Been many a year since I found any good vinyl at a yard sale, and the shops are more shiny than dusty. Sales of new vinyl records in the US have grown about 500% in the last 5 years. Around 2000, I couldn't find a lot of the new music I wanted on vinyl. Things have changed, I can get pretty much anything I want on vinyl now.

Vinyl vs. cloud is a false dichotomy, most new stuff you buy on vinyl you get access to it in the cloud too. Best of both worlds.

Text-only books I will buy digital. Graphic novels, anything with art or other visual content I will kill some trees for. Best of both worlds. Except for the trees I guess.

There are new record stores opening up all over the place, there are independent book sellers that are having record years, there are video rental chains that are opening new stores. You've gotta be quick and you've gotta be smart to stay in business but that's the same as it ever was.

Haha POJOs.

I love that typical developers using Java, an object-oriented language, got so far down the over-engineering path that they had to make an acronym for those obscure corner cases where you might want to just use....an object.

Although it's true that the Java development community does seem to be header in a much nicer direction lately.

You are doing something illegal - everyone is. You may not even know what you are doing that is illegal, but if the NSA knows everything you do, they know what you are doing that is illegal.

They aren't going to do anything about it until you do some thing that is legal that they don't want you to do.

If you run for office, they own you.

Read the constitution.

It is a tragedy to the same extent that it was a tragedy when Blaise Pascal wasted all those hours gambling when he could have been doing mathematics.

Learning things that won't increase your earning potential is fine. Learning things that won't increase your earning potential and then bitching about the debt you incurred from those supposed learnings on the fucking interwebs is not fine. It's beyond lame.

So you thought you might like to go to the show, to feel the raw, uninterrupted, chaotic thrill of entertainment and anarchy, that space cadet glow.

Scientists now say the collapse was due to climate change.

Good programmers work to replace themselves with small shell scripts.

The people in the comments on this shit article are the other type of programmers.

"Were"? You idiot.

There are jobs where face time is important - there is a lot of knowledge sharing that happens informally just by being in the same office. For those type of jobs, you tell the remote workers either start coming in to the office or find another job.

There are jobs were face time isn't important. For those type of jobs, you fire the US remote workers and hire someone in India, if being able to sort of speak English is important, or some other even more hellish Asian country if it isn't.

"There should be a business document that says what the application does at a high level and you design/write code based on that."

Hahaha.

I don't see how any of your argument applies to the Swartz case. Swartz makes the worst poster boy for criminal justice reform ever.

He was not a disadvantaged minority. He was not poor, was not a "poor looking defendant". He was a rich white college educated adult. He was a faculty member at Harvard University. It was not a case of manufactured or suppressed evidence. There was solid evidence that he committed the crimes of which he was accused. He was not forced to use a public defender.

And most importantly, this was not a good example of the abuse of plea bargaining. The cases where the plea bargain system are most troublesome are the cases where the defendant has to make the choice between a guilty plea and a trial - while sitting in a jail cell unable to make bail. The choice Swartz faced was a fair one. The choice someone makes when faced with a guilty plea to a felony and a 6 month sentence, or who knows how long in jail during the trial and sentencing is much less fair.

As Orin Kerr wrote:

These sorts of tactics have been going on for years, without many people paying attention. If we don’t want a world in which prosecutors have these powers, we shouldn’t just object when the defendant in the crosshairs is a genius who went to Stanford, hangs out with Larry Lessig, and is represented by the extremely expensive lawyers at Keker & Van Nest. We should object just as much — or even more — when the defendant is poor, unknown, and unconnected to the powerful. To do otherwise sends an extremely troubling message to prosecutors that they need to be extra sensitive when considering charges against defendants with connections. We have too much of a two-tiered justice system already, I think.

So much of the response to the case - not yours specifically - seems to be simply tribal. It doesn't seem that people in general care that prosecutors use these powers every day against poor or disadvantaged people. It seems to bother people here that the prosecutors dare use these tactics against one of us.

I think we have the motto to put on the trillion dollar platinum coin:

"The United States of America - Likely No Worse Than Scotland".

"There's only an IOU there with no economic value"

IOUs written by the US government have economic value. They have so much value that over the last few years, investors have occasionally paid the US government for the privilege of being allowed to hold those IOUs, as in a negative interest rate.