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Since people were asking about the context of the "Sir, this is a Wendy's" statement in front of the Supreme Court... here it is, and no, I don't understand it any better now as when I was listening to it.

Mike Masnick@masnick.com

Question for the experts: was this the first time "Sir, this is a wendy's" has been said during oral arguments at the Supreme Court?

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The attorney is aware that cultural phenomena can exist without the internet, right? Because it sounds like they're trying to make it so that the internet is *the* repository for quips and the like, which is creating a whole other problem.

If you're gonna make a fast food restaurant a town square, might as well be the place that sells square burgers.

Won't this case, if affirmed, absolutely wreck The Internet? I mean, nobody can be banned for being vexatiously off topic, all they'd have to do is claim they were being censored for being a conservative. No more topical forums, I'm going to troll everything and claim I'm a conservative Texan.

I think people have posted it in response to so many comments he's made on various social media apps that he assumes it's sort of a generic acknowledgement that someone has made a post.

The best I can come up with his he was trying to argue that people need to be able to respond critically even "trollfully" (new word) to a post they disagree with and therefore (I guess) social media companies shouldn't be able to restrict that "right".

i'm pretty sure this happened like this: uhhhhhh private communication private communication… why does private communication have to exist everywhere… ah! people should not be allowed to see what i'm saying and reply "sir, this is a wendy's!" to me!!

I thiiiiink he's misusing the phrase to mean "This is a place that does xyz, so you need to expect xyz there." Like he thinks it's for situations analogous to someone going to a Wendy's and complaining about them having fries.

"Well, we cited Lipnicki in our brief for the proposition that the human head weighs eight pounds, and well, from there it's simple matter of arithmatic, converting heads into tubes. I'm afraid I can't do that math on my feet right here, but if the Court would like supplemental briefing [LAUGHTER]"

I can’t think of any response I would have, were I counsel, that could be construed as polite. Coming in around #10 (and the first answer without swears), is: “Slightly more than the average velocity of a laden swallow.”

J: “Are you trying to be funny?” Response: “No, sir, I’m just hoping you’ll realize that’s the stupidest question I’ve been asked in my entire career and withdraw it.”

Depends on the frame rate and viewport. Let’s say 24 fps at 2x1.2”, for 360 frames per side of 24”x36” newsprint, or 15 seconds (no margins). 2 sheets (both sides) for a minute. So 19 billion sheets for the ~9.5B minutes on the site, or 38M reams. Reams are at least 22lbs, so … more than 800M lbs.

On an SSD, a bit position with a negative charge is infinitesimally heavier than one with a positive charge owing to the mass of electrons. Therefore we must first establish... Oh, you're just dicking around here until you vote the way the Federalist Society demanded? Cool, yeah, I'll shut up.

This is a candidate for the operators of our simulation* to say to themselves, "how many clues do we have to give them that this isn't real?" *my wife gets mad when I mention the "living in a simulation" idea :-)

Remember in SimCity when you got bored with a save, so you would hit the disaster button over and over again before starting a new game? It's like that but they have an "Absurd" button. Reality Winner is the name of the person given the longest prison sentence ever for leaking govt secrets.

It’s really not. People don’t need their stupidity explained by “we are living in a simulation.” It’s easily explained by their being coddled by privilege and our education system itself being destroyed by the same powerful idiots that ought to be embarrassed but aren’t.

I also don't understand the analogy of a telephone call between private parties where people can say a lot of bad things vs. a public social media post where a lot of people say bad things and a lot of people people see those bad things. These are not equivalent. Maybe only in the context of DMs.

Amazing to see that the guy whose job is articulating points in front of a judge seems to have a weaker grasp on spoken English word than me after a couple of drinks.