He has 12 years of experience. He just needs the degree to get past bureaucrats who toss his resume in the garbage because they automatically toss out the resume of everyone without a degree. For him, a degree *is* just a line item on a resume.
Doesn't even looking at this source code create a minefield for open source developers? If you look at the source code, Microsoft can scrutinize all your open-source contributions claiming that since you read Microsoft's source code, you can't suddenly forget everything you learned, so all your contributions to open-source software are tainted by your knowledge. It will be impossible to prove otherwise. This may mean that if you look at Microsoft's source code, you are barred for life from working on the Linux kernel or anything even remotely related to operating systems. It could even affect your ability to get a job.
If nothing else, this is an excellent example of how the race and gender warriors aren't going to stop at race and gender. Suddenly nationalism becomes equivalent to wanting to keep black people as slaves and women in the kitchen. What next, will they complain about capitalism in games?
Characters who are physically disabled don't appear in games because the kind of things that characters do in games tend to involve a lot of physical activity. How's someone who can't walk going to be jumping over obstacles? How's someone who can't see going to be shooting things?
And your idea about dark skin is particularly ridiculous.
1) "Dark skin" is exactly worded, because if you were to say "non-white" it would be obvious that games made in Japan have Japanese characters, who are non-white. 2) At any rate, Japan has few black people and you would not expect to see any in Japanese games except as a percentage of the Westerner-type characters, who in turn are only a small portion of all the characters. 3) Street Fighter II contains a black character, an Indian character, and several non-Japanese Asians and it comes from 1991. I suppose "recently" means "within 23 years"? 4) A lot of games, especially games from before "recently", have characters who are not human and so can't be black. Exactly what race is Sonic the Hedgehog or the ship from Defender? A lot more games have characters drawn with such few pixels that you have no way to tell what race they are unless you say "that pixel has a brightness of under 50 so it's dark enough that the character is probably black".
Oh, and Constantine is based on a comic. Gabriel is white in the comic.
Why would people file complaints of actual police misconduct when there's no camera available, but suddenly stop filing those complaints when the camera was there (even if the footage was "lost")?
Some reports are real and some are fake. Cameras reduce the number of fake reports, but they don't reduce the number of real reports (since the police will "lose" the recording in a real incident). The end result is that the total number of reports of police misconduct goes down, but actual police misconduct doesn't go down.
The reason that terrorists use 18-25 year old males from the Middle East by default is that such people are the most practical for them to use, and that using someone else would be a lot harder and would make it more likely they would get caught (for instance, because such alternates have less loyalty to them).
Scanning the targets that are easiest for terrorists to use doesn't stop them, but it makes their plan harder compared to scanning random people, as long as you still scan the random people at some lower rate.
I would expect that in a libertarian society, when you buy a house you'd buy the right-of-way to get to the nearest road system, so nobody could cut off your access. You would also buy title insurance on your right-of-way just like you buy title insurance on the rest of the house today. Eventually there would be an ecosystem where anyone who registers themselves as owning property also registers the status of the rights-of-way through their property (because nobody will transact with you if you don't do it through a trusted company, and all the trusted companies will require that you state your right-of-way ownership).
In practice, you'll probably end up with the road owner having the right-of-way right up to your front door, while you have a contract with the road owner saying that you have a right to use the road as long as you pay your road fee.
And that's what I came up with in just fifteen minutes. I'm sure actual libertarians have thought about it for longer and come up with better answers.
I just looked up that Haitian earthquake quote using your own link. Eric is not arguing that the earthquake was caused by a voodoo curse. All he's arguing is historical accuracy--someone really did perform a ceremony that's pretty much a curse. He's not saying that the curse caused the earthquake, only that the curse ceremony itself was not something someone just made up yesterday because they didn't bother to check the history books.
If you seriously think that we shouldn't worry about things that kill fewer people than cancer and heart disease, bear in mind that not only are fewer people killed by terrorists than by cancer and heart disease, but fewer people are killed by ordinary criminals and by a whole host of other things that even you think it's the proper role of government to protect us against. Unless you're an extreme libertarian who would reduce the government's rule down to almost nothing, you really have no business saying the government should stay out of it just because it kills fewer people than cancer and heart disease.
In fact, I'd consider this to be one of the least objectionable things the NSA does. It's what they're *supposed* to be doing, after all..
(The single least objectionable thing the NSA does is spy on foreign governments. Since foreign governments have lots of funds and easy access to the press, they can get lots of favorable media coverage by hypocritically complaining about the USA doing things they're perfectly willing to do themselves.)
You tella car company that you're going to pay them a half million dollars for a special custom car. You sign the contract, which requires that you pay them $500000 and that they give you a car when it's completed. Halfway through the process you suddenly decide that you don't want the car after all.
Well, tough. You already signed the contract and they're already building the car. You have no choice but to pay for a car that you aren't going to use.
That's what goes on in vases like this. The government signed the contract saying that they'll pay. They can't renege on the deal just because they decided they didn't want what they were paying for any more, so instead they have to pay for it and let it gather dust once they have it. I can guarantee that if you or I signed a contract that said we'd pay for something we wouldn't be able to get out of it just because we no longer wanted what we were paying for.
This isn't so much about grandstanding politicians that want money for useless programs, but about grandstanding politicians who like to decide the government doesn't want something for which the contract has already been signed.
1) Women generally are less willing than men to do things that result in them becoming social outcasts as a youth. This will lead to a lot fewer girls doing things that lead them to STEM jobs later in life. 2) Women are a lot less willing to take jobs with low satisfaction and high working hours in order to get high pay. CS-related jobs, of course, tend to be like this. This effect is made even bigger by the fact that it's still, even in these liberated days, a lot more acceptable for the man to be the primary breadwinner, allowing the woman more freedom to choose a lower-paying but more satisfying job.
Any case where someone actually warned the FBI about someone and they caught them in advance won't get the massive news coverage of a successful terrorist attack. So you only remember the cases where they fail.
Moreover, if the FBI is warned and catches someone ahead of time, and does prevent a terrorist attack, it's going to be hard to prove that anything was prevented unless the FBI catches the guy red-handed. Otherwise be prepared to see headlines "FBI destroys life of innocent man based on word from dictatorial foreign government".
And the next day you walked into your son's room, but instead of smoking he was studying for a test. You then forced him to study from then until 6 AM, whereupon he went to school and failed the test he was studying for because he fell asleep in the classroom.
Many Europeans know another language because they live close to a border where the people on the other side speak a different language, or they even live in a country where the people have more than one native language. They know another language because it is directly useful in their everyday life, not because knowing another language is good all by itself or because of indirect benefits like knowing the meaning of new words that are related to that language. The US is pretty big and it's a lot more common to live far from a land border (or to only live near the border with English-speaking sections of Canada.)
Googling up the American Botanical Council shows that 1) they're unimportant enough that Wikipedia does not have an article aboutf them or their magazine 2) They are not part of any professional botanical organizations 3) Their facebook page calls them "Your source for reliable herbal medicine information" and shares links for organizatioins whose descriptions include phrases such as "holistic" and "alternative medicine". 4) Their own homepage is clearly aimed at the herbal medicine crowd and even includes a disclaimer that "The information on this site is intended for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for the advice of a qualified healthcare professional". Their magazine is called HerbalGram, for pete's sake.
I dare you to read their own site's news page at http://abc.herbalgram.org/site... and conclude that they are anything but a bunch of alternative medicine crackpots whose belief about the Voynich Manuscript should be taken as seriously as their belief that it's worth giving a presentation at an aromatherapy conference.
All this injection stuff is to spare OUR feelings, not the prisoner's
Who are you calling "we"?
The reason that "we" try to use humane methods in executions is that there are death penalty opponents who like to call every method of execution inhumane as a way of nickel-and-diming the system to destruction. Occasionally a court disagrees with them, which leaves us with one completely arbitrary method that is established as legally permissible because it's "humane". That's the reason we use lethal injections and not the guillotine--pressure from opponents. I would bet that most supporters of capital punishment wouldn't care about the difference.
The difference is nonsense anyway. Sure, that punishment isn't the absolute least painful execution possible. It harms the prisoner. But it harms the prisoner overalll less than, say, a year in jail, and nobody thinks it's inhumane to put someone in jail for a year (or to put someone on death row for a period that is pretty much guaranteed to be longer than a year), and it's a small amount of extra harm compared to the harm caused to him by, you know, being dead.
It isn't really clear that they did in fact lie to Congress.
From your own link:
The attempts to parse his answer to Wydenâ(TM)s question as being technically truthful don't work and he should stop trying to claim that he didn't lie. But a dispassionate view of these circumstances shows that there are times when honesty is not always the best policy.
In other words, even your link admits that they lied to Congress, the link just tries to argue that lying is justified.
Everyone is responding based on knowing that the patent troll's claim of patent violation is probably bogus. But the question is over whether the FTC even has jurisdiction over claims of that type. Whether the claim is bogus doesn't come into effect at that stage--you can't say "the FTC can stop the patent troll's lawsuits because their claim is bad", since whether the claim is bad is something that gets decided in the lawsuit (or in the agreement to avoid the lawsuit).
Here's an analogy where the claim is not bad. The police accidentally blow up your house looking for marijuana. Your lawyer tells you that even with the drug war the way it is, a lawsuit is reasonable. So you tell the police "pay for for the damage caused by blowing up my house, or I take you to court". However, at this point the government steps in and says "you are charging people money to blow up your house. By selling the service of letting people blow up your house, you are violating the zoning laws, permit laws, and a whole bunch of other laws related to running businesses. If you try to charge anyone for blowing up houses, including the police, we will put you in jail."
Should they be able to say that? Of course not. There's a difference between selling someone something as a business and "selling" someone something when you are asking them to pay to cover damages. While we may informally say "the patent troll's business is lawsuits", as far as their legal claims go, they're just sitting on the porch and someone else damaged them, and they're only asking anyone to buy a license because that's how you pay for the damages.
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if that argument will ultimately win in court, but they at least have a legitimate point.
Almost any political position is believed by its followers to be something that affects people's lives, and thus can be spun as affecting health care costs. It's just as easy to do it for the other side. Just take the standard political argument and tack on "so it affects health care costs". For instance, conservatives say that the costs hurt the economy. Well, in a worse economy, people have more health care problems (for hopefully obvious reasons). So food stamps increase health care costs because although they provide food (reducing health care costs), they also harm the economy by a marginal amount (increasing health care costs). If the latter effect is larger, then food stamps are a health care disaster.
And it's unlikely that the study which claimed that cutting food stamps increases health care costs by 15 billion took into account the possibility that paying for food stamps hurts the economy and health care costs are larger in a worse economy.
I can claim that gun control decreases health care costs (because it reduces gun violence and victims of violence use hospitals--this has been claimed for real). I could on the other hand claim that looser gun laws decrease health care costs (because people can use guns to protect themselves from criminals and people hurt by criminals use hospitals). Maybe we need stronger drug laws (stoned people don't take care of themselves very well) or weaker drug laws (the drug war sends people to prison where health is bad and they can't earn a living when they get out since they have an arrest record, making them poor, and so more likely to have high health care costs).
How about arguing that censoring video games reduces health care costs? (fewer teens will become criminals if you censor games; less crime means fewer people sent to hospitals by criminals). It's all about disguising a political position as a nonpartisan one, not about health care.
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He has 12 years of experience. He just needs the degree to get past bureaucrats who toss his resume in the garbage because they automatically toss out the resume of everyone without a degree. For him, a degree *is* just a line item on a resume.
Doesn't even looking at this source code create a minefield for open source developers? If you look at the source code, Microsoft can scrutinize all your open-source contributions claiming that since you read Microsoft's source code, you can't suddenly forget everything you learned, so all your contributions to open-source software are tainted by your knowledge. It will be impossible to prove otherwise. This may mean that if you look at Microsoft's source code, you are barred for life from working on the Linux kernel or anything even remotely related to operating systems. It could even affect your ability to get a job.
Notice how he snuck "nationalism" in there?
If nothing else, this is an excellent example of how the race and gender warriors aren't going to stop at race and gender. Suddenly nationalism becomes equivalent to wanting to keep black people as slaves and women in the kitchen. What next, will they complain about capitalism in games?
Characters who are physically disabled don't appear in games because the kind of things that characters do in games tend to involve a lot of physical activity. How's someone who can't walk going to be jumping over obstacles? How's someone who can't see going to be shooting things?
And your idea about dark skin is particularly ridiculous.
1) "Dark skin" is exactly worded, because if you were to say "non-white" it would be obvious that games made in Japan have Japanese characters, who are non-white.
2) At any rate, Japan has few black people and you would not expect to see any in Japanese games except as a percentage of the Westerner-type characters, who in turn are only a small portion of all the characters.
3) Street Fighter II contains a black character, an Indian character, and several non-Japanese Asians and it comes from 1991. I suppose "recently" means "within 23 years"?
4) A lot of games, especially games from before "recently", have characters who are not human and so can't be black. Exactly what race is Sonic the Hedgehog or the ship from Defender? A lot more games have characters drawn with such few pixels that you have no way to tell what race they are unless you say "that pixel has a brightness of under 50 so it's dark enough that the character is probably black".
Oh, and Constantine is based on a comic. Gabriel is white in the comic.
It does if you're playing the sexism card and the problem is real but not sexism.
Some reports are real and some are fake. Cameras reduce the number of fake reports, but they don't reduce the number of real reports (since the police will "lose" the recording in a real incident). The end result is that the total number of reports of police misconduct goes down, but actual police misconduct doesn't go down.
Ellsberg is on record saying that Snowden did the right thing.
The reason that terrorists use 18-25 year old males from the Middle East by default is that such people are the most practical for them to use, and that using someone else would be a lot harder and would make it more likely they would get caught (for instance, because such alternates have less loyalty to them).
Scanning the targets that are easiest for terrorists to use doesn't stop them, but it makes their plan harder compared to scanning random people, as long as you still scan the random people at some lower rate.
I would expect that in a libertarian society, when you buy a house you'd buy the right-of-way to get to the nearest road system, so nobody could cut off your access. You would also buy title insurance on your right-of-way just like you buy title insurance on the rest of the house today. Eventually there would be an ecosystem where anyone who registers themselves as owning property also registers the status of the rights-of-way through their property (because nobody will transact with you if you don't do it through a trusted company, and all the trusted companies will require that you state your right-of-way ownership).
In practice, you'll probably end up with the road owner having the right-of-way right up to your front door, while you have a contract with the road owner saying that you have a right to use the road as long as you pay your road fee.
And that's what I came up with in just fifteen minutes. I'm sure actual libertarians have thought about it for longer and come up with better answers.
I just looked up that Haitian earthquake quote using your own link. Eric is not arguing that the earthquake was caused by a voodoo curse. All he's arguing is historical accuracy--someone really did perform a ceremony that's pretty much a curse. He's not saying that the curse caused the earthquake, only that the curse ceremony itself was not something someone just made up yesterday because they didn't bother to check the history books.
Yes, I could make that kind of statement 20 years from now (and probably 10 as well), because the p[atents will have expired.
If you seriously think that we shouldn't worry about things that kill fewer people than cancer and heart disease, bear in mind that not only are fewer people killed by terrorists than by cancer and heart disease, but fewer people are killed by ordinary criminals and by a whole host of other things that even you think it's the proper role of government to protect us against. Unless you're an extreme libertarian who would reduce the government's rule down to almost nothing, you really have no business saying the government should stay out of it just because it kills fewer people than cancer and heart disease.
In fact, I'd consider this to be one of the least objectionable things the NSA does. It's what they're *supposed* to be doing, after all..
(The single least objectionable thing the NSA does is spy on foreign governments. Since foreign governments have lots of funds and easy access to the press, they can get lots of favorable media coverage by hypocritically complaining about the USA doing things they're perfectly willing to do themselves.)
Japan is known for making video games. And they're software.
Better than that, many religions are *blatantly* sexist, and yet more women go to church than men.
It's a typo for "cases". Slashdot doesn't let you edit your posts.
You tella car company that you're going to pay them a half million dollars for a special custom car. You sign the contract, which requires that you pay them $500000 and that they give you a car when it's completed. Halfway through the process you suddenly decide that you don't want the car after all.
Well, tough. You already signed the contract and they're already building the car. You have no choice but to pay for a car that you aren't going to use.
That's what goes on in vases like this. The government signed the contract saying that they'll pay. They can't renege on the deal just because they decided they didn't want what they were paying for any more, so instead they have to pay for it and let it gather dust once they have it. I can guarantee that if you or I signed a contract that said we'd pay for something we wouldn't be able to get out of it just because we no longer wanted what we were paying for.
This isn't so much about grandstanding politicians that want money for useless programs, but about grandstanding politicians who like to decide the government doesn't want something for which the contract has already been signed.
1) Women generally are less willing than men to do things that result in them becoming social outcasts as a youth. This will lead to a lot fewer girls doing things that lead them to STEM jobs later in life.
2) Women are a lot less willing to take jobs with low satisfaction and high working hours in order to get high pay. CS-related jobs, of course, tend to be like this. This effect is made even bigger by the fact that it's still, even in these liberated days, a lot more acceptable for the man to be the primary breadwinner, allowing the woman more freedom to choose a lower-paying but more satisfying job.
Any case where someone actually warned the FBI about someone and they caught them in advance won't get the massive news coverage of a successful terrorist attack. So you only remember the cases where they fail.
Moreover, if the FBI is warned and catches someone ahead of time, and does prevent a terrorist attack, it's going to be hard to prove that anything was prevented unless the FBI catches the guy red-handed. Otherwise be prepared to see headlines "FBI destroys life of innocent man based on word from dictatorial foreign government".
And the next day you walked into your son's room, but instead of smoking he was studying for a test. You then forced him to study from then until 6 AM, whereupon he went to school and failed the test he was studying for because he fell asleep in the classroom.
That'll teach him!
Many Europeans know another language because they live close to a border where the people on the other side speak a different language, or they even live in a country where the people have more than one native language. They know another language because it is directly useful in their everyday life, not because knowing another language is good all by itself or because of indirect benefits like knowing the meaning of new words that are related to that language. The US is pretty big and it's a lot more common to live far from a land border (or to only live near the border with English-speaking sections of Canada.)
Googling up the American Botanical Council shows that
1) they're unimportant enough that Wikipedia does not have an article aboutf them or their magazine
2) They are not part of any professional botanical organizations
3) Their facebook page calls them "Your source for reliable herbal medicine information" and shares links for organizatioins whose descriptions include phrases such as "holistic" and "alternative medicine".
4) Their own homepage is clearly aimed at the herbal medicine crowd and even includes a disclaimer that "The information on this site is intended for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for the advice of a qualified healthcare professional". Their magazine is called HerbalGram, for pete's sake.
I dare you to read their own site's news page at http://abc.herbalgram.org/site... and conclude that they are anything but a bunch of alternative medicine crackpots whose belief about the Voynich Manuscript should be taken as seriously as their belief that it's worth giving a presentation at an aromatherapy conference.
Who are you calling "we"?
The reason that "we" try to use humane methods in executions is that there are death penalty opponents who like to call every method of execution inhumane as a way of nickel-and-diming the system to destruction. Occasionally a court disagrees with them, which leaves us with one completely arbitrary method that is established as legally permissible because it's "humane". That's the reason we use lethal injections and not the guillotine--pressure from opponents. I would bet that most supporters of capital punishment wouldn't care about the difference.
The difference is nonsense anyway. Sure, that punishment isn't the absolute least painful execution possible. It harms the prisoner. But it harms the prisoner overalll less than, say, a year in jail, and nobody thinks it's inhumane to put someone in jail for a year (or to put someone on death row for a period that is pretty much guaranteed to be longer than a year), and it's a small amount of extra harm compared to the harm caused to him by, you know, being dead.
From your own link:
In other words, even your link admits that they lied to Congress, the link just tries to argue that lying is justified.
Everyone is responding based on knowing that the patent troll's claim of patent violation is probably bogus. But the question is over whether the FTC even has jurisdiction over claims of that type. Whether the claim is bogus doesn't come into effect at that stage--you can't say "the FTC can stop the patent troll's lawsuits because their claim is bad", since whether the claim is bad is something that gets decided in the lawsuit (or in the agreement to avoid the lawsuit).
Here's an analogy where the claim is not bad. The police accidentally blow up your house looking for marijuana. Your lawyer tells you that even with the drug war the way it is, a lawsuit is reasonable. So you tell the police "pay for for the damage caused by blowing up my house, or I take you to court". However, at this point the government steps in and says "you are charging people money to blow up your house. By selling the service of letting people blow up your house, you are violating the zoning laws, permit laws, and a whole bunch of other laws related to running businesses. If you try to charge anyone for blowing up houses, including the police, we will put you in jail."
Should they be able to say that? Of course not. There's a difference between selling someone something as a business and "selling" someone something when you are asking them to pay to cover damages. While we may informally say "the patent troll's business is lawsuits", as far as their legal claims go, they're just sitting on the porch and someone else damaged them, and they're only asking anyone to buy a license because that's how you pay for the damages.
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if that argument will ultimately win in court, but they at least have a legitimate point.
Almost any political position is believed by its followers to be something that affects people's lives, and thus can be spun as affecting health care costs. It's just as easy to do it for the other side. Just take the standard political argument and tack on "so it affects health care costs". For instance, conservatives say that the costs hurt the economy. Well, in a worse economy, people have more health care problems (for hopefully obvious reasons). So food stamps increase health care costs because although they provide food (reducing health care costs), they also harm the economy by a marginal amount (increasing health care costs). If the latter effect is larger, then food stamps are a health care disaster.
And it's unlikely that the study which claimed that cutting food stamps increases health care costs by 15 billion took into account the possibility that paying for food stamps hurts the economy and health care costs are larger in a worse economy.
I can claim that gun control decreases health care costs (because it reduces gun violence and victims of violence use hospitals--this has been claimed for real). I could on the other hand claim that looser gun laws decrease health care costs (because people can use guns to protect themselves from criminals and people hurt by criminals use hospitals). Maybe we need stronger drug laws (stoned people don't take care of themselves very well) or weaker drug laws (the drug war sends people to prison where health is bad and they can't earn a living when they get out since they have an arrest record, making them poor, and so more likely to have high health care costs).
How about arguing that censoring video games reduces health care costs? (fewer teens will become criminals if you censor games; less crime means fewer people sent to hospitals by criminals). It's all about disguising a political position as a nonpartisan one, not about health care.