First, we've already established for a long time that mindset matters. Each of these scenarios is a different crime with different sentencing guidelines

1) Driving a car drunk with your spouse in it and getting into a crash where they die
2) Walking in on your spouse cheating on you and killing them in the heat of the moment
3) Meticulously planning how to kill your spouse over the course of several months

In each case we have the same result (due to your actions, your spouse is dead) but we already recognize that your mindset (drunk, angry in the heat of the moment, systematically planning someone else's death) matters.

Second, hate crimes are added on to other charges because hate crimes are actually a seperate crime. If you were driving drunk with a black friend in the car and crashed it's different than if you went and lynched someone. In the second case, you not only wanted to hurt the person directly involved but you wanted to send a message of intimidation to people like them.

In this particular case, I think the jury did the right thing by rejecting the hate crime charges. It seems as it Ravi was dumb, insensitve and certainly invasive of his roomates privacy but it doesn't seem like this was a crime intended to intimidate the community.

You've confused your right wing memes.

ACORN, the group shut down after the faked videos, is the group that was going to destroy the country by letting poor people vote.

The keywords you want for "destroy our economy by getting poor people mortgages" are either Barney Frank or Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac.

Just pointing this out to help but if you want to keep your right wing memes straight, watch more Fox news.

There's a difference between being able to do something and being able to get something done. Basically, unless you have people skills you'll forever be in the position of executing someone else's idea. We need people who can execute so that's not meant to diminish those roles, it just means theres a limit to what you can accomplish.

If you want to be in a position to execute on your own ideas for how to get things done or what to do you'll need to develop the people skills necessary to convince someone else that your ideas matter and should be implemented.

If you're happy executing, great. However, if you are frustrated that you have all these great ideas but "nobody ever listens" you likely need to improve people skills rather than technical ones. In my own career I reached a point where I realized if I was going to put X amount of time into coming up with an idea I'd need to plan on putting X or even 2X time into convincing people why my idea was worth doing. This doesn't mean lying or playing games but simply figuring out what the best and fastest way to convince someone totally unfamiliar with the problem I ways trying to solve that

1) a problem exists
2) I have a solution
3) this solution is preferable to all alternative solutions

It really has made a huge difference not just in getting stuff done but also in helping me refine and improve my own ideas. Give it a shot.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who immediately thought of that song.

The whole tablet phenomenon is a fad.

I actually thing in 20 years we'll look back at the customizable home PC as the fad. The idea that the average person is the one responsible for securing, maintaining and updating a computer was a pain worth dealing with when the benefits of having the tech was offset by the ability to do something new but as technology evolves the pain just isn't worth what you get out of it.

PCs may survive in business where the flexibility they offer can be supported by IT departments but for home use I'm betting that you'll see tablets (or similar appliance-like devices with walled app-stores) take over more and more. It may not be Apple that wins and we'll certainly see a lot of failures between now and then but I think, over the long haul, people will move towards appliance-like computers and away from what we know now as PCs.

[blockquote]We still need one additional security measure.
SAMs for defense on all buildings taller than 1000'
If the WTC had that, there would have been no successful tower strikes.
It doubles as defense for a large section of major metropolitan areas.[/blockquote]

So instead of having towers that fell largely within their own footprints we'd have shot down a large airliner flying at low altitude over 2 really populated areas. How is that better?

We'd also have commercial real-estate developers with responsibility or access to SAMs. I'm not sure I'm ready to trust Donald Trump with missiles.

No, I think you may have misunderstood. The alt text is the alt text of the button used to trigger the audio captcha, not the alt text of the captcha itself. In this case, a user who was blind would use a screen reader and see an icon with alt text that said something like "click here to hear the captcha" and then could get an audio representation of the words in the image.

There are devices that convert on-screen content into braille that someone who was both blind and deaf could use to read. I haven't played with these but I'm assuming there's an associated input device. There's a whole range of assistive technology out there for people now. The modern Helen Keller would probably be hanging out on facebook.

Someone who'se completely blind would most likely use a program called a screen reader (JAWS was a common example last time I really looked into this, probably others out there as well). This is just a program that does text-to-speech for on-screen content, including web pages.

A screen reader would "read" the images using their alt text. Assuming the sound button had alt text that made sense it'd be pretty simple to select it and hear the content of the captcha.

As a Starcraft player, I suck.

At my level (bronze), Starcraft is primarily not a strategy game, it's a "push buttons faster" game. The best thing I could do to improve my play is to make more stuff and spend more money. At low levels it's a game of who can make the most stuff (almost ignoring what that stuff is). If I had perfect macro, made only marines and did absolutely 0 micro I'd probably at least move out of bronze and maybe further.

Watching Starcraft is the only way I get to enjoy the game as a strategy game. When I see a player, for example, cancel a hatchery after having it scouted and then build a baneling nest on the remaining creep I can enjoy what a brilliant strategic that is. If I were to try that at my skill level I'd probably screw it up or my opponent wouldn't know how to react even if they fell for my trap.

The game I watch is almost a totally different game from the game, at my skill level, that I play.

I don't want to have to bullshit and listen to idiotic stories from people who have nothing insightful, interesting or, often, even truthful to say.

There's a difference between being introverted and being a condescending ass. If you're not the sort of person who thrives in a social setting that's fine. That's not what you're describing. If you honestly believe that no one but you has anything interesting, insightful or even honest to offer, you're the sort of person that any company SHOULD be driving out.

Even if you happen to be as good as you are in your own mind, it's not worth dealing with your bullshit ego and crap attitude to get whatever value you have to offer.

*UX? stop sounding like an idiot..or worse a wanna be hipster geek.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean but, in case you don't know, UX is a widely used abbreviation for "user experience". It appears in job titles; UX Designer, UX Researcher

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience_design

UX is very important to Apple and also to Ubuntu. That doesn't make them "hipster geeks", it makes them companies that realize that computers have long passed the point in their design lifecycle where functionality alone is the major selling point.

Think about cars (to use a common analogy). In the early days, you could compete on functionality, as in "hey look, we got rid of reins and are using a steering wheel". Today, the design of a car is a major selling point. All cars need to be designed with a certain minimum level of user experience to be successful. Some companies sell great car design at premium prices because there is a wide market willing to pay a lot more for a very well designed/high performing car.

It may not be geeky but computers have moved beyond the realm of geeks into the realm of consumers. Consumers care about experience. Embrace it or live in an increasingly small hobbyist niche market.

No they can't. HTTPS inspection works only if user installed "trusted" certificate on his computer. This can be done in corporate environment, but not for home users.

That makes it sound like all an ISP would have to do is to put this certificate into an installer that provides it's users with "valuable connection tools and internet utilities". Ship a few CDs to customers and you'll get a large number of people installing and clicking through whatever dialogs pop up because they think they'll need to in order to get online.

It doesn't work that way because you are completely and totally unqualified to be CEO of Goldman Sachs. That, not your ruling class diatribe, is why you will not ever be considered for that 8 figure salary, despite your willingness to take a lower salary. It has nothing to do with the ruling class or workers of the world unit or any other such nonsense you espouse.

http://www.bizjournals.com/triad/news/2011/02/01/bank-of-america-ceo-brian-moynihan.html

Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, got a 9 million dollar bonus this year. BoA lost 3.2 billion dollars. I think a trained chimp could at least equal losing 3.2billion dollars and you only have to pay him bananas. Hell, I'd volunteer to run a company into the ground for a third of that.

When CEO pay REMOTELY tracks to CEO performance, you can start claiming that any random person is unqualified to be a CEO. In todays world, CEOs and other upper management positions are just welfare for rich idiots. They rely more on having gone to the right prep school and summered in the right part of Martha's Vineyard than any real skill.

I'd think if a PR firm was paying someone to be disruptive they could do better than posting shitty erotica. My guess is that this particular troll falls more into the "bored teen" category.