As the father I see how hard the community pushes boys and girls into their gender roles. My daughter doesn't love pink because of the color, she loves it because no one calls her a boy when she wears it. She plays with cars at home, but she won't touch one when another kid is around. When she wears any dress she gets constant compliments, not so when she wears a very cute outfit consisting of a shirt and pants. And whenever we talk with other parents the talk of the "inate" characteristics of girls and boys is usually constant, even when the characteristics are obviously universal.

It doesn't just stop at childhood either, as an involved father that stayed at home for a 18 months after my kids were born I met the most sexist women I've ever encountered on the playground. Now there were many women who weren't and I wasn't the only dad around, but even a woman I knew before, who had a kid around the same time, couldn't stop herself from saying men can't do X and women always do Y when I was doing those things everyday by choice before and after my wife went back to work. Mom's groups were also extreemely unwelcoming. I understand that they might not want to talk about their breastfeeding problems with a man around but there are a plethora of things to talk about when cooped up all day with a small child. For any mothers-to-be out there, taking a vote on whether do admit me and my kids to a playdate makes you appear about as democratic as an apartheid jury deciding if I looked white enough to join you at the pool; I won't really care which way the vote goes, I don't want my children around bigots.

FYI I also see sexism alive and well when hiring in IT. At work we'd been interviewing for a programming position for months and finally found a decent candidate. I wanted to hire her and kept getting resistance and unqualified alternate prospects pushed at me. When I finally found out what the reservations were, it came down to "she'll be the only woman on the team and will be lonely" and "this job involves working late and it's dangerous for a woman to go home alone at night." I reminded them that as a woman in IT she is surely used to a male dominated workplace and the position rarely involves working very late, we could call a car service when it does as is company policy for all day-shift employees anyway. Luckilly she was hired, but we could have easily lost her to another company with the delay these unstated concerns caused.

Qt has been available under both LGPL and GPL since version 2.2. But there were always some extensions that were only available in the commercial libary.

What you are probably remembering is that Trolltech only produced this version for free platforms like Linux and the BSD's. If you wanted to run this version on Windows you had to jump through hoops and wouldn't get any support from TrollTech people. For Windows, Trolltech only packaged and supported commercially licensed and later GPL licensed versions. After Nokia bought TrollTech the next version was released as LGPL on all platforms. Nokia could produce the product as a loss leader and didn't have to make a profit on the commercial version, although it is still sold by a 3rd party mostly for the support that comes with it.

TrollTech also used to have this clause in the commercial license that wouldn't allow you to switch from LGPL to the commercial license. I don't know if they actually refused to sell the commercial license to anyone in practice though as that would seem counterproductive for a for-profit company supported by licensing and support.

The law regarding recording telephone conversations is more variable, but most jurisdictions have a "so long as one party consents" law, which in this case wouldn't be met. It doesn't matter, in UK law at least, whether the recording is done on the electrical or the acoustic side of the proceedings, and I'd be surprised if other legislation draws that distinction: recording phone calls with a sucker mic on the receiver is just as illegal as doing it electrically.

This is the second time I've heard this about English law and it strikes me as extremely odd, and indeed I'd be very surprised if this applied in a general sense in other jurisdictions+. The packets being incidentally recorded were broadcast and the listener had no intention to listen to that broadcast. That is like shouting out your window or making a speech on Speaker's corner (the broadcaster) and someone walking down the street dictating a voicemail (google) incidentally captured your yelling as background on that recording. What purpose does it serve to make it illegal to listen in this case? Obviously the Queen's subjects aren't required to icepick their ears because someone might yell at them without first giving them permission to listen, why would the icepick in ear logic be applied here? You won't convince such a law is a good idea, but I'd like to understand what the rationale is.

+ I know it is applied in some specific sections of the electromagnetic spectrum in other countries when used for specific purposes, but the assumption is it is legal to listen except for some carved out exceptions where the harms have been weighed and ignorance has been deemed the lesser evil (these exemptions are in themselves controversial.)

I said,
Apple has said that 50% of their suppliers violate the 60 hour work week.

Gnasher said,
The first statement is plain incorrect. Read Apple's Supplier Responsibility report to find what Apple _actually_ said. Yes, the words 50%, suppliers, violate, 60 hour, are all there, but what Apple says is significantly different. And these reporters should urgently visit some US software companies.

Sorry, "93 facilities had records that indicated more than 50 percent of their workers exceeded weekly working hour limits of 60", "At 90 facilities, more than half of the records we reviewed indicated that workers had worked more than 6 consecutive days at least once per month", "Practices in compliance : Working Hours : 38%"

So I should have said, "Apple has said that 62% of their suppliers violate their 60 hour work week practice."

I stand corrected! Working conditions much are worse than I stated.

And what about Intel, where a huge dust explosion happened at about the same time? Shouldn't that have been addressed by simple ventilation? But I guess that happened at a part of their factory that exclusively made chips for Apple?

From a quick google, in the May explosion, 3 dead and 9 others hospitalized, 2 weeks after SACOM released a report detailing the ventilation problem. In the December explosion, 23 hospitalized. Apple contractors are blown up due to poor ventilation and then seven months later Apple contractors are again blown up for the same reason and you deflect to Intel?

If my workers start dying in easily preventable explosions you can be sure no one will be exploding for the same reason seven months later. As dust goes aluminum is a lot easier to deal with than wood dust, yet Ikea isn't beset with claims of the dead toll from the production of LACK tables like Apple is with the iPad deaths.

The only explosion I can find in Google at an Intel plant was last June in the solvent room when testing chemicals. There are some things with inherent risk, like volatile solvent testing, there are other things, like polishing an Apple iPad, where an explosion only occurs through gross negligence.

Apple has said that 50% of their suppliers violate the 60 hour work week. Real reporters have interviewed the employees who did feel pressured to do the overtime they didn't want. There were two explosions separated by seven months at factories polishing the aluminum for Apple products; deaths and injuries that could have been addressed by simple ventilation.

You don't need to visit a factory personally to comment on the issue. There are facts about working conditions that are not in dispute. Some of these are reprehensible enough to make headlines in China.

Mike Daisey said he saw some things that from other accounts are really rare, like child labor and debilitating incidents of poisoning, and he said he witnessed an outright repressive atmosphere (angry guards with guns, cameras in bedrooms) which simply does not reflect reality. By saying he saw these he made it appear like these were common, when they are outliers.

The day-to-day problems are a lot more mundane. Factory managers that don't follow basic safety guidelines not because they are malevolent, but because they don't know which safety measures are really necessary and which are nice-to-haves. I have visited a workplace in India where the second means of egress was blocked; it took a while for me to explain why exactly this was a serious hazard. The managers there really cared about their workers, they kept a 5 day work schedule instead of the typical 6 day schedule, they had a break room with internet terminals. Work hours are a real issue in the 3rd world too. The workers want to work more hours, up to a point of course. The research shows that you hit diminishing returns very quickly after 35-40 hours, especially when this extends past a couple weeks into death march mode. But if the managers are inexperienced and don't understand this, overtime becomes chronic and this costs the company a lot of money.

I'm no potty expert, but I thought that water that is output from a toilet is called black water, water collected from the bathtub, and kitchen are called grey water, and what they are actually using is called treated water.

Am I just behind the times on the terminology or is the article's writer just being sloppy?

This is how you should implement unlimited scrollback, create a tmp file in /tmp and then unlink it so it will be freed on exit.

/tmp is something a sysadmin should be aware of. All kinds of sensitive data is written there by applications and if the computer might be stolen and contains sensitive information then /tmp and swap (and a few other things) should be encrypted or otherwise secured. But honestly if someone with malicious intent gets physical access to an unencrypted disk I'm sure they wouldn't even bother with this. There are a lot more interesting things to look at than some fragmentary shell history. And if they get root while you are still typing then they have the keys to the kindom, access everything you type and everything you see without bothering with this.

I'm hoping the VTE guys don't change to a less good implementation just because some idiot is screaming off rooftops, "The sky is blue! The sky is blue!"

When I first read this my thought was, "OMG this is as bad as counting LoC for evaluations." But then I thought, "If a programmer was fired after producing less than 300 LoC in 4 years I would not be shocked."

The number of papers expected this isn't really so bad. When I was in graduate school I published 0.75 paper per year. Professors each had at 3-6 graduate students.. It would be really hard not to make those numbers. There were some professors who had only one graduate student, but those students published more often. In my field at least, my advisor's name was always on that paper and deservedly so.

I do feel bad for the people let go, I think this type of metric should be given up front. I can envision someone working hard on something for three years and not publishing anything because the results are very surprising and require more verification before they put their reputation on the line, but they should still be writing technical reports. This also obviously shouldn't apply to teaching faculty, but then at my University their salary was in the $10k/yr - $150k/yr range vs. $300k/yr - $1.5M/yr for the research faculty.

Just as a correction, you don't need to carry papers in New York State:
    http://www.nyclu.org/oped/column-showing-id-nypd-our-times

I'm not as brave as I wish I were with the random searches in NYC. What I do is say "no thank you" and leave the station and then re-enter the station at another entrance.

There is a good book on this subject, "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" by Milton Mayer. It gives you a much better understanding of how the Nazi's really gained power vs. the silly version you get from popular culture and high school history classes. In some senses it's very chilling because the parallels are strong but you also see how powerful the parallels were to what happened here during the cold war yet we managed self correct. Reading that book was what made me realise why Joseph Welch's standing up to McCarthy was so important, if decent people had done the same thing early enough in Germany it really would have prevented the Holocaust. Again I'm not as brave as I'd like, but I've seen the a little bit of power of standing up to the thugs at the airport. When I opt-out of the porno-vision scanner there are often a number of people who summon up the courage to do so as well.

Yes, of course. But the alternative would be to run a water cooled electrical power-plant that uses the water on the cool end of their heat engine and pumps more heat into the water and then run an AC that pumps the heat from the data center into the atmosphere. So this ends up putting less heat into the environment overall. There can be arguments for why not to put this type of data center in some sensitive environment, say spawning grounds, but those same arguments would be made about the power plant and there is no reason to think Norway doesn't do the type of environmental assessments that would prevent you from dumping heat into a sensitive area. Using a body of water for cooling isn't a new idea, it's used for air-conditioning skyscrapers all over the world. Data centers have been built up very quickly in the couple decades and are just now starting to be made more efficient. As far as I know all the issues have solutions. The water intakes are designed not to suck in too much fauna and the exhaust is mixed with cold water and/or located where it will have minimal impact (there are of course a lot of grandfathered in power-plants that don't do this, but the solutions exist.)