MoreMoschops

I think you left out some context there.

Grace Hopper, one of the most accomplished computer scientists not just of her day but ever. Rose to dizzying heights in the US military because they needed her so much. A towering giant of the field. So when the picture of her comes up on screen, does the speaker say any of this? Does he acknowledge her greatness? No. He says she's wearing a cute hat. All her accomplishments and ability reduced to how she looks in a hat.

The problem here has absolutely nothing to do with the hat.

It's a training course that the people building the product need to go on (which, in this case, is a single person). Some kickstarters might send two of their people on a 3D animation course. Some might buy an expensive set of textbooks and other such training material. This one sends someone on a residential RPG course. Some kickstarters might need to buy some expensive hardware that she could not otherwise afford. That's exactly what this one is doing.

I could not disagree more that it counts as "fund my life". "Fund my life" would be paying for things that she was going to have to do anyway, such as paying the rent and bills (which she probably doesn't, being 8 or however old she is, but that kind of thing is "fund my life").

"I had a list of 10 young women who went to my high school, their birthdays, profile photos, class schedules, the television shows they watch, the people they've dated, the parties they went to, where they eat on which days, and even a handful of mobile and home phone numbers. Did I purposefully cause chance meetings with people at my high school? I did. Did I go on dates with a number of those people? I did. Do they, to this day, have any idea how we came to meet each other? Not in the slightest."

Is that more than a little creepy? Yes, it is.

"Thats all there is to it."

An unbending, absolute rigid belief? Sounds like a religous style "broken brain".

"Common sense" is not much more than a myth now that (many, including those of the majority of the posters here) societies are not homogenous and not filled with people all subscribing to a very narrow view of what is right and wrong. I believe "common sense" is, in this context, a way of stating a belief without feeling that any evidence is required. A bit like religion.

There was a thread around here somewhere in which the correct, acceptable behaviour of a society (real, not an imaginary example, unless I radically misread it) involved boys becoming men by giving oral sex (and swallowing) to older men. A neighbouring society decided anal sex was the way to go. This is simply "common sense" in those societies. Everyone agrees.

We live in societies where one person's "common sense" is another person's completely unacceptable behaviour.

"Who would you rather see in court first mass murderer or a thief?"

Will you be petitioning the courts to refuse to try thieves unless everyone accused of murder has been tried already? That would essentially legalise theft.

So how do you justify where you draw your own line? Is it okay for you to murder someone because every day somewhere there is a massacre? No? Well then, is it okay for you to shoplift because someone else, somewhere, is stealing much more than you? Is it okay for you to push someone over because every day, somewhere, someone gets assaulted?

The list goes on and on. If you draw the line anywhere then you've applied the exact same principle you just espoused against; you just choose to draw the line in a slightly different place.

Is this not taking a literal interpretation of his words a bit too far? Is your scenario really that because someone can stick their hands in their pockets and refuse to take the US dollars (and then a court declares that the debt has been paid), they didn't actually HAVE to accept US dollars because they can just stick their hands in their pockets? By that reasoning, I don't HAVE to not murder people, you can't make me, it's just that the courts will put me away for life. The whole conversation becomes meaningless.

What would the two sides be? One side is presumably every citizen, but that leaves no citizens on the other side. Sounds more like a revolution.

Sadly, the next step appears to be:

-> using Turbo-C++ for DOS (to learn pre-1998 C++) at university

When you have one of the big ticket items that they make the big money on, such as cancer, you have a lot of time to shop around.

Sure are a suspicious number of very new commenters here making their first comment ever.

"read books instead of use e-readers."

How necessary is that? Does it depend on the eReader? I use a Sony 300 series (which I personally think is about the high point of the eReader evolution, with the exception of the 350 for more screen space in an almost identical sized casing) which is as thankfully dumb and disconnected as eReaders get. It plugs in like an external hard drive and I simply copy epub files onto it.

You couldn't pay me to have a kindle (well, you could, but you'd have to pay me a lot and I'd just sell it and get another Sony).

How about the guy who does a minimum of 20 per day, and does extra on the good days? He's going to clean your clock. Or the guy who uses a bicycle. Or a car. Or flies. Or takes a different route. What exactly is the point of this story? It's advocating consistency through a completely fictional, contrived story.

"But now rewrite the article to take out reduce it to the facts not including her psychological/physiological state (effects of handcuffs on wrists OK, relevant; perspiration rate not really.) "

If you rewrite this to make sense, I'll give it a go :)

It has been made very clear in many circumstances and cases that "just doing my job" is NOT an acceptable excuse.

The inconvenience IS the glamour of martyrdom. If the TSA had calmly and politely carried out the hands-on search as she recited the constitution, there would have been no effect. No inconvenience, no martyr.

"My Computer" et al. sounded patronising and childlike when it started and continues to do so now.

How about just "Items" and "Photos"? Unless there is something marked "Someone else's items" and "Someone else's photos", is it necessary to specify that they belong to the user?

Demanding people give their real names to reduce behaviour deemed unacceptable. I've heard that somewhere else recently. Trolling and protesting are two sides of the same die.

We're already living in one :)

You get ripped off, so you laugh at other people who don't like getting ripped off. Nice.

Did you finish double-checking yet? It is.

To my mind, there's a difference in the relative size of the oil windfall. The UK has over ten times the population of Norway, so in effect the sudden cash income just doesn't compare to the Norwegian experience. The UK enjoyed similar benefits in absolute terms, but per capita it was much, much less. For the UK, it wasn't a game-changer, but for Norway etc, it was. The UK did not become "rich through oil", but Norway did.

"What about other oil-prosperous small countries such as the Emirates or Kuwait?"

For a long time, when a country became rich through oil, there were two paths. One was a fascist socialism in which the population was bought off with the proceeds, non-jobs flourished and foreigners did all the actual work (many of who were effectively slave labour). This is most of the oil-rich middle-east.

The other model is, horrifyingly, even less admirable. A handful at the top take everything, sell their souls to foreign oil giants, and everyone else is screwed over. This is Nigeria and chums.

Norway is the third option. Norway ploughs the money into a sovereign wealth fund, with long term plans. They've become world experts in getting "difficult" oil out of the wells which will see their services increasingly in demand around the world. Norway is a charming country to live in, despite being cursed with oil.

There's no trick to it. Not everyone here wants to run their own business.

Big pay packet. Great pension plan. Stack of benefits. Interesting problems. An office (with door and windows), or at least an office shared with only a couple of other people. Multiple monitors, decent hardware, company practices that meet expectations (source control, code reviews, etc etc). I'm not obsessed with any of the coding religions (XP, agile, waterfall, pair-programming and all the rest - you know who you are, and no, of course I don't mean _your_ particular religion, reader, you've got the one true faith so there's no need to argue) but reasonable management with an understanding that estimates will only ever be estimates and that coding is not at all like building a bridge.

"There's nothing that would delight me less than driving on the road with someone who has hacked their cars firmware."

Engine tuners already do this.

Also, I spend most of the day wearing just a dressing gown and if I have to appear on a webcam for some kind of chat or conference, I smear the lens with vaseline and hold up a little doll of myself dressed smartly that I made, wiggling it whenever I'm speaking.

This comes at enormous cost to my dignity.

Victims of a rather harsh bait and switch 40 years ago; "Prior to the cancellation of Black Arrow, NASA had offered to launch British payloads for free; however this offer was withdrawn following the decision to cancel Black Arrow."

Ouch!

Does that mean we should accept it? Does that make it OK?

Well, it's interesting to hear how some people justify this sort of thing to themselves. I suppose at least the fact that they do need to justify it to themselves gives us some hope; if they didn't even realise it was wrong, they wouldn't need to give themselves excuses.

It's been a crime for years and the police don't seem to have been able to stamp it out. Gosh, it's almost as if they can't be everywhere at once and that citizens will have to take some responsibility themselves for what constitutes acceptable social behaviour. Writing about it on blogs and news aggregates and raising awareness is the only way the problem will get solved.