It's far easier to just arrest all the brown people.
Considering the mass move away from the republicans by conservative hispanic voters due to the nutty racist shit coming out of the likes of Tancredo et al, which played a large part of the republicans nosediving in the last election, on top of the fact that the republicans seem hellbent on scaring the hell out of almost everyone with the batshit crazy teaparty stuff, do you ever get the feeling the republicans are TRYING to create a "permanant democrat majority".
The funny thing is, considering the widespread perception of innefectiveness thats dogged Obama, it wouldn't actually be too hard to win the next election, except for the fact the republicans seem hell bent on totally alienting the all important hispanic vote (think florida!) , and somehow seem to have taken away from the last election that they where not right wing enought, I doubt they'll be able to capitalize on that.
Because only the federal government can make laws about immigration, according to the US constitution.
According to an AZ lawyer friend, this law won't last 15 seconds in court before its invalidated.
The US constitution provides that: 1) The "Papers Please" part of the law is unconstitutional. If you refuse and are arrested, you can most likely sue for breaches of civil rights, regardless of AZ law. 2) AZ has no constitutional authority to pass this law. 3) It violates the 14th ammendment....and a bunch of other stuff.
Between laws banning the antichrist (actually Im not sure if thats AZ, but lol if it is), the nutty "president must have birth certificate" (Hmm, yes I'm SURE AZ has the authority to make federal election laws) and this, plus the fact that Sherrif Arpaio *STILL* isn't in Jail for massive breaches of every god damn law regulating police powers and police brutality ever concieved, AZ is apparently a pretty embarassing place to be a lawyer right now.
There is a rule on defamation, the mistake the reviewer made was in consider defamation and ridicule to be the same thing. </blockquote>
The problem is , even lawyers can have a hard time working out the difference. In the US its a fairly bright line thanks to the first ammendment, but in the UK and elsewhere the answer lies in a confusing mess of case history , common law, and badly written statutes. If a Lawyer or journo has trouble working it out (Most newspapers just put aside a big stash of cash and expect to lose a few cases) a 19yo acne scarred intern at apple trying to make a judgement call on international juristiction shopping possibilities has no chance.
I hear ya man. My bro has Tourettes and has perfectly controlled speech, other than the occasional muted yelp. Tourettes is in some sense like an ultra nasty version of obessive compulsive, except with less hand washing, and more twitching.
Living with it certainly requires one to develop bit of a sense of humor about it (and knowing when someone deserves a good punch in the mouth) . Its not a fun disorder, and yeah, nothing we know about its genetics (Gilles De Tourette gene complex on I *think* chromasone 18 (I think!)) , some tell tale signs in cerebral blood flow and EEG scans , and so on.
The notion you can develop in neurotically from PTS is complete bullshit.
Absolutely. As a geek, I really dislike Apples insistance on disallowing jailbreaks (Although I've got the dev kit, so I just jacked some hacks in via that and managed to get myself inside that way) but I'm not a typical user.
This is something I could give my grandma, or my deeply tech befuddled mother and just say "Poke the little button with the app and follow the instructions on the screen!" and they know everything they need to know about it.
You are NOT supposed to use this as a netbook! Your supposed to use it like you might use apps on an iphone, simple apps that have simple purposes with very high availability and nearly a zero learning curve.
For power use this won't replace your laptop. But its not supposed to. I'm pretty certain apple doesnt want to cut its notepad lunch.
I can see the use of this for instance if I'm at a friends house and someone says "Hey, whats yeast autolyis, apparently its bad for my homebrew beer" and I can just whip it out and within a couple of seconds have wikipedia up telling me. No boot up, no fudging thru menus.
I think the long battery life is part of this. I dont want to be constantly fighting the ever diminishing battery life of a notepad which is always stricken by the demands of a hard drive. I just want the damn thing to be there.
Steve Jobs has been talking a lot about the "Post PC" era, meaning a world where computing isnt trapped in typwriters-with-monitors, but is pervasive and everywhere. I think he's right on that, and although I think the jury is still out on whether the ipad will be that revolutionary break (Give us a multitasking that is resistant to a thousand and one apps sticking horrible background tasks that slowly bleed the power out of the unit, give me a forward facing camera for video conferencing, and give us the ability to print, and I think we are there), but its a harbringer of things to come.
Netpads that are just tablet windows PC miss the whole point. At this stage the race should be between the iPad and the Android devices and stuff that nukes the desktop metaphor in favor of genuine newbie friendlyness and always-there simple access to the interwebs.
I didn't assault the kid, I grabbed his arm and launched him off the bus. And we are talking nearly 20 years ago. Fuck back when I was at school your worst violence issue wasn't other kids, it was the fucking teacher and his god damn belt.
I didn't assault the kid, I grabbed him fairly firmly, but not harmfully, and with the bus drivers approval forcibly removed him from the bus. The kid was basically beating up his geeky victim and that just wasn't going to fly with me. Half the bus clapped and the other half of the kids just stared realising that shit was going to change.
It does highlight something that really worries me about this case. As a kid I copped a bit of bullying myself, at least till I got big enough to fight back, but I came to the conclusion that kids are, well, shitheads, and that most hopefully grow out of it.
Whats disturbing, is that the adults did nothing to protect this poor girl when it should have been immediately obvious she was being victimized. Sometimes when your being bullied, simply having an older kid or adult take your side can be immensely comforting.
When I was around 25 I used to catch a public bus to work, and every morning this scruffy young kid would be on the bus being teased and taunted till I decided to intervene, picked up one of his tormentors and physically launched him off the bus then let the kid sit next to me from that point on. I told the bullies that I would hunt down and beat senselessly any kid that bullied my new little mate, and within a couple of weeks the kid stopped being bullied. I gave the kid a bit of friendship and kind of explained how to work on his goofy demeanor, and within a year he was a reasonably popular kid himself.
All it takes is someone to care about these kids. To give a damn about them. Show some genuine concern for these kids, and they'll shine. They always do
I had an old motorola phone, can't remember the model, but it was about 8 years ago. At the pub, the phone rang, and as I yanked it out my top pocket it flew out my hand and landed in my beer (to a roar of laughter from my friends). Anyway the phone appeared dead on contact.
So I dried it out, took out the battery and and left it for a week and put the battery in. Still dead.
Then about 2 months later it spontaneously came back to life with a beep. Other than some stickey keys, it worked fine!
Yeah your right. I'm 35 and I've got far less tolerance for the long hours and crunches than I did when I was younger. The problem however is not in older workers , imho, but in younger workers putting up with it. I actually want a life, and time to focus on family. Lifes far too short to be spent in a bad suit and a tie. I don't want a million dollars anymore, I want a yacht and some time to spend on it with my family!
One big difference I think between me at 25 and me at 35 is I simply don't fear employers anymore. Whereas when I was 25 I'd just accept I'm not going home till ten for three weeks straight, I can now recognise it as abusive and I'm more likely to tell my employer so. And being that bosses can't look down on me as some sort of uppity kid, I get to achieve that. The reality is I still get kept around jobs, because I have better 'meta' skills than the young guys, younger guys are great at seeing fine print problems, but us older coders excel at spotting organisational and big picture issues. Those are life skills, not technical skills, and are frankly pretty damn important.
But I still think that theres a pressure on us older workers to put in the extra hours and to shut the fuck up and comply with bad management, so part of what I try and do is teach the younger guys to be assertive, think broad and to not be afraid to reach out to management and flag shit that personally hurts their real lives. Ultimately it leads to younger coders not burning out and in the long run that means better productivity.
I'll be giving this game up soon and heading into management, I think.
You don't even have to be an authoritarian communist country, just in one with a bad regard for human rights. Theres a littany of tales about both foreign companies and foreign workers being detained and harassed in Dubai, because the company had ideas contrary to the ruling elite there.
Regardless, good on Google for doing this. Remembering a companies social responsibility is just as important as its profit baseline is depressingly rare, and this will help google take the moral lead its always claimed to have.
Yep. When I first started learning Jazz, I was amazed at how much theory you needed to know just to get in the front door. At the very least you need to know your scales (all of them!) , modes of scales, how chords actually work, the various tone cycles, and so on. Then you start on the rhythm, and your STILL only in basic jazz.
Compared to the 'academic' 12 tone stuff (Create a 12 tone sequence, throw some inversions and stuff in there, shift em around and tweazle with the timing and your done) , jazz is immesurably more difficult to compose, let alone improvise in (You gotta do that theory in your head, AND in real time, possibly after a few beers , jazz being smoky bar stuff and all).
I'll admit some early jazz variants where pretty simple minded (ie a lot of the tin-pan alley stuff) but its foolish to claim that jazz is 'rule-less'. Its a damn sight more academically structured than rock and roll.
Yep, and that immunity isn't going to impede on your rights in any substantial way anyway. No matter what the whitehouse does, you've still got the full protections of the courts in a manner that the constitution guarantees. If stuff is used against you in a trial, you CAN challenge how it was obtained, if wiretaps happen, you CAN assert your constitutional rights to privacy, and if one of these suits tries and grabs you (They can't) you can damn well have them charged on deprivation of liberty if they havent gone through all the due processes to get a judge to agree on terms compatible with American justice.
Generally its pretty unlikely an American will ever face an international court for stuff done at home, the US govt has been adamant on that, but even if you did, the european courts have a very modern set of evidence laws that make the US ones look draconian. (Ie afaik, American courts seem to permit entrapment by undercover agents for some reason)
I'd not be too worried about this, its just the right blowing fear trumpets again. Where where these people when Bush was rolling out the patriot act anyway?
Yep. I'm an iphone developer and I really think the iPhone is a superior phone (although the maemos might just give it a good run for the money, if it really does prove to be the linux phone we had wished the android was) but the Nokias have had a massive impact by making mobile phones *AFFORDABLE* to the third world. Heck I read somewhere that Somalia (or one of those places), with no effective government to speak of, has a more reliable mobile phone infrastructure than most first world countries. Thats a massive benefit. Sure it aint food and perhaps stable governance (what these countries REALLY need), but communications will go a long way to bringing poor old africa out of the economic hell its been trapped in.
Eh. It might not be so bad. Patents suck balls, but the mutual mexican stand off between IBM and Microsoft over OS patents (Both have enough to take each other to the cleaners) has meant that Microsoft cant sue 'linux' (directly, note the SCO scenario) and IBM cant sue microsoft directly. Both face huge retaliation danger, so both more-or-less do nothing.
The problem is more the patent troll companies like EOLAS.
Solution: Get rid of the ability to patent math and code!
..And the only reason why Microsoft is really allowed to dominate the OS market is due to artificial regulations put in by the government (software patents) and government sponsorship.
Erm. I hear libertarian types say this a bit. But can you please provide an actual concrete example of this in action? Because I'll be damned if I can think of a mechanism that doesn't completely contradict modern economics that'd make this work.
The CRU, whos been largely vindicated on most of the allegations made against them (except perhaps the one about plotting to do over the denialist journal editor. That was kind of dickish) and employs some of the best minds in climate science.
*VS*
A notoriously dodgy right wing think tank, headed by a political associate of putin, with a reputation of engaging in dodgy tactics against whatever branch of science they've been contracted to try and rubish on any given week.
I'll bet the heratige foundation is behind the scenes somewhere too. Those cats still running the "smoking doesn't cause cancer" line still?
Without data to prove it, this is just more idiotic noise coming from the angry right wing blogger pack.
The Greens, despite their reputation as being a bit luddite have proven themselves surprisingly literate with Scott Ludlum putting up a great fight against the laws, practically being the lone voice against censorship in the senate.
This attitude sucks, "If you dont like it, then get another job" roughly paraphrased.
Bullshit.
People seem to forget that without workers, the value of a company is nothing. Trying to hand-wave away problems on the premise stated above forgets that the most socially valuable part of a business isn't the product, nor is it the employer or shareholders, but the employees , the value they bring to society and the fair reward they get for their labor.
We SHOULD be discussing what makes a pleasant workplace, because the fair alternative is we all stop working.
But that isn't going to happen.
My alternative: Bosses: If you don't like the employees simple requests that make the day pleasant and productive, [i]get the hell out of business and hand management over to someone who will[/i].
Putting up with injustice , even by just walking away , makes you complicit in that injustice.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering the mass move away from the republicans by conservative hispanic voters due to the nutty racist shit coming out of the likes of Tancredo et al, which played a large part of the republicans nosediving in the last election, on top of the fact that the republicans seem hellbent on scaring the hell out of almost everyone with the batshit crazy teaparty stuff, do you ever get the feeling the republicans are TRYING to create a "permanant democrat majority".
The funny thing is, considering the widespread perception of innefectiveness thats dogged Obama, it wouldn't actually be too hard to win the next election, except for the fact the republicans seem hell bent on totally alienting the all important hispanic vote (think florida!) , and somehow seem to have taken away from the last election that they where not right wing enought, I doubt they'll be able to capitalize on that.
Because only the federal government can make laws about immigration, according to the US constitution.
According to an AZ lawyer friend, this law won't last 15 seconds in court before its invalidated.
The US constitution provides that: ...and a bunch of other stuff.
1) The "Papers Please" part of the law is unconstitutional. If you refuse and are arrested, you can most likely sue for breaches of civil rights, regardless of AZ law.
2) AZ has no constitutional authority to pass this law.
3) It violates the 14th ammendment.
Between laws banning the antichrist (actually Im not sure if thats AZ, but lol if it is), the nutty "president must have birth certificate" (Hmm, yes I'm SURE AZ has the authority to make federal election laws) and this, plus the fact that Sherrif Arpaio *STILL* isn't in Jail for massive breaches of every god damn law regulating police powers and police brutality ever concieved, AZ is apparently a pretty embarassing place to be a lawyer right now.
I hear ya man. My bro has Tourettes and has perfectly controlled speech, other than the occasional muted yelp. Tourettes is in some sense like an ultra nasty version of obessive compulsive, except with less hand washing, and more twitching.
Living with it certainly requires one to develop bit of a sense of humor about it (and knowing when someone deserves a good punch in the mouth) . Its not a fun disorder, and yeah, nothing we know about its genetics (Gilles De Tourette gene complex on I *think* chromasone 18 (I think!)) , some tell tale signs in cerebral blood flow and EEG scans , and so on.
The notion you can develop in neurotically from PTS is complete bullshit.
Absolutely. As a geek, I really dislike Apples insistance on disallowing jailbreaks (Although I've got the dev kit, so I just jacked some hacks in via that and managed to get myself inside that way) but I'm not a typical user.
This is something I could give my grandma, or my deeply tech befuddled mother and just say "Poke the little button with the app and follow the instructions on the screen!" and they know everything they need to know about it.
You are NOT supposed to use this as a netbook! Your supposed to use it like you might use apps on an iphone, simple apps that have simple purposes with very high availability and nearly a zero learning curve.
For power use this won't replace your laptop. But its not supposed to. I'm pretty certain apple doesnt want to cut its notepad lunch.
I can see the use of this for instance if I'm at a friends house and someone says "Hey, whats yeast autolyis, apparently its bad for my homebrew beer" and I can just whip it out and within a couple of seconds have wikipedia up telling me. No boot up, no fudging thru menus.
I think the long battery life is part of this. I dont want to be constantly fighting the ever diminishing battery life of a notepad which is always stricken by the demands of a hard drive. I just want the damn thing to be there.
Steve Jobs has been talking a lot about the "Post PC" era, meaning a world where computing isnt trapped in typwriters-with-monitors, but is pervasive and everywhere. I think he's right on that, and although I think the jury is still out on whether the ipad will be that revolutionary break (Give us a multitasking that is resistant to a thousand and one apps sticking horrible background tasks that slowly bleed the power out of the unit, give me a forward facing camera for video conferencing, and give us the ability to print, and I think we are there), but its a harbringer of things to come.
Netpads that are just tablet windows PC miss the whole point. At this stage the race should be between the iPad and the Android devices and stuff that nukes the desktop metaphor in favor of genuine newbie friendlyness and always-there simple access to the interwebs.
Oh and apple, give us flash already huh?
I didn't assault the kid, I grabbed his arm and launched him off the bus. And we are talking nearly 20 years ago. Fuck back when I was at school your worst violence issue wasn't other kids, it was the fucking teacher and his god damn belt.
He was beating the kid up. Me physically restraining and ejecting him off the bus was a sure lot less than what his victim had been copping.
I didn't assault the kid, I grabbed him fairly firmly, but not harmfully, and with the bus drivers approval forcibly removed him from the bus. The kid was basically beating up his geeky victim and that just wasn't going to fly with me. Half the bus clapped and the other half of the kids just stared realising that shit was going to change.
It does highlight something that really worries me about this case. As a kid I copped a bit of bullying myself, at least till I got big enough to fight back, but I came to the conclusion that kids are, well, shitheads, and that most hopefully grow out of it.
Whats disturbing, is that the adults did nothing to protect this poor girl when it should have been immediately obvious she was being victimized. Sometimes when your being bullied, simply having an older kid or adult take your side can be immensely comforting.
When I was around 25 I used to catch a public bus to work, and every morning this scruffy young kid would be on the bus being teased and taunted till I decided to intervene, picked up one of his tormentors and physically launched him off the bus then let the kid sit next to me from that point on. I told the bullies that I would hunt down and beat senselessly any kid that bullied my new little mate, and within a couple of weeks the kid stopped being bullied. I gave the kid a bit of friendship and kind of explained how to work on his goofy demeanor, and within a year he was a reasonably popular kid himself.
All it takes is someone to care about these kids. To give a damn about them. Show some genuine concern for these kids, and they'll shine. They always do
I had an old motorola phone, can't remember the model, but it was about 8 years ago. At the pub, the phone rang, and as I yanked it out my top pocket it flew out my hand and landed in my beer (to a roar of laughter from my friends). Anyway the phone appeared dead on contact.
So I dried it out, took out the battery and and left it for a week and put the battery in. Still dead.
Then about 2 months later it spontaneously came back to life with a beep. Other than some stickey keys, it worked fine!
Yeah your right. I'm 35 and I've got far less tolerance for the long hours and crunches than I did when I was younger. The problem however is not in older workers , imho, but in younger workers putting up with it. I actually want a life, and time to focus on family. Lifes far too short to be spent in a bad suit and a tie. I don't want a million dollars anymore, I want a yacht and some time to spend on it with my family!
One big difference I think between me at 25 and me at 35 is I simply don't fear employers anymore. Whereas when I was 25 I'd just accept I'm not going home till ten for three weeks straight, I can now recognise it as abusive and I'm more likely to tell my employer so. And being that bosses can't look down on me as some sort of uppity kid, I get to achieve that. The reality is I still get kept around jobs, because I have better 'meta' skills than the young guys, younger guys are great at seeing fine print problems, but us older coders excel at spotting organisational and big picture issues. Those are life skills, not technical skills, and are frankly pretty damn important.
But I still think that theres a pressure on us older workers to put in the extra hours and to shut the fuck up and comply with bad management, so part of what I try and do is teach the younger guys to be assertive, think broad and to not be afraid to reach out to management and flag shit that personally hurts their real lives. Ultimately it leads to younger coders not burning out and in the long run that means better productivity.
I'll be giving this game up soon and heading into management, I think.
Java also gives the web designer a more broader pallette of techniques for crashing the users browsers that work cross platform just as god intended.
Well in the case of the parents in this story, I'd say "poorly".
You don't even have to be an authoritarian communist country, just in one with a bad regard for human rights. Theres a littany of tales about both foreign companies and foreign workers being detained and harassed in Dubai, because the company had ideas contrary to the ruling elite there.
Regardless, good on Google for doing this. Remembering a companies social responsibility is just as important as its profit baseline is depressingly rare, and this will help google take the moral lead its always claimed to have.
Yep. When I first started learning Jazz, I was amazed at how much theory you needed to know just to get in the front door. At the very least you need to know your scales (all of them!) , modes of scales, how chords actually work, the various tone cycles, and so on. Then you start on the rhythm, and your STILL only in basic jazz.
Compared to the 'academic' 12 tone stuff (Create a 12 tone sequence, throw some inversions and stuff in there, shift em around and tweazle with the timing and your done) , jazz is immesurably more difficult to compose, let alone improvise in (You gotta do that theory in your head, AND in real time, possibly after a few beers , jazz being smoky bar stuff and all).
I'll admit some early jazz variants where pretty simple minded (ie a lot of the tin-pan alley stuff) but its foolish to claim that jazz is 'rule-less'. Its a damn sight more academically structured than rock and roll.
Its not the dupe guys they fear, its penisbird.
Yep, and that immunity isn't going to impede on your rights in any substantial way anyway. No matter what the whitehouse does, you've still got the full protections of the courts in a manner that the constitution guarantees. If stuff is used against you in a trial, you CAN challenge how it was obtained, if wiretaps happen, you CAN assert your constitutional rights to privacy, and if one of these suits tries and grabs you (They can't) you can damn well have them charged on deprivation of liberty if they havent gone through all the due processes to get a judge to agree on terms compatible with American justice.
Generally its pretty unlikely an American will ever face an international court for stuff done at home, the US govt has been adamant on that, but even if you did, the european courts have a very modern set of evidence laws that make the US ones look draconian. (Ie afaik, American courts seem to permit entrapment by undercover agents for some reason)
I'd not be too worried about this, its just the right blowing fear trumpets again. Where where these people when Bush was rolling out the patriot act anyway?
Yep. I'm an iphone developer and I really think the iPhone is a superior phone (although the maemos might just give it a good run for the money, if it really does prove to be the linux phone we had wished the android was) but the Nokias have had a massive impact by making mobile phones *AFFORDABLE* to the third world. Heck I read somewhere that Somalia (or one of those places), with no effective government to speak of, has a more reliable mobile phone infrastructure than most first world countries. Thats a massive benefit. Sure it aint food and perhaps stable governance (what these countries REALLY need), but communications will go a long way to bringing poor old africa out of the economic hell its been trapped in.
Eh. It might not be so bad. Patents suck balls, but the mutual mexican stand off between IBM and Microsoft over OS patents (Both have enough to take each other to the cleaners) has meant that Microsoft cant sue 'linux' (directly, note the SCO scenario) and IBM cant sue microsoft directly. Both face huge retaliation danger, so both more-or-less do nothing.
The problem is more the patent troll companies like EOLAS.
Solution: Get rid of the ability to patent math and code!
Erm. I hear libertarian types say this a bit. But can you please provide an actual concrete example of this in action? Because I'll be damned if I can think of a mechanism that doesn't completely contradict modern economics that'd make this work.
Yeah I'm going to go with you on this one.
The CRU, whos been largely vindicated on most of the allegations made against them (except perhaps the one about plotting to do over the denialist journal editor. That was kind of dickish) and employs some of the best minds in climate science.
*VS*
A notoriously dodgy right wing think tank, headed by a political associate of putin, with a reputation of engaging in dodgy tactics against whatever branch of science they've been contracted to try and rubish on any given week.
I'll bet the heratige foundation is behind the scenes somewhere too. Those cats still running the "smoking doesn't cause cancer" line still?
Without data to prove it, this is just more idiotic noise coming from the angry right wing blogger pack.
rape comedy?
Stay classy slashdot!
The Greens, despite their reputation as being a bit luddite have proven themselves surprisingly literate with Scott Ludlum putting up a great fight against the laws, practically being the lone voice against censorship in the senate.
I'd be more disturbed if I got a job because I was looking up "cheerleader specific pr0n".
This attitude sucks, "If you dont like it, then get another job" roughly paraphrased.
Bullshit.
People seem to forget that without workers, the value of a company is nothing. Trying to hand-wave away problems on the premise stated above forgets that the most socially valuable part of a business isn't the product, nor is it the employer or shareholders, but the employees , the value they bring to society and the fair reward they get for their labor.
We SHOULD be discussing what makes a pleasant workplace, because the fair alternative is we all stop working.
But that isn't going to happen.
My alternative: Bosses: If you don't like the employees simple requests that make the day pleasant and productive, [i]get the hell out of business and hand management over to someone who will[/i].
Putting up with injustice , even by just walking away , makes you complicit in that injustice.