Yeah, a previous employer was acting as an intermediary between two large organizations. They were both having problems opening the other's large, complex documents. On a conference call, one of their techs finally, sheepishly, admitted that they were using OpenOffice and running everything through an import filter. The other broke out laughing and admitted that they were, too. When they decided to start swapping ODFs directly, their problems immediately disappeared.

Note to Wall Street investor types: the best guy in the business is scrupulous to the point of rigorously avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. Warren Buffett became a gazillionaire without bending the rules and throwing ethics aside.

If you feel you have to cheat to get ahead, then openly admit that you're not very good at your job. Go ahead: look in the mirror and say "I suck too much to play it honestly". If you can't do that, then maybe you need to evaluate your decision making.

Re Go being statically linked: great! It's meant to be a language for writing services. Those are typically deployed by creating a giant tarball of all the artifacts needed to deploy a service, copying it to all the hosts that will run it, extracting in place, and restarting. In this case, the tarball is the compiled executable. You can copy it to its server and have everything required to run it in a single tidy package.

Contrast with a Java deployment where the tarball will contain many JAR files, etc. Rolling back to a previous version either involves a symlink shuffle and restart or updating CLASSPATH to point to the old version. The Go equivalent is stopping the service and running the previous binary.

Static linking would be a pain in the ass for replacing everything in /bin. It's awesome for deploying network services, where building a new binary and deploying it to 1,000 servers is no harder than updating a particular library on each of those 1,000 (and avoids version conflicts where another service on the same box really wants a slightly older version).

Yes, I understand. That doesn't contradict my message: I have to grant an easement to utility companies to set poles in my backyard. As a whole, this is a good thing since it prevents private entities (like a cranky neighbor) from blocking deployment of those utilities to everyone else.

In the exact same vein, I think it's unreal that AT&T - who owns that pole in the easement in my backyard - can block deployment of a utility that everyone wants to use. If I had to grant an easement to AT&T, I think it's completely fair that they should be forced to grant an easement to Google to use the pole for its intended purpose.

You and AC seem to think that I'm against utility easements when I said nothing of the sort.

But those physical poles are in my physical backyard. If I have to grant utilities an easement, then I am perfectly fine with them having to grant an easement to other utilities.

So, how much does an artist make per single over-the-air play on a station with 550,000 listeners? If as many people listened to Spotify as to broadcast radio, half a million plays per month seems absolutely trivial.

Without knowing how Spotify's pay compares to radio, this sounds like little more than an emotional rant from Clear Channel.

I agree wholeheartedly, and that's compatible with my original position. There's nothing to be lost (other than a little time) by re-hearing the requests he denied, and everything to be gained by saying "let's play it safe and review these to see whether he acted properly".

Even if he hadn't made other comments that more clearly displayed a bias against the people in front of him, joking about any of it in public shows poor judgement on his part. That alone is enough to justify double-checking.

Those comments were infinitely more damning and indicative of actual bias. I really have no idea why people think I'm defending him when I'm absolutely not. My opening paragraph stated that he was unprofessional. When regarding a judge, that's pretty damning; we're supposed to hold them up as the epitome of professionality.

My whole point stopped at "joking about their font choice isn't necessarily prejudicial". The comments he made about the "pervs" are strong evidence supporting the case against him. Being flippant about Arial - in isolation - isn't.

If you're seriously equating race (and the reasons it's a protected class distinguisher) from choice of programming languages, you're fucked in the head. It's not even a matter of degree: they're totally different.

In most US states, you can fire someone for any non-protected reason. Don't like their shirt color? Best of luck with the job hunt! Joking about someone's technology decisions is in no way discriminatory in the same way that joking about someone's race would be.

By the books: of course you're right.

By reality: I'm walking to coffee with my coworker and saying outside the earshot of anyone else. People tell inappropriate jokes under these circumstances. And often times those jokes are self-deprecating, like "ewww, she went to a state school" (just like I did) or "what kind of nerd wears [same kind of glasses he and I both have]?" They're jokes, they're intended as jokes, and everyone does this.

There's a time and place for everything. Laughing with a close coworker about something you both understand is not meant seriously is a world apart from shouting it from your Facebook timeline. The former is clearly OK, but the latter is an obvious lapse of, well, judgement.

Maybe, maybe not. It was certainly unprofessional; I won't argue that. But it's also the kind of thing I might say as a joke to a friend afterward without attaching any real meaning to it at all.

Suppose I interview an engineer and it goes badly. We have an up-or-down vote after his series of interviews and decide not to hire him. At that point, I could see telling jokes like "...and I'd never hire someone with Perl on their resume, anyway." We'd all laugh and move on to the next person. In fact, though, if the candidate was good then it would never come up again. It absolutely would *not* prevent us from hiring someone and wouldn't even remotely be a weighted factor.

I suspect it was a similar throwaway comment that didn't actually reflect the judge's true feeling, but was meant as something his coworkers would find amusing (even as they understood it was utterly lighthearted). It was obviously a bad idea to joke about it somewhere as public as Facebook, but doubt that it truly reflected any personal biases.

The problem with that is that adding a conditional ("IF citizen meets these extra criteria, THEN enact loophole-ending routine number 23") doubles the number of code paths through the law (or function definition). Now there are two potential loophole conditions that have to be accounted for.

Electing political science majors has fucked us. We desperately need programmers, mathematicians, and philosophers in Congress.

Your card is invalid. If and when some clerk refuses to accept your unsigned card, please understand that you're in the wrong and he's just doing his job.

You'd love Haskell.

Illegality has traditionally been an effective deterrent against cracking and disassembly.