"Other countries have mandatory voting," said Obama "It would be transformative if everybody voted — that would counteract money more than anything,

Money? Nope that will just mean people who care nothing about politics will be forced to check a box based on whatever ads they watched the most of - payed for by money. These people can't be bothered to vote, and certainly can't be bothered to be informed citizens. This would completely drown out the voice of informed citizens, and cede everything to money.

Obama just sees the short term 'gain' of groups that he thinks would vote for Democrats being forced to vote more. As if 'Democrat' or 'Republican' are even a coherent things.

IMHO:

Full size wireless keyboard with Trackpoint ala/Lenovo and three separate mouse buttons with no Trackpad ( save the space on my lap ). Where the Trackpad would be, put a two function keys that change the function of the Trackpoint to do either horizontal or vertical scrolling. Clicking both enables both axes. Three separate mouse buttons is CRUCIAL.

Trackpoint is insufficient for heavy mouse work. However this is a keyboard. If you have heavy mouse work to do, use a wireless mouse or whatever device you want. The keyboard is mainly for typing and navigating through screens - light duty mousing only.

Firefox does what I want about as quickly as anything out there, ( don't notice any difference from other browsers ). And it's the freest major browser out there. Do you seriously want Google knowing anything more about you than it already does?

I still trust that Firefox doesn't have hidden code against my interests. Can you say that about any other major browser?

I did recently switch to Pale Moon, since it's basically Firefox without the Lame. But Firefox isn't really all that lame to begin with. I switched back from Pale Moon, due to a Flash security update that wasn't yet applied to Pale Moon. I have been planning to switch back, but I might not - Firefox isn't all that Lame to begin with.

However Firefox did recently make Yahoo the default search engine in the search box, and then seems to have removed all other choices, and I have not been able to re-enable them.

I tried just using Yahoo, but it soon became too annoying, I wanted to support Firefox by giving them clicks, but I got tired of clicking on the home page button to get to Pale Moon's home page which I set Firefox to use( it's not bad, and it lists stuff I might not have used or heard of - keeps me current on the latest stuff out there ), and then clicking on the Google search link I put there, or searching for google in the yahoo search box. So I installed Quick Search Bar, which is an addon that seems to have given me back my choices of search engine.

I don't own a smartphone. I don't even own a tablet, or 'pod' device. My 9 year old kid does, and it runs Android. My impression is that the OS's available for such devices are Lame incarnate. Everything wants your credit card number so it can charge you for in app purchases, and they've made it purposefully annoying to get gift cards. You can't get Google Play cards online. You need to go to a store that carries them. THey want your CC number SO BAD. At least Amazon lets you buy gift cards online, and email them to the recipient ( though it's not obvious at first how to do that - they want your CC number too. )

If a non-profit like Mozilla came up with something for tablets/smartphones that catered to me, instead of app-makers I might be interested in owning a smartphone or tablet/pod. Until then I don't even want one.

And fsck Apple. Eww.

Refactoring IS evil. It's time you spend to make your code more maintainable by others. So it makes you look bad by taking your time, and makes others look good when they work on your code, by making their job easier. And you're probably a temporary who won't get the opportunity to eat your own dogfood if you're a Sri-Lankan coder, anyway....

Also, 4,500 lines of code was used in this study. That is TINY. Who works on 4,500 lines of code? It's possible to analyze that much code without too much troubley ( unless it was written by kindergarteners maybe ) no matter how it was factored. There is a little overhead in abstraction - not much, but enough that maybe 4,500 lines of ok code doesn't benefit all that much in some ways from the abstractions they tested. Whatever. It doesn't invalidate the abstractions, and it's likely down to a matter of opinion whether in a tiny project the abstractions are worth their weight.

But they are hard coded into programs. It it were possible to do without problems, the second thing I would do is delete these folders.

Also, 'Program Files' has a space in it.

The second thing I actually do on windows is install cygwin.

Generally I like to avoid spaces in folder names, also long paths, both of which are unavoidable in windows.

I like zombie movies, but I've begun to lose my ability to suspend disbelief. The Walking Dead has slow mostly rotted zombies with unbelievably soft skull into which a knife can be easily driven. It's gotten to the point of ridiculousness. The humans would clean house.

But you know, the humans would clean house anyway.

I have over 400 rounds of ammo in my home, and three guns. I don't believe I'm uncommon. Even if only one in 30 people is as well armed as me, and if one in 12 of us survives the initial surprise attack long enough to get up on our roofs. (nobody expects zombies, so you could well be surprised and eaten on the first day), then by shooting a bullet into the head of each zombie from the safety of the roof, one would expect to have enough ammo to clear the area. And the shooting would conveniently make noise and attract the zombies. There would remain only people with guns and dead zombies after a short while.

The first thing I do on windows is change the settings to show tilename extensions. Much of the confusion I see in others can be directly traced to the fact that they don't know what their files are.

Stop being afraid to make someone learn something useful to use a computer.

That being said, don't make people learn useless things. Design a powerful set of useful things to learn each of which is valuable and worth learning and remembering and then reward people for learning them by maintaining their usefulness

Making things overly simple robs users of the power to make things simple for themselves, and ends upt complicating their interaction with the computer.

But but but, "comprised of" is Vogon Poetry!

Of course you are right, this is not offshoring. And IT is something that's easy to offshore for real.

However while the effect of competition will tend to lower wages in general regardless, importing more people can only decrease the wage relative to the median of everyone making less than the imported workers even non-IT workers, and certainly those in direct competition with imported workers lose wage bargaining power. As imported workers become naturalized, they dilute the power over the geographical area defining the nation represented by one vote. Also remittances overseas tend to devalue currency already held.

Those who benefit are the ones who hire the cheap labor, who are few. Attempts to claw back the benefits through taxation are met with threats to relocate to more tax friendly climes, which mirror threats to offshore if cheap labor isn't allowed to be imported from the world at large.

The economists are right that free trade in goods and labor is more efficient, and raises GDP, but so what if the benefits accrue only to a few while median wage falls?

And while highly skilled labor may typically earn more than the median wage, by easing wage pressure, they rob opportunities and rewards from those already in the country, who might otherwise fill those positions albeit less efficiently GDP wise.

What happens when it's cheaper to import already skilled foreigners than raise a child to competency, is that the child is never concieved, yet the overall population of the country increases, degrading the environment.

The US Census Bureau declared in 1890 that the US no longer had a frontier. The need for the US to accept immigration in order to preserve it's borders ended then. Since then, every immigrant has been given opportunity from a finite pie that is the inheritance that comes from being born in the US. It's time to stop giving away the inheritance of opportunity being born in the 'land of opportunity' represents.

If people in the US want children in their lives who have a chance to have it as good as they do, they can't force their yet to be concieved infants to compete with imported adults.

People should demand that their country protects them from physical and economic harm. If your country isn't protecting you from harm, then what good is it? A smaller GDP with less people is better than a larger one with more.

The Native Americans tried that, they just let the ice bridge from Asia melt away after the last ice age. And it worked well for tens of thousands of years, until immigrants came over from Europe. How did that work out for them eh?

There's nothing wrong with pulling up a drawbridge - it's a what cells do when they build their cell membrane to maintain homeostasis by separating their innards from the outside world.

It's not fair that spouses of H1B workers can't work. It enforces that they be totally dependent on their H1B holding spouses. Completely unfair. If people want to work in they US, their spouses should be independent like everyone else's spouse in the US. Also - people come with spouses. If you don't accept someone's spouse, then you don't accept them.

I don't understand plebs who subscribe to cable.

I remember they'd come out with new channels or switch channel numbers ever few months, so if you had spent the hour it takes to delete all the 100s of Home Shopping / Religious / Sports channels you don't watch you had to add them back to get the full lineup and spend another hour to delete all the Home Shopping / Religious / Sports channels again.

They made the process deliberately cumbersome to prevent you from deleting the Home Shopping Channels. Now I hear they don't even allow deletion.

And they bundle phone and internet. Sheesh! You can pay 15 bucks a month for broadband nowadays. I have an OOma phone which costs me 15 bucks a year in taxes for a landline phone with real cheap international rates and free everything else. I don't know anyone overseas nowadays so ...

I've had Netflix and no cable for years. I have Hulu now, but have been meaning to cancel. These amount to 20 bucks / month. I think I will use the money I was spending on Hulu to do Amazon prime for 100/year. If I order off Amazon.com I get free shipping that way which might pay for half of it.

And I rent movies, and purchase series I am interested in watching off Amazon. Say I spend 18/month on Netflix/Amazon Prime, and have a 75/month TV/Phone/Internet budget, that gives me up to $40.00/month to rent/buy whatever I want off Amazon. I can tell you I don't spend nearly $40.00/month on that - yet I can I watch what I want.

Bill is a joke

Yeah, even though the bill doesn't seem to grant more power to the government than it has already grabbed for itself, having a law around what was illegally done, legitimizes it after the fact, and puts the onus to create new law forbidding the abuses on those who would end them.
and so are the groups that endorse it

Except that the bill at least defines what can and can not be done. The status quo is no definition which means it's free to slide anywhere, by not being prosecuted crimes become norms.

One of the biggest things they should hash out in the courts IMHO is the idea that copying data to a hard drive and not having humans look at it is somehow not unreasonable search. A machine you operate needs to be considered your agent, as machines will only get more intelligent. Indexing is understanding and machines do this. If your agents understand the information gleaned, then the information has been effectively searched. To obtain a copy of information your machine agents have had to handle every bit of the information and save it. Having a copy is the most basic version of understanding information. It equals search. Indexing just compounds the crime.

Yeah, you can tell what the bill does by the title: it's generally the opposite.

It's softer and smaller meaning your car is less likely to crumple. I have no duty to die smashing into a Lincoln to save the idiot driving toward you the wrong way in a Prius or on a motorcycle.

I want MY car that I paid for to protect MY life and the lives of the people in MY car.

I'll drive myself otherwise.

Also Antilock brakes suck. At slow speed they kick in when they shouldn't. There are many times they kick in when control would not be lost and stopping distance would be decreased if they did not kick in. I should be able to override what my car wants.

I hate technology that's mine doing things I don't want despite my wishes.