're firmly in the "it's rotting the minds of our youth" camp.

The real bad thing about all this is the precedent it sets. Our government has established that it's just fine to ban an app, and you better believe they're greasing up that slope for the next one.