DirtyCalvinist

At least as of a few years ago, that's not quite true. I went back to school at 24, and because I had earned over 50% of my own income in the past year (100% in my case) and had not been claimed as a dependent on my parents' taxes, I was considered independent.

The folks at JetBrains must be a little annoyed at all the iOS devs who say that now that there's a decent tool for developing Android apps they'll give it a try. Android Studio looks to be more or less IntelliJ, which I've been using to develop Android apps professionally for the past year or so.

And as soon as AppCode, JetBrain's ObjC IDE, became stable enough to use all the time, I ran from the wretchedness that is Xcode.

I mean you have no right to an offense-free existence. Otherwise, claiming offense amounts to a heckler's veto, and is chilling and oppressive. You can be offended, and proclaim your offense to your offender, but offense isn't enough to require a change of behavior without an ancillary moral imperative, such as "offending some women is wrong".

On further thought, this post was probably written for an particular community, of which I am not a part, and on whose internal discourse I cannot make demands.

I actually thought of this after writing the above. It struck me than KeenIO is probably the sort of community where this wouldn't need to be explained.

For better or worse, HN is.

Interesting here is the automatic assumption that the company should agree with the criticism and apologize. Except for the gratuitous accusation of bad faith, the response is what one might expect from someone who did not agree with the offended's characterization of the situation.

Rather than explain exactly why the display was sexist, this is mostly a combination of condescending hectoring and whining. You have no right not to be offended. If you think that the display was sexist, it is incumbent on you to explain why and not act as though it is obvious to everyone under the sun.

This phenomenon is called pauperization. Many countries in Europe experienced it acutely during the early 19th century. People were allowed to starve back then until production shifted to take advantage of the surplus labor. And though people in developed countries are unlikely to starve this time around, the real challenge for us is figuring out how to allow the change to continue (because we will all be better off for it) without destroying people's dignity and/or creating an economically futile and dependent underclass.

Strictly speaking this is true. For a number of (perfectly rational and moral) reasons, women on average bring home less money than men. This statistic is not terribly good evidence of discrimination, but it does make a bit of sense here, because we're talking average people.

> In addition, while it is true that judgements of value cannot be reduced to judgements of facts (i.e. the "is-ought problem"), one must acknowledge that judgements of value must be based upon judgements of fact. If you're basing your values upon incorrect facts, your values are very likely to be mistaken. For example, if you state that another person is not deserving of moral consideration, that is a judgement of value which may or may not be valid. However, if your justification for that judgement is hearsay evidence or religious bias, then that judgement starts to look very shaky.

You've committed the same error. One ramification of the is-ought divide is that ultimately, ethical norms are assertions divorced from empirical basis. Saying that 'murder is wrong' is epistemologically very similar whether it is based on some religious text or something like "what would society be like if we allowed people to murder each other?". It is simply expressing a preference for one empirical state over another empirical state, and absent some transcendental determinant, no final conclusion can decisively be reached.

Electronic voting machines allow for easier customization of text for edge cases, like a need for higher contrast, larger print or another language. A good compromise, I think, would be to have the electronic machines print out a human-readable paper ballot, and that would be counted as ballots used to be. The security/checkability of the old system with the convenience of the electronic interface.

There are different factors in different fields. The downsides of software patents far outweigh any upside for innovation and should be done away with. Same for business method patents and most trade dress patents.

But designing and implementing an effective regime for promoting new pharmaceuticals, or biotech crops, is a different proposition. Unlike software or fashion or business, the products here are extremely expensive to develop and almost trivially easy to reproduce. In the case of pharmaceuticals, patent protection pays not only for the physical development of the drug, but also the trials of its efficacy and safety. (Yes, it's not exactly that simple) There have been proposals for replacing the current system in these cases, but none have struck me as effective or practicable.

The patent system is a wholly artificial creation, and as such, can be shaped to our collective whim. We can throw out software patents and business method patents and all other types of patents that destroy innovation while keeping those types that do fulfill their original purpose. We need not get rid of them all.

It won't destroy all incentives to innovation. Hence the word 'monetary'. But if someone can make billions of dollars from innovating, that will certainly be a spur to do it, right?

This is one of those cases where the rights and interests of patent holders need to be balanced with the rights and interests of the public at large. Biotech crops are probably key to our survival and prosperity as a species on this planet and if anyone can simply grow some seeds and sell them, that will reduce/destroy the monetary incentive for creating new varieties of plants. (In some cases this does not matter, like corn and apples, because these plants do not breed true. But this is apparently not true of soybeans.) That incentive is what the patent system is ideally supposed to protect.

That said, Monsanto's ability/propensity to sue any farmer who breathes in a bit of their genetically modified plant material needs to be curtailed.

I just tried it on the S3 test device here at work. No go on either putting it in a web page, or going through a QR code.

Does not the same problem exist with judges?

Also, have a large enough pool and this becomes more difficult.

It seems to me that all this wrangling and instructing juries is an argument for having dedicated, technically and juridically trained jurists decide these cases.

From the standpoint of a mobile developer and a user of one of Samsung's 7" tablets, the 7" form factor is too big for phone apps to really feel right on it, and too small for the big tab apps to be naively scaled down and feel right. So any Apple tablet at that size will suffer from a lack of good software until everyone catches up.

On the plus side, with the entry of an Apple device, there will be a much greater incentive to create workable design paradigms for the form factor, and both Android and iOS devices this size will benefit.

I once had a conversation with a Frenchman (in France) about how he had berated some poor American girl (also in France) for not knowing that Zurich was in Switzerland. I promptly quizzed him on which states 5 American cities were in, all larger than Zurich. He failed miserably.

The United States is geographically almost as large as the whole of Europe. The closest foreign border to me is Niagara Falls just over 400mi away, and even if I go there, they still speak my native tongue with pretty much the same accent. I don't think there exists any point in Germany that far from another country.

It seems to me that being dictatorial and downright mean only works if you are right about whatever you've decided to be dictatorial about. So when Jobs dropped that iPod prototype in water to prove that it could be smaller still, this helped the iPod's success largely because Jobs was right about the smallness, not because he berated his engineers. That ability to be right about what people wanted, not his apparently capricious and unpleasant demeanor, is why we still talk about him a year after his death.

Incidentally, it is also the difficult to reproduce part of his success.

In response to a Swedish economist noting that there was no poverty in Scandinavia, Milton Friedman once said that in America there was no poverty among Scandinavians either.

Probably apocryphal, but it does draw attention to the role that cultural differences play in what sort of rules you can implement in organizing a society.

"Strangely though, in these experiments, people tend to readily and accurately agree on who the worst performers are, while failing to recognize the best performers."

So we know incompetence even if we don't recognize competence. This appears to be good enough for government work.

Nonetheless, companies would do well to remember that the first unions were formed not to demand higher pay, but to protect the worker from employer caprice and tyranny, and to lobby employers to make changes to keep workers from being mangled by the machines they worked on. Paying people a pittance may make them depressed, but destroying their dignity and their health will compel them to organize - labor laws and strike breaking tactics be damned.

Interestingly, "Fake" and not "Faux".

I'm wondering why Twitter would suspend those accounts. Does the French government exercise some power over them?

https://twitter.com/#!/_nicolassarkozy is accessible, at least here in the US, though @SarkozyCaSuffit and @MaFranceForte are not.

I think your logic is a bit facile. If you want people to take your creations, that is not piracy, more or less by definition.

I've thought about that and I still don't have a good answer. My guess is that it is only marginally more theft-prone than the self checkout stations. It probably helps that the store is in an affluent suburb. They won't be setting up such a system in Baltimore where I live any time soon.

When I lived in the area I only used the system once because it just took too long. My mom stopped using it because she found on one trip she had effectively stolen two items by forgetting to scan them and was so horribly embarrassed she gave up on it.

My parents' local supermarket already has a version of 'scan as you place in the cart.' This works ok for small trips, but two-cart food sprees are much better handled by the folks in the green smocks behind the cash registers.

The fact that a person who has not lived in the US for 30 years, has been a citizen of a foreign power for 30 years and has never earned a penny in the US nor held directly any US assets must now worry about the long arm of the IRS is ridiculous and unjust. Regardless of whether the law's aims are necessary and just or not.

Britain, the Low Countries, France and the German States all went through this process in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Historians call it pauperization. The only good solution seems to be keeping people from starving to death (the above named societies often did not, incidentally) and wait for/encourage the economy to find a way to suck up the surplus labor.