In my experience (Canadian government IT) if there is racism preventing black people getting jobs, it is happening before the job application process.

I am a programmer working in an IT section with about 75 employees, and we do not have a single black person currently employed. And this is government, where being any official minority gives you a leg up on everyone else in the pool. We had a black testing consultant a several years back, and last year we had a black student. But otherwise we have many whites, asians, indians, and misc, all of varying qualities. In university (in the same city) my classrooms were a similar mix, also with very few black people. Of the black people I've encountered that work in this organization, almost all of them are on the business policy side, which usually means they are PhD's (veterinarians).

The only reason I even opened this discussion was to complain about the same thing. I think Slashdot is making me a bad person.

If I store my MP3s on this sheet of paper and then photocopy it, is that copyright infringement?

Free Luna!

It is now, jerk!

I am not an American, but my assumption is that you work in a strip club.

This is just completely incorrect. I put up a 10 year old laptop on my local freecycle (a yahoo group for free items) overnight. I took the post down immediately the next morning because I had over a hundred emails from people who wanted it. I even mentioned in the post that the battery didn't work so it had to be plugged in to use. I've also been passing my used computers to my mother and other family members as I upgrade.

Anything that can get a person on the internet is pretty useful to someone who wouldn't normally afford it.

You realize that even backups degrade over time? This requirement would mean that every tape reaching a certain point in its life would then need to be backed up to a new tape to prevent data loss. Eventually the cost of backing up the backups would dwarf the cost of backing up your recent data. But hey, it's just taxpayer money...

Ok not that I'm really following this story, I'm sure there are better numbers elsewhere, but in this quote: "perhaps dozens"? What does that even mean? Perhaps thousands? Perhaps millions? Perhaps none? This implies they don't actually know any numbers.

Is every single piece of information automatically document that must be kept? If I choose to call someone in the next building instead of emailing them, am I responsible for transcribing the phone call to a text file to ensure the information exchange is preserved for X years?

Deleting emails once an issue is known is certainly dubious behaviour, but I'm sure 95% of internal mail is just people communicating about day-to-day work. In my office if an email has some kind of significance it must be transferred to our document repository, but that is mainly for things that act as a signature (e.g. approvals).

I will agree it was ignorant as I missed the portion about New Jersey, in which case it makes sense in that state. Moreso it makes sense for the gun-toting populace of New Jersey to appeal to their politicians, and let the market decide.

I would consider my country's government being occupied by foreign military forces a pretty good sign of being "under duress". Also if the occupying force held a referendum where status-quo was not an option, it would be pretty easy to argue that I am being forced to go down one of two paths that I do not want.

Maybe things look different from the perspective of the Crimean populace, and maybe this really is what the overwhelming majority wanted. But from outside it certainly doesn't seem legit.

But what is the point of mandating that police use it? Nobody on the selling side of this product is advocating forcing this gun on the populace. This is a private company selling a particular product to a particular market. That market is probably gun owners who have young children.

Nobody is forcing anyone to buy electric cars today either.

"The Baby Popper"

FTFY.