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Comment Re:Pinto (Score 3, Informative) 247

Yes, but I live in the San Francisco Bay area and, were I to try to keep this minimum safe braking distance, I would end up a traffic hazard as I continually brake hard to reestablish my minimum safe braking distance to the idiot who has just switched into the lane in front of me since they can get ahead one car length.

Comment Why not ask the review site to remove it instead? (Score 1) 106

I find it interesting that the court insists that Google no longer returns the page with the negative review. Rather the court should force the review site to remove the review then the links should disappear from Google (and I assume the Google cached copy too after a while.) It seems an unfair burden to me to force Google to take ownership for any of the content on site that it indexes using purely algorithmic processes.

Comment What is the legal theory here? (Score 4, Insightful) 140

One of the things that I really hate about some journalism today is a failure to ask the obvious question. Could someone please explain under what legal theory an agency (state or local police) can sign an NDA and claim the NDA allows them to fail to meet a provision of law. I would think the law trumps the NDA and that it wouldn't be legal or perhaps unenforceable to sign such an NDA when you are required to release records under state or local law.

Comment Was any of this classified? (Score 2) 538

I fully understand the implication for archival purposes of this failure and I'm not happy but it seems she's trying to rectify this thought I'd rather a national archivist select which emails get archived not her staff. However,I kind of yawn at this aspect of things: not good but not worth getting in a tissy over.
My greater concern was if any of the communication was classified or unclassified but sensitive. I mean over the course of her tenure she's got to have had some emails like that. Even if none of it was classified or sensitive, does she understand the implications this has for national security particularly should she become president and do something this boneheaded? She's gotta know she was doing it and it was wrong.

Comment Which to choose (Score 1) 407

Pick Objective-C. The language is small and simple to understand. If you're already a good programmer with knowledge of C you can learn it in 2 weeks to a month. The frameworks will take longer but the language you can learn in a few weeks. C++ on the other hand will take you forever to learn, it's a large complex language.

Comment Re:Enough (Score 1) 288

No that's not what I said. By "public benefit" I mean the government (state local federal) can't provide a right or a benefit (education, social security, medicare, unemployment) to a segment of the population. If Microsoft wants to provide their own after school programs or summer camp that is their right (and we could argue separately if that would be a good thing.) I'm specifically talking about things our government provides.

No it's still not acceptable. If they are doing that it's not acceptable. Make opportunity and programs available to all. If there are resource limitations then have a process for selecting beneficiaries that is gender neutral. Skills based testing or lottery.

Comment Re:Lead girls to water bottles to stoke CS interes (Score 2) 288

Actually I was. I had no role models and no encouragement. I was ignored. I was ostracized by my peers. In high school I was told I didn't have the math skills to continue in the honors math track. Not once, but twice. I insisted I was going to stay in that track. I had to take summer school to so. I was also moved from honors biology to regular because "I wasn't honors material". I ended up get a 93% after I was moved. There were universities to which I wasn't accepted. I was touched inappropriately by my professor when I tried to get help with a class I wasn't getting. I've failed classes. I've been told I couldn't take classes that I needed to graduate. But I didn't give up or quit. This is what I want to do and I'm good at it.

Comment Re:Couldn't they have spent that money better? (Score 1) 204

Yes and this is important. We need bad examples to teach people that bad things can happen and you want to do the right thing to avoid them. For instance you don't want civil servents to collude with politicians to jack up their retirement benefits to unsustainable levels so that they can get a benefit in collective bargaining agreements with politicians who will be out of office when the benefits are due. Too big to fail is likewise a problem with wall street. The fear of a city failing is what ought to keep retires from taking an "I don't care" attitude to city management. If civil workers and retires know that their failure to encourage a responsible path for their government will mean possible loss of their retirement they will be quite effective advocates. Besides their already was a safety net for retires who loose their pension. They'd still get social security. True that's not great but it is meant to keep them from starving and the undesirable outcome is necessary for the feedback system to work. I find it problematic to advocate that we need to prevent people from investing so we can protect them from bad outcomes because we lack the resolve to let them fail. Failure is an important part of many systems and our failure aversion doesn't benefit us as a society. If we're going to eliminate the down side to market based systems should we really be surprised when they don't work? Bondholders should have lost money and lots of it. After all they were investing where there is always a risk of loss of investment.

Comment Re:Couldn't they have spent that money better? (Score 3, Insightful) 204

If they borrowed money in the form of municipal bonds to get this done and it doesn't pay off and they default or declare bankruptcy why should the state bail them out? The creditors who bought the bonds should take a haircut for making a bad investment. Why should the state bail out those investors? Isn't that how municipal bond markets are suppose to work? Isn't that why they're private, won't private investors look at what the bonds are for and make a judgement if it's a good investment of their money or not? Who are you to tell the bond holders how to invest their money?

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