I'd say the French have been doing just fine. The first successful high-speed train, the first digital information service in every home (minitel, long before the Internet became a commodity), the first supersonic airliner, the Channel Tunnel, the discovery of the HIV virus, and an automobile industry that manages to produce cars that are inexpensive, elegant, and comfortable all at once (Citroën seats FTW!), and they continue to be among the world's best when it comes to food, wine, and fashion.
What's not to admire? I'm having trouble coming up with a lot countries with a more impressive record of accomplishment.
According to this, the first powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft took place in 1874, in a plane built and flown by Félix du Temple, a Frenchman. Another pre-Wright brothers flight was achieved by Gustave Whitehead, a German-American, in 1901.
The Wright brothers are generally credited with designing and building the first practical planes; the key to their success was the invention of ailerons, which allow the pilot to control the plane's roll (rotation on its front-to-rear axis). Other designs were unstable in this regard; with ailerons, you can keep a plane upright even if wind or some other effect tries to blow it on its side. The Wright brothers deserve full credit for figuring out how to build and operate a truly controllable plane, but it is still a shame that many history books overlook their predecessors... Kitty Hawk was not the first powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft.
The whole point is we cannot expect individual people, with normal lives, normal families and normal financial worries, to stand up to this kind of crap. Are you honestly telling me you'd say no to a six-figure sum, and all the comfort and security that would bring your family, in order to defend your software freedom ideology? I wasn't talking about "software freedom ideology"; I was responding to a post that sounded an awful lot like it was defending corruption -- provided that that corruption benefited the perpetrator's family.
Here's a thought: if you can't afford to give your children a decent education, don't have them. If the only way that you can provide for your family is to be a crook, don't you think you should be having second thoughts about having a family in the first place?
I don't know you, I don't know your life situation, but you cannot blame someone for putting their family first. We cannot ask that of people. Put yourself in someone else's shoes for a second. It's real easy to come across all hard line on slashdot. It's quite a bit harder to just rip up a check that will put your kids through college. Be honest with yourself. See above. The world doesn't owe you the right to raise a family. Don't expect anyone to sympathize with you for being corrupt, just because you're worried about your kids' future... In the civilized world, we take kids away from incompetent parents and look for foster parents instead; we do not approve of bad behaviour "just because of the kids".
And for your fucking information, neither I nor the person I talked about is American, so your following comments are bullshit too. I'm not American either. So what? What does that have to do with anything anyway?
Anyone should be ashamed to even play the apologist for this kind of behavior. I'm not apologising for it, and you're a jerk for saying I am. I'm just telling you what happened. I know it's bad. But these are normal people for chrissakes. You making a point of saying "you won't throw the first stone" pretty much sounds like you think that their behavior is at least defensible. Pardon me for pointing that out.
"These are normal people"? It sounds like these are people who either didn't plan ahead before they had children, or who had no trouble whatsoever taking a bribe from someone, in what they bloody well *knew* to be a bad cause. Why do you get so upset at me, for pointing out bad behavior when I see it?
Until you yourself have been in that situation and turned down the 6-figure sum for some free software ideal and then driven home in your 15-year-old car while worrying about your credit card debt, your comment means nothing, you hear me? It means NOTHING. Please let me know what exactly makes you think I'm advocating any kind of "free software ideal" here. And please, also let me know why I should sympathize with irresponsible individuals, who steal from the community to benefit their children. Now hear me: if you can't afford to have a faimily and to provide for it properly, then don't. Suck it up.
Or, if possible, try to change society for the better. Go into politics.
But don't screw other people in order to benefit your own family. And if you choose to do so anyway, don't expect anyone to sympathize.
They dropped their opposition, recommended the MS deal, and got paid a quarter of a million (equivalent) to do sweet fuck-all for 6 months. My friend feels like a sell-out, but his daughter's now in a better school. Wow, way to defend corruption. As if selfish, short-term monetary benefit is the only thing in the world that matters. OK, in all fairness, according to the current American political dogma, that is exactly true, but then again, that is exactly why so many people elsewhere hate the stereotypical "ugly American".
To get back to the point, I wonder if this guy will ever have the nerve to tell his daughter how he managed to send her to the extra-fancy school? To defend not only this elitism (how about working to improve the non-fancy schools instead?) but his act of screwing other people over just for her (don't those other people deserve consideration as well)?
"This is how it's done, people." Bah. Anyone should be ashamed to even play the apologist for this kind of behavior. Now excuse me while I go to the bathroom to throw up.
If YOU write code and release it under the GPL, you can always change your mind later and re-release it under a different license. The copies that were already published are out there; you can't change the terms under which you already licensed THOSE, but remember, you are still the author, and, assuming you didn't do the work under contract for someone else, that makes you the copyright holder.
I suspect many people will tell you that the GPL is irrevocable because the scenario I just described is not typical; most GPL projects are collaborative efforts, and to change the licensing terms, all the copyright holders would have to agree to such a change. For a project of the magnitude of the Linux kernel, say, that would probably be impractical if not downright impossible. BUT, for a project where all copyrights are in one person's or one company's hands (as in the case of GNU software whose copyrights were signed over to the FSF), then yes, it is perfectly fine for such persons or entities to re-release the software under a GPL-incompatible license.
The big point is that there is a crucial difference between what the copyright holder can do, and what a licensee under the GPL can do. Removing the GPL from something you don't hold the copyright to is specifically forbidden; this is by design and this is the quality that MS and other enemies of OSS sometimes refer to as the "cancerous" or "viral" nature of the GPL. But this restriction in no way affects the original author slash copyright holder.
I wouldn't turn away a hot chick because she started talking about astrology -- I would simply go along assuming it was all in good fun, and if it turns out she's actually serious, I'll give her my serious opinion on the topic. If that makes her turn me away, so be it; I might miss out on some sex but I'll definitely avoid some really bad headaches.
A Calculator that doesn't suck: RPN and trig functions etc. No more Dollar store Calc. Once I get up to speed on the SDK, I plan to port Free42 to the iPhone.
That's an HP-42S simulator.
In other words that STAR WARS DEFENSE INITIATIVE is becoming practical at about the time that Reagan predicted If you think that shooting down one lone satellite the size of a bus, whose trajectory was known months in advance, is anywhere near being able to shoot down a ballistic missile that launches two dozen separate nuclear weapons on its way down, well, I have a really nice bridge to sell you. The problem with multi-tipped warheads, and even larger numbers of cheap decoys, is and always has been the Achilles heel of SDI, and it's something that no one ever answered satisfactorily. Probably because it's impossible.
So really what it it has come to is that kids feel they have nothing to fear. And parents have everything to fear, but no way of strongly disciplining their kids. You make it sound like violence is the only way to educate a child. If that's how you were raised yourself, I feel sorry for you. Really.
My parents didn't believe in hitting kids. They warned my brother and me about the dangers outside -- about traffic, about not going home with strangers, about not being outside after dark in unfamiliar neighborhoods -- in other words, concrete, practical advice. And then they let us make our own decisions.
I would hate to imagine what my teenage years would have been like if I had gotten beaten for growing my hair, or dyeing it, or wearing hippie outfits, or smoking pot, or drinking beer while technically underage (i.e. younger than 16, where I grew up), and what have you. The child-breaters like the GGP seem to think that activities like that will send a person straight to hell, or into the hands of predators, and so they'll discipline them -- oblivious to the trauma that that discipline can cause, not to mention ruining your relationship with the kid.
My nonviolent, child's-freedom-respecting parents have never had any reason to regret their '60s approach. I ended up graduating at the top of my class, dropping out of college (oops), and getting good, well-paid jobs in IT. I made the right decisions, mostly anyway, because I understood the possibilities and the dangers; if I had been raised with discipline and fear, I'd never have been able to tell right from wrong, and smart from stupid, as well as I have. My brother did just as well after equally adventurous teenage years.
To get back on topic, it doesn't really matter whether anyone considers a bare midriff or a modest high-necked dress arousing. Everything is arousing to someone, and the GGP's big delusion seems to be that he can keep his daughter safe by forcing her to be unattractive. Listen up, folks, when a girl gets raped, it's never her fault, or her parents' for allowing her to dress some way or other; blame the rapist, for God's sake.
Dammit children need to be beaten a LOT more today. Damn, this child beater gets modded "insightful"? Is this the same Slashdot that gave Obama a big nod in a recent poll?
I scratch my head at all those teenage girls that dress like hookers, but if you think that that's all it takes to turn men on, you have a pretty narrow perception of what male sexuality can be like. I would bet that most child molesters are turned on by the children's perceived *innocence*, and as such I'd sooner expect someone like that to go after a girl in a modest, flowery dress, than one in hip huggers with a tongue piercing. A lot of guys are turned *off* by that kind of overt sexuality, and deviants (no judgement here) probably even more so than others.
If I ever catch my neighbor hitting or otherwise terrorizing his kids because his boy wants to look like a hippie or his girl wants to bare her midriff, I'm calling social services on the bastard.
Is that billion as in "million million" or billion as in "thousand million"? I always wondered how that verbal discrepancy got started There is some background on the 10^9 vs 10^12 confusion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_scale
The article doesn't address why the long scale didn't become universal... My personal theory is that in mainland Europe, where the words million, milliard, billion, etc., are universally pronounced with stress on the final syllable, those words all sound very distinctive, while in English, where the stress is placed on the first syllable, the difference between million and milliard was just too awkward, and so the milliard fell out of favor and the billion moved down by a factor of 1000 to take its place.
I'm sure any linguist will rip this theory to shreds, though.:-)
America also has a far more sophisticated understanding of religious tolerance than Europe. For all the talk of naive and barbaric Americans, why is it that Western Europe is having such a difficult time integrating Muslim immigrants? At a guess, I'd say the difference has nothing to with anyone's "sophisticated understanding" of anything. Only 0.5% of the population of the U.S. is Muslim; in some Western European countries, it's 5% or more, with many inner city neighborhoods having Muslim majorities.
Tiny minorities have to blend in. Large minorities tend to segregate -- and that may happen because of intolerance from the larger population, but sometimes it's the other way around, particularly with minorities with ultra-strict religious norms, who despise modern Westerners as immoral and simply refuse to socialize and intermarry with them.
In a Java application server, where you build web applications using Servlets and/or JSP pages, you can configure the server so that it maps a certain URL pattern to a servlet, and anything following that URL is handed to the servlet as a parameter. This means that handling a syntax like www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels is directly supported in Java servlets, and so it sounds like the Amazon patent now limits the kind of parameters that you and I are allowed to accept in a servlet.
What's next, patenting the sine of 30 degrees? I can't see this patent holding up for one second in court.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
I always thought that a computer deciding to shoot down a civilian airliner was a pretty powerful reminder to be careful about automated weapons. What, the computer thought it was an F-14? Good Lord.
Yes, several other people have posted very positive comments about the N770 in this thread as well...
It may be all about how you use it. In my experience, the worst offender in the crash department was the browser, and that was a real problem for me, because I got the N770 specifically for web surfing. The RSS reader never gave me trouble, but then again I didn't use it very much.
I love the concept -- being able to surf the web while lying on the couch is really awkward with a laptop, and much nicer with a little tablet. Also, it's nice to take along and use at WiFi hotspots in airports and whatnot.
However, I soured on the N770 pretty quickly because it would crash all the time. The thing may run Linux, but it's a stripped-down version, with a completely new user interface, and thus there is plenty of room for Nokia to introduce bugs. I downloaded their system software update, but the crashes kept on coming. I'd say I had at least one crash a day; about half my sessions would end with a crash instead of a normal shutdown. In the end, I got so frustrated I threw it in the trash. I couldn't even in good conscience sell the thing on eBay.
I still like the concept, and I specifically do not consider the iPhone an alternative because I don't want a cell phone, but Nokia isn't getting any more of my money unless these later tablets (N800 and N810) are much better in the stability department.
"A single event and the responses by inept leadership led to a variety of disasters that nothing and nobody could have predicted."
The event, 9/11, could easily have been predicted -- heck, it wasn't even the first attack on the WTC. Predicting the details of the second attack was impossible, but that there would be one was a given, given that militant extremism in the Middle East never showed any signs of decreasing and given that the U.S. never changed its policies in that region significantly.
As to the excessive, knee-jerk reactions to 9/11, including the systematic undermining of civil liberties, that should not have come as a surprise to anyone either. People *always* react like that -- when they get scared they'll agree to all kinds of extreme measures, and once the fear has subsided, it takes forever to undo the damage. People who remember the RAF terrorists in 1970's Germany can tell you how a bunch of armed college drop-outs, who were never anywhere near as crazy or violent as al-Qaeda, provided politicians with all the excuse they needed to erode civil liberties in that country just as badly as what Bush and his cronies have done in the U.S.
The U.S. fascination with the Constitution stems from the fact that its existence, combined with the existence of the U.S. Supreme Court, means that potentially every law and every judgement can be turned into a constitutional issue. In countries that don't have a constitution, or where the courts are not allowed to test laws for constitutionality, this type of legal argument simply cannot arise -- Jammie's only remaining option would be to plead to the general population for financial support (and for political activism to put pressure on lawmakers to fix this silly law, or the excessive statutory damages clause anyway).
Unfortunately, the U.S. Constitution is sufficiently vague on many matters that almost everyone seems to think they can use it to argue their side. As a result, the Supreme Court gets bombarded with cases that really aren't legal but political, and many of its judgements become political decisions instead of decisions of law. This is not exclusively a U.S. problem; witness the recent controversy over Muslim headscarves in public schools, and the blatantly political judgement handed down by the German Supreme Court (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/oct2003/scar-o09.shtml -- echoes of the States' Rights argument popular with the far right in the U.S.).
I thought Larry Niven named the matter scoop after Bussard -- in his Known Space novels and stories, there are frequent references to "Bussard Ramjets", a fictional propulsion system consisting of an electromagnetic scoop that collects hydrogen from space, and a fusion-powered rocket that uses some of the hydrogen for nuclear fusion, and uses the remainder as reaction mass. I'm pretty sure this was long before STtNG.
Actually, this works even when there are no juries. The much-publicized but little-understood Dutch tolerance of recreational drug users and dealers is the result of police refusing to arrest drug offenders, DAs refusing to prosecute, and judges refusing to convict. The situation with assisted suicide started similarly, until the law was finally changed (unfortunately, the politicos still don't have the spine to change the drug laws, but that is getting *really* offtopic).
Those are some pretty messed-up stories. I guess I'm lucky I never had to work in environments like that -- being a guy I would not get singled out for the treatment you described, but that kind of assholery would make me start looking for another job too. Being around assholes sucks even if they don't have it in for you...
Such a culture doesn't just tend to exclude women, but also people from non-anglo cultures that value family. I've always wondered why there are so few people from India and China in the IT profession... Thanks for clearing that up.
I'd like to hear from some people who have actually witnessed that kind of thing first-hand. Are you actually reading the threads? Anyone who has posted is chastised for their experience.
I am reading the threads, but the negative stories I'm seeing are about companies with nasty, back-stabbing, cut-throat cultures. Being a nice guy myself, I hate work environments like that and avoid them like the plague. Women who complain that aggressive = bitch? Jeez, from where I'm sitting, looking at male aggression, aggressive = asshole. This is not a sexist thing, it's about civilized behavior or the lack thereof.
The "anyone who has posted is chastised for their experience" comment means nothing. Anyone can speak up anonymously here, in case they're afraid of retribution -- and if a posting receives nasty replies here, well, so what, the important thing is you get to say your bit, no?
Slashdot Mirror
What's not to admire? I'm having trouble coming up with a lot countries with a more impressive record of accomplishment.
The Wright brothers are generally credited with designing and building the first practical planes; the key to their success was the invention of ailerons, which allow the pilot to control the plane's roll (rotation on its front-to-rear axis). Other designs were unstable in this regard; with ailerons, you can keep a plane upright even if wind or some other effect tries to blow it on its side. The Wright brothers deserve full credit for figuring out how to build and operate a truly controllable plane, but it is still a shame that many history books overlook their predecessors... Kitty Hawk was not the first powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft.
Here's a thought: if you can't afford to give your children a decent education, don't have them. If the only way that you can provide for your family is to be a crook, don't you think you should be having second thoughts about having a family in the first place? I don't know you, I don't know your life situation, but you cannot blame someone for putting their family first. We cannot ask that of people. Put yourself in someone else's shoes for a second. It's real easy to come across all hard line on slashdot. It's quite a bit harder to just rip up a check that will put your kids through college. Be honest with yourself. See above. The world doesn't owe you the right to raise a family. Don't expect anyone to sympathize with you for being corrupt, just because you're worried about your kids' future... In the civilized world, we take kids away from incompetent parents and look for foster parents instead; we do not approve of bad behaviour "just because of the kids". And for your fucking information, neither I nor the person I talked about is American, so your following comments are bullshit too. I'm not American either. So what? What does that have to do with anything anyway? Anyone should be ashamed to even play the apologist for this kind of behavior. I'm not apologising for it, and you're a jerk for saying I am. I'm just telling you what happened. I know it's bad. But these are normal people for chrissakes. You making a point of saying "you won't throw the first stone" pretty much sounds like you think that their behavior is at least defensible. Pardon me for pointing that out.
"These are normal people"? It sounds like these are people who either didn't plan ahead before they had children, or who had no trouble whatsoever taking a bribe from someone, in what they bloody well *knew* to be a bad cause. Why do you get so upset at me, for pointing out bad behavior when I see it? Until you yourself have been in that situation and turned down the 6-figure sum for some free software ideal and then driven home in your 15-year-old car while worrying about your credit card debt, your comment means nothing, you hear me? It means NOTHING. Please let me know what exactly makes you think I'm advocating any kind of "free software ideal" here. And please, also let me know why I should sympathize with irresponsible individuals, who steal from the community to benefit their children. Now hear me: if you can't afford to have a faimily and to provide for it properly, then don't. Suck it up.
Or, if possible, try to change society for the better. Go into politics.
But don't screw other people in order to benefit your own family. And if you choose to do so anyway, don't expect anyone to sympathize.
To get back to the point, I wonder if this guy will ever have the nerve to tell his daughter how he managed to send her to the extra-fancy school? To defend not only this elitism (how about working to improve the non-fancy schools instead?) but his act of screwing other people over just for her (don't those other people deserve consideration as well)?
"This is how it's done, people." Bah. Anyone should be ashamed to even play the apologist for this kind of behavior. Now excuse me while I go to the bathroom to throw up.
I suspect many people will tell you that the GPL is irrevocable because the scenario I just described is not typical; most GPL projects are collaborative efforts, and to change the licensing terms, all the copyright holders would have to agree to such a change. For a project of the magnitude of the Linux kernel, say, that would probably be impractical if not downright impossible. BUT, for a project where all copyrights are in one person's or one company's hands (as in the case of GNU software whose copyrights were signed over to the FSF), then yes, it is perfectly fine for such persons or entities to re-release the software under a GPL-incompatible license.
The big point is that there is a crucial difference between what the copyright holder can do, and what a licensee under the GPL can do. Removing the GPL from something you don't hold the copyright to is specifically forbidden; this is by design and this is the quality that MS and other enemies of OSS sometimes refer to as the "cancerous" or "viral" nature of the GPL. But this restriction in no way affects the original author slash copyright holder.
I wouldn't turn away a hot chick because she started talking about astrology -- I would simply go along assuming it was all in good fun, and if it turns out she's actually serious, I'll give her my serious opinion on the topic. If that makes her turn me away, so be it; I might miss out on some sex but I'll definitely avoid some really bad headaches.
My parents didn't believe in hitting kids. They warned my brother and me about the dangers outside -- about traffic, about not going home with strangers, about not being outside after dark in unfamiliar neighborhoods -- in other words, concrete, practical advice. And then they let us make our own decisions.
I would hate to imagine what my teenage years would have been like if I had gotten beaten for growing my hair, or dyeing it, or wearing hippie outfits, or smoking pot, or drinking beer while technically underage (i.e. younger than 16, where I grew up), and what have you. The child-breaters like the GGP seem to think that activities like that will send a person straight to hell, or into the hands of predators, and so they'll discipline them -- oblivious to the trauma that that discipline can cause, not to mention ruining your relationship with the kid.
My nonviolent, child's-freedom-respecting parents have never had any reason to regret their '60s approach. I ended up graduating at the top of my class, dropping out of college (oops), and getting good, well-paid jobs in IT. I made the right decisions, mostly anyway, because I understood the possibilities and the dangers; if I had been raised with discipline and fear, I'd never have been able to tell right from wrong, and smart from stupid, as well as I have. My brother did just as well after equally adventurous teenage years.
To get back on topic, it doesn't really matter whether anyone considers a bare midriff or a modest high-necked dress arousing. Everything is arousing to someone, and the GGP's big delusion seems to be that he can keep his daughter safe by forcing her to be unattractive. Listen up, folks, when a girl gets raped, it's never her fault, or her parents' for allowing her to dress some way or other; blame the rapist, for God's sake.
I scratch my head at all those teenage girls that dress like hookers, but if you think that that's all it takes to turn men on, you have a pretty narrow perception of what male sexuality can be like. I would bet that most child molesters are turned on by the children's perceived *innocence*, and as such I'd sooner expect someone like that to go after a girl in a modest, flowery dress, than one in hip huggers with a tongue piercing. A lot of guys are turned *off* by that kind of overt sexuality, and deviants (no judgement here) probably even more so than others.
If I ever catch my neighbor hitting or otherwise terrorizing his kids because his boy wants to look like a hippie or his girl wants to bare her midriff, I'm calling social services on the bastard.
The article doesn't address why the long scale didn't become universal... My personal theory is that in mainland Europe, where the words million, milliard, billion, etc., are universally pronounced with stress on the final syllable, those words all sound very distinctive, while in English, where the stress is placed on the first syllable, the difference between million and milliard was just too awkward, and so the milliard fell out of favor and the billion moved down by a factor of 1000 to take its place.
I'm sure any linguist will rip this theory to shreds, though. :-)
This is just another spin on Creationism. God built a computer and we're in it.
Yawn! Nothing to see here, move along.
In a Java application server, where you build web applications using Servlets and/or JSP pages, you can configure the server so that it maps a certain URL pattern to a servlet, and anything following that URL is handed to the servlet as a parameter. This means that handling a syntax like www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels is directly supported in Java servlets, and so it sounds like the Amazon patent now limits the kind of parameters that you and I are allowed to accept in a servlet.
What's next, patenting the sine of 30 degrees? I can't see this patent holding up for one second in court.
"Fear of people on cellphones?"
Fear has nothing to do with it. It is a completely normal and sane hatred of people on cellphones, you insensitive clod!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
I always thought that a computer deciding to shoot down a civilian airliner was a pretty powerful reminder to be careful about automated weapons. What, the computer thought it was an F-14? Good Lord.
Yes, several other people have posted very positive comments about the N770 in this thread as well...
It may be all about how you use it. In my experience, the worst offender in the crash department was the browser, and that was a real problem for me, because I got the N770 specifically for web surfing. The RSS reader never gave me trouble, but then again I didn't use it very much.
I love the concept -- being able to surf the web while lying on the couch is really awkward with a laptop, and much nicer with a little tablet. Also, it's nice to take along and use at WiFi hotspots in airports and whatnot.
However, I soured on the N770 pretty quickly because it would crash all the time. The thing may run Linux, but it's a stripped-down version, with a completely new user interface, and thus there is plenty of room for Nokia to introduce bugs. I downloaded their system software update, but the crashes kept on coming. I'd say I had at least one crash a day; about half my sessions would end with a crash instead of a normal shutdown. In the end, I got so frustrated I threw it in the trash. I couldn't even in good conscience sell the thing on eBay.
I still like the concept, and I specifically do not consider the iPhone an alternative because I don't want a cell phone, but Nokia isn't getting any more of my money unless these later tablets (N800 and N810) are much better in the stability department.
"A single event and the responses by inept leadership led to a variety of disasters that nothing and nobody could have predicted."
The event, 9/11, could easily have been predicted -- heck, it wasn't even the first attack on the WTC. Predicting the details of the second attack was impossible, but that there would be one was a given, given that militant extremism in the Middle East never showed any signs of decreasing and given that the U.S. never changed its policies in that region significantly.
As to the excessive, knee-jerk reactions to 9/11, including the systematic undermining of civil liberties, that should not have come as a surprise to anyone either. People *always* react like that -- when they get scared they'll agree to all kinds of extreme measures, and once the fear has subsided, it takes forever to undo the damage. People who remember the RAF terrorists in 1970's Germany can tell you how a bunch of armed college drop-outs, who were never anywhere near as crazy or violent as al-Qaeda, provided politicians with all the excuse they needed to erode civil liberties in that country just as badly as what Bush and his cronies have done in the U.S.
The U.S. fascination with the Constitution stems from the fact that its existence, combined with the existence of the U.S. Supreme Court, means that potentially every law and every judgement can be turned into a constitutional issue. In countries that don't have a constitution, or where the courts are not allowed to test laws for constitutionality, this type of legal argument simply cannot arise -- Jammie's only remaining option would be to plead to the general population for financial support (and for political activism to put pressure on lawmakers to fix this silly law, or the excessive statutory damages clause anyway).
Unfortunately, the U.S. Constitution is sufficiently vague on many matters that almost everyone seems to think they can use it to argue their side. As a result, the Supreme Court gets bombarded with cases that really aren't legal but political, and many of its judgements become political decisions instead of decisions of law. This is not exclusively a U.S. problem; witness the recent controversy over Muslim headscarves in public schools, and the blatantly political judgement handed down by the German Supreme Court (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/oct2003/scar-o09.shtml -- echoes of the States' Rights argument popular with the far right in the U.S.).
I thought Larry Niven named the matter scoop after Bussard -- in his Known Space novels and stories, there are frequent references to "Bussard Ramjets", a fictional propulsion system consisting of an electromagnetic scoop that collects hydrogen from space, and a fusion-powered rocket that uses some of the hydrogen for nuclear fusion, and uses the remainder as reaction mass. I'm pretty sure this was long before STtNG.
Actually, this works even when there are no juries. The much-publicized but little-understood Dutch tolerance of recreational drug users and dealers is the result of police refusing to arrest drug offenders, DAs refusing to prosecute, and judges refusing to convict. The situation with assisted suicide started similarly, until the law was finally changed (unfortunately, the politicos still don't have the spine to change the drug laws, but that is getting *really* offtopic).
Those are some pretty messed-up stories. I guess I'm lucky I never had to work in environments like that -- being a guy I would not get singled out for the treatment you described, but that kind of assholery would make me start looking for another job too. Being around assholes sucks even if they don't have it in for you...
I am reading the threads, but the negative stories I'm seeing are about companies with nasty, back-stabbing, cut-throat cultures. Being a nice guy myself, I hate work environments like that and avoid them like the plague. Women who complain that aggressive = bitch? Jeez, from where I'm sitting, looking at male aggression, aggressive = asshole. This is not a sexist thing, it's about civilized behavior or the lack thereof.
The "anyone who has posted is chastised for their experience" comment means nothing. Anyone can speak up anonymously here, in case they're afraid of retribution -- and if a posting receives nasty replies here, well, so what, the important thing is you get to say your bit, no?