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sgaither

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We have to ask ourselves: where is the money? Our rights aren't being lost to a sprawling military-police state just because there's a Big-Brother wannabe conspiring to destroy the constitution. Police departments grow the same way our project departments grow in engineering companies: by managers arguing for bigger budgets and spending more, sometimes wastefully, to justify bigger budgets come next fiscal year.

These hyped-up (sometimes roided-up) SWAT teams do what they do to justify their existence....no manager wants to preside over a shrinking department. It takes a lot of thinking and long-term policy making to reduce this perverse yet basic economic incentive

The page looks nice and you have a clear flow and call to action...but the copy could use tightening up all around. For example, the subhead:

New, exciting way of doing online courses

Sounds like it's missing an article: "A new, exciting way of doing online courses"

And is "doing" the right word? Maybe the verb should be: "taking" or change the sentence structure from "of doing" to "to take"

There's a lot of little grammar and style things that should be polished...IMO it's a big factor in an online education's first impression

i'm not sure if the audience is supposed to be clients or if it's supposed to be informational to prospective devs, but it's not a very welcoming/informational page to someone who isn't familiar with your service.

You're obviously not overweight but you're pretty light for that height, so I wonder if someone with a lower center of gravity would suffer fewer back issues? What if you used a laptop that you could move from standing desk to couch from time to time? Like after every 40 minutes?

I looked at the title and thought "good riddance", assuming it meant mediocre maintenence-only programmers were being replaced by automated-programming/systems, just as low-level lawyers can be replaced with document scanner/databases.

But systems programming seems to be an essential role that uptime-concerned operations will always want on retainer...

Am I being nitpicky in pointing out that this probably shoulda been done not using giant background images? I guess if it's not a web design company it's not a big deal...but it would raise a flag for me as a designer

According to this New Yorker story: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_...

There are almost no cases of an elevator's cable just snapping and going into downwards free fall - with the exception of (possibly) during 9/11 and an incident in 1945 where a bomber pilot rammed a building. The elevator operator dropped 75 floors but miraculously survived:

> One of them fell from the seventy-fifth floor with a woman aboard—an elevator operator. (The operator of the other one had stepped out for a cigarette.) By the time the car crashed into the buffer in the pit (a hydraulic truncheon designed to be a cushion of last resort), a thousand feet of cable had piled up beneath it, serving as a kind of spring. A pillow of air pressure, as the speeding car compressed the air in the shaft, may have helped ease the impact as well. Still, the landing was not soft. The car’s walls buckled, and steel debris tore up through the floor. It was the woman’s good fortune to be cowering in a corner when the car hit. She was severely injured but alive

true...I've been wanting to try out jekyll and even though it looks slower than a login/3rd-party setup it's still demonstrably easy, from this post...so that's extra incentive to give it a go.

I wondered if it was just a misunderstanding by the OP but it's the same language on JSTOR's site: http://about.jstor.org/rr

>> "Register & Read Beta is a new, experimental program to offer free, read-online access to individual scholars..."

I dont think it's too geeky to point out that the use of "read-online access" indicates a poor understanding of digital tech and rights management and the web in general. Reminds me of the article posted the other day about how the no-fly list might be circumventable with a DOM editor.

Most of the anti-SOPA companies like Google would agree with the sentiment of this statement. Look at their statement during the SOPA hearings. http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/Oyama%2011162011.pdf

"While we have serious concerns with SOPA as written, we look forward to working with the Committee to find focused mechanisms that effectively target foreign rogue sites. Already, Google and other companies are engaged in voluntary, industry-led efforts to attack the problem. As detailed below, we believe that legislation guided by common sense principles and focused on eliminating the financial incentives for rogue sites – while avoiding collateral damage – would receive wide support from the technology sector."

Not everyone who is against SOPA is also (publicly) OK with online piracy...they limit their arguments to the logistical problems introduce by SOPA enforcement