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Some parents may deliberately do this in order to provide "teachable moments" for both their own children and people who interact with their kids.

Unfortunately, what is often taught from this is not that there are some racist people and that you need to work around them because you will never be able to force them to change, but that every bad thing that ever happens to you is because everyone who is different than you is a racist towards you and they need to be forced to stop. As in, the reason you weren't hired for that job is because the employer is a different color than you are, not that you didn't graduate from second grade, you smoke a rock as soon as you get up in the morning just to get your day started right, have 83 tattoos counting the ones on your face alone, and can't spell the word "I".

It's the same kind of lesson that the welfare system (and proponents) teaches: you can't succeed on your own, you need the government to give you things for free. (You don't need the baby daddy to stick around to support you, the government will do that. What do you mean the kid needs a father? That's trying to impose MORALS on someone!)

That leads to things like kerfluffles over the use of the word "niggardly", and "affirmative action" where the only reason one person was hired over another is fear of reprisals from a minority group and not because the person who was hired is more qualified for the job.

If anyone does really name their children based on trying to teach them about racism, then those parents should have made better use of birth control.

But, if it is a case of ignorance of the listener ("niggardly" is not a racist term),

I've seen racists (where the racism is clearly and unambiguously established by things they've said in other contexts) deliberately using this word as cover. E.g., talking about a black guy, "This man is so niggardly", followed by "Don't you know what the definition of niggardly is? Ha Ha I'm Not Racist" when called on it.

Language is not set in stone. The whole reason we have the study of etymology is that words pick up new connotations and uses over time. In this case, we have one somewhat out-of-fashion mildly negative word which sounds very similar to another word with incredibly potent racist connotations. We also have a group of racist people who know they'll be ostracized if they express their racism openly. It was inevitable that they'd start punning on the mild word.

What exactly is the problem with calling a racist a racist?

Nothing, if the person the label is being applied to has actually said something truly racist deliberately.

But, if it is a case of ignorance of the listener ("niggardly" is not a racist term), or someone helpfully trying to "decode" a "keyword" for us, or assuming because one party to some event was white and the other black that the event must have been racially motivated (e.g., the white cop who made a black congressman who had just broken into his own house show ID), there's a lot wrong with trying to permanently stain someone with the accusation. This would include the case of someone who, nine and a half years previously, while working with a Hollywood script writer to create dialog for a cop show, suggested that the bad cop being portrayed might use 'the N word'.

Adding to it by posting true identities and physical locations just makes it worse.

Now, I haven't seen the tumblr stuff so I don't know if the person who was doing this limited himself to clear-cut unambiguous things, but I'm responding to your simple question "what's wrong with".

For this kind of approach, you really need to hear about your customers, and write the scenarios that they need, and it's obviously impossible when you start your company.

The project is now radically different, but not yet released, since it's really a subset of the previous project.

When you release it you will find the following things guaranteed
- Customers have forgotten to mention 20% of the scenarios they need which is present in your current release.
- 20% more have been misunderstood by you.
- Your new software may be a little more flexible for adding features as compared to the old one, but as much as you had wanted it to be when you decided on a rewrite.
- There are a lot of obscure, difficult to reproduce & difficult to fix bugfixes hidden in your old software, which will not be carried over to your rewrite. You will end up spending a lot of time on these once your rewrite is released.

This is a no brainer in my book, but apparently not in everyones. Making it difficult or illegal to discuss racisim certainly doesn't remove it.

The best strategy is to create an environment where being a racist is 'uncool' (for lack of a better word). This is one arena where the rest of world can, I think, learn quite a bit from the United States. Although the U.S. still has a huge racial problem, it has improved vastly since 1950. Maybe it's getting worse again under the new administration, I don't know. Anyone still in the U.S. have a comment about that?

In the U.S. you can spout whatever racial crap you want to. Free speech isn't attacked. Rather, the laws address concrete areas where racism directly affects minorities. If you are at home with your buddies, or writing a blog, you can call blacks niggers and the law won't do anything about it. Do it in the workplace, where it could bother a co-worker though, and bam, down comes the stick. Not a bad strategy.

Even that is subject to abuse though. For example a teacher suffered http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2002/0 9/03/american_political_correctness_the_word_nigga rdly.html for teaching her children the word 'niggardly'.

Say somone writes a blog where they critisize the administration for censoring racist blogs. It wouldn't be outside of the realm of possiblity for this to be taken down for being pro-racist as well.

I think the best example of censorship failing is modern Germany, where right wing, pseudo neo-nazism http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spie gel/0,1518,357628,00.html (it isn't as bad as it sounds, but it's creepy enough) is getting trendier in Germany. It's become cool because it's anti establishment. As soon as you start censoring something, a large population is going to get curious about it. If racism is really an inferior point of view (and I believe it is), then it will lose out in the marketplace of ideas.

It's like Noam Chomsky says, freedom of speech means freedom to say things we don't like to hear. Even Stalin gave people the freedom to say things he liked to hear. It's our tolerance for unpleasant ideas that measures the degree to which we have freedom of speech.

Windows 2000/XP have a tab autocomplete for the commandline too. Sometimes it's not on by default, but there's a registry key to turn it on. It's not as complete as the *nix one, but it's still great for filenames.

Here's a link.

Here is a very very short list of American charities that do work that impacts the world. I'm only listing a few to give you a few links. You can find a gazillion others.

http://www.pedaids.org/

http://www.cancerresearch.org/

http://www.children.org/home.asp?sid=98BD1FD2-E8B7 -42F2-B0A7-BC88E745D831

http://www.conservation.org/xp/CIWEB/home

http://www.afsc.org/

http://www.accion.org/default.asp

http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php? content_id=49986

You can get a nice list of the top ranked (in terms of money raised being used wisely) charities online

According to American Association of Fundraising Counsel" Americans gave $241 Billion to charity in 2003.

<sarcasm>

That's only ~$1000 per person in the US, which probably does seem a bit niggardly to other countries who like to envision the United States Citizens as fat bloated and heartless. Look at it this way: The average income for a family of 4 in the US is $40k. Giving $4000 for that family is just down right cheap.

</sarcasm>

Certainly if you look at the charts you'll see that Americans did indeed give the Lions share on internal charity, because charity does in fact begin at home, but the amounts spent on international charities, plus the amounts spent for medical research that will eventually benefit the world are hardly insignificant. Donations to save the environment benefit everyone, as does charitable giving in many scientific and medical areas of research.

So, there are some of my figures. If I may turn the tables, you said :The hike in interest rates in the 1980s, caused indirectly by Star Wars expenditure, raised these repayment rates to crippling levels. Would you return the courtesy and post some documentation/facts/figures to back up that statement? I know that the "Star Wars defense was proposed in 1983, and that $60 Billion had been spent on Star Wars in the last 20 years. Yet, if Americans gave away 241 Billion in 1 year, I can't see how 60 billion over 20 years would have caused a hike in interest rates.

I also agree that debts can be crippling, which is why now there are policies established such as the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative (run by USAID) call for forgiving foreign debt (at least in South and Cetral America) in return for children's welfare reform. The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative also makes sure that countries are able to survive their debt. I would very much like to see Iraq be forgiven the debts that their Dictator amassed in their name, but it seems Iraq's creditors will have their pound of flesh.

You can bet that the bill will be footed from here, and we

Why not just mod me up instead? I provide links!

What virus requires consent?