sodomizer

What bothers me most about elite colleges is that they're based on sheer amount of work, not actual ability.

Thus you get a lot of droids who are good memorizer/regurgitators but not necessarily all that wise, perceptive, creative, etc.

In my experience, schools discriminate against groups which they see as proxies for this group, such as doctor's kids, nerds, Asians, because having too many of them will mean a miserable "is this on the final?" campus with no commitment to learning.

"this method of sleuthing would be far less exciting for users, and would probably generate less traffic, than its current free-for-all approach."

When people do things for their own entertainment, they're always thoughtless.

When they do them out of deep conviction that they're contributing something positive, as in the open source movement, they are more effective.

Ironically, terribly and not-funny-at-all, the Boston bombers were working with the latter mindset. This enabled them to put a city on standstill and terrify a nation using bombs made from household items and black powder (normally considered too slow to be useful as a modern weapon).

"But how is that not discrimination masked in sheep's clothing?"

That's what it is. The inconsistency in the law has created a niche market, and people are taking advantage of it. That's why groups like "Women Who Code" exist; show up here to get a job.

If you're hiring someone because of their gender, race, etc., that's discriminatory.

However, you're also going to be judged by the statistics, which is to say, if you don't discriminate, you're going to be seen as discriminatory.

Someone write Congress and have them fix this please :)

As far as solutions, recognize that there's a reason most businesses like to hire people they know. They already know the people are capable and will fit in with the team, rather than "rolling the dice" with an unknown who might be perfectly competent but impossible to work with.

What that means is that you have a networking problem. You need to meet enough people so that if you decide to hire someone for a position, you immediately know some candidates. This means that some of them will be women.

I recommend going to the professors, campus organizations, or other authority figures that people already trust. This enables you to meet people without the somewhat creepy idea of showing up and trying to "recruit women" with some weird geek stunt.

Even better, consider your existing network: your employees. Have a dinner or drinks session where you encourage every employee to bring a friend "who might someday want to come on board."

I can't help you with the inherent paradox of being discriminatory in order to avoid being seen as discriminatory. But with more people on your mental rolodex, you'll have a better choice of finding someone who's a fit, and more of those will be women and other protected groups.

"I dislike your name"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAZOZ5hNN9g

Feel differently about it now?

I can't think of a better way to illustrate my point about walking a mile in someone else's shoes!

I think his point is that if we encourage that mentality and don't fight it on twitter etc, soon no accounts will be associated with the employers unofficially, and thus we won't get any of the news that leaks out that way. Our loss.

I think it's a terrible idea to judge other people's political decisions until you've walked a mile in their shoes.

If you are a professional, you should be ready to work with anyone, not just the people who agree with you.

Your view is not objectively correct. To insist otherwise is fascism.

I sympathize.

However, I think the most successful WordPress plugins are free, because most WordPress sites belong to dabblers. They are already paying for hosting; in their view, software should be free.

As leverage however, having a successful WordPress plugin can get your name out there, build up a ton of links to your URL, and get you contract gigs. People are making this work. I doubt you're going to make any money from the plugin alone however for the reasons you mentioned.

Please alert Hari Seldon.

Go to your local 2600 meeting.

Or, find a volunteer group; they all need computer people.

Then expand your role to something that requires people interaction.

Otherwise, you'll get the mushroom treatment: they'll keep you in the dark and feed you cow feces.

Either way, you'll get to practice socializing, which is a skill like any other (think of it as learning to code recursively) and get to meet some new people, some of whom might become friends.

It could be that laws in general need to be more flexible, and to keep in mind the end goal more than the boundaries of strict limits in the language of the rules. That way, you don't have this one-or-the-other decision.

I guess it's a good time to post pictures of my junk to Facebook, then?

Notice how many of the comments in this topic verge on the hysterical, paranoid, reactionary and ill-informed.

It brings them out. The sheer emotional appeal of the original headline brings out the worst in people.

The idea of having a site's TOS be law is terrible for almost infinite reasons. None of the rigor of law is applied to it.

Thus, I implore you, all webmasters: insert the phrase "And you promise to have sex with a goat" into your TOS as soon as possible. That should make Congress think twice...

I want to meet your parents and grandparents. They sound lovely.

In defense of the laws, however, they were formulated only to regulate sex outside of marriage. With love and marriage, sex was viewed as something else.

For proof of this, look to the prosecutions. If we had a vast history of people being prosecuted for marrying young, that would be one thing. Instead we've got a lot of busts in parks or having other public trysts.

You mean, sort of like how we all used to log on to mainframes, or rent Linux accounts from our webhosts?

You mean... Huxley was right?

Part of the reason USENET got abandoned is the same reason that MySpace and Facebook are being abandoned: as newer services came about, the cutting edge flocked to them, which left a high ratio of malcontents, trolls, bullies, assorted dickheads, etc.

If Reddit is evolution for humanity, I support global thermonuclear war.

One other form of regression: people navigating the web through custom apps on their phone, like "Hail a Cab" or "Shop at Target." The whole idea of the web was to create a neutral platform so that custom software wasn't needed. In addition, this is raising a generation who are illiterate of general computer principles, but have lots of brain-space for specific apps. "I'm really good with Hail a Cab!"

She's doing this to get away from "me-first" culture, which is common to all dying firms, and to get people toward a "goal-first" outlook instead.

The problem with this attempt is that it's one rule trying to stand in for many. The first thing you have to do is make sure that no one is rewarded unjustly, and that no achievement goes unrewarded. The next thing is to get rid of the free riders, hangers-on, bad management, sociopaths and other office blight.

The final step, and she'll hate this, is some kind of ownership. Employees are people who do what you tell them to do. Part owners look for something they can do to contribute to collective wealth through the future of the company.

Sounds Communist? Not to my ears, and I'm pretty far from ever supporting dead ideologies. It's just common sense. People need to feel like they're part of a team, and that's how we signal that in our society, through ownership.

I love BSD, but the user community is hostile to entry and hostile to causal users, so it's not surprising that everyone but the experts has switched to Linux.

The thing that no one's mentioning in these press releases that should be discussed: robotics.

Moving a plant here doesn't equate to moving manufacturing jobs here. The traditional fear of manufacturing in the USA has been high cost of labor including possible strikes.

If plants are able to replace bulk labor with robots, and have the rest of their labor be engineering-type roles, they'll have no problem moving here.

But it won't bring thousands of jobs, maybe hundreds, although they will be better paid.

Update to those who last checked in the 1990s:

"Hauntingly beautiful" is now officially a cliche.

I miss it, too, but the overuse is crushing any significance it once had.

The school bureaucracy is a symptom of something else, as is the monotonous testing and the union power. The American educational system changed its premise back in the 1960s.

Since that time, we have become addicted to assembly line, one-size-fits-all, bulk format education in which we put kids through a ton of information and measure them by how much they retain. Not the quality of what they retain, and not their actual skills, but what they've memorized.

By prioritizing memorized facts over learned application, we are losing a lot of our most talented kids. To compound the problem further, this one-size-fits-all approach isn't calibrated to the smart kids, but to the average. In public schools, it's also impossible to send home the disruptive kids.

The result is a system that is so hobbled by contradictions that it is dysfunctional. Dysfunction attracts lazy administrators who like to use test metrics to force teachers to teach to the test, thus making everyone look like a success, even when the graduates aren't good at doing anything.

The recent spate of test-cheating scandals should show us exactly why these tests are in favor among administrators. Instead of a broad open-ended task like "teach these kids to reason," all you have to do is make sure they make a pretty bell curve on the standardized test.

This is the real outcome:

"Account status should not affect any customer's ability to access their library."

Amazon has realized that they can quarantine suspect accounts, but not cut off the customer's right to their purchased books.

Every other manufacturer is now going to follow suit. The end result is a win for the consumer.