"You'll never get a Purple Heart hiding in a foxhole! Follow me!"

That's just stupid racist nonsense.

Lovely. Zero to 'racist' is 4.3 seconds. What a lovely rhetorical tool! Almost as good as tossing out "nazi" or "Hitler".

Let's not have an honest discussion...

Some background

Re: CRA

According to one enforcement agency, "discrimination exists when a lender's underwriting policies contain arbitrary or outdated criteria that effectively disqualify many urban or lower-income minority applicants." Note that these "arbitrary or outdated criteria" include most of the essentials of responsible lending: income level, income verification, credit history and savings history--the very factors lenders are now being criticized for ignoring.

You:

All the feds did was to outlaw redlining. Banks were simply forced to use the same standards regardless of the skin color of the applicant.

Way to totally ignore the amendments to the CRA -- particularly those made during the late 80's and early 90's. It set silly and arbitrary targets lenders must make by location and race. CRA forced lenders to lend to uncreditworthy persons to satisfy the CRA.

Now, I'm not suggesting the CRA was the SINGLE cause -- but it certainly was a major contributor. As well as many other points of government involvement.

Do you REALLY want to discuss? Or just be an ignorant name-calling prat?

"a threat to the apolitical nature of public school governance and academic content standards in California."

That (laughably) implies schools in general are apolitical entities. The supposed apolitical nature of textbooks is just an example of this. The GP was pointing out a specific example of a definite political bent in recent news involving the CA school system... The GP could have have spent hours dredging up examples of systemic bias in public schools in the USA, but I'm sure it was just easier to refer to a recent example fresh in his or her memory. This in no way implies a lack of understanding by the GP. It may be true that the GP does not understand the difference, but such a conclusion cannot be reached solely on that one comment.

So basically, they can't afford the books no matter what is in them till 2013. That's good stuff right there, don't care who ya are.

I think AC's point was that your posting in it shows your reading it, and with all the attention this gets from both fanbois and haters (lets be honest, no one anywhere seems to fall in the middle) a news outlet would be truly insane not to pick this up.

copying isn't even actionable here.

Nor is receiving a copy.

Only when distributing a copy are you infringing.

Except they did work, and worked better, in the last version. The kernel maintainers swapped out the working version for a flakey version, and now have made enough changes that the working version won't work even if you compile it in manually.

Did it occur to you to actually read the post you were replying to? This was in all there, not behind a link or anything.

It's an interesting read but nothing terribly informative - it doesn't really provoke thought on the subject. For anyone who's interested in the topic, it's stuff that they've already encountered (and thus already thought about) and, for anyone who hasn't encountered these ideas, then it's almost certainly not a topic of interest. I think we're at a point where people who are interested in this subject have already heard all the arguments for/against their stance on the subject and nothing terribly new is being brought to the discussion (by either side). And others just don't care so any talk is largely wasted. Which is unfortunate because I care about this subject a great deal and would like a lot more involved and interesting debate regarding it but I just have not seen it happen in a while...

I don't perceive any true elements to that statement. Are middle Americans driving over exotic flora and fauna in their SUV's by shortcutting through the 'glades to get their groceries quicker? Or are acres of rain forest being burned and cut down every day by subsistence farmers in financial straits where they have no other options?

Only a small portion of the world can really argue from the position of having comfort to sacrifice things over, and those are in virtually all cases not the portions of the population on the front lines of our encroachment against nature.

I am not trying to tell you that reversing this trend is impossible, but we should not kid ourselves what socially deep roots would need to be cut or rearranged in order to affect change. So why don't you start by illustrating what comfort you could conceivably give up that would give Brazilian farmers an alternative to deforestation? Hint: it's not buying a hybrid.

Yes, but what I'm saying is sometimes you have a marketable idea that you can't currently market to anyone, but still want protection. We've seen this many times already, and we've seen people have marketable ideas that the market wasn't ready for-- many actual companies get a product to market way ahead of the technology curve, for example Apple had this with their network-ready phones....

In any case, there are things that need patent protection, which we can't really do anything with unless we're market movers. Unfortunately, the market movers will often wait out a patent as long as they can; for example, a patented portable MP3 player design would have been waited out until Apple noticed a demand and a market for a music store. If this was thought up in 1990, nothing would have happened until just after Napster came out; everyone would have figured, hey, a portable player that uses an internal hard drive would be way expensive and hold not much music.

Hell, they weren't marketable when they came out; they cost $300 and held 50 songs.

Someone who only "knows how the word sounds" loses out on that relationship, and if they e.g. ever happen upon a word like "malevolence" may think "maleculur structure" is semantically related to the Latin word for evil.

I took both high school and college chemistry. Therefore I can vouch, their guess would be correct.

Furthermore: Universities are actively trying to license their inventions and get them out in the open and in widespread use.

Patent trolls don't. They sit on patents and wait for someone to implement something they have a patent for and then attack.