sporaderic 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (470)

• On the post: Naperville, IL Development Project Forced To Drop Name To Avoid Public Confusing It With City 1.7K Miles Away

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 11 Jan, 2019 @ 08:37pm

  Re:

  From what I can see based on latitude and longitude, a great circle route is only 1.5K miles between the two cities anyway... This means everyone here is using rhumb lines. You know who else uses rhumb lines? Pirates. Oh my god, blue's been right all along!

• On the post: Appeals Court: First Amendment Violation To Ban Members Of The Public From Gov't Officials' Facebook Pages

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 11 Jan, 2019 @ 06:20pm

  Re: Not a difficult concept(you'd think)

  Keep your personal stuff and business stuff separate unless you want the restrictions from the latter imposed on the former. Or, when it comes to email, Public Records Act rules governing the latter imposed on the former.

• On the post: CBP Will Search You And Your Property If You're Paying Too Much Attention To An Agent. Or Too Little.

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 11 Jan, 2019 @ 01:11pm

  Re:

  (20) whether there is intelligence available that suggests that smuggling will occur in the area Isn't this really kind of a wildcard/catchall that could be used for everything? Wouldn't this let the CBP argue that their presence in an area, by its very nature, means that they believe smuggling will/may occur?

• On the post: LinkedIn Is Helping The Chinese Government Silence Critics

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 11 Jan, 2019 @ 10:58am

  Re: Re: Re: Either corporations are Trolls

  If you want to prove to us that you aren't a liar, a troll, and a fraud show us a comprehensive manifesto. I've always thought of him as the epitome of someone who does have a manifesto -- in the sense of "700 volumes, written in crayon, covering Google mind-control, a comparison of Reynolds Wrap vs. generic aluminum foil, the best sources for buying 70s-era Testors model paint, random grocery lists, and Zdzisław Beksiński/Care Bears fanfic".

• On the post: CBP Will Search You And Your Property If You're Paying Too Much Attention To An Agent. Or Too Little.

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 11 Jan, 2019 @ 12:46pm

  The CBP has studied every Fourth Amendment-related legal decision to compile a long list of things officers can use to predicate a warrantless search.

  Gotta admit that LEAs have a pretty tough balancing act to perform here: it must be hard to train agents & officers to know every little legal pretext to perform a search while, at the same time, making sure that they're so ignorant of the law that good-faith exceptions and qualified immunity will always kick in when needed.

• On the post: AT&T's Planning Yet More Layoffs Despite Tens Of Billions In Tax Breaks And Government Favors

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 10 Jan, 2019 @ 07:34am

  Re:

  AT&T in 2020: Thanks to $1 trillion in tax breaks and government windfalls, we're proud to announce that we've managed to fire everyone. In fact, to meet our target we had to re-hire 10,000 former employees just so that we could double-fire them.

• On the post: Dept. Of Interior Wants To Rewrite FOIA Law To Make It Easier To Reject Requests

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 09 Jan, 2019 @ 04:53pm

  It gets mentioned almost every day now on TD, but I'll mention it again: humor is getting to be either impossible or redundant when it comes to the government. I mean, how the hell is someone supposed to satirize We need to reject more FOIA requests because it costs too much to reject FOIA requests?

• On the post: Notoriously Corrupt Sri Lanka Police Force Arrests Citizens For Pretending To Bribe A Cardboard Cutout Cop

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 09 Jan, 2019 @ 08:18am

  Re: Re:

  The sad thing is that as stupid as the Sri Lankan cops look for arresting people over a little joke, that "Not willing to risk it" group has probably grown larger. Even bad publicity achieves their goal.

• On the post: Cable Industry Hypes Phony '10G' When 5G Isn't Even Available Yet

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 09 Jan, 2019 @ 08:02am

  Re:

  You must be in great shape: with all those Gs, I didn't have the strength to even lift my hand for a facepalm.

• On the post: Cable Industry Hypes Phony '10G' When 5G Isn't Even Available Yet

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 09 Jan, 2019 @ 07:52am

  Re: '5/10G: Now you can hit your monthly cap even faster!'

  They could always give us the higher speeds with the same usage caps, and then just change the standard billing cycle to daily instead of monthly.

• On the post: Techdirt 2018: The Stats.

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 04 Jan, 2019 @ 06:37pm

  Re: The Poe Problem

  I'd attribute a lot of that to the 'How am I supposed to compete with that?!' problem I'm just waiting for comedy writers and stand-ups to file some sort of class-action tortious interferece lawsuit against the US government. (The funny thing is, I can't even tell if I'm joking about this...)

• On the post: FCC Shuttered, Ajit Pai Forced To Cancel CES Trip Because The US Government Is a Hot Mess

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 04 Jan, 2019 @ 06:02pm

  Re: Re: Re: work?

  Why does every US department and commission want to become part of the security services? They don't have to tell us, as it's a matter of national security.

• On the post: Copyright, Culture, Sharing, Remix… And A Congresswoman Dancing As A College Student

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 04 Jan, 2019 @ 05:47pm

  Re: Re:

  I presume you're ESL? That assumes that the AC has a native language, which implies a living, breathing human being behind the comment. Given its tone, I'm putting my money on a weirdly clever attempt to pass the Turing test.

• On the post: Techdirt 2018: The Stats.

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 04 Jan, 2019 @ 12:37pm

  Once again, it appears to be much, much, much more difficult to get the "funny" icon, so folks need to pick up their game on that one.

  I sure I can manage to be funnier this year... starting, oh, I dunno, around 11:30PM Sunday, February 17.

• On the post: The Internet Giant's Dilemma: Preventing Suicide Is Good; Invading People's Private Lives… Not So Much

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 03 Jan, 2019 @ 01:45pm

  Re:

  ... and whoever happens to be the Chief Engineering Officer of the Enterprise

• On the post: Siri's Hebrew Voice Sues Apple Because She Doesn't Like The Way IPhone Owners Are Using Siri

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 03 Jan, 2019 @ 11:28am

  The lawsuit suggests that Gura-Eini’s voice is “widely identified and associated” with her own live persona.

  If your voice is a vital part of your public identity and primary career, maybe you shouldn't be doing voice acting gigs on the side. (Or does being a voice "artist" sidestep this criticism?)

• On the post: AT&T Attempts A Head Fake With 'Fake 5G'

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 02 Jan, 2019 @ 01:24pm

  Re: Four-day work week

  Those promises have come true: over the years, I've known plenty of people who've managed to score four-day work week jobs. Sure, they usually needed to work at least two at a time, but, you know, details... ;)

• On the post: Creators Of Dance Moves Suing Creators Of Fortnite Over Copyright Infringement That Can't Possibly Have Happened

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 02 Jan, 2019 @ 12:17pm

  Re: Is it just me or...

  If I were Ribiero, I'd be happy to go out on the relatively high note of "that guy who didn't actually endorse Roca Labs".

• On the post: County Pays $90,000 Settlement To Man After Seizing $80,000 Judgment From Him Using 24 Deputies And An Armored Vehicle

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 29 Dec, 2018 @ 02:14pm

  Re: Re: Re: Sheriff Greg Bean is a certified weenie

  It shifted in the seventies. ... They're SUPPOSED to be out-gunned by the citizenry - they're cops, NOT soldiers. The seventies also brought us the War on Drugs, which conditioned us to the reclassification of "the citizenry" as "the indigenous population" and "enemy combatants." Presto, cops became soldiers. At least we learned our lesson and never fell for that sort of overhyped "War on ..." nonsense again.

• On the post: California Town OKs Destruction Of Police Shooting Records Days Before They Could Be Obtained By The Public

  

  sporaderic ( profile ), 28 Dec, 2018 @ 09:46am

  Re:

  Produce a list of all such requests and approvals made in the last 10 years... I'm sure their records of routine records destruction were destroyed, as is routine.

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