Arguing that we should have the right not to do business with groups we dislike, which was precisely the excuse given in the 60's by people who didn't blacks in their restaurant, is not-so-thinly veiled bigotry. It's painful listening to those who don't know history trying to repeat it, desperately hoping that this time it will be different and they'll be allowed to show "those people" who's in charge.

For the record, I'm not black, gay, or liberal. But things like this are exactly the reason why I'm no longer a Republican. I just can't go along willingly with the Attempt Of The Week to make this a hyperconservative theocracy. When someone inevitably comes along and wants to deny my right to fully participate in society, I hope we'll have built the momentum to shut it down.

This problem isn't just in pure developer-land.

As an example, meander on down to the PuppetForge and look at the common modules used to do boring stuff.

For example, installing and maintaining PHP on a box via Puppet should be drop-simple, with little-to-no work... I designed and wrote a simple module for it in like 30 minutes, spending 15 minutes of that having a cigarette, no sweat. But one look at some of these, and you'd think they were writing Turing-capable climate modeling software. Okay, I exaggerate (a little), but the point is, these guys spend untold hours trying to turn a set of car tires into jet engines.

Here's where it gets ugly: Most DevOps folks liberally download these beasts and implement them, never realizing (until it's way too late) that the vast majority of these modules are written either to be cute, to be clever-by-too-far, or to bolster someone's resume ('look, I'm a coding deity!' type crap***). They then spend hours on end busting their ass trying to get these damned things to work in their environment, and end up with something that quite frankly eats more CPU cycles and disk space then it really should... by orders of magnitude.

TL;DR? The greatest wasting of time I've seen in development and beyond is when people try to get too cute or too clever with code.

*** if someone showed me some of these ugly-assed bloat-factories as part of the interview process, they would face some damned hard questions from me about design before I'd even think of recommending them to be hired.

Could it also be related to poorer parents working more hours, thus having less time to be with the kids during their early years

There are probably dozens of measurable ways being poor affects the development of brains. But ultimately, it's happening because that's the way the people at the very top in terms of wealth and power want it. The last think they want is for poor people to suddenly become successful, and develop political power.

One of the side-effects of the New Deal and the labor movement in America is that a bunch of people who were on the shitty side of the street suddenly were able to take a big step up. GIs coming out of WW2 who would normally have gone to work in the coal mine or slaughter house suddenly had the means to go to college, buy a house, live a life of reasonable comfort. And do you know what they did with this sudden shift in circumstances? They developed political power. Their kids went from blue collar to white collar. And similar steps up during the pre and post-war period occurred for women and American blacks.

And this scared the bejeesus out of the elite. So, in the 70s, and peaking in the 80s, there came an effort to undo these advancements. The effort included an attack on New Deal programs like Social Security and the labor movement. The effort included the flooding of the inner city with crack cocaine (which we now know to have been run by our own government). The effort included the confluence of evangelical religion with supply-side capitalism by Billy Graham (who started his ministry with funds from the Chamber of Commerce).

The effort to put the genie back in the bottle continues to this day, and it's been quite successful. Economic disparity hasn't been this out of whack since the 19th century. Militarized policing, private prisons, an attack on public education are all fronts in this class war being waged by the elite. You want to see it in action, watch the political policies being pushed by governors of Kansas, Indiana, and many states throughout the South and in big cities in the North. Just watch.

I cannot keep up with the contortion of intellectual dishonesty required to type that sentence with a straight face. I don't think you're lying to me and that you really believe this, but I equally believe that you're lying to yourself. Have a nice day and best of luck in your future endeavors.

It was no less than Thomas Jefferson who said:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

Next, your strawman:

Correct. Still doesn't. You're legally entitled to say "blacks are of the devil" (or whites for that matter). Go ahead! No government agency will stop you. However, you're not allowed to discriminate based on race, color, religion or national origin in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce (court-upheld interpretation: pretty much anywhere).

No one believes that any of our rights are unlimited. You can speak your opinion, but you can't yell fire in a theater. You can bear arms, but don't expect to own a nuclear bomb. You can sincerely believe that whites are a superior species to blacks, but you don't get to own, kill, intimidate, lynch, or otherwise harm a black guy, regardless of your vile beliefs. This isn't something I'm making up out of whole cloth, but well-established and widely accepted interpretation of Federal law.

Read your Constitution, son. The 14th amendment says:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

This codified previous Constitutional supremacy thoughts by explicitly stating that States don't get to write laws violating the Constitution or selectively affording privileges to one group and not another.

Except we've decided as a country that there are certain ways it's not OK to be an asshole, particularly when it's because the other person is black, female, Muslim, etc. I did not advocate for restricting free speech. I'm advocating for what law already says regarding other minority classes: feel free to speak your mind, but you shouldn't get to act against gay people any more than you're allowed to act against black people.

I'm dyed-in-the-wool small-l libertarian (and a registered large-L), but I'm horrified at the idea of passing laws to explicitly protect the "right" to discriminate against minorities. "First they came ..." and all that; we shouldn't be looking for new and creative ways to crap on our neighbors.

You mean the case where the court ruled very narrowly that atheism should be afforded the same legal respect as religions when ensuring the rights of people holding those opinions? You would be hard pressed to choose a case less helpful to your viewpoint.

So you're not American and you're unfamiliar with American law, but feel compelled to comment on a case involving one particular American state. Allow me to give you a quick introduction: your opinion is explicitly opposed to American case law. Feel free to speculate as much as you'd care to, but understand that from a US point of view, you are completely wrong.

Recently, because of stupid laws like Indiana's RFRA which would prevent a minority chunk of their population from living theirs. "Opposition to bigotry" is not "bigotry".

Are ye daft, son? That's exactly what it says: religion cannot become the basis for law. It is literally impossible for my religion to write laws without prohibiting your free exercise thereof; that's what laws do.

IHBT. Sigh. I hope you're trolling anyway, because I'd hate to think that an adult could pack that much accidental ignorance into a single sentence. No courts have ruled that way, and atheism cannot be a religion (any more than my lack of belief in the Tooth Fairy establishes me as an "aTooth-Fairyist").

You can say asshole things to people, but there are enumerated acts of assholery that are explicitly illegal. You have the freedom of speech, but the Civil Rights Act of 1964 says it ends at the cash register.

Jesus fucking Christ. What backwoods school did you go to that didn't teach American History? The rules you're protesting have been the law of the land for 51 years now and somehow we've persevered. Your opinion is wrong. We took a vote and decided, almost half a century ago. You lost.

Yes, I'm angry. I'm having a hard time believing the among of ignorant bigotry I've seen pouring into Slashdot very recently. Where the hell did you guys come from? Were you here all along, and just recently felt brave enough to come out of your hateful little closet?

I ask this honestly: would you have used the same argument when "those people" were blacks who didn't believe in "separate but equal", or is this your new opinion that only applies to gay citizens? Suppose I own a hamburger stand, that I am a white man, and that I dislike blacks and gays. By your words, it would seem that you'd be OK with me selling hamburgers to white men but not black men. If I am incorrect, what distinction do you draw between a black man and a gay man that would compel me to do business with the former but not require me to serve the latter?

It's right next to "freedom of speech", which I'd lay down cash that you claim to cherish.

Grownups understand that things like "freedom of speech" and "separation of church and state" are phrases that refer to an enormous body of legal rulings that collectively establish and define those concepts. Grownups also recognize that "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins", and that a law keeping you from being an asshole to people you don't like is not oppressing your religious rights.

Sadly, no. While MP4 has effectively won the battle to be the de facto standard video format, support for it still isn't completely universal and probably never will be until the patent issues are irrelevant. And of course there are numerous different variations that all typically end in .mp4 so you're also stuck with either inefficient encoding for widest possible support or smaller files but limited range.

As for controls, I have lost track of how many times even the same browser has changed its controls within the past 2 years. There is basically no standardisation across browsers at all. It doesn't matter much if you're building YouTube or Vimeo, when it's obvious which parts of the page are videos. However, if you want to integrate video content into a more general page the same way you'd use an image, having no idea whether your visitors will even get any indication that it actually is a video, or where that indication will be if so, makes it absurdly difficult to present the content well across browsers without going 100% custom controls and ignoring the built-in browser ones entirely (which then runs into numerous JS bugs, causing problems of their own).