Innovation is fine. Invention is better, but if you can't have that then innovation makes a decent replacement. However, Unity isn't really inventive or innovative, and attempting to force someone to use one DWM is definitely a regression.
You are confusing change/novelty with creativity. They're not the same.
And, yes, there SHOULD be push-back. Once it goes past the early adopters, it will make its way to the Real World(tm) where the REAL critics hold multi-million dollar contracts in one hand and a fine sherry in the other. Those critics know nothing about the value of technology, but they know the price of everything, especially that of technology. You WANT the flaws ironed-out before then. You WANT to have put the software not just through the reliability and quality tests but also through the user acceptability tests and the PR tests. You WANT well-tempered systems, honed to damn-well near perfection.
Because, in the end, without those multi-million dollar contracts, the Ubuntus and the Red Hats of the world simply aren't going to bother. There won't be any development at all if we lose the big players at this stage. Linux isn't a garage development project any more, or hadn't you seen the kernel contribution stats on LWN? We NEED the corporations to want to invest not just the time and money they're spending now but more of it. And we won't get that without the PHBs.
Do the PHBs care about Unity or loggers? Directly, no. They care about image and if the unwashed masses turn away from Linux, that's bad image. If there's a security flaw, that's major bad image. If it costs more for the developers to do the same amount of work because of added inefficiencies, especially when the shareholders are baying at the door, that's lethal image. Doesn't matter if Windows would be worse, PHBs won't think like that. Linux is a gamble and it HAS to pay and pay big.
We don't celebrate the same sort of commentary. From "That Was The Week That Was" (TW3) to "Spitting Image" to "The Mary Whitehouse Experience", we've had apolitical satire (ie: everyone's fair game, and like most game it's apparently best served plucked and roasted). Politically-inspired satirists (Ben Elton, Alexi Sayle, etc) also exist. However, they're nowhere near as nasty, cruel or mass-marketed. They're humourists who present the warts-and-all view of contemporary life, including politics, in a way that might provoke a little thought here and there ("Bumbledown: Life and Times of Ronald Reagan" is a great example) but isn't intended to be the mouthpiece of some specific segment of society. There wasn't the mean-spirited attitude there.
Paxman - psssh! He interviews political figures and is nasty to some of them, but David Frost was both a stronger interviewer and a more respectful one at the same time. Being unpleasent isn't necessary or useful in political commentary.
Indeed, I'll argue that that that is really the underlying difference there. Us Brits can get nasty - In Scotland, never, ever try and put ginger ale in a single malt Scotch if you value your life - but it's just not in the same way. We save our violent rhetoric for where it belongs, the football terraces^W^H^WLongship Burnings and the LARP SummerFest.
Good programming practices are essential in all aspects of programming, code management and indeed software design.
There is, of course, a balance point - the better the programming practice, the more effective the testing and the more confident you can be in the final outcome, but it follows the usual law of diminishing returns once you pass a certain point. You can prove certain classes of program correct within finite resources (Turing's Halting Theorum only shows that you cannot prove ALL programs correct) where the range of classes increases linearly when the resources increase exponentially.
In other words, "good general programming practices" want to be efficient enough to be usable for the widest possible number of cases AND allow the best possible testing for those cases even if that means sacrificing certainty.
Really, what is wanted is a set of books, each for a different required confidence level. This would make an excellent book #1 in the set. Book #2 onwards would need to add to the book before, explaining where a certain methodology simply won't work at the more stringent level and what you replace it with. For example, their compliant solution on page 25 for doPrivilegedAction() is good for a basic level of confidence but has flaws. There's magic numbers (an 8 for the maximum length of a username), the program flow isn't great (check for a maximum length doesn't actually trip an exception), some parameters aren't sanity-checked (the password is passed straight to the hash function without knowing if it meets the size requirements for the function or if there's anything in the string that might break things). It's perfectly good for a basic level of good practice, but I wouldn't consider it adequate for more advanced levels.
(Having everything in one single book and coding to an insanely high standard is why the DoD's efforts for higher quality code ultimately failed. It had nothing to do the limits of what people can do, it had everything to do with what people have time to do. You need a good baseline and build from it.)
The thing that concerns me is that Oracle will probably consider this sufficient for everyone, which it isn't. The standards are not even up to the quality needed by e-Commerce and should not be used directly from this book for that purpose. This is a foundation layer, it isn't the entire edifice.
My perspective is that real, open and admitted-to risks are quantifiable. They are known problems and have knowable solutions. Knowledge is Power. I am frankly not that worried about dangerous situations. I lived in England for most of the IRA's bombing campaign and was in Manchester when they planted a 5000 lb. bomb there. Didn't faze me in the least. And to judge from other news reports, I was one of the more worried. That's not detached from reality, that's simply being British. We don't scare. We simply don't scare. We don't live down rabbit holes and we don't need AK47s to protect our houses from imagined burglars as Americans seem to.
You're out, alright. Out to lunch. Perspective? You talk to ME of perspective? You are the one who only wants no Government interference so long as it benefits you personally. When it benefits any individual or any group beyond you, you're the one who would rather roast in hell than allow anyone other than you-and-yours to have any gains whatsoever.
MY perspective is unaltered from when I started posting here (not long after Slashdot started). I have advocated, will always advocate, the absolute right of all individuals to be provided education of the highest grade and to the greatest extent that resources sensibly permit. I have never wavered in that, I don't make exceptions for people I don't happen to like, to me a principle worth holding is worth not burning when others want it applied to them.
MY perspective is that the UN Declaration of Human Rights applies to Americans in America, including Article 21 parts 1 and 2 (which the US Government is in violation of in my case).
MY perspective is that honest, open abuse is survivable and endurable and leaves minimal long-term damage, but that dishonest clandestine abuse (of which you and all other hostile posters are guilty of advocating and the US government is guilty of promoting) is NOT survivable OR endurable in the long-term and, in the short-term, is extremely damaging, which is why many Americans who have never served or been in open conflict nonetheless have identifiable symptoms of PTSD.
MY perspective is that your blatant dishonesty and flagrant advocacy of corrupt practices is why the person mentioned in the Original Post couldn't get foreign investors into the US.
MY perspective is that you're a piece of shit and, yes, that I'd rather be shot at honestly than slammed dishonestly. Bullets are nothing and irregular armies mere paper tigers in comparison to a population that would poison its own mind. You can't put a bandage on a mental scar and you can't perform surgery to remove mental damage. There are no bullet-proof shields that can spare a person from an evil thought. Stone walls will stop anything short of a tank, but stone walls won't stop extreme nationalist propaganda. People like you are mindless savages and have no business calling themselves geeks or nerds. To be either requires a mind you evidently do not possess.
The UK Border Agency FAQ is no more correct than the Selective Service FAQ which claims that people like me are legitimately exempt. Yet you pick the one that favours your position and disregard the existence of the other entirely. I reject both as untrue.
If I wanted to whine, I'd go back to Britain. I don't have time for you lot. You really are pathetic, d'you know that? You sit around complaining when Big Government is an entirely appropriate "problem" for you, but applaud when it is a wholly INappropriate problem for others.
Somalia has an advantage over America. It's honest about how corrupt it is. Civil wars? Peanuts compared to the bureaucracy you advocate. I'd rather have been in the war in Angola as a civilian because at least there's no pretense at a civility that isn't there. War is hell but it's honest hell. This is a dishonest hell that I endure but will never tolerate.
I'm not convinced that Britain has anything to do with it, besides merely being where the story was first exposed. Do you suppose the Italian press (mostly owned by their soon-to-be-ex-leader) has never hacked into the phones of people Berscolini wanted discredited? Perhaps you imagine Fox News and TMZ are wholly innocent of any kind of malpractice in the United States? Clear Channel Radio is, of course, wholly innocent of any wrongdoing, right?
It seems to me that most nations have press scandals that they've either successfully suppressed or don't need to suppress because they own all the media that matters.
And people wonder why I despise libertarians and other right-wing lunatics.
My mother filed on my behalf when I was a child. The US Govt never issued me one. Happy?
First off, what's your obsession with filing? The UK never required me or my parents to file for a NI number, they simply gave me one. The UK never required me to sign up for the draft (which is what Selective Service is), they simply gave me University grants.
Education Is A Basic Human Right. You want to know why American politics is crap? It's because of pathetic educational standards. You want to know why American industries are crashing? It's because there are too many uneducated people and too few educated ones.
The US meaningfully recognized dual citizenship and all that that implies in 1996. However, they want their cake and to eat it too. The UK isn't a problem. If they actually were competent enough to have a decent economy, I'd move back.
Why?
Easy. As 90% of the Slashdot responses show so far, Americans are rabidly against people who differ from the norm, they despise foreigners (even American foreigners) and reject their responsibilities to do with them. Further, Americans' cries for less government interference and more liberty sound VERY hollow when those same Americans spout propaganda for the Draft as a reason to deprive me and other Anglo-Americans of our basic human rights. Yes, Libertarians' first step in dealing with such people as myself is to call on government. Ironic? Well, it would be if I regarded such people as anything but low-life scum.
If people like me didn't exist, would these "Libertarians" be any happier? No. They'd just find another sector of American society to reject and another excuse for why they should be rejected. They aren't about liberty, they are about rejecting and exiling.
You want to know why foreign investors don't like America? Why America currently has a brain-drain? Why American industry has failed in so many sectors? Don't blame "the unions", don't blame "the left-wing", blame this rabid hatred.
Education is a basic human right. It is also a fundamental requirement to function. Under US Common Law, I *MAY NOT* be deprived of the tools of my legitimate trade.
As a dual citizen, I =cannot= legally adhere to the rules of both countries. As a dual citizen, I expect the right to be able to function within the system. If the system has no valid functional state, that is a fault of the system, not of my response to it.
Actually, no, and I'm got going through the massive list of reasons again. If you're too blind to read them from before, posting them again won't help.
No such postcards were ever sent to me. Hell, the web didn't exist when I was 18. There was NO information whatsoever supplied to me by the US embassy or their associated outposts throughout the UK. So where the hell was I supposed to get this information from? Telepathy?! Christ, if I'd invented that, I sure as hell would never have moved to the US.
That said, YES, I was treated with bigotry. And yes, I've had enough relatives in German POW camps during WW2 to know that I'd rather have been in one of those or a Soviet Gulag (which, incidentally, I was a few thousand miles closer to than you) to know that they treat their inmates FAR better than the US has ever treated me.
US law doesn't apply in the UK, the US withheld my SSN until I was almost 30, the US government never gave me any information, working for a foreign power as a UK citizen would have been High Treason, can't renounce UK citizenship, blah de bloody blah.
You're a moron if you think privately-subsidizing your own education (to any serious level) in the US is even remotely feasible. As for the rest of your comment, it's brain-dead at best and merely proves my point. I am a second-class citizen in the eyes of the US Government, have always been and will always be. The US doesn't give a shit about rules (it breaks enough of them), it only gives a shit about limiting opportunity to a privileged few. In the case of the Bush administration, who gave pardons to Republican-voting criminals to help get re-elected, the privileged few certainly included those who broke the law.
I provided exactly such evidence to the US Government in 2006, the last time I tried. I was informed that it didn't matter how much evidence I provided, that it didn't matter. The Selective Service rules, apparently, are that a non-registrant CAN be denied any and all benefits, that the FAQ merely says otherwise for PR reasons and not because of any rules that actually exist. Now, I will say that this might not "technically" be true - that what the FAQ says may indeed by what is policy - it may have merely been the government officials I spoke to. However, in practice, the law doesn't write paychecks or grant checks, and the Federal Government has sovereign immunity. Which means I have no means of complaining and no authority to complain.
In short, I am a second class citizen in a nation with no (official) classes. That makes me feel real welcome, I must say. (It also means that the multitude of citizens who are worse off than me are actually third-class or lower down the food chain.)
I do not consider that to be acceptable. In the US, all those who are citizens by birth (ie: not naturalized) have a right to be treated as equals. I'd say naturalized citizens should be equals as well, but that's a whole different ballpark and I'd prefer to stick to something that should be extremely clear-cut than muddy the waters.
Not until I was 27 - no SSN was given to me until then - and you can't apply for Selective Service until you have an SSN. What should I have done, wave a magic fairy wand? Invade Parliament and have them declare themselves the 51st State? The US chose not to offer me Selective Service. That was the US' choice, not mine. The UK chose to create rules forbidding Selective Service, that's the UK's rules, not mine. I cannot sign up for Selective Service.
(And, no, I can't renounce UK citizenship. That's not actually allowed. UK citizens are citizens for life. Violation of those rules is classed as High Treason.)
To judge from some of the other responses, you could have left it at the US having a mean population. They seem damned and determined that I should be a second class citizen because I was born overseas.
I am not only a citizen of the United States, I am a citizen of the United Kingdom and may NOT serve a foreign power. Second, you might not be aware of this, but banks haven't given out loans to almost anyone in four years. We're in a recession that is soon to become a depression. Third, I had no US SSN at age 18 - I wasn't given an SSN until I was 27. With WHAT should I have registered? My toenail clippings?
Finally, I seem to recall from a prior thread something about a government having no just right to impose upon those who did not grant it. I granted the US no authority over me until I was 27. My birth certificate and embassy registration were accepted as proof of my right to that citizenship and I was granted it. I was NOT granted Second Class status, which is what you insist I should have.
WHY THE HELL should I be a Second Class citizen here?
US law does not extend to the United Kingdom. As much as the US might like to act like the UK is the 52st State, it is a Sovereign Nation and the US has NO legal right to tell me what to do there. (Nor was there any place to register, or indeed serve. You might like to consider that. But, noooo. you're more interested in maintaining the draft.)
I cannot think of a single nation on the planet - actual or theoretical - where each individual has had any such power. To compound the issue, in many countries, whilst you can take up the citizenship of other nations if you like, you cannot renounce citizenship. Ever. In consequence, by your logic there are no legitimate governments or nations.
What about corporate entities? Well, a person's got to eat. Fine-sounding words won't change that. Which means you have a choice between delegating to a corporate entity or killing yourself. A bit of a naff equation, but until countries do more for individual inventors and artists, it's the way it's going to be. Since agreement under duress (which is what this is, like it or not) is not legally an agreement at all, you have not meaningfully agreed to anything and so no corporate entity can be legitimate under your logic.
Not sure you'll find too many who would be sympathetic to the view that nothing exists. merely because nothing is "just". Life itself isn't just. The entire concept is a holdover from the Iron Age. Since the Middle Ages, the concept of "just" anything has been largely replaced with the notion of appropriate. The latter exists, the former does not. And existing has definite advantages.
The US has some amazing restrictions and employment laws. For example, I am a US citizen born abroad. Because I was born abroad and lived abroad, I didn't sign up for "Selective Service". Well, duh. However, this makes me ineligible for most government jobs or indeed student loans. (Yes, I have been told this in person by government officials.) I may have lived in the US now for over half my life, paid taxes, yadda yadda yadda, but if I want additional schooling then I'd have to go back to my country of origin (England) because I'd be refused it here.
As a US citizen by birth, denied rights of employment and education in my own country is simply not acceptable. I stay here on sufferance, because the jobs I can get in the private sector are marginally better. I certainly don't stay out of feeling welcome. A gulag would be preferable to the attitudes and bigotry I have experienced on both east and west coasts. That others who don't even have the citizenship to protect them -- well, (insert deity here) help them because the US sure as hell won't.
I am sympathetic to the rights of those of talent who want to migrate to the US but find themselves blocked by red-tape. I'm moderately sympathetic to the rights of all who want to migrate, full stop. That sympathy is, in part, one of a preference for freedom and respect, but I'd be lying if I denied that the treatment I've received as an overseas US citizen had nothing to do with it. If they cannot and will not treat even their own with respect and dignity, then the US has lost any credibility in my eyes over its claim to want to deter immigration on behalf of its own. It doesn't give a rat's arse about it's own and I will not accept that these immigration laws are on behalf of me or any other US citizen by right of birth.
Slashdot Mirror
Innovation is fine. Invention is better, but if you can't have that then innovation makes a decent replacement. However, Unity isn't really inventive or innovative, and attempting to force someone to use one DWM is definitely a regression.
You are confusing change/novelty with creativity. They're not the same.
And, yes, there SHOULD be push-back. Once it goes past the early adopters, it will make its way to the Real World(tm) where the REAL critics hold multi-million dollar contracts in one hand and a fine sherry in the other. Those critics know nothing about the value of technology, but they know the price of everything, especially that of technology. You WANT the flaws ironed-out before then. You WANT to have put the software not just through the reliability and quality tests but also through the user acceptability tests and the PR tests. You WANT well-tempered systems, honed to damn-well near perfection.
Because, in the end, without those multi-million dollar contracts, the Ubuntus and the Red Hats of the world simply aren't going to bother. There won't be any development at all if we lose the big players at this stage. Linux isn't a garage development project any more, or hadn't you seen the kernel contribution stats on LWN? We NEED the corporations to want to invest not just the time and money they're spending now but more of it. And we won't get that without the PHBs.
Do the PHBs care about Unity or loggers? Directly, no. They care about image and if the unwashed masses turn away from Linux, that's bad image. If there's a security flaw, that's major bad image. If it costs more for the developers to do the same amount of work because of added inefficiencies, especially when the shareholders are baying at the door, that's lethal image. Doesn't matter if Windows would be worse, PHBs won't think like that. Linux is a gamble and it HAS to pay and pay big.
We don't celebrate the same sort of commentary. From "That Was The Week That Was" (TW3) to "Spitting Image" to "The Mary Whitehouse Experience", we've had apolitical satire (ie: everyone's fair game, and like most game it's apparently best served plucked and roasted). Politically-inspired satirists (Ben Elton, Alexi Sayle, etc) also exist. However, they're nowhere near as nasty, cruel or mass-marketed. They're humourists who present the warts-and-all view of contemporary life, including politics, in a way that might provoke a little thought here and there ("Bumbledown: Life and Times of Ronald Reagan" is a great example) but isn't intended to be the mouthpiece of some specific segment of society. There wasn't the mean-spirited attitude there.
Paxman - psssh! He interviews political figures and is nasty to some of them, but David Frost was both a stronger interviewer and a more respectful one at the same time. Being unpleasent isn't necessary or useful in political commentary.
Indeed, I'll argue that that that is really the underlying difference there. Us Brits can get nasty - In Scotland, never, ever try and put ginger ale in a single malt Scotch if you value your life - but it's just not in the same way. We save our violent rhetoric for where it belongs, the football terraces^W^H^WLongship Burnings and the LARP SummerFest.
Good programming practices are essential in all aspects of programming, code management and indeed software design.
There is, of course, a balance point - the better the programming practice, the more effective the testing and the more confident you can be in the final outcome, but it follows the usual law of diminishing returns once you pass a certain point. You can prove certain classes of program correct within finite resources (Turing's Halting Theorum only shows that you cannot prove ALL programs correct) where the range of classes increases linearly when the resources increase exponentially.
In other words, "good general programming practices" want to be efficient enough to be usable for the widest possible number of cases AND allow the best possible testing for those cases even if that means sacrificing certainty.
Really, what is wanted is a set of books, each for a different required confidence level. This would make an excellent book #1 in the set. Book #2 onwards would need to add to the book before, explaining where a certain methodology simply won't work at the more stringent level and what you replace it with. For example, their compliant solution on page 25 for doPrivilegedAction() is good for a basic level of confidence but has flaws. There's magic numbers (an 8 for the maximum length of a username), the program flow isn't great (check for a maximum length doesn't actually trip an exception), some parameters aren't sanity-checked (the password is passed straight to the hash function without knowing if it meets the size requirements for the function or if there's anything in the string that might break things). It's perfectly good for a basic level of good practice, but I wouldn't consider it adequate for more advanced levels.
(Having everything in one single book and coding to an insanely high standard is why the DoD's efforts for higher quality code ultimately failed. It had nothing to do the limits of what people can do, it had everything to do with what people have time to do. You need a good baseline and build from it.)
The thing that concerns me is that Oracle will probably consider this sufficient for everyone, which it isn't. The standards are not even up to the quality needed by e-Commerce and should not be used directly from this book for that purpose. This is a foundation layer, it isn't the entire edifice.
My perspective is that real, open and admitted-to risks are quantifiable. They are known problems and have knowable solutions. Knowledge is Power. I am frankly not that worried about dangerous situations. I lived in England for most of the IRA's bombing campaign and was in Manchester when they planted a 5000 lb. bomb there. Didn't faze me in the least. And to judge from other news reports, I was one of the more worried. That's not detached from reality, that's simply being British. We don't scare. We simply don't scare. We don't live down rabbit holes and we don't need AK47s to protect our houses from imagined burglars as Americans seem to.
You're out, alright. Out to lunch. Perspective? You talk to ME of perspective? You are the one who only wants no Government interference so long as it benefits you personally. When it benefits any individual or any group beyond you, you're the one who would rather roast in hell than allow anyone other than you-and-yours to have any gains whatsoever.
MY perspective is unaltered from when I started posting here (not long after Slashdot started). I have advocated, will always advocate, the absolute right of all individuals to be provided education of the highest grade and to the greatest extent that resources sensibly permit. I have never wavered in that, I don't make exceptions for people I don't happen to like, to me a principle worth holding is worth not burning when others want it applied to them.
MY perspective is that the UN Declaration of Human Rights applies to Americans in America, including Article 21 parts 1 and 2 (which the US Government is in violation of in my case).
MY perspective is that honest, open abuse is survivable and endurable and leaves minimal long-term damage, but that dishonest clandestine abuse (of which you and all other hostile posters are guilty of advocating and the US government is guilty of promoting) is NOT survivable OR endurable in the long-term and, in the short-term, is extremely damaging, which is why many Americans who have never served or been in open conflict nonetheless have identifiable symptoms of PTSD.
MY perspective is that your blatant dishonesty and flagrant advocacy of corrupt practices is why the person mentioned in the Original Post couldn't get foreign investors into the US.
MY perspective is that you're a piece of shit and, yes, that I'd rather be shot at honestly than slammed dishonestly. Bullets are nothing and irregular armies mere paper tigers in comparison to a population that would poison its own mind. You can't put a bandage on a mental scar and you can't perform surgery to remove mental damage. There are no bullet-proof shields that can spare a person from an evil thought. Stone walls will stop anything short of a tank, but stone walls won't stop extreme nationalist propaganda. People like you are mindless savages and have no business calling themselves geeks or nerds. To be either requires a mind you evidently do not possess.
The UK Border Agency FAQ is no more correct than the Selective Service FAQ which claims that people like me are legitimately exempt. Yet you pick the one that favours your position and disregard the existence of the other entirely. I reject both as untrue.
If I wanted to whine, I'd go back to Britain. I don't have time for you lot. You really are pathetic, d'you know that? You sit around complaining when Big Government is an entirely appropriate "problem" for you, but applaud when it is a wholly INappropriate problem for others.
Somalia has an advantage over America. It's honest about how corrupt it is. Civil wars? Peanuts compared to the bureaucracy you advocate. I'd rather have been in the war in Angola as a civilian because at least there's no pretense at a civility that isn't there. War is hell but it's honest hell. This is a dishonest hell that I endure but will never tolerate.
I'm not convinced that Britain has anything to do with it, besides merely being where the story was first exposed. Do you suppose the Italian press (mostly owned by their soon-to-be-ex-leader) has never hacked into the phones of people Berscolini wanted discredited? Perhaps you imagine Fox News and TMZ are wholly innocent of any kind of malpractice in the United States? Clear Channel Radio is, of course, wholly innocent of any wrongdoing, right?
It seems to me that most nations have press scandals that they've either successfully suppressed or don't need to suppress because they own all the media that matters.
And people wonder why I despise libertarians and other right-wing lunatics.
My mother filed on my behalf when I was a child. The US Govt never issued me one. Happy?
First off, what's your obsession with filing? The UK never required me or my parents to file for a NI number, they simply gave me one. The UK never required me to sign up for the draft (which is what Selective Service is), they simply gave me University grants.
Education Is A Basic Human Right. You want to know why American politics is crap? It's because of pathetic educational standards. You want to know why American industries are crashing? It's because there are too many uneducated people and too few educated ones.
Sadly, YOU are amongst the uneducated.
The US meaningfully recognized dual citizenship and all that that implies in 1996. However, they want their cake and to eat it too. The UK isn't a problem. If they actually were competent enough to have a decent economy, I'd move back.
Why?
Easy. As 90% of the Slashdot responses show so far, Americans are rabidly against people who differ from the norm, they despise foreigners (even American foreigners) and reject their responsibilities to do with them. Further, Americans' cries for less government interference and more liberty sound VERY hollow when those same Americans spout propaganda for the Draft as a reason to deprive me and other Anglo-Americans of our basic human rights. Yes, Libertarians' first step in dealing with such people as myself is to call on government. Ironic? Well, it would be if I regarded such people as anything but low-life scum.
If people like me didn't exist, would these "Libertarians" be any happier? No. They'd just find another sector of American society to reject and another excuse for why they should be rejected. They aren't about liberty, they are about rejecting and exiling.
You want to know why foreign investors don't like America? Why America currently has a brain-drain? Why American industry has failed in so many sectors? Don't blame "the unions", don't blame "the left-wing", blame this rabid hatred.
Education is a basic human right. It is also a fundamental requirement to function. Under US Common Law, I *MAY NOT* be deprived of the tools of my legitimate trade.
As a dual citizen, I =cannot= legally adhere to the rules of both countries. As a dual citizen, I expect the right to be able to function within the system. If the system has no valid functional state, that is a fault of the system, not of my response to it.
That was YOUR CHOICE. I wasn't GIVEN a choice. THAT'S WHY YOUR EXPERIENCE DOESN'T MATTER!
Actually, no, and I'm got going through the massive list of reasons again. If you're too blind to read them from before, posting them again won't help.
No such postcards were ever sent to me. Hell, the web didn't exist when I was 18. There was NO information whatsoever supplied to me by the US embassy or their associated outposts throughout the UK. So where the hell was I supposed to get this information from? Telepathy?! Christ, if I'd invented that, I sure as hell would never have moved to the US.
That said, YES, I was treated with bigotry. And yes, I've had enough relatives in German POW camps during WW2 to know that I'd rather have been in one of those or a Soviet Gulag (which, incidentally, I was a few thousand miles closer to than you) to know that they treat their inmates FAR better than the US has ever treated me.
As noted above, I can't. To work for a foreign power is treason under my other nationality (British).
US law doesn't apply in the UK, the US withheld my SSN until I was almost 30, the US government never gave me any information, working for a foreign power as a UK citizen would have been High Treason, can't renounce UK citizenship, blah de bloody blah.
You're a moron if you think privately-subsidizing your own education (to any serious level) in the US is even remotely feasible. As for the rest of your comment, it's brain-dead at best and merely proves my point. I am a second-class citizen in the eyes of the US Government, have always been and will always be. The US doesn't give a shit about rules (it breaks enough of them), it only gives a shit about limiting opportunity to a privileged few. In the case of the Bush administration, who gave pardons to Republican-voting criminals to help get re-elected, the privileged few certainly included those who broke the law.
I provided exactly such evidence to the US Government in 2006, the last time I tried. I was informed that it didn't matter how much evidence I provided, that it didn't matter. The Selective Service rules, apparently, are that a non-registrant CAN be denied any and all benefits, that the FAQ merely says otherwise for PR reasons and not because of any rules that actually exist. Now, I will say that this might not "technically" be true - that what the FAQ says may indeed by what is policy - it may have merely been the government officials I spoke to. However, in practice, the law doesn't write paychecks or grant checks, and the Federal Government has sovereign immunity. Which means I have no means of complaining and no authority to complain.
In short, I am a second class citizen in a nation with no (official) classes. That makes me feel real welcome, I must say. (It also means that the multitude of citizens who are worse off than me are actually third-class or lower down the food chain.)
I do not consider that to be acceptable. In the US, all those who are citizens by birth (ie: not naturalized) have a right to be treated as equals. I'd say naturalized citizens should be equals as well, but that's a whole different ballpark and I'd prefer to stick to something that should be extremely clear-cut than muddy the waters.
Not until I was 27 - no SSN was given to me until then - and you can't apply for Selective Service until you have an SSN. What should I have done, wave a magic fairy wand? Invade Parliament and have them declare themselves the 51st State? The US chose not to offer me Selective Service. That was the US' choice, not mine. The UK chose to create rules forbidding Selective Service, that's the UK's rules, not mine. I cannot sign up for Selective Service.
(And, no, I can't renounce UK citizenship. That's not actually allowed. UK citizens are citizens for life. Violation of those rules is classed as High Treason.)
To judge from some of the other responses, you could have left it at the US having a mean population. They seem damned and determined that I should be a second class citizen because I was born overseas.
I am not only a citizen of the United States, I am a citizen of the United Kingdom and may NOT serve a foreign power. Second, you might not be aware of this, but banks haven't given out loans to almost anyone in four years. We're in a recession that is soon to become a depression. Third, I had no US SSN at age 18 - I wasn't given an SSN until I was 27. With WHAT should I have registered? My toenail clippings?
Finally, I seem to recall from a prior thread something about a government having no just right to impose upon those who did not grant it. I granted the US no authority over me until I was 27. My birth certificate and embassy registration were accepted as proof of my right to that citizenship and I was granted it. I was NOT granted Second Class status, which is what you insist I should have.
WHY THE HELL should I be a Second Class citizen here?
US law does not extend to the United Kingdom. As much as the US might like to act like the UK is the 52st State, it is a Sovereign Nation and the US has NO legal right to tell me what to do there. (Nor was there any place to register, or indeed serve. You might like to consider that. But, noooo. you're more interested in maintaining the draft.)
I cannot think of a single nation on the planet - actual or theoretical - where each individual has had any such power. To compound the issue, in many countries, whilst you can take up the citizenship of other nations if you like, you cannot renounce citizenship. Ever. In consequence, by your logic there are no legitimate governments or nations.
What about corporate entities? Well, a person's got to eat. Fine-sounding words won't change that. Which means you have a choice between delegating to a corporate entity or killing yourself. A bit of a naff equation, but until countries do more for individual inventors and artists, it's the way it's going to be. Since agreement under duress (which is what this is, like it or not) is not legally an agreement at all, you have not meaningfully agreed to anything and so no corporate entity can be legitimate under your logic.
Not sure you'll find too many who would be sympathetic to the view that nothing exists. merely because nothing is "just". Life itself isn't just. The entire concept is a holdover from the Iron Age. Since the Middle Ages, the concept of "just" anything has been largely replaced with the notion of appropriate. The latter exists, the former does not. And existing has definite advantages.
Ye gods! The Ghost in the Machine is a Nigerian Elizabot?
The US has some amazing restrictions and employment laws. For example, I am a US citizen born abroad. Because I was born abroad and lived abroad, I didn't sign up for "Selective Service". Well, duh. However, this makes me ineligible for most government jobs or indeed student loans. (Yes, I have been told this in person by government officials.) I may have lived in the US now for over half my life, paid taxes, yadda yadda yadda, but if I want additional schooling then I'd have to go back to my country of origin (England) because I'd be refused it here.
As a US citizen by birth, denied rights of employment and education in my own country is simply not acceptable. I stay here on sufferance, because the jobs I can get in the private sector are marginally better. I certainly don't stay out of feeling welcome. A gulag would be preferable to the attitudes and bigotry I have experienced on both east and west coasts. That others who don't even have the citizenship to protect them -- well, (insert deity here) help them because the US sure as hell won't.
I am sympathetic to the rights of those of talent who want to migrate to the US but find themselves blocked by red-tape. I'm moderately sympathetic to the rights of all who want to migrate, full stop. That sympathy is, in part, one of a preference for freedom and respect, but I'd be lying if I denied that the treatment I've received as an overseas US citizen had nothing to do with it. If they cannot and will not treat even their own with respect and dignity, then the US has lost any credibility in my eyes over its claim to want to deter immigration on behalf of its own. It doesn't give a rat's arse about it's own and I will not accept that these immigration laws are on behalf of me or any other US citizen by right of birth.
If that was the case, a base in Texas would be cheaper than a base out on the ocean.