Shit like this, which the Supreme Court has already taken a dim view on constitutionally needs a new amendment to 42USC1983:
The enactment of any policy or law by a state or municipality which alters or abolishes any right, privilege or immunity acknowledged by judicial precedent shall constitute a deprivation of liberty under color of authority for the purpose of this section. Enforcement of the same shall be considered a deprivation of liberty under color of authority.
The Nazi leadership had more in common with renaissance fair nerds than science and engineering geeks. The People's Republic of China and Iran, meanwhile, actually have a lot of engineering-trained leaders. For pete's sake, Hu Jintao, one of the most powerful leaders in the world right now has a degree in hydraulic engineering. The President of Iran is a civil engineer who actually still teaches a class or two on civil engineering at university.
Is that enough for you or do I need to drive a few nails into the clue stick for you?
1) Start with Metro-driven login screen. 2) Show the user a panorama of Metro for a minute and ask "do you want this or the traditional windows experience on start up?" 3) If they want classic, login takes them back into the desktop like they're used to. 4) In classic, the effin start menu works like it did in Windows 7. 5) Metro apps can be launched seamlessly from explorer with Windows shifting effortlessly back and forth between metro for metro apps and explorer for everything else. 6) Windows key + tab shifts between the two environments like alt-tab between windows in explorer.
Microsoft's only hope in fighting Apple in the integrated PC/tablet/phone market is to make Windows be more open and more "whatever you want is cool with us." That means they should be planning RIGHT NOW how to make Windows on PC behave in a totally laissez faire fashion in UI and have a touch UI system for traditional Windows apps so that businesses that don't like Metro can recompile for ARM.
You know who has societies where "geeks" (engineers, mainly) are highly placed throughout government? China, Iran and many other closed societies run by authoritarian states. Geek arrogance toward the common man combined with political power is an extremely dangerous combination. Thanks, but no.
"Scientific government" sounds great until you realize that in practice it'll be run by people who think statecraft and philosophy are nearly worthless endeavors and that it'll likely have an attitude of "hey, let's try this radical restructure of people's lives because the theory sounds great and looks applicable on paper."
This actually seems like a pretty sane plan for most people who aren't diehard pirates or Netflix users. Most users don't use 300GB. If Comcast is smart they'll use this as a basis to actually fund the development of a more powerful and competitive network instead of just milking it for short term gains.
We pressed him on this. Michel conceded the problem was less that it was too anecdotal and more that he disagreed with the book's premise—that high litigation costs were a sign the patent system wasn't working.
If the cost of enforcing the patent equals or exceeds the recoverable benefit, you have just conceded the fact that the benefit no longer carries more than marginal economic value to the alleged beneficiary. The best that could be said here is that it distracts a competitor. The worst (and probably closer to reality) case scenario is that the pursuit of marginally valuable patents creates a perverse incentive that distracts a company from more useful economic activities.
It's really hard to take seriously someone who says they're all about facts and figures, but then jettisons economics because the economic aspects of his preferred system are abysmal. There will come a day, at the rate we are going, where the rule of law will be formally dead in the US similar to how it is in Russia because the legal profession (and judges and prosecutors in particular) have made the cost of participation so high from various factors ranging from failing to sanction frivolous lawsuits and criminal charges, to allowing blatant corruption. As it currently stands, it's on life support.
State and federal spending rules are designed to be penny wise and pound foolish. They'll imprison a contractor who charges 5 hours of lunch breaks to a contract but won't even fire an employee who wastes several millions of dollars in a spending spree so ludicrous that no reasonable person would have charged forward on that. So the Verizon contractor who skips an hour a day but costs the tax payers a few thousand dollars at the most is more likely to get prosecuted than the high ranking government employee who just spent $25m when $2.5m (parts and labor) was likely the true ceiling for legitimate costs.
But most of the jobs recent grads are getting are more likely to be closer to wait staff, manual labor or some other position where you don't even submit a resume to a HR department.
If I am going to be using the laptop outside of a dimly lit room, give me the option of buying a quality matte display. I don't care if it's an extra $200. Just give me the damn option. My comfort and ability to work in public without feeling like I'm staring into a mirror is more important.
Let's consider what college now means for many millennials:
1) Get a degree with minimal job applicability. 2) Go tens of thousands in dollars into debt to get it. 3) Get a job that requires no more skills than the degree imparted (and that pays ~$10/hour or less) 4) Find out that the federal government and private lenders put in all sorts of riders ranging from rising costs of holding the debt, to "we can arrest you if you are delinquent on your federal loan."
Anyone advocating making it easier to fall into the student loan trap is morally analogous to a drug dealer.
For all of their bullshit about human rights, the neocon Bush administration threw the religious and ethnic minorities of Iraq to the wolves in the name of "democracy." Iraq has lost half of its Christian population because of the violence and persecution they've faced since the fall of the Ba'athist regime. The US needs to stop meddling in these countries; the "freedom fighters" are often as bad as the regimes they want to replace. Hell, even now in post-Kadaffi Libya, the Berbers are getting mistreated even worse than before.
When this is what democracy means, I say "fuck democracy."
Unless the school sucks, they do have those requirements. But you have repeatedly showed yourself to be a misogynistic prick so I doubt you care about reality or what people actually do with these degrees (hint: they do find jobs, some of them quite well paying, some even at tech companies).
Do you even taste the aftertaste in the Kool Aid these days? If you look at the unemployment stats for engineers, they're typically well below the national average and people with real liberal arts educations are badly unemployed or underemployed.
LBGT studies, Womyn's studies, etc. would be tolerable if they were minors within a broader liberal arts background that at least left students with broad exposure to math, literature, philosophy, logic and other things which constituted the traditional liberal arts path. Instead, you have these insular majors which tend to focus on grievances that the group that is being "studied" has with American society. All of that to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per year which leaves students at these universities absolutely crippled without even a rigorous, broad liberal arts education that might prepare them for SOMETHING productive down the road.
Federal law affects only federal law enforcement except where there is contradicting jurisdiction. Even in overlapping jurisdiction, the supremacy clause doesn't apply. For example, federal drug laws do not override state drug laws within a state's borders because the constitution gives virtually no jurisdiction to the federal government over what happens within a state's boundaries except matters of civil rights protection, coinage of currency and a few other domestic things. The federal government is free to arrest Californians for selling drugs across the border, but California is free to legalize the sale of drugs within its borders and even to prosecute federal agents who arrest people complying with California law in California's borders.
Big business, like big labor, hates state sovereignty. It makes the regulatory environment "messy." This is why contra what most liberals think, states rights are not a racist anachronism, but anti-venom for big business' reach and power.
It was well understood among the actual developers her work did more harm than good.
Most of the older women in the field that my wife has worked with are like that. She has come home with more than her fair share of bitter grumblings about having to work twice as hard because some affirmative action quota didn't realize, for example (yes, this is a real example), that using a tab panel with the tab headers pushed above the user's viewable area in the container to simulate a card layout is an amateurish hack at best and inexcusable from a "senior software engineer" who claims to have used.NET since day one.
Having seen her frustration with this, I am always left with a little bit of anger when I see the articles lamenting the dearth of women in the field. What we do to the women who by nature want to be here and compete fairly without changing the culture of the field is completely dishonorable.
As Wadhwa notes, even if the 45-year-old programmer making $120,000 has the right skills, “companies would rather hire the younger workers.”
I took over as a developer on a project lead by a "hot young developer" (how the management saw his skill set). He and I graduated around the same time. Guess what? Dude didn't even know what primary or foreign keys were. He also had no defaults, not null or unique constraints. Most of his code was a steaming pile of dog crap expressed crudely in Java. When I got on the project and saw the code, my eyes felt like they were on fire it was that bad.
But hey, he's got the "latest skills" right?
Repeat the same story with PHP, Python or Ruby replacing Java and you get a snapshot of where this leads.
American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Film and Media Studies, Golf and Sports Turf Management, Information Systems, International Studies, Marketing, Modern European Studies, Public Relations, Recreation, Parks and Tourism, Religion (this is why we have seminaries!), Sociology and Women's Studies are all still there.
There are also three music degrees: Music Education and either a B.A. in Music or a "Bachelors of Music" in Music. Similarly, Art is broken down into three or four majors instead of 3 or 4 concentrations.
What we need is a tax payer revolt in Florida over all of those useless majors, especially, the grievance mongers like Women's Studies surviving the cut.
It's a factor insofar as it is part of the process of turning Macs into status symbols. Price alone is just one variable; it's the price factor which separates the product from the hoi polloi who couldn't stomach a $2000 professional laptop when a $500 meets their needs easily. It's everything from the packaging, to the build quality and taste, to the marketing and product integration.
Macs were always expensive, but 10 years ago, they were more of an eccentricity or specialty than a high quality replacement for a Windows PC for most people with some money.
In all of the fights between Windows and Mac users over the disparity in viruses for both platforms, I've never seen a Windows user point out the fact that Windows is often used on infrastructure that is valuable to compromise. No major business runs their corporate infrastructure on Macs. No major sites with valuable data I know of are hosted on Apple hardware. What has changed with the marketshare is that now Macs are used by the upper-middle and upper classes extensively at work and at home. So even at 6.5% of the market, you're far more likely now to compromise a Mac with valuable data or access to it now.
Compromise a Mac today and you might get access to a corporate network, a richer man/woman's bank information, etc. That wasn't true 10 years ago.
While it looks good on paper it is not practical and is not working. The language barrier for IBM’s Indian staff is huge, for example. Troubleshooting, which was once performed on conference calls, is now done with instant messaging because the teams speak so poorly. Problems that an experienced person could fix in a few minutes are taking an army of folks an hour to fix. This is infuriating and alarming to IBM’s customers.
Phone support with trained professionals who can get the job done fast to impersonal IM with barely bilingual, questionable quality support techs on the other side of the planet. Rates are more or less the same (I'm being generous). What could POSSIBLY go wrong with that? That's like putting a Ford Mustang body on a low end Tata car and wondering why customers flee from it.
The point of a trade representative to another country is to shill, without principle, for the interests of their country's economy. If the US Trade Representative gets too pushy, just remind him that if the US ever has any intention of "containing China," Australia is one of those "do not piss off, under any circumstances" regional bases. It's especially important to have on our good side in the event China ever goes batshit crazy by seizing Taiwan, then says "since we've already risked WWIII, let's just go ahead and invade South Korea and Japan as well since their armies aren't worth shit."
IANAL, so can someone explain to me why a US court thinks it has any effect in Germany?
It's a federal crime to go abroad for the purpose of having sex with a minor. One may seem justified and the other not, but the underlying legal principle is the same. You are an American (or American corporation). You are at all times and places subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. You may disagree with that, and often the feds won't push it. However, if you come back into contact with the federal government having broken federal laws abroad, you better watch yourself.
In their zeal to pretend that the Civil War was more than about Slavery, or else suffer the indignity of being very much on the wrong side
Slavery was the primary state's rights issue. What is often lost on opponents of the Confederacy is that the issue of state's rights ultimately exposes very large questions of how different sides see the nature of the United States. Opponents of the Confederacy ultimately do not accept the proposition that the United States was founded as a federation of states, but rather treat the states like provinces that are ultimately under higher accountability to one another than what is laid out in the U.S. Constitution.
This is dangerous stuff if you are a strong supporter of democracy and self-determination. There are very few issues that could be so bright lined for being "simply in the wrong" as slavery on basis of race. Now we have pro-choicers and pro-lifers who ardently agree that it must be all or nothing. The fact is that we've now reached a point where key decisions cannot be decided at the state level and dissidents forced to simply deal with it. For example, Rick Santorum and NARAL both agree that California and Alabama should have no say in the matter. This is why we are being ripped apart culturally. The simple fact is that aside from shared language, the various regions of the United States really are not "one nation, under God, indivisible" yada yada yada anymore than Great Britain is "one nation" because the Welsh, Scots, English and Northern Irish share the same native language among the vast majority of their populations.
And you also have to remember one thing about the Fugitive Slave Act. In all matters of property, if someone feels the jurisdiction with your property you have a right to reclaim it. For example, if someone drives your car to Canada, the Canadian government is obligated (morally, if not by treaty) to facilitate its return to the rightful owner. The problem here was that few people on both sides recognized that the differences were so great with regard to slavery that it was likely not possible that the union could have been preserved except by force. One side felt slaves were property, another did not even recognize slavery. It was about as viable to be held together by peace as a political union of Athens and Sparta.
The time has come for the legal profession to become fully accountable to the public like the rest of the white collar professions. Lawyers should not sit on the Bar associations; businessmen, doctors, engineers, etc. should be the ones judging the professional conduct of lawyers. Lawyers have little to no education in these matters but deem themselves fit to judge every facet of how we do our work. Why is it then so outrageous to think that similarly intelligent and educated people from different fields should be the ones judging their ethics, billing practices, etc.?
Rove was behind the outing of Valerie Plame. As such, I think he deserves the same thing this guy is facing. Even more so since he's higher up in the pecking order.
Slashdot Mirror
Shit like this, which the Supreme Court has already taken a dim view on constitutionally needs a new amendment to 42USC1983:
The Nazi leadership had more in common with renaissance fair nerds than science and engineering geeks. The People's Republic of China and Iran, meanwhile, actually have a lot of engineering-trained leaders. For pete's sake, Hu Jintao, one of the most powerful leaders in the world right now has a degree in hydraulic engineering. The President of Iran is a civil engineer who actually still teaches a class or two on civil engineering at university.
Is that enough for you or do I need to drive a few nails into the clue stick for you?
Here's the workflow they should have done:
1) Start with Metro-driven login screen.
2) Show the user a panorama of Metro for a minute and ask "do you want this or the traditional windows experience on start up?"
3) If they want classic, login takes them back into the desktop like they're used to.
4) In classic, the effin start menu works like it did in Windows 7.
5) Metro apps can be launched seamlessly from explorer with Windows shifting effortlessly back and forth between metro for metro apps and explorer for everything else.
6) Windows key + tab shifts between the two environments like alt-tab between windows in explorer.
Microsoft's only hope in fighting Apple in the integrated PC/tablet/phone market is to make Windows be more open and more "whatever you want is cool with us." That means they should be planning RIGHT NOW how to make Windows on PC behave in a totally laissez faire fashion in UI and have a touch UI system for traditional Windows apps so that businesses that don't like Metro can recompile for ARM.
You know who has societies where "geeks" (engineers, mainly) are highly placed throughout government? China, Iran and many other closed societies run by authoritarian states. Geek arrogance toward the common man combined with political power is an extremely dangerous combination. Thanks, but no.
"Scientific government" sounds great until you realize that in practice it'll be run by people who think statecraft and philosophy are nearly worthless endeavors and that it'll likely have an attitude of "hey, let's try this radical restructure of people's lives because the theory sounds great and looks applicable on paper."
This actually seems like a pretty sane plan for most people who aren't diehard pirates or Netflix users. Most users don't use 300GB. If Comcast is smart they'll use this as a basis to actually fund the development of a more powerful and competitive network instead of just milking it for short term gains.
If the cost of enforcing the patent equals or exceeds the recoverable benefit, you have just conceded the fact that the benefit no longer carries more than marginal economic value to the alleged beneficiary. The best that could be said here is that it distracts a competitor. The worst (and probably closer to reality) case scenario is that the pursuit of marginally valuable patents creates a perverse incentive that distracts a company from more useful economic activities.
It's really hard to take seriously someone who says they're all about facts and figures, but then jettisons economics because the economic aspects of his preferred system are abysmal. There will come a day, at the rate we are going, where the rule of law will be formally dead in the US similar to how it is in Russia because the legal profession (and judges and prosecutors in particular) have made the cost of participation so high from various factors ranging from failing to sanction frivolous lawsuits and criminal charges, to allowing blatant corruption. As it currently stands, it's on life support.
State and federal spending rules are designed to be penny wise and pound foolish. They'll imprison a contractor who charges 5 hours of lunch breaks to a contract but won't even fire an employee who wastes several millions of dollars in a spending spree so ludicrous that no reasonable person would have charged forward on that. So the Verizon contractor who skips an hour a day but costs the tax payers a few thousand dollars at the most is more likely to get prosecuted than the high ranking government employee who just spent $25m when $2.5m (parts and labor) was likely the true ceiling for legitimate costs.
But most of the jobs recent grads are getting are more likely to be closer to wait staff, manual labor or some other position where you don't even submit a resume to a HR department.
If I am going to be using the laptop outside of a dimly lit room, give me the option of buying a quality matte display. I don't care if it's an extra $200. Just give me the damn option. My comfort and ability to work in public without feeling like I'm staring into a mirror is more important.
Let's consider what college now means for many millennials:
1) Get a degree with minimal job applicability.
2) Go tens of thousands in dollars into debt to get it.
3) Get a job that requires no more skills than the degree imparted (and that pays ~$10/hour or less)
4) Find out that the federal government and private lenders put in all sorts of riders ranging from rising costs of holding the debt, to "we can arrest you if you are delinquent on your federal loan."
Anyone advocating making it easier to fall into the student loan trap is morally analogous to a drug dealer.
For all of their bullshit about human rights, the neocon Bush administration threw the religious and ethnic minorities of Iraq to the wolves in the name of "democracy." Iraq has lost half of its Christian population because of the violence and persecution they've faced since the fall of the Ba'athist regime. The US needs to stop meddling in these countries; the "freedom fighters" are often as bad as the regimes they want to replace. Hell, even now in post-Kadaffi Libya, the Berbers are getting mistreated even worse than before.
When this is what democracy means, I say "fuck democracy."
Do you even taste the aftertaste in the Kool Aid these days? If you look at the unemployment stats for engineers, they're typically well below the national average and people with real liberal arts educations are badly unemployed or underemployed.
LBGT studies, Womyn's studies, etc. would be tolerable if they were minors within a broader liberal arts background that at least left students with broad exposure to math, literature, philosophy, logic and other things which constituted the traditional liberal arts path. Instead, you have these insular majors which tend to focus on grievances that the group that is being "studied" has with American society. All of that to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per year which leaves students at these universities absolutely crippled without even a rigorous, broad liberal arts education that might prepare them for SOMETHING productive down the road.
Federal law affects only federal law enforcement except where there is contradicting jurisdiction. Even in overlapping jurisdiction, the supremacy clause doesn't apply. For example, federal drug laws do not override state drug laws within a state's borders because the constitution gives virtually no jurisdiction to the federal government over what happens within a state's boundaries except matters of civil rights protection, coinage of currency and a few other domestic things. The federal government is free to arrest Californians for selling drugs across the border, but California is free to legalize the sale of drugs within its borders and even to prosecute federal agents who arrest people complying with California law in California's borders.
Big business, like big labor, hates state sovereignty. It makes the regulatory environment "messy." This is why contra what most liberals think, states rights are not a racist anachronism, but anti-venom for big business' reach and power.
Most of the older women in the field that my wife has worked with are like that. She has come home with more than her fair share of bitter grumblings about having to work twice as hard because some affirmative action quota didn't realize, for example (yes, this is a real example), that using a tab panel with the tab headers pushed above the user's viewable area in the container to simulate a card layout is an amateurish hack at best and inexcusable from a "senior software engineer" who claims to have used .NET since day one.
Having seen her frustration with this, I am always left with a little bit of anger when I see the articles lamenting the dearth of women in the field. What we do to the women who by nature want to be here and compete fairly without changing the culture of the field is completely dishonorable.
I took over as a developer on a project lead by a "hot young developer" (how the management saw his skill set). He and I graduated around the same time. Guess what? Dude didn't even know what primary or foreign keys were. He also had no defaults, not null or unique constraints. Most of his code was a steaming pile of dog crap expressed crudely in Java. When I got on the project and saw the code, my eyes felt like they were on fire it was that bad.
But hey, he's got the "latest skills" right?
Repeat the same story with PHP, Python or Ruby replacing Java and you get a snapshot of where this leads.
From their list of majors...
American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Film and Media Studies, Golf and Sports Turf Management, Information Systems, International Studies, Marketing, Modern European Studies, Public Relations, Recreation, Parks and Tourism, Religion (this is why we have seminaries!), Sociology and Women's Studies are all still there.
There are also three music degrees: Music Education and either a B.A. in Music or a "Bachelors of Music" in Music. Similarly, Art is broken down into three or four majors instead of 3 or 4 concentrations.
What we need is a tax payer revolt in Florida over all of those useless majors, especially, the grievance mongers like Women's Studies surviving the cut.
It's a factor insofar as it is part of the process of turning Macs into status symbols. Price alone is just one variable; it's the price factor which separates the product from the hoi polloi who couldn't stomach a $2000 professional laptop when a $500 meets their needs easily. It's everything from the packaging, to the build quality and taste, to the marketing and product integration.
Macs were always expensive, but 10 years ago, they were more of an eccentricity or specialty than a high quality replacement for a Windows PC for most people with some money.
In all of the fights between Windows and Mac users over the disparity in viruses for both platforms, I've never seen a Windows user point out the fact that Windows is often used on infrastructure that is valuable to compromise. No major business runs their corporate infrastructure on Macs. No major sites with valuable data I know of are hosted on Apple hardware. What has changed with the marketshare is that now Macs are used by the upper-middle and upper classes extensively at work and at home. So even at 6.5% of the market, you're far more likely now to compromise a Mac with valuable data or access to it now.
Compromise a Mac today and you might get access to a corporate network, a richer man/woman's bank information, etc. That wasn't true 10 years ago.
Phone support with trained professionals who can get the job done fast to impersonal IM with barely bilingual, questionable quality support techs on the other side of the planet. Rates are more or less the same (I'm being generous). What could POSSIBLY go wrong with that? That's like putting a Ford Mustang body on a low end Tata car and wondering why customers flee from it.
The point of a trade representative to another country is to shill, without principle, for the interests of their country's economy. If the US Trade Representative gets too pushy, just remind him that if the US ever has any intention of "containing China," Australia is one of those "do not piss off, under any circumstances" regional bases. It's especially important to have on our good side in the event China ever goes batshit crazy by seizing Taiwan, then says "since we've already risked WWIII, let's just go ahead and invade South Korea and Japan as well since their armies aren't worth shit."
It's a federal crime to go abroad for the purpose of having sex with a minor. One may seem justified and the other not, but the underlying legal principle is the same. You are an American (or American corporation). You are at all times and places subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. You may disagree with that, and often the feds won't push it. However, if you come back into contact with the federal government having broken federal laws abroad, you better watch yourself.
Slavery was the primary state's rights issue. What is often lost on opponents of the Confederacy is that the issue of state's rights ultimately exposes very large questions of how different sides see the nature of the United States. Opponents of the Confederacy ultimately do not accept the proposition that the United States was founded as a federation of states, but rather treat the states like provinces that are ultimately under higher accountability to one another than what is laid out in the U.S. Constitution.
This is dangerous stuff if you are a strong supporter of democracy and self-determination. There are very few issues that could be so bright lined for being "simply in the wrong" as slavery on basis of race. Now we have pro-choicers and pro-lifers who ardently agree that it must be all or nothing. The fact is that we've now reached a point where key decisions cannot be decided at the state level and dissidents forced to simply deal with it. For example, Rick Santorum and NARAL both agree that California and Alabama should have no say in the matter. This is why we are being ripped apart culturally. The simple fact is that aside from shared language, the various regions of the United States really are not "one nation, under God, indivisible" yada yada yada anymore than Great Britain is "one nation" because the Welsh, Scots, English and Northern Irish share the same native language among the vast majority of their populations.
And you also have to remember one thing about the Fugitive Slave Act. In all matters of property, if someone feels the jurisdiction with your property you have a right to reclaim it. For example, if someone drives your car to Canada, the Canadian government is obligated (morally, if not by treaty) to facilitate its return to the rightful owner. The problem here was that few people on both sides recognized that the differences were so great with regard to slavery that it was likely not possible that the union could have been preserved except by force. One side felt slaves were property, another did not even recognize slavery. It was about as viable to be held together by peace as a political union of Athens and Sparta.
The time has come for the legal profession to become fully accountable to the public like the rest of the white collar professions. Lawyers should not sit on the Bar associations; businessmen, doctors, engineers, etc. should be the ones judging the professional conduct of lawyers. Lawyers have little to no education in these matters but deem themselves fit to judge every facet of how we do our work. Why is it then so outrageous to think that similarly intelligent and educated people from different fields should be the ones judging their ethics, billing practices, etc.?
Rove was behind the outing of Valerie Plame. As such, I think he deserves the same thing this guy is facing. Even more so since he's higher up in the pecking order.