the pervasive pressure that's exerted against people who aren't like you [...] But we can get even better than that and be pretty good and inclusive.

So why must the pendulum swing the other way? Why can't Google offer free coding lessons to anyone and try their best to employ processes to make sure that they are advertising so as diverse a population as possible and nothing is in place that might favor one group over another? (Bonus points for transparency in that.) And if, despite their best efforts to be inclusive, the turnout is vastly white male it would be useful to find out why. Are the minorities/women threatened by the prospect of being around so many white males? Are they disinterested in coding in general? In how Google was presenting it?

Do Asians get to take part in this? Or are they not allowed because their quota has been met? At least here in America, they're still a minority (Wiki says 6% in 2010.)

I guarantee you if the headline read "Google is Offering Free Coding Lessons to White Males" the same "equal rights" people who view their current action as a Very Good Thing would rage with the power of a thousand suns. I'm not against equality, but I'm for equal equality. I wouldn't try to stop Google from doing this (I don't see it as a bad thing, I just think it's misguided, and it's a private initiative), but I await the day when elementary schools and nursing programs having hiring/teaching days targeting males.

What needs to happen is a permanent recording of all interactions with people so they can't just get together and decide what their story will be.

Agreed. At the same time, legal teams and individual citizens can tie up the courts with counter-claims, so not only would constant monitoring of the police keep the system from abusing the people, but it would decrease the potential for the people to abuse the system. So these systems save a lot of headache (at the very least) for a lot of people and should be mandatory for all standard police forces.

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

I'm a long-time gamer, and I was astounded at the demo as well. It doesn't claim otherwise, so I assume the video is not from in-game footage, but just the design and suggestion really riled my inner geek. If their final product can reach even 70% of what the video suggests, it will be amazing... ...and that's the problem. As beautiful as the trailer is to me, there is a lot being promised and I doubt they can deliver on that, much like Fable. Fable (at least the first one) was still a good game, but it was far more limited than originally promised. And Molyneaux probably had a team of more than 10 people behind him when he made those promises.

Sadly, this is probably either vaporware or will be underwhelming when released.

I went to an interview for a tech company (can't remember what they did now, this was years ago) and one of the questions went something like "We're looking for people who will be dedicated to our small company; right now most everyone regularly works 10 hours a day. Would this be a problem for you?" I can't remember my exact answer, but I tried to be clear but soft that I had no interest in doing that on a constant basis. While there were more questions, the interview basically ended at that point for me and, I'm sure, for them.

Crunch time happens, but it should be rare and compensated. If it's not rare, then something is seriously wrong at the company in the way it manages people, it's business, or all of the above. Thankfully, at my current job when I hit 40 hours I'm out the door unless there is something seriously wrong or I'm way behind a massive deadline (and those are rare to begin with). No one makes a peep about this, and everyone else does the same. My income isn't high compared to averages for the area for my job, but so long as I can survive I'm okay with that if it means not being beat like a rented mule.

Seriously. Try getting by on $30-35K a year. Now try doing it WITH STUDENT LOANS.

Adjusted to my situations. Thanks to believing the lies/myth that if I go to college and get a degree I'll get out with, at worst, a moderately paying job and those loans will be no biggy.

So, being a white male that did almost no extracurricular activities in high school, I had almost no scholarships and just put in for massive loans each year to also help cover room & board. It didn't help that I chose to go to an expensive, out of state, private university. (In fact, Yahoo! Finance did a piece recently on university costs, using my alma matter as a central example. Apparently it's now about $37K/yr there; when I was a freshman a decade ago it was about $30K.) And so I graduated, right after the Great Recession started, with approx. $150,000 in student loan debt. Unable to get a job, I did a stint in the military and took part in their Loan Repayment Program; between that and regular, minimum payments of $900/mo I'm down to $111,000.

I'm able to pay it with my current job (roughly $38K take home), but I live paycheck to paycheck and with such a massive debt over my head as I near 30 I don't even consider things like relationships, hobbies, or getting a place of my own.

I never thought about it that way, but perhaps this is the result of the ideal in many schools/communities that everyone is completely equal no matter what they do. "Okay, you all played kick ball, so everyone gets a blue ribbon, yay!" "Oh, you won the championship kick ball game? Good job, here's your blue participation ribbon!"

The result being that when you grow up you think you're on the same level as everyone, regardless of actually being better or worse in any particular area, so you don't see the point in unions because "everyone is the same, they can just go to management and talk it out!" because they think management is also the same. And then management, who grew up in a different generation and/or knows better, takes full advantage of this.

Don't forget all the dancing!

That being said, it's remarkable they're still in business.

Aye, but I'm thankful they are. I think it's because general trust in them is so deep that they keep a steady readership. They also lock most of their stuff online behind a paywall (especially auto reviews, which I'm sure gets them most of their attention; after all, if you're looking to buy an $XXK car, dropping $5-10 for a short subscription to their site makes sense.)

It also wouldn't surprise me if they were extremely zealous in keeping sites from reposting their material, though I've not actually heard of actions on their part.

Or they can what Consumer Reports does: Buy the models themselves. I didn't see mention of it while skimming TFA, but many review sites/publications use samples/loaners from companies, making this kind of bait-and-switch easy.

Sure, this means they might not get the review out before it's released, but that also makes this kind of thing far harder to do. (They could still release a first batch of high-quality items, and then successive batches use lower-quality parts, but that still costs more money and will mean less people swindled.)

You're making a big assumption, in that our metaphorical bread winner has a car. This isn't always the case, and in poor areas the lack of a car not only makes getting a job harder, but it also makes getting proper food harder due to the lack of local markets. And, even if that person somehow had unlimited funds for food, they are still at a disadvantage because they can't buy in bulk, being limited to whatever they can carry in that trip.

Sprawling suburbs have the same problem, but we don't notice it because we're used to driving multiple miles, sometimes out of our way, to go grocery shopping. This is thanks to many of our zoning laws, because having a small shopping center in the middle of suburban areas is somehow a travesty to many people (NIMBYs?)

Because most grocers don't like losing shedloads of money due to food-stamp/EBT fraud, shoplifting, robberies, etc.

It's not just due to those, but the added cost of getting food (especially fresh food) into dense cities, and that's just on the financial side. You can't regularly drive huge 18 wheelers down the streets of an urban population, to my knowledge. Food deserts are a relatively new problem.

You decide who is on the ballot.

Actually, no. Not for the two sides of the Establishment Party, anyway.

First, in 2011, 196 people provided almost 80% of the funding to all Super PACs. The one with the most funding is also often the winner, though thankfully we have a recent case to show there are outliers.

Second, I read an article last year (or the year before) that tried to work out how many people it actually takes to get someone on the ballot. I wish I could find it now, it was incredibly insightful. (My first born to the man or woman who can find it in my stead.) It talked about the primaries, the selection of convention delegates, how people are chosen to run, etc., some of which is controlled by state laws (like having to register as a party to partake in that party's primary.) I believe the final number was something like a few tens of thousands people decide who gets on the ballot in the major parties, leaving the millions of people who staunchly tow their respective parties to have "only" one option (because, what, vote for third party? You're mad, that's just throwing your vote away!)

The problems in our national politics are far deeper than people voting only with regard to "their" party, though if we could at least get them to acknowledge third parties that would be a major advancement.

Oh, come now. Given our political climate, I'm sure any despot that the oligarchy put on the ballot (for either party) would be just as happy to allow or order such acts.

It's not that you give President Obama too much blame, it's that you give him too much credit.

I'm not a paid shill.

Then you are naive, at best. Even if he came back to the states today, there is no possible way for him to get a fair trial. It would be a huge miracle for such a trial to even be public, given our government.

Consider that it took one person eight years to get taken off the no-fly list after being put on for what is reportedly a government mistake. Part of the reason (if not the entire reason) for that was the continued insistence by the Justice Department that they couldn't reveal why she was on the list, even just to her own attorneys, because it was a state secret:

Holder and Clapper argue that U.S. national security could be seriously or significantly harmed if Ibrahim or her lawyers are provided with classified information about whether she was the subject of an intelligence or terrorism investigation or about the standards for inclusion in a database called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) could harm national security.

This is how our government reacts for a single individual who has been unable to use air travel because of the mistake of a lone public worker.

While he did technically break many laws, it was justifiable because of the sincere good it did in revealing just how unconstitutional our government acts, which is the first step necessary to making it stop. In order to prove that it was justified, he would have to present evidence of the wrong-doing of the government. Do you honestly believe he wouldn't be completely stonewalled and railroaded by the Justice Department, Congress, and whoever was the President? Even if the documents are now in the public eye, they can still be withheld from trial; nevermind the mountain he would have to claim to extricate extra documentation from the NSA proving how much shit they do.

The only way for Snowden to come back with any hint of safety is a Presidential Pardon; I'll know our nation has finally grown up and stopped being scared of the invisible monster under its bed once that happens, if it ever does.

In 120 years people will laugh at the primitives from the early 2000's who reacted with shock and horror to Google glass.

Yes, and in 120 years there will be a similar uproar over FutureBrainWave's BrainReader, wearable tech which can roughly read the thoughts of people in a specific vicinity and upload them to the Stratosphere (the replacement of the Cloud).

The tinfoil in me says that these "stingrays" don't exist at all; instead, whenever law enforcement gets info from their NSA buddies concerning cell phone use/location, these mysterious "stingray" devices are stated as the way the defendant was found. The documents the ALCU would have obtained probably showed the devices (if there are even any physical objects) to be 100% useless at best, leading to further digging, and the eventual revelation of unconstitutional searches that these "devices" lead to.