I worked at AOL for 4 years. Layoffs happened every year like clockwork around the holiday season. Great people, shitty company.

I've been in court when I've seen judges reduce the fine based on speedometer calibration report from a mechanic.

US law used to recognize Mens Rae (guilty mind) as a necessary component for a criminal conviction. However, the War On Drugs has given rise to the predominance of strict liability in criminal law (whereas it was formerly confined primarily to civil law).

Grammatical mistakes, like disagreement in plurality or using the wrong word, are very annoying.

Insurance is one of the most tightly regulated industries around. It also has one of the most effective lobbying organizations around. This results in a lot of regulation that works on their favor, but it's by no means universal.

Why do I suspect more thought has been given to giving the bill a catchy acronym than has been given to the legislation itself?

Anyone who's worked for a company that uses the Mongolian Hoarde technique of software development can tell you that "not enough Indians" (literally) isn't the problem.

The whole point of the Thompson hack is that it would survive a source code audit. If you compiled the clean source for the compiler with a dirty compiler, it would insert the backdoor into the new executable, making it self-replicating in an virtually undetectable fashion. The code you compiled yourself would be byte-for-byte identical with the bootstrap compiler.

Quoting the proposed version of legislature is meaningless. The bits you quote as "proof" for your anti-gun stance were stricken from those laws before they were adopted. Quoting the losing side of a 200-year-old debate to prove your point is disingenuous at best.

While sequel is an acceptable, if unnecessary, pronunciation of SQL, I have found it rare except in the specific case of users of Microsoft SQL server, where it seems to be the rule rather than the exception

I worked as a DBA for over a decade and never once met a DBA who pronounced it as anything but "sequel".

So fix the (broken) gameplay mechanic that allows bot users to have an advantage.

Having to 'grind' at mindless / meaningless tasks in game in order to play the interesting parts of the game is just bad game design - it disrespects the player's time and money. It's a transparent attempt to increase subscriber revenue. Get rid of the grind and you eliminate the incentive to use a bot in the first place.

More to the point, the Saudi royal family owns Saudi Aramco, not the other way around.

Why we call these f*tards our "allies" is beyond me. We should take all the money we spend propping up their regime and spend it on alternative energy research.

I pay attention to what the tea party candidates actually DO, versus what they SAY.

They SAY they're about fiscal responsibility and small government. What they actually DO when they're elected is work to enact far-right social policy.

Hell, can you just imagine the nightmare it must have been to get all the insurance companies to provide all their data/plans in a standardized format so they could be integrated to the store front?

That's where being the Government has the advantage: you just mandate that the data be supplied in such-and-such a format, and fine companies for non-compliance. I've been on both sides of that equation, and (from an engineer's perspective) it actually works pretty well.

That, and it was designed and managed by committee. Worse, you had people on the committee who wanted it to fail.

You have to remember that, prior to Nixon's Southern Strategy, southern Democrats (AKA Dixiecrats) were the Tea Party of their day: racist, xenophobic, religious fundamentalists bent on socially regressive and theocratic policies.

The south remained solidly Democratic from 1865 to 1965, a legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The only thing that got them to switch sides was because the butthurt of a Yankee Catholic giving civil rights to the n*****s was greater than the butthurt of a Republican giving them freedom in the first place.

Most people tend to forget that, from Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt, the Republicans were the progressive party, and the Democrats were the Conservatives. It wasn't until after the Taft-Roosevelt split at the 1912 Republican National Convention in that the GOP started becoming the party of big business and fiscal conservatism. The progressives eventually migrated to the Democratic party, but this just exacerbated the existing split between the northern Democrats and the Dixiecrat faction. For much of it's history the Democratic party was as dysfunctional and fractious as the GOP is today - unsurprising, considering that the Tea Party, the Dixiecrats, and the Civil War era Know Nothings are basically different manifestations of the same ideology and encompass the same demographic.