This is a false dichotomy. It's not that there is either only stereotyping, or only real differences in qualifications. It's probably both. In fact the stereotypes and lack of qualified applicants of certain types probably feed off eachother.

I don't expect qualified tech applicants to look like a perfect cross section of society, any more than I would expect the USA to win the world cup. It's not that the world cup was rigged. We are just not as good at soccer (yet).

I don't even know how you could show that even if it were true. It's not exactly the most objective of claims.

When I was in college I did witness a tour group of middle school (I'm guessing) aged kids that were almost all black, and when the tour guide (who was trying to get them interested in attending college) asked them what they wanted to do as a profession, all the boys answered either "basketball player" or "rapper". The girls' answers were more varied.

When I see this kind of thing, I am usually the first to point out that this is probably more to do with poverty than skin color, but the fact remains that there is still a high correlation between poverty and skin color. So whether you want to call it "black culture" or the black version of the general culture of poverty, the end result is still that a disproportionately high number of black kids are not being brought up in a culture that respects intellect (At least not the kind that results in interest in science and engineering).

I don't know if lack of education is causing a culture of ignorance, or whether a culture of ignorance is causing a lack of education, but I suspect it's a positive feedback loop, and I don't have a good answer for how to fix it, other than suggesting that ignoring this problem, and pretending that everybody is equally likely to be qualified regardless of race and the only problem is racism, is probably not going to do anybody any good.

I don't want to discount the effect of racism, but I don't think it's the only problem.

I agree, but I think this trick of picking yourself up by the bootstraps is easier said than done. I know I have had a lot of advantages that others probably didn't (i.e. parents that had a good education, and forced my siblings and I to get a good education), and that's something that's pretty hard to create out of nothing.

Who knows, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe "fake it till you make it" is as good a strategy as any.

This is (and should be) the goal of all corporations. There are many strategies for achieving this goal. A corporation can bribe legislators for laws giving them special benefits and extra restrictions on their competitors, it can try to achieve a monopoly and exploit it, it can lower the cost of operation at the expense of quality, hope no one notices. It is our job as consumers to choose the companies we want to survive. It is in our interest as consumers to vote with our wallets for companies whose strategy for profit is to focus all their attention on creating better products than their competitors. It is our job as members of society to vote in elections for representatives who will not be bribed by lobbyists, and to ensure that corrupt politicians lose their jobs (i.e. regardless of their party).

Even cases of fair use involve a non-copyright holder making a reproduction.

Playing a DVD or blu ray movie in a any player, causes a reproduction to be made in electronic memory before it is displayed.

Clearly there are some exceptions, and this clause is not meant to be taken 100% literally.

uncompressed mkv file? An uncompressed video the same resolution and frame rate as a blu ray (which is already compressed) would be like 1TB.

I haven't seen an uncompressed digital video file since 1995, due to how impractical they are.

Also, mkv is just a container format. Whether a file is in mkv format has nothing to do with whether or how it is compressed.

Also, why would someone want a file smaller than 25-50GB? No one will care in 10 years, but for now, that is still quite a lot of space to dedicate to a movie that you may not even like that much.

I would also like to point out that back when it was every coder did everything himself from scratch (i.e. the good old days), the actual products sucked. There was a lot of fun work to be done reinventing the wheel millions of times over, but when 99.9% of the wheels had serious flaws, it was pretty hard for the user of these wheels to get any real work done.

So it turns out that most programmers are terrible, and they think it's fun to reinvent the wheel, because wheels are the only thing (they think) they understand. They think learning new tools are "boring" or "stupid" but mainly because it's hard to do things in a way you aren't already used to and "hard" things are "stupid" to people that want to use the rationale that the only reason they might not understand something is if it's stupid. The smart programmers learn to use the tools because it actually makes more efficient use of the time spent programming.

There was a time when programmers complained that compilers were stupid because there was no need to write in a high level language when you could just write in assembly code instead.

The smart programmers weren't the ones that could read and write in assembly and didn't need high level languages. The smart ones were the ones who recognized that high level languages would make programming more efficient and created that tool.

There is a high correlation between not believing in climate change and being stupid. There is also a high correlation between being stupid and not having a lot of money to spend consuming energy (e.g. buying a giant house and keeping it climate controlled, etc). Hence the correlation between not believing in climate change and low energy usage.

For all those out there who don't know what a "high correlation" is, please look it up before you reply with a response like "Not all people who ..."

There is unscrupulous business practices happening at all times, regardless of whether the labor market is favoring workers or employers. There has never been a time when this wasn't happening somewhere. Is it far to say that the labor market is lopsided toward workers, if I can find plenty of examples of employees taking advantage of his employer? Of course not.

It's not a tactic. It's drawing attention to the fact that you can't follow what the people you are arguing with are actually saying. It's pretty fucking hard to have a reasonable argument when one person doesn't understand English. You can call it bullying if you want, but it's true. I am not doing it to win the argument. I'm am doing it to try to get you to read what I am saying rather than substituting whatever you seem to feel like I am saying.

I didn't just accuse you of reading comprehension problems. I cited examples where you completely misread what I had wrote, and in many cases understood the exact opposite of what I was saying.

For as long as you continue to misunderstand my statements.

Also I am not whining. I am showing you how bad at reading comprehension you are.

So this is what I am talking about.

I say: I don't think the allies are losing the war.
You hear: Not only are the allies winning hugely, there are no allied casualties.
You say: How dare you make the disgusting suggestion that nobody on the allied side is dying. Tell that to the 400,000 dead soldiers.
I say: I didn't say that nobody on the allied side is dying.
You say: Now you are trying to change your story. Which is it? Do you think the allies have no casualties or do you think the axis have no casualties?

You fail to grasp that there is a middle ground between these 2 extremes. But everything that is not on your extreme looks like the opposite extreme even if it is actually pretty moderate.

I try not to let my emotions cloud the truth. Just because it is hard for workers, doesn't mean the labor market is lopsided. It is hard for employers too. It's a fucking global recession.

It's not my fault you have trouble understanding what is actually being said, rather than what you are incorrectly inferring.