Instead, it belonged to Eric Mueller, who owns the domain themepark.com, which he uses for his web design firm.
Given Zynga's code of ethics (or lack thereof), I would wager this e-mail found its way into "their" product by way of their mission statement which probably transcends game ideas into directly taking web designs that are, by definition, available to anyone with an HTTP connection. Stay classy, Zynga.
Then when the lie is outed, you try to soften it some by saying it was a mistake, an erroor, or I misspoke.
Don't overlook the other responses like one of the authors of the Patriot Act, Jim Sensenbrenner's response:
As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation. While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses. The Bureau’s broad application for phone records was made under the so-called business records provision of the Act. I do not believe the broadly drafted FISA order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act. Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.
Oh, so now instead of taking responsibility as the author of that which has threatened your constituents it's the fault of those who interpreted the law incorrectly. Surely, then, you will go after those who interpreted the law incorrectly for breaking the spirit of the law? No? You don't say
Or perhaps you'd like to hear George W. Bush's take on his responsibility for his administration allowing the Patriot Act to be passed:
Asked about an NSA program that tracks people's Internet activity, Bush said, "I put that program in place to protect the country. One of the certainties was that civil liberties were guaranteed."
So, we have another slam dunk certainty that civil liberties were guaranteed and as long as you keep saying that, it's true in your own little reality that no one else shares with you! Thank god those were guaranteed, right? RIGHT?
I am having trouble understanding your post. The parts you quoting appear basically unrelated to your responses.
Basically your post demonstrates a failed understanding that there are many marriage laws at the federal level. To say "Good! The US should stay out of it." makes about as much sense as saying "We should have no federal laws regarding marriage." This includes laws like federal tax laws being applied to married couples.
To recap, the federal government had to weigh in one way or another because they had a large amount of legislation that refers to "marriage." And the opposing sides in this issue actually view either ruling as the federal government sticking its nose in people's personal business. The anti-gay marriage crowd saw DOMA as the status quo and will likely view this overturning of DOMA as the federal government getting involved with dictating what is and isn't a marriage. Conversely the status quo was unacceptable to a small group.
Ethically this is a black and white issue and DOMA should have been overturned. But saying the federal government should butt out is not so cut and dried. Your post seemed to say it's just a marriage certificate and "News flash: gay couples live as married couples whether you like it or not." This is completely the wrong way to look at this, they were not receiving the same benefits as heterosexual married couples and saying "gay couples live as married couples" shows you don't understand the significance of DOMA being overturned. Now surviving spouse benefits will apply to one member of a gay couple same as it would to a member of a heterosexual couple. And that's just one of many things that heterosexual couples were enjoying that homosexual couples could not.
Anyway, this is great. People think that preventing gay marriage is somehow taking a stand against homosexuality or something. News flash: gay couples live as married couples whether you like it or not.
You clearly have not been following this issue. This wasn't just about a marriage certificate. This was also about the thousand or so federal laws that applied only to heterosexual couples now also applying to homosexual couples that are married.
Now they can truly be viewed as equal couples in the eyes of the federal government and, most importantly, receive the same exact treatment -- good or bad -- in the federal legislation for married couples.
The only thing banning the marriage certificate does is punish them for being gay.
What rock have you been living under for the past decade?
Did they think it was a for-profit scam, or did they just not understand the approach?
I'm very pro-open source but it appears that the fear from the Internal Revenue Service was that companies were figuring out ways to dodge taxes by moving developers to 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6) organizations and then paying them in "donations" after the software was released thereby avoiding some federal and state income taxes to what normally would be their regular employees. Basically you would be setting up an educational or scientific group of your own developers, you would be able to pay them less due to 501(c) income tax leveraging and at the end of the day you'd still get your commercial software designed for you under an Open Source license. This, of course, by and large does not happen nor is there any evidence of it (I'd imagine very few open source developers even get paid for it) but was it really so wrong for the IRS to watch out for it? Even if they're not engaging of what the IRS would call "non-linear compensation" you might still be able to pay developers as employees of the 501(c) their regular wages with far less tax.
I mean, are we going to sit here and bitch and moan about corporate tax avoidance in our country and then freak out when the IRS investigates if Open Source groups are being abused in the same manner?
Is it really that wrong for the IRS to identify points of abuse and to look out for them? My gut says they should be able to identify and investigate but perhaps I just can't imagine how they would abuse that ability if they present a legitimate reason. Seems like they had a legitimate reason to watch for unlawful activity, unless I'm missing something?
How Will You Replace Google Reader?
(Disclaimer: I'm going to use the term 'bandwidth' universally instead of the more correct 'latency' or 'throughput' so normal people can hopefully understand this post) The biggest problem I have with every alternative I have tried is that they are built with the most annoying design flaws. They are so painful to me that I am certain these flaws will be look back upon as the geocities of our modern day web development.
When I fire up an alternative, the responsiveness that was in Google Reader just isn't there. And it always seems like the alternatives require you to hit "refresh" on their interface and then what happens? It apparently makes a call out to every single RSS feed to get updates. On the surface this may seem like standard HTTP way of thinking about things. But it makes for a shit user experience. I have thousands of RSS feeds. Thousands. And if I hit refresh in this paradigm, my browser makes 1,000+ HTTP GET requests. It's not a lot of data but if even one of those requests is slow, it's usually blocking on ceding control back to me.
So let's iterate improvements on here that will get us back to Google Reader style responsiveness, shall we? Well, one of the simplest improvements I can see is to do these requests asynchronously with nonblocking web workers. You can attach each of them to the div or construct that each feed is displayed in and only have them work when that feed is visible (for instance if I am collapsing/expanding folders of feeds). You can grey out the feed until the request comes back but if another request returns first, it is parsed and inserted and activated to my vision. That way if cnn.com comes back faster than NASA's Photograph of the Day, I can read while waiting for my images.
But the core problem is that I'm on my home computer on a residential cable modem and, let's face it, Cox sucks. So what I think Google was doing was sacrificing their bandwidth to actually "reverse" the request from client to server. And, in doing so, they could package up all your updates and ship them out in one request (probably compressed). So, this is how I would approach that. Instead of doing a heart beat HTTP GET to check for RSS updates, I'd build a WebSocket and instead of requesting information, the client (browser) would be listening for information. The event/listener paradigm here would save both the user and the RSS host a lot of bandwidth but it would cost the host of the feed reader service some of that bandwidth (although much less). So basically the client JavaScript would load the page just like normal but instead of continually sending HTTP GET requests, a WebSocket would merely inform the server which feeds are active and listen for updates coming in from the server.
On the downside, this greatly complicates the server side. You need to have one be-all end-all "cache" or storage of all incoming feeds that any user is subscribed to. And for each of these feeds, you need to have a list of the users subscribed to it. And now your server will need to maintain the HTTP GET requests to cnn.com and NASA in order to get updates. When it gets an update, there's two ways you could handle it (user queues are complicated so I won't suggest that) but the most basic way is to send it right out to everyone on that subscription list who has an active WebSocket session established with their account. If a new WebSocket session is established, they simply get the last N stories from their subscriptions (Google included pagination backwards binned by time). To alleviate even more bandwidth from you, you could store it on the client side with HTML5 Web Storage and then the first thing the Web Socket does is find the last date on the last stored element and send that across to the server to establish the session. The server responds with any updates past that time. And from there your WebSocket is merely listening and inserting elements into the page when they arrive.
Of course, after you valiantly save your RSS providers from death by a thousand cuts, you yourself face that same fate. And now you know why Google scheduled a turn off of Reader
It's time for people to stop with this pretending to write computer games nonsense.
HTML5 is not a suitable development environment. Javascript is not a suitable development environment. Your web browser is not a suitable development environment. HTML5 is vaporware. HTML is designed to display TEXT.
Please re-read those sentences until you get it through your head. If you want to write a computer game, start with a real programming language:
1. C 2. C++
I recommend C so you don't get distracted by all the horse**** theory around OOP.
If you need a graphics engine, fine. Get one. Then code the game in a real development environment on a real computer (not a fiddly mobile device) on the metal. It will be hard, but the results will be worth it. If you can't bring yourself to do this, then you have no business programming or writing computer games.
P.S. I'm not interested in Javascript DOOM or whatever the "gew-gaw of the week" is, and I've been programming computers for 37 years, so I'm not interested in your tech credentials either. Either code the game or don't code the game, but knock it off with this artificial development nonsense.
That is all.
It's time for people to stop with this pretending to write computer games nonsense.
C/C++ is not a suitable development environment. VI is not a suitable development environment. Emacs is not a suitable development environment. C++14 is vaporware. C++ is designed to focus on OBJECTS, not GAMES.
Please re-read those sentences until you get it through your head. If you want to write a computer game, start with a real instruction set:
1. ARM (ARMv7 not ARMv8)
2. x86-64
I recommend ARM so you don't get distracted by all the horse**** bloat around CISC.
If you need a punch card reader, fine. Get one. Then code the game on a real ENIAC (not a fiddly PC) in the vacuum tubes. It will be hard, but the results will be worth it. If you can't bring yourself to do this, then you have no business programming or writing computer games.
P.S. I'm not interested in C++ OOP or whatever "Stroustrup's latest fly-by-night language" is, and I've been programming computers for 1,337 years, so I'm not interested in your tech credentials either. Either code the game or don't code the game, but knock it off with this artificial C/C++ development nonsense.
That is all.
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. -- Niels Bohr