So when the executive (or the DoJ) mounts a 'weak' defense, thus ensuring that the courts will rule against the law?

There's plenty of ways around absolute declarations like you're suggesting.

I'm not saying you're wrong in itself, just that there are far too many angles and ways around any sort of absolute position that the executive *must* do something.

In the case of California (or more recently, Virginia), when there is a major shift in the controlling party, it gets even more complicated. The referendum in VA was passed in 2006 under Republican leadership. The defense of the law became (in 2013) the responsibility of the new Democratic party Governor and the Democratic party Attorney General. What then is the responsibility of those officers to defend a law they never supported in the first place, particularly when they were elected on a platform encouraging equality?

The responsibility to defend (or not) a law may be the role of the executive, but at the same time, the executive, as a representative of the people, must act per the fact that they were, in fact, elected by the majority of the people. As such, their decisions not to enforce, or more accurately not to aggressively defend, a law they believe to be Unconstitutional is a reflection of the faith in their office given to them by the majority that elected them.

If they do a poor job of it, they can just as easily be kicked out 4-6 years later in the next election.

That said, it would certainly have been easier on everybody if such blatantly Unconstitutional referendums weren't so easily passed by the states in the first place. A constitution, even a state-level one, shouldn't be so easily amended by a simple majority of whomever decides to vote one particular day. The U.S. Constitution is a pain to amend *because* it is meant to be immune to fly-by-night sentiments (prohibition being the one oddball exception to its history).

but if it sincerely is unconstitutional, what worth is a Governor's (or President's) oath to "Defend the Constitution"?

Refuse it and you are breaking a responsibility of your office. Defend it and you are breaking your oath of office itself?

The legislature, and certainly not "the people" (in the case of a referendum) shouldn't have so much power to put an executive in such a bind.

It's all good and well that he spent $1,000 of his own money on legalizing bigotry.

Look at it from the other side of history: he *wasted* $1,000 for pretty much no reason at all, now that the courts have asserted that the ban was unconstitutional.

CostCo still would be out millions of dollars defending itself, even if it won every case and every appeal. You don't get paid back 100% of your legal costs by the government when you win.

Code written to do one thing is inherently elegant.

No code ends up ever having to do one thing.

The job of requirements gathering is to determine what are the constants and what are the variables. In the case of, say, GPS, the constants should be the protocol of the satellites, the max and min # of sat's that can be found at any given time, the grid representation of the earth, and the system clocks.

Nice and easy, right?

Now change all of those to a variable: you have satellites speaking to you in different protocols based on their age. You end up with only one sat connection so no triangulation due to mountain or building blockage. The grid representation of the earth is inherently distorted at the north and south extremes (and whenever you're above 5,000 feet). Oh, and the you forgot to time-distort your own clock for the rotation of the earth, so a tiny offset is being caused by General Relativity.

Suddenly code that was nice and simple is now full of ifs and switch loops and complex adjustments and bits of guess work and comments that say "oh, well, we'll just have to ignore that last part...but we'll only be off by 30 feet or so".

The first bug in software happens when something that was presumed in the requirements to be a constant has to be changed into a variable. Every bug that follows is a result of trying to fix that first bug.

Because of that requirements problem, no working production code can ever be elegant.

on the #ThankYouDayton game?

Just find a personal itch to scratch and scratch it.

Doesn't have to be something you'll release, but being able to show it in action is an interview booster (thus, if it is mobile, all the better). The fun part is that once it is scratched and you decide to move it somewhere else into the cloud for more permanent hosting, there's another itch to scratch.

Case in point, I put together a shopping list manager using node/express/mongo and jquery/jquery mobile/stativus. Then found that if I were to deploy it at my webhost, I don't have mongo so I then needed to learn an ORM system for node to mysql (using bookshelf js right now). Similarly if you build something in mongo, you can look to learning AWS or Google Cloud Development and get the app out there and there's another skill on the resume checklist.

In fact, doing the database port actually helped me develop and refine unit testing so my data-access layers had the same front API - knowing you're replacing a single piece actually encourages writing the pieces to be more modular and independent.

All javascript, plenty of html5 modern architecture skills learned or refined, and this from someone who spent most of the mid-late 2000s as a J2EE w/ Oracle guru.

So really, the short answer is: just do it.

...when it is religion itself that is causing you stress?

In addition to "all of the above", the other contribution is that of the philosophical equivalent of Heisenberg: the predictions of outbreaks may have increased vaccination usage in the areas involved, which of course will have an effect of downplaying the outbreaks in those areas.

Not saying I have any evidence for that, (and I will wager it unlikely, considering the #s who vaccinate is still far lower than it should be), but a correlation study may be interesting to see.

If the point of knowledge of a possible outcome is to act to deter it, then shouldn't the actions that attempt to deter it be taken into account?

heh. I do wonder if their use of these is considered 'fair use' or if, like in the case of the Obfuscated C entry, it really is a copyright violation and the coders should get compensated? :)

I'm inclined to agree - "malaise" is an opinion, seen better from the outside than within. Ask any social commentator to look at today's workers or kids, with how much they 'veg' in front of a TV or on a computer, and you definitely know that the work itself, with the rare exception, is not in any way fulfilling.

He was right in that automation doesn't necessarily lead to total unemployment: it changes the jobs, and within a company it reduces them, but on the whole we've more jobs now than we did then (as we have more than twice as many people, but close to the same employment rate as we did then), so the system adapts to unemployment, eventually.

I don't think he was using the term 'spiritually' to in any way imply any aspect of religion, so those that interpret it that way are misreading him.

perhaps true...but then I wasn't coding on a laptop in the 4x3 era. :)

and even so, I still live in alt-tab hell because a laptop screen, no matter that it is 1440x900, can't get me my code, my web browser large enough to see the space I'm fixing, and the firebug console to figure out what the bleep is wrong with it, all at the same time.

gimme that thunderbolt...

all that said, the idea of very small pixels on a laptop-sized screen doesn't necessarily make things more readable. For a tablet where you can use vertical orientation to read, it might be better, but on a laptop that is fixed horizontal orientation, I can't see it being that much use for text, and while it may render a blue-ray more accurately, your eyes won't know the difference at that size.

(oh, and in addition to fixing it, I have a thunderbolt monitor for my mac laptop at work, and an imac with a larger screen ratio, too...and i've yet to meet a mac developer who wants to go back to a mere 1080 after finally getting a screen with serious real estate like that.)

I fixed it. I said I fixed it for myself: I have one monitor in vertical orientation. I also shrunk my font size down to 7 point. Seems to work, I can generally get most of a file on the screen at once.

why did it not catch on? Because the display was horrendously expensive since it was so mostly unique, compared to CRT components for 4x3 screens that were extremely cheap and off-the-shelf. It had nothing to do with coder preference at the time and EVERYTHING to do with how much a corporation was willing to spend on its coders. As such, few outside of Xerox even got to try it. Nobody knew what they were missing, because everybody knew it, "wasn't that difficult to work around".

Still, maybe someday it might be nice to have better options and better designs out there instead of stuff that "isn't that difficult to work around." Coding and building the right thing (or a more flexible thing but with better default settings) should be inherent in interface design, but it still isn't, because coders like you seem to be just fine with stuff that "isn't that difficult to work around."