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Comment Re:Here's some quotes (Score 1) 233

Unless, of course, that's what the government was going to use it for.

Then, what, 20% of it ends up going for that same purpose, after the politicians, lobbyists, bureaucracies and waste take their cuts?

Of course, that's only when they don't manage to create a worse problem altogether with their "program" by subsidizing the problem they were supposedly attempting to cure.

Comment Re:Love the quotes (Score 1) 233

Name a single charter school that accepts *every* applicant. When that happens, then we can talk.

Ok, Gateway Preparatory Academy (GPA). True, they only accept students who live in the State that chartered them, because otherwise the State doesn't pay, but they've accepted every student who has ever applied. That's because they haven't hit their State mandated cap on enrollment yet.

Any other Charter school in the same State that hasn't hit the cap the State Board of Education is willing to pay for also accepts every student that applies. The only time they have a lottery is when they are no longer legally allowed to accept more students, because the State has set a limit on enrollment. The only preference allowed when they have a lottery is that the children of the people who founded the school may get a preference if that's written into the Charter. Typically that might affect a handful of kids, as the number of founders is usually half a dozen or less and their kids were all enrolled before the school filled up years later.

Also, the Charter schools in the same State have the same rules for expulsion, special ed, etc... as the other public schools in the State. GPA has 2x the "average" special education enrollment and 2X the "average" gifted and talented enrollment.That's because personalized education attracts both ends of the spectrum.

There may be other States where the rules are different, but I didn't found a Charter school in those States, so I wasn't required to become an expert on their school-related law. I do know the way things work in a few States, though, and non of them work they way you state.

Comment Re:How do we get more women involved in tech? (Score 1) 545

Thank you for your considered reply.

I don't know all the details (just from what you've stated), but I agree that if the change was rejected with the comment "women suck", that's obviously a pretty big statement about the lack of maturity of the person rejecting the change. A big enough statement that it pretty much creates an obligation for the higher level maintainer to accept the change at that point because to do otherwise would cast them as agreeing with the immature kid that rejected it.

Inconsiderate behavior like that isn't justified towards anyone in the context of maintaining an open source code repository, or anywhere else in life, for that matter. Sure, the owner of the code (which this specific case wasn't about an owner, just someone with privileges) has the right to behave however they like short of causing actual harm to someone else, but I'd hope it wouldn't take much of that sort of behavior toward anyone before folks with a sense of justice and propriety would create a fork and go on their merry way.

In this specific case, based on their reaction to the incident, it sounds like the actual owners of the repository agree that they needed to step in to limit the damage this particular individual was doing.

Comment Re:How do we get more women involved in tech? (Score 1) 545

I know there is a fashion lately to try and force people to be "gender neutral" in their writing, but "he" has for a very long time been a standard reference that you use in English when the sex of the person being referred to is unspecified. It's perfectly acceptable and anyone who is offended by it is either incapable of critical thinking, uneducated or simply looking for something to be offended by. It's not any more insulting to a female reader to refer to "he" in the generic when writing something generic than referring to a ship as "her" is insulting to males who happen to work on "her".

Should all men in the United States be insulted that America is referred to as "her" in the song God Bless America? No, because we understand that in the English language, one personal pronoun doesn't _always_ mean a specific human sex. We have traditions of usage that add poetry to the language and customs that work fine for communication, which is supposed to be the intent of speech and writing.

So yeah, you can signal your feminism group-think all you want by writing or saying something stupid like "him/her" or "s/he", but depending on your audience, you're likely saying more about the influence of your modern teachers and your personal inability to discern importance than you are about anything of significance.

Comment Re:It's called perspective (Score 1) 683

The world death rate is about .85%/year, or over 5 years, ~4.25%. The world birth rate is about 2%/year, or over 5 years, about 10%.

Now factor in how much people's wealth changes, which is relatively consistent as they get older.

So yeah, add all that up and I'd call it pretty significant for only 5 years later.

Comment Re:It's called perspective (Score 1) 683

if 90 percent of people were in the initial cohort and 90 percent of people were in the final cohort, at least 80 percent would still be in the lower 90 percent.

I said they have as a whole become wealthier. That doesn't require much movement among the cohorts, because the cohorts are based on percentages of population, not absolute wealth levels.

Comment Re:It's called perspective (Score 2, Interesting) 683

My 9 year old daughter is debt free, but doesn't really have any income. That places her as wealthier than 2 BILLION people (with negative net worth) using your methodology!

There are "lies, damn lies, and statistics." Your use of statistics falls into that category.

It doesn't matter how wealthy people are compared to each other, unless your overwhelming consideration is jealousy. It matters how wealthy people are compared to how wealthy they used to be.

Also "the bottom 90 percent became poorer" is an inaccurate statement, unsupported by the data. If you took the people considered part of the "bottom 90 percent" in 2009 after the housing/financial crisis, those specific people have as a whole become wealthier. The current group of people (in 2014) they might rate as the "bottom 90 percent" are a significantly different set of individuals, many of whom were not in the "bottom 90 percent" in 2009.

Comment Re:One and the same (Score 3, Insightful) 441

Because the people involved in the prosecutions and classifications don't report up to him as the head of the executive branch? Because he doesn't have an absolute pardon power to pardon anyone he likes? You'd blame the CEO of a company for what his company does. In this case the President has way more legal power to intervene than a CEO would in a similar situation. Heck, after President Obama's recent stint of just changing laws with only a fig leaf of legal basis beyond he said so, presumably his administration thinks he can just unilaterally declare they weren't enforcing the law in these particular types of cases.

United States

Why Whistleblowers Can't Get a Fair Trial 441

phantomfive writes "'Seven whistleblowers have been prosecuted under the Obama administration,' writes Jesselyn Radack, a lawyer who advised two of them. She explains why they can't get a fair trial. In the Thomas Drake case, the administration retroactively marked documents as classified, saying, 'he knew they should have been classified.' In the Bradley Manning case, the jury wasn't allowed to see what information was leaked. The defendants, all who have been charged with espionage, have limited access to court documents. Most of these problems happen because the law was written to deal with traitorous spies, not whistleblowers."
Biotech

Anti-GMO Activists Win Victory On Hawaiian Island 510

biobricks writes "New York Times reports on how the county council on the Big Island of Hawaii banned GMOs. 'Urged on by Margaret Wille, the ban’s sponsor, who spoke passionately of the need to “act before it’s too late,” the Council declined to form a task force to look into such questions before its November vote. But Mr. Ilagan, 27, sought answers on his own. In the process, he found himself, like so many public and business leaders worldwide, wrestling with a subject in which popular beliefs often do not reflect scientific evidence. At stake is how to grow healthful food most efficiently, at a time when a warming world and a growing population make that goal all the more urgent.'"

Comment Re:They should learn from this (Score 1) 303

I bet the first airline promoting a policy of randomly offering 90% off or free first class to every X users would get a big boost in business.

And then they'd stop after people learned to go to checkout to see if they'd "won", and if not stop or get a refund, clear their cookies, etc... and try again.

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