> The police in Canada would not arrest you for an un-returned video no matter how long you had it because it is an obvious civil matter to be resolved by small claims court

IANAL but you can read about how that's not what happened.

> Yes, you have broken the law, and the owner of the video can take you to court, but you can't go to jail unless you fail to return the video after losing your small claims case, and then you would be going to jail for contempt, not theft.

There was no small claims case, because there was no appearance in a filed report of theft. Maybe it would have been thrown out for improper venue (meaning go to small claims), but more likely the fees associated with non-returning for 2 years passes the $500 (or whatever maximum for that area) that Small Claims can arbitrate. The warrant was likely for failure to appear and summary judgement of guilt. There isn't enough information here to say definitively, but deduction gives a couple possibilities. Warrants are issued to ensure other localities can arrest and hold regardless of charges (which may not even apply in the locality they are apprehended). That's part of the purpose of a warrant. It says "this person is wanted for a crime somewhere else, bring them back to us". Warrants sometimes describe what the crime was, but often do not because it can be complicated (failure to appear as a subpoena'd witness to testify about a civil case against a public defender being at a strip club instead of in court for a 3rd party contempt case, etc.)...Where the warrant applies is always present.

You seem amusingly critical for not recognizing the basic flow of events or even understanding the subtleties of the US justice system. Nobody spent tax money to chase her down, she ended up in a police station and was nabbed for a warrant. Nothing in the video cassette case seemed improper.

> Keep in mind that it's hard to return a movie to a defunct video chain.

Keep in mind she was arrested for an outstanding warrant. Returning the video would not have invalidated that. She was released on her own recognizance.

>> That's a beautiful and inspiring speech, but nothing that you pointed out can be distilled down to X and Y chromosomes like sex can.

Um, that's exactly what he just did (2 of 3).

f(n) == true | false
ambient temperature > 32F
f(x) 1 for all born in USA

>> distilled down to X and Y chromosomes like sex can

You seem to be a bit ignorant about the topic you are arguing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

If I don't want to work on a project with an "expert", as part of my job, but I don't want to work on the project anymore because of something someone else is doing...I'd complain to my supervisor, then if I still wasn't happy, I would quit my job. If I wanted to keep my job (even if it was just to see them fail) I would manage to hobble through by doing the absolute minimum. It's not exactly controversial. How is this interesting enough to be a topic?

I've been around long enough to see ppl WHARGLBRGL about liberty all day long, but when it comes to protesting simple content inconsistency, we see total inaction. THIS IS NOT APPROPRIATE NEWS FOR THIS SITE and wrongs of the past do not change that.

Please REPEAT.

This is NOT tech news.

This is NOT tech news.

> What's repugnant is to coerce a man in difficult financial position to sell parts of his body that are essential to his well being and survival.

This makes no sense as an argument. An open market legitimizes the ability to choose. The choice is still there NOW, without the proposed market (i.e. the choice is the black market today).

> How about picking the best tool for the job, rather than holding a popularity contest? Too old-fashioned?

How do you judge best tool for the job? That isn't an objective question. How would I know if Ruby is the right tool for me?

The more useful question is "what does the tool offer" and Ruby doesn't have much going for it. If you are using a tool that uses Ruby (like Gherkin), you have a compelling reason to use Ruby. The cost tradeoffs, for integrating one of the many equivalent languages, usually results in the language of least resistance. This doesn't bode well for that language as the primary driver for adoption...excepting when the language has no real competition, as happened with ECMAScript->javascript in the browser.

You want Ruby/Python/Go to become the most common language and last beyond your lifetime? Get the major browsers to integrate runtimes for those languages. What happened to browser development? Instead of speeding up rendering by 12% I would gladly trade the ability to write and serve client side code in Ruby and have Mozilla automatically (with permission) download a runtime for it. Even if the performance sucked or the features were hobbled.

> And? Check the official vote rolls [senate.gov]. He didn't vote for it. His name isn't even in the list. Want to try again?

Please try to get the facts correct.

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (also called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008, H.R. 6304

The roll call is here:
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=110&session=2&vote=00168 (vote 168 not 236 which you linked to)

His name is on that list from 2008. You linked to the extension vote in 2012...of course his name isn't on it as a voting SENATOR.
Obama's the PRESIDENT at that time.

> Yeah, you really understand and care about what's happening in China. Hell, you'd fit right into the Chengguan, which you probably don't even know anything about without looking it up.
> GDP should contain movie production costs.
> What point is there on zooming in on x or y industry? Sure there are growth sectors in any country, but we're talking about aggregates.

The majority of this post is not on the point we were discussing. As I understand it, the topic was the relative fiscal responsibility of the Chinese government, in relation to other world markets or nations. I do not think you have demonstrated the opposite or even shed some doubt on it.

Do you have any idea what the debt load is of the provincial governments? Do you even know that provinces and other lower levels of the Chinese government are taxing their constituents months, sometimes years in advance to try to maintain solvency?

So what?

Do you know that the statistics on things like the expansion of electrical power usage do not line up in any even remotely sane way with the CCP's claims of GDP growth and many economists believe that their rate of growth is now the same as the stagnant West?

The US has done quite a bit of magic (GDP now incorporates movie production costs? Do you understand what QE is?). While I can agree that numbers have been altered, I'm not sure it's relevant to compare 2 lies. that leads into...

many economists believe that their rate of growth is now the same as the stagnant West?

When you talk about "the stagnant west" I have to wonder what you even mean? The US is a different beast from the UK and Germany but similar to Greece in function, not location. A lot of people are wrong all the time about broad subjects so please be a bit more specific about differing opinions. I wonder what you mean by rate of growth? The steel industry (as well as most rare earths) has been dominated by China for over a decade, for example. I guess that's stagnant? The trade deficit in the US is obscene, mostly due to imports from China so I'm sure anyone you're talking about can at least throw out an industry sector where they are choked. Whichever economists you are referring to (just name some please?) I suspect they aren't saying what you are. I'm willing to read up on alternate theorycraft.

> But each of those bitcoins can be subdivided into ten million pieces

100 million. Not that it makes a big difference right now.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths

> You have 40-50 (possibly out-of-work) people who wasted maybe 10 minutes and a buck or two sending you a resume, or an hour composing a cover letter.

If you are applying to a Tech job and are spending any money, sending it by fax, or sending it by snail mail, you are wasting your own time (the vast majority of cases). That's not the employer's fault.

> All when you had a candidate you were happy with.

A candidate does not mean the person will take the position. That's myopic. A job interview is 2-way.

Even after a "successful" interview, things can come up that don't involve death. I have had a short listed candidate turn up on a google search (for his github) as having been arrested for child abuse the previous week.

This idea that an employer should put all their eggs in 1 basket for a given position, is irrational.

Did you look at the released code?

http://www.glitchthegame.com/public-domain-game-art/

Serverside code:

https://github.com/tinyspeck/glitch-GameServerJS

Is it complete? I don't know of anyone who has tried to find out.

In programming, our challenges includes some tightly coupled issues. Identifying and removing errors to large programs and keeping code complexity to a minimum. Strict typing usually eliminates a number possible errors. Unexpected autoboxing is one of them, depending on the strength of the type system. You describe adding a 0 to a string, which is how people think for a simple domain. A type is a domain. An int will (in most languages) not contain .01 nor 1i nor A. Representative values notwithstanding. So I understand your point, but I disagree that people do not think in types.

Strict typing, for the most part, increases notation complexity in naming (z = ArrayList[T,H,G] vs y=ArrayMap[L,P], ad nauseam) and an added layer of boilerplate conversion code/functions for moving between types explicitly. I'm really surprised there aren't more PHDs getting proper staticians to correlate this from the glut of Java code flying about. This is a tradeoff any time you trade compiler checking for the conversion code that had to be written to support the types being used. You have to decide if that's worth the cost of a programmer's time (let's not talk about the programmer's sanity). I think it's a great tradeoff, in many languages. Type systems aren't trivial to maintain in a language and I don't envy maintainers.

Some languages are still developed saying they don't have a strict type system. While I don't have an example for Perl, PHP definitely has a demonstrable wishy-washy type system, it's just hidden from most developers.
$z=1.5*2;
$y=array(1,2,4,5);
$t = array_key_exists($z,$y); // error! because $z is a float
Since you can't have float keys, where's the autobox there? Another function, array_slice, doesn't care and converts it to int.
At some point the compiler has to figure out if the value is representative or not. Every language has a strict type system at some level so, I have to disagree that it's brain dead to have one.

The question is, should it be a tool for the programmer to ensure code correctness or just a set of rules that usually ignore? One leads to, among other things, more robust and reliable large systems with an added benefit to prolonging the useful life of a programmer (old programmers usually end up in java because the compiler/IDE catches many problems) and the other path can lead to more rapid development, more intimate knowledge of the language to avoid behaviors like subtle bugs, and more flexibility in reusing code. Instead of a bunch of utility methods or conversion code for handling different possible types, you just use 1. I prefer languages without type systems because I primarily write and work on smaller systems, but I see the value in larger projects that use them. I'm not sure it's useful to call one side weaker than the other where there's no solid criteria for what's "best".