I like the fact you're talking about HTML5 coming as a distinct platform. I've been using HTML5 database features for years now. Sure Microsoft has a roadmap to getting where everyone else was two years ago.
Microsoft's C++ tools are ok, but who would want to invest energy in learning Visual C++ unless they only wanted to target Windows? Most people are going to go with a gcc tool chain so they can do easy porting.
Most of the languages and ports you listed are not as good and/or slower and/or lag in features their real counterparts. And you kind of prove the point. People have ported a bunch of tools for Windows to make it easier to port your Linux or mac app to the majority of users. But that's not Microsoft. That's the open source community getting its programs on Windows.
Microsoft quite simply is too slow. They build nice tools, but they do so slowly. Far too slowly for the pace of the Internet. If they were an innovative company that might not be a problem, but Microsoft is now chasing at about a 2-4 year disadvantage.
It has nothing to do with "cool". I don't use COBOL not because it isn't "cool". I don't use COBOL because it doesn't have useful hooks into the libraries I need to use on a day to day basis. Same with Microsoft tech.
Yes. Remember the US government is under no obligation to get you out of prison for trying to subvert their firewall. Most of the time if you commit an obvious crime in another country, the US is more than happy to let you serve your time.
Dell had a culture that only cared about short-term stock price. Only. No decisions were ever made in the long term, and they rocketed to the bottom in a blaze of corruption. Every company meeting was like an ad for the lottery. If we can just make this number, you'll be rich like the cleaning lady who's actually a millionaire! It's no surprise that they often did things that were ridiculously short-sighted. They were only ever hoping to beat out a quarter. The quarter after that was never a concern. Replace defective motherboards with defective motherboards? That's a great solution as long as they won't blow up again until next quarter.
I worked there in 1996, and I'm just shocked it took as long as it did.
Actually, as a Christian you're supposed to sell all your worldly goods and go out into the world making Disciples of all nations. Jesus doesn't really care if you can hold a job or buy/sell. And it's expected that your government will be abusive.
So the whole buying/selling, job, and overthrow of government, while associated with Libertarian/Republican/Evangelical issues in the US, are not actually Christian issues.
I hate to point out the flaw her, but all those things you listed actually happen and are legitimate. Many employers I've worked for give free health benefits to the employee and match some amount of a couple or family's plan! That would be exactly what you're describing. Many employers offer eye care benefits even though some people don't have to wear glasses!! Some employers offer child care subsidies even though some of their employees don't have children!!!
This would only be illegal if Google said, "Hey, you're gay, have a raise!". If they're essentially offering to compensate for differences in costs of benefits, I don't see how that would be any more discriminatory than any other pay package in existence.
No, I think they're marketed for SIDS prevention, so your dead babies is right on.
Fever would be pretty hard to detect without being invasive if you think about it. If a room was cold a feverish baby could have skin that was more or less cool to the touch.
I'm not ignoring the liberty bit, nor am I ignoring that you still are ignoring the greater question of how to get the racist to hire the most qualified candidate.
So here's the question? You have a black woman and white man applying for the same job. The woman holds a higher applicable degree, longer work history, and aces the interview. In addition all the other employees she interviewed with recommend her as the better candidate. The hiring manager is a racist misogynist and chooses the white man. Your solution to that is what? If we accept that in 1960 the majority of hiring decision were made by white men (and I hope to god we can agree on that). How do you change that, to allow equal opportunity?
You're very fast to complain about the liberty of the racist to make racist decisions, but not particularly interested in the liberty of the minority candidate to have access to a job commensurate with her experience and ability.
The entire point of government is find ways to balance out two peoples right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" when they come into conflict. You've already made the value judgment that the racist hiring manager has more right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" than those applying for a job. And I have decided that in my perfect world racist hiring managers are morally abhorrent and we should always chose the liberty of job seekers when conflict occurs.
We know what happens allowing all liberty to hiring managers. We know that affirmative action can lead to under-qualified candidates. You can keep screaming "it's not fair", but we've gone from minorities being excluded almost completely from the workforce to minorities being within a decade or two of complete wage and promotion equality. So you can't say the program hasn't been successful. It's been wildly successful.
So what's the better mousetrap? What keeps the amazing gains we've made in just 50 years, without being unfair to any given party?
The problem with comparing this to forced altruism is that these laws are not forcing you to do something additional. It's asking you to treat everyone the same. It's not asking people to not be racist. It's telling them that they cannot be racist, homophobic, sexist, or ageist when it comes to hiring.
Perhaps you haven't read what the founding fathers wrote recently enough:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
We create government to secure these rights to equality for us. And government is doing exactly that to the best of its ability. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But do you have a better solution to prevent the best candidate from being eliminated due to race, age, or gender?
And don't forget that your family had decades longer to build up capital in things like a home, bank accounts, and the stock market that they were able to potentially pass on to you in the form of assistance in paying for college, etc.
I really wish you were right. Voters did not put those regulations in place. Legislators did. And many of them lost their jobs as thanks for those votes. President Johnson is pretty well documented as having figuratively pulled a couple of legislators arms out of their sockets twisting so hard to get civil rights legislation passed.
Many of those laws were required because the supreme court struck down existing laws, or demanded that congress ensure equality for citizens.
There was absolutely NOT some shiny happy movement of people voting in progressive politicians who changed everything with no argument. The civil rights movement did NOT make up the majority of Americans. Segregation was prevalent in the North. It just wasn't legally codified as in the South.
The country WAS dragged kicking and screaming. That's what the guns, fire hoses, bombs and assassinations where about. There are a lot of people who want to revise the history of the US just because they didn't wear a Klan robe. Putting minorities in ghettos and denying them economic opportunity isn't that much better than share-cropping.
" Racism has diminished through a shared social development" And how did we get shared social development? By the courts and congress mandating shared schools, shared public facilities, and shared businesses. The civil rights movement inspired the change that the government then enforced.
The triumph of the civil rights movement is exactly the sets of laws and court cases that made it possible for minorities in this country to overcome centuries of persecution and be treated equally. And in less than a century these civil right triumphs were made. Are you really so naive to believe that the civil rights movement actually convinced people to stop being racist? What convinced them was living and working day-in, day-out with minorities and realizing that they were just normal people like themselves, going about their normal boring lives. It was this forced integration that made the attitude change happen so quickly.
Eliminating racism was never the central goal of the civil rights movement, any more than the goal of the gay rights movement is to make everyone completely loving and accepting of homosexuals. At the end of the day the groups just want to be treated fairly under the law. Period. If they convince people to like them in the process, fantastic, but ultimately it's about the law.
Frankly you're a US citizen. If you want to be a homophobic, racist asshole that's completely within your civil rights. Civil rights is just about preventing homophobic, racist assholes from denying others their rights under the US constitution.
This libertarian saw is SO tired. The entire last half of the 19th century and first 2/3 of the 20th century showed what a libertarian world looked like. Whites hired whites. Except for horrible underpaid manual labor jobs. Whites who hired blacks for skilled labor were harassed often violently, and sometimes murdered. Then within one generation through heavy regulation we've been able to dramatically change hiring practices in this country. Are they perfect? Not even close. But does an educated black woman have a very good chance of getting a good job in her field now? Absolutely. We went from lynching to something approaching parity in less than 50 years thanks to regulation. It wasn't that our society suddenly decided during the 1960s that it was economically better if they appealed to boarder markets. They were dragged kicking and screaming.
So thanks, but I'll take the lightly regulated market with equal opportunity. And I don't mind requiring that people who wish to participate in the political process, remove their white robes and hoods first.
Put the "Best places" in quotes. The "Best Places to Work" are generally the worst places to work that have hired a PR firm to get them on one of these best of lists so someone, anyone will want to work for them.
These will be worth buying once they're at $50. And they'll sell billions. I don't really see why Amazon isn't just doing the $50 deal today to take out the market and get people buying ebooks. This is another market that's waiting to be flooded with either overpriced Apple hardware or commodity hardware that can read books from anywhere. If Amazon wants to be "the eBook store" they need to make their reader ubiquitous.
It only falls into the "what I had for breakfast" category if no one who is following me is interested in what my daughters are doing. I happen to know that all of my family members who follow me do so explicitly for this type of post. Therefore even if it's banal, it's exactly the type of banality my audience is looking for.
"Things you are not interested in" != "Things no one is interested in".
So let's see in the past week via Twitter I received notes live minutes from the Austin City Council, received crime and real estate stats for my zip code, registered my concerns about regional mobility with our Capital Metro, and notified my extended family of several cute things the kids said. That's just stuff off the top of my head.
Twitter's a really useful tool. Much like the web, if all you're getting is what someone ate for breakfast, you're doing it wrong.
At the same time, I'm completely ok with the majority engineers not "getting" social networking technologies. It makes it easier for me to find work.
Texas Governor Rick Perry is up double-digits over his Democratic competitor Bill White, yet the green party recently got gifted enough signatures to be added to the ballot.
The third answer is that Republicans are ridiculously paranoid and will use dirty tricks even if they don't have to.
"So which parts of the constitution do you find is "out of date"?" The second amendment is pretty glaringly dated.
I like the one allowing the income tax. I think interstate travel and communication have revolutionized the world. Granted it funds the military, but we also get good things like Social Security. So I'd say on a day-to-day basis the 16th amendment has a whole lot more value than that archaic second one. The world's changed. As much as the idea of being able to overthrow the government sounds good in theory, the last decent attempt (Civil War) was a resounding failure and that was before the US military become the most powerful in the world. The second amendment is a joke that should be repealed. You're not overthrowing the government with your guns.
The world's changed. We should either repeal the second amendment in an effort to reduce gun violence in the US, or we should weaken the US military to achieve balance with the aims of the second amendment. As it stands now it's really just an affront to common sense.
Slashdot Mirror
I like the fact you're talking about HTML5 coming as a distinct platform. I've been using HTML5 database features for years now. Sure Microsoft has a roadmap to getting where everyone else was two years ago.
Microsoft's C++ tools are ok, but who would want to invest energy in learning Visual C++ unless they only wanted to target Windows? Most people are going to go with a gcc tool chain so they can do easy porting.
Most of the languages and ports you listed are not as good and/or slower and/or lag in features their real counterparts. And you kind of prove the point. People have ported a bunch of tools for Windows to make it easier to port your Linux or mac app to the majority of users. But that's not Microsoft. That's the open source community getting its programs on Windows.
Microsoft quite simply is too slow. They build nice tools, but they do so slowly. Far too slowly for the pace of the Internet. If they were an innovative company that might not be a problem, but Microsoft is now chasing at about a 2-4 year disadvantage.
It has nothing to do with "cool". I don't use COBOL not because it isn't "cool". I don't use COBOL because it doesn't have useful hooks into the libraries I need to use on a day to day basis. Same with Microsoft tech.
Yes. Remember the US government is under no obligation to get you out of prison for trying to subvert their firewall. Most of the time if you commit an obvious crime in another country, the US is more than happy to let you serve your time.
Dell had a culture that only cared about short-term stock price. Only. No decisions were ever made in the long term, and they rocketed to the bottom in a blaze of corruption. Every company meeting was like an ad for the lottery. If we can just make this number, you'll be rich like the cleaning lady who's actually a millionaire! It's no surprise that they often did things that were ridiculously short-sighted. They were only ever hoping to beat out a quarter. The quarter after that was never a concern. Replace defective motherboards with defective motherboards? That's a great solution as long as they won't blow up again until next quarter.
I worked there in 1996, and I'm just shocked it took as long as it did.
I'd prefer English majors. Then I'd teach them to program. I find communication is easier.
Actually, as a Christian you're supposed to sell all your worldly goods and go out into the world making Disciples of all nations. Jesus doesn't really care if you can hold a job or buy/sell. And it's expected that your government will be abusive.
So the whole buying/selling, job, and overthrow of government, while associated with Libertarian/Republican/Evangelical issues in the US, are not actually Christian issues.
I hate to point out the flaw her, but all those things you listed actually happen and are legitimate. Many employers I've worked for give free health benefits to the employee and match some amount of a couple or family's plan! That would be exactly what you're describing. Many employers offer eye care benefits even though some people don't have to wear glasses!! Some employers offer child care subsidies even though some of their employees don't have children!!!
This would only be illegal if Google said, "Hey, you're gay, have a raise!". If they're essentially offering to compensate for differences in costs of benefits, I don't see how that would be any more discriminatory than any other pay package in existence.
Yeah, no joke. Didn't we just have a financial crisis with roughly the same cause?
No, I think they're marketed for SIDS prevention, so your dead babies is right on.
Fever would be pretty hard to detect without being invasive if you think about it. If a room was cold a feverish baby could have skin that was more or less cool to the touch.
Your statement would make more sense if Nintendo hadn't already stated that the 3DS wasn't for children under the age of 7.
I'm not ignoring the liberty bit, nor am I ignoring that you still are ignoring the greater question of how to get the racist to hire the most qualified candidate.
So here's the question? You have a black woman and white man applying for the same job. The woman holds a higher applicable degree, longer work history, and aces the interview. In addition all the other employees she interviewed with recommend her as the better candidate. The hiring manager is a racist misogynist and chooses the white man. Your solution to that is what? If we accept that in 1960 the majority of hiring decision were made by white men (and I hope to god we can agree on that). How do you change that, to allow equal opportunity?
You're very fast to complain about the liberty of the racist to make racist decisions, but not particularly interested in the liberty of the minority candidate to have access to a job commensurate with her experience and ability.
The entire point of government is find ways to balance out two peoples right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" when they come into conflict. You've already made the value judgment that the racist hiring manager has more right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" than those applying for a job. And I have decided that in my perfect world racist hiring managers are morally abhorrent and we should always chose the liberty of job seekers when conflict occurs.
We know what happens allowing all liberty to hiring managers. We know that affirmative action can lead to under-qualified candidates. You can keep screaming "it's not fair", but we've gone from minorities being excluded almost completely from the workforce to minorities being within a decade or two of complete wage and promotion equality. So you can't say the program hasn't been successful. It's been wildly successful.
So what's the better mousetrap? What keeps the amazing gains we've made in just 50 years, without being unfair to any given party?
The problem with comparing this to forced altruism is that these laws are not forcing you to do something additional. It's asking you to treat everyone the same. It's not asking people to not be racist. It's telling them that they cannot be racist, homophobic, sexist, or ageist when it comes to hiring.
Perhaps you haven't read what the founding fathers wrote recently enough:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
We create government to secure these rights to equality for us. And government is doing exactly that to the best of its ability. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But do you have a better solution to prevent the best candidate from being eliminated due to race, age, or gender?
And don't forget that your family had decades longer to build up capital in things like a home, bank accounts, and the stock market that they were able to potentially pass on to you in the form of assistance in paying for college, etc.
I really wish you were right. Voters did not put those regulations in place. Legislators did. And many of them lost their jobs as thanks for those votes. President Johnson is pretty well documented as having figuratively pulled a couple of legislators arms out of their sockets twisting so hard to get civil rights legislation passed.
Many of those laws were required because the supreme court struck down existing laws, or demanded that congress ensure equality for citizens.
There was absolutely NOT some shiny happy movement of people voting in progressive politicians who changed everything with no argument. The civil rights movement did NOT make up the majority of Americans. Segregation was prevalent in the North. It just wasn't legally codified as in the South.
The country WAS dragged kicking and screaming. That's what the guns, fire hoses, bombs and assassinations where about. There are a lot of people who want to revise the history of the US just because they didn't wear a Klan robe. Putting minorities in ghettos and denying them economic opportunity isn't that much better than share-cropping.
" Racism has diminished through a shared social development"
And how did we get shared social development? By the courts and congress mandating shared schools, shared public facilities, and shared businesses. The civil rights movement inspired the change that the government then enforced.
The triumph of the civil rights movement is exactly the sets of laws and court cases that made it possible for minorities in this country to overcome centuries of persecution and be treated equally. And in less than a century these civil right triumphs were made. Are you really so naive to believe that the civil rights movement actually convinced people to stop being racist? What convinced them was living and working day-in, day-out with minorities and realizing that they were just normal people like themselves, going about their normal boring lives. It was this forced integration that made the attitude change happen so quickly.
Eliminating racism was never the central goal of the civil rights movement, any more than the goal of the gay rights movement is to make everyone completely loving and accepting of homosexuals. At the end of the day the groups just want to be treated fairly under the law. Period. If they convince people to like them in the process, fantastic, but ultimately it's about the law.
Frankly you're a US citizen. If you want to be a homophobic, racist asshole that's completely within your civil rights. Civil rights is just about preventing homophobic, racist assholes from denying others their rights under the US constitution.
This libertarian saw is SO tired. The entire last half of the 19th century and first 2/3 of the 20th century showed what a libertarian world looked like. Whites hired whites. Except for horrible underpaid manual labor jobs. Whites who hired blacks for skilled labor were harassed often violently, and sometimes murdered. Then within one generation through heavy regulation we've been able to dramatically change hiring practices in this country. Are they perfect? Not even close. But does an educated black woman have a very good chance of getting a good job in her field now? Absolutely. We went from lynching to something approaching parity in less than 50 years thanks to regulation. It wasn't that our society suddenly decided during the 1960s that it was economically better if they appealed to boarder markets. They were dragged kicking and screaming.
So thanks, but I'll take the lightly regulated market with equal opportunity. And I don't mind requiring that people who wish to participate in the political process, remove their white robes and hoods first.
Put the "Best places" in quotes. The "Best Places to Work" are generally the worst places to work that have hired a PR firm to get them on one of these best of lists so someone, anyone will want to work for them.
These will be worth buying once they're at $50. And they'll sell billions. I don't really see why Amazon isn't just doing the $50 deal today to take out the market and get people buying ebooks. This is another market that's waiting to be flooded with either overpriced Apple hardware or commodity hardware that can read books from anywhere. If Amazon wants to be "the eBook store" they need to make their reader ubiquitous.
Do you think twitter users don't use email? Or RSS feeds? Or the web? Or read books?
I find it actually leads to MORE succinct discourse. Minimalism leading towards conciseness.
It only falls into the "what I had for breakfast" category if no one who is following me is interested in what my daughters are doing. I happen to know that all of my family members who follow me do so explicitly for this type of post. Therefore even if it's banal, it's exactly the type of banality my audience is looking for.
"Things you are not interested in" != "Things no one is interested in".
So let's see in the past week via Twitter I received notes live minutes from the Austin City Council, received crime and real estate stats for my zip code, registered my concerns about regional mobility with our Capital Metro, and notified my extended family of several cute things the kids said. That's just stuff off the top of my head.
Twitter's a really useful tool. Much like the web, if all you're getting is what someone ate for breakfast, you're doing it wrong.
At the same time, I'm completely ok with the majority engineers not "getting" social networking technologies. It makes it easier for me to find work.
Texas Governor Rick Perry is up double-digits over his Democratic competitor Bill White, yet the green party recently got gifted enough signatures to be added to the ballot.
The third answer is that Republicans are ridiculously paranoid and will use dirty tricks even if they don't have to.
An interior designer, Realtor or a politician is the correct tool for the job.
"So which parts of the constitution do you find is "out of date"?" The second amendment is pretty glaringly dated.
I like the one allowing the income tax. I think interstate travel and communication have revolutionized the world. Granted it funds the military, but we also get good things like Social Security. So I'd say on a day-to-day basis the 16th amendment has a whole lot more value than that archaic second one. The world's changed. As much as the idea of being able to overthrow the government sounds good in theory, the last decent attempt (Civil War) was a resounding failure and that was before the US military become the most powerful in the world. The second amendment is a joke that should be repealed. You're not overthrowing the government with your guns.
The world's changed. We should either repeal the second amendment in an effort to reduce gun violence in the US, or we should weaken the US military to achieve balance with the aims of the second amendment. As it stands now it's really just an affront to common sense.