Jack, and shit. As someone who worked in construction for 10 years and now has 3 years experience as a software developer, allow me to present a rebuttal:

The bricklayer is an independent contractor who signed a contract to deliver a finished wall on a certain date for a certain price. How much or how little time it takes him to complete the job is his own business. He gets paid the same amount regardless. Whether he's super awesome and completes the wall in half the time, or he's a screw-up who ends up putting in 80 hour weeks tearing down sections and rebuilding them, he gets paid the same.

That contract was created in the context of a STRICT waterfall development model. The dimensions, materials, and probably even the pattern the bricks are to be laid in have already been specified, in detail, by the architect/engineer. All the bricklayer has to do is lay bricks. He's not doing any design work. If there's a design flaw in the wall, that's not his fault, and fixing it will cost you extra. If the design changes after the contract was signed, that's probably also going to cost you extra. If modifications are made after the the bricklayer completed his work on a section of wall, any structural weaknesses introduced by those modification are not his fault and fixing them will cost you extra. You see where this is going, right?

In cases where the bricklayer is an hourly employee rather than an independent contractor, there is no way in hell he's fixing anything on his own time. You are paying for every minute he's working. Period. If you hired a screw-up bricklayer (probably the cheapest one you could find), you're eating those costs.

I'd be really impressed if someone managed to get anything to stick on Issa. He's as dirty as they come, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

Even if you don't carry a balance, cancelling a card still hurts your score since the reporting agencies don't distinguish between reasons why that line of credit was cancelled.

There is no gaping hole in the theory here, you've just failed to understand it.

I completely agree with you, and so does the article. Gangsta culture is all about glorifying poor impulse control. Note that impulse control is one of the things the article says is essential to success (and not just this article, there are tons of studies backing up that assertion). Additionally, that glorification of negative achievement promotes the opposite of the second item on the list of essentials, "insecurity, a feeling that you or what you've done is not good enough."

Again, you are correct, and the article agrees with you:

"The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality."

This is really the big issue facing the African American community, IMO. This one is about having a sense of racial/ethnic/cultural superiority, and they've been told they're inferior so often and for so long that they've come to believe it. People fight hard to defend their beliefs, even when those beliefs are harmful to themselves. The evidence of their inferiority (their inability to overcome the oppression of The Man) is all around them, so it's easy to excuse a lack of personal success. And if they're prevented from achieving success within mainstream culture they must seek it elsewhere, meaning the underground economy and the thug culture that comes with it. Anyone similar to them who is able to achieve mainstream success is a threat to that narrative, and stands as a silent accusation that their of mainstream success might be due to personal failure rather than the inevitable result of powerful forces working against them.

To sum up, in the language of the article:

The typical Successful Immigrant has a sense of ethnic superiority, personal inferiority, and strong impulse control, and this is why they are successful.
The typical Gangsta Thug has a sense of ethnic inferiority, personal superiority, and poor impulse control, and this is why they are not successful.

Where is the hole in the theory?

Why? What technical advantages would UnixWare give them over Linux? It seems like a lot of extra work for no real benefit.

Copyright covers only a specific implementation of an idea.
Patent covers the idea itself.

The length of copyright terms is not relevant if I write my own implementation from scratch.

This is China we're talking about. They will get whatever source code, specs, etc they ask for, because whoever refuses will find themselves in prison, probably with their company nationalized. That sort of thing happens regularly in China, for far less capricious reasons than this.

What would a Chinese Snowden blow his whistle on? Everyone in China already knows their government is spying on them.

Buy it? Because the Chinese totally give a shit about IP rights?

Yes, the law is the law, but some laws leave a lot of room for interpretation, and some cops can be very creative. Here's an example to illustrate my point:

My brother-in-law (we'll call him Dave) is a CHP officer. One day he spotted a van on the freeway that was weaving a lot. It was a clear day, mid afternoon, and the van was going 65mph, which is the posted speed limit on that section of road. Upon pulling the van over, Dave discovered that the driver had a punch bowl full of soup in his lap which he was attempting to eat with a large serving spoon. Dave wrote the driver a ticket for going 65mph over the legal speed limit. His argument was based on the California Basic Speed law, which allows an officer to cite a driver for going faster than what the officer deems is safe under the current conditions. In Dave's opinion, the only speed at which it is safe for a driver to eat soup out of a punch bowl is zero, and this driver was going 65mph faster than that.

FWIW, Dave fully expected that ticket to get thrown out by a judge, and he had no doubt that the driver would fight it since he estimated the fine would be about $2000. But he also felt certain the driver would never do that again, and that he would probably tell all his friends about this crazy ticket he got, and those friends would likely also never try anything that stupid. Mission accomplished as far as Dave was concerned.

If the street walkers in my neighborhood actually get paid what they claim, sucking dick pays a lot more than Wal-Mart, regardless of how you look.

It's a nonsensical argument, pay it no mind. The fact is that everyone in China pirates all their software, so forcing everyone to upgrade will only result in a spike in piracy numbers, which will make the guys (allegedly) trying to reduce piracy in China look bad. Looking bad (aka "losing face") is a big deal in most Asian cultures. That's really all that's driving this announcement.

In reality, EOLing XP will make no practical difference in China any time soon. The Chinese love XP. I've sent refurbished laptops with clean installs of Win7 to friends in China, and the first call I get after they get it is "how do I install XP?" Anyone who thinks those people are going to give two shits whether MS continues to support XP or not is nuts.

I agree in principle that it's best for the company to hire promising individuals and train them. In fact, my company does this. The majority of our employees start out as interns, and the ones that work out get hired full time (I was one of those). The thing is, not everyone works out.

Some of them just never seem to get it. Generally it's because their problem solving processes are just too convoluted, and it leaves them unable to organize things intelligibly. We're big on mentoring, and give plenty of second chances, but at some point you have to just cut your loses.

Well, you're wrong. It does work that way. As proof, I offer every single protestant denomination that has ever existed. Especially the Church of England.

I'm pretty sure that imposing significant restraint on a person is the entire point of seatbelts.

I don't think it's the actual driving that's important here. I think it's the ability to go where we want to go without having to rely on someone else to get us there that people actually care about. Autonomous cars satisfy that need just fine in the majority of cases.

Here, we agree. I'd be perfectly fine with a self-driving car as long as it had a manual mode. I don't have a great deal of confidence in a self-driving car's ability to properly navigate the bumpy dirt road to my mom's house, for example. But, I only make that drive a few times a year. For the other 99.9% of the driving I do, it would be awesome.