NaibofTabr

You could save a lot more time and money very easily... by not playing this derivative knockoff drivel.

reap what you sow

Apparently the shooter was in the crowd, which means it wasn't a long gun of any kind. Probably a pistol, something small enough to conceal. 22 makes sense.

It's costing them money, and they're not sure they're going to get it back.

I hate the rent-seeking economy.

Microsoft put themselves in this position when they started giving out Windows 10 for free. It was effective in bringing most of the market onto the new version, but it set an expectation which it now feels like they can't break, so they're also giving Windows 11 away. Now to offset that missing revenue, they have to do something to extract value from users.

I don't see how they could stop this without replacing it with something more exploitive.

These are the same chucklefucks that have repeatedly voted against election security bills. They don't care about improving the integrity of the voting process, they care about making it harder to vote.

Where I live, there are security cameras all over the buildings and the lamposts and the traffic intersections and the parking lots, plus Ring/Nest doorbells everywhere. There are more cameras outside the buildings than inside. Everybody is carrying a smartphone and I see people taking pictures or video with them all the time.

Drones and satellites are really only outside.

So I don't agree with your conclusion.

You know what, there's a small chance they would if they knew. But let's say the Pentagon stopped all silos and kept it hush. Russia and China would never know whether they stopped or where remaining ones would be.

Under the terms of the New START treaty, the US and Russia conduct inspections of each other's nuclear weapons programs:

The treaty provides for 18 on-site inspections per year for U.S. and Russian inspection teams

Both countries are intimately familiar the other's weapons systems.

Never mind the security cameras, and the drones, and the smartphones, and the satellites...

But it's so much easier to just blame the one thing, pretend to do something about it, and claim we've made progress.

The First Ammendemnt protects your right to not participate in reciting the pledge of allegiance:

In 2006, in the Florida case Frazier v. Alexandre, a federal district court in Florida ruled that a 1942 state law requiring students to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. As a result of that decision, a Florida school district was ordered to pay $32,500 to a student who chose not to say the pledge and was ridiculed and called "unpatriotic" by a teacher.

In 2009, a Montgomery County, Maryland, teacher berated and had school police remove a 13-year-old girl who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in the classroom. The student's mother, assisted by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, sought and received an apology from the teacher, as state law and the school's student handbook both prohibit students from being forced to recite the Pledge. reference

You might suffer some immediate consequences from ignorant people, but courts have repeatedly upheld that this is protected by the First Amendment. Even the current Supreme Court would have a hard time justifying overturning this precedent.

You could even argue that choosing not to participate is a highly patriotic act, as an exercise of your Constitutional rights as a citizen.