If you write software for a living and you’re located in Silicon Valley, you have your pick of employment options at an array of tech start-ups — yes, even in this economy. When a recruiter’s pitch is: “Wanna bro down and crush some code?” — like San Francisco-based Klout’s was — you get a sense of what that company is looking for. If you’re a woman, it’s not you.

via In war for talent, ‘brogrammers’ will be losers – CNN.com.

People like me got into programming not only to pursue something they love, but also to get away from this sort of attitude. We were forced to endure it in public school, and often had to route around it in college. Since those days, we find the world is a big place, and that we have a lot of choice in where we want to work. Believe you me, Ms. Trapani, this sort of job posting is a big, red flag for a lot of male programmers as well.

“This is no different than withholding transportation funds from states that don’t enforce seat-belt laws.”

House to vote on Trayvon amendment – Washington Times.

Indeed. This is how all un-Constitutional federal power is exercised these days: by withholding tax money from the states.

Remember that there was once a dream of LIBERTY that was the United States. As law after law, passed by both Republican and Democrat congresses, have stripped more and more of our freedoms away, the dream has nearly died. With the Patriot Act, the retroactive legalization of all signal snooping by the telcos, and now the NDAA, the 4th and 5th Amendments mean almost nothing now. They’re coming after the 2nd, directly, even as I type this.

They don’t have to come after freedom of the press, as the majority of major news outlets have become so liberal that they apparently don’t care what gets passed as long as a Democrat does it, and they routinely report as good news such financial statistics they excoriated Bush 41 for. But mark my words: They’ll soon be coming for freedoms of expression, religion, and assembly.

“Congress shall make NO LAW…” “… shall NOT BE INFRINGED.” “…SHALL NOT BE VIOLATED.” How is this language confusing?! Only to professional lawyers are these grey areas.

Your pocketbook is a poor substitute for your freedoms. Don’t let them buy you so cheaply. VOTE FOR LIBERTY!

A California college student is conducting a social experiment where he’s trying to get his peers to sign a petition in favor of distributing grade point averages to show how the federal government distributes wealth.

Oliver Darcy, a recent college graduate, proposes that students with good grades contribute their GPA to their academically sluggish friends. He argues that this is how the federal government takes wealth from the country’s high wage earners and distributes it to the low income earners.

“They all earn their GPA,” said Darcy in an interview with “Fox and Friends.” “So we asked them if they’d be interested in redistributing the GPA points that they earned to students who may be having trouble getting a high GPA.”

Darcy, who films his encounters with teachers and fellow students, doesn’t have much luck selling this theory.

He said many students on college campuses support high taxes on the rich, but when put into relative terms, cringed at the thought of spreading around their academic wealth.

In a video posted on exposingleftists.com, one student said, “If I do give GPA points to students that don’t deserve it, it isn’t fair, I work for what I have.”

From College Students in Favor of Wealth Distribution Are Asked to Pass Their Grade Points to Other Students | Fox News.

Simply brilliant.

How do you overturn fundamental American rights without forcing people into the streets with protest signs, or even rifles? By doing it slowly… slowly… Bill Looks at how the Affordable Care Act and the National Defense Authorization Act threaten our First and Fifth Amendment rights and how both parties are slowly taking away the protections that guard us from the Ring of Power.

via SLOWLY… SLOWLY… – YouTube.

The president claimed reservations about how the act affected citizens at home when he signed the NDAA into law, but this video includes footage from the floor of the Senate where Carl Levin (D – MI) points out that the original bill did NOT include language that would extend coverage to citizens, and that the Obama administration requested they do so. Talk about speaking with a forked tongue!

This whole thing makes me want to puke.

And if I made a Facebook post about this, and you “liked” it, it could be grounds for termination from your job, as that would not be Free Speech.

Seriously: judge Raymond Jackson needs to be impeached.

Funny how those who usually have such a knack for sensationalizing the news and exaggerating the danger to the public can suddenly make a group of would-be domestic terrorists sound like a bunch of innocuous, unaffiliated dupes.

via Michelle Malkin » MSM: Occupiers Anarchists arrested for bridge bomb plot.

My point is that these sorts of stories surface from time to time. If you’re paying attention, they always describe how the FBI foiled some home-grown terrorist plot because an undercover agent strung them along till they could prove that they truly intended to carry through with their plan. So my question is this: How are they finding these people in time to insert themselves into their plans? Because their intelligence is very good. Very, very good. Like, they’re monitoring every email, cell phone call, and page visit everyone is making. (Or, at least, if not everyone, then the people who show up with a suspicious behavioral profile on social networks.) Are you cool with that? Are you okay with the total and utter lack of concern for the 4th and 5th Amendments? Because that’s what’s happening, and — and I get tired of hearing myself say this — it’s just as much the fault of the Democrats as it is the Republicans.

Pole applied his program to every regular female shopper in Target’s national database and soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. If they could entice those women or their husbands to visit Target and buy baby-related products, the company’s cue-routine-reward calculators could kick in and start pushing them to buy groceries, bathing suits, toys and clothing, as well. When Pole shared his list with the marketers, he said, they were ecstatic. Soon, Pole was getting invited to meetings above his paygrade. Eventually his paygrade went up.

At which point someone asked an important question: How are women going to react when they figure out how much Target knows?

“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

via How Companies Learn Your Secrets – NYTimes.com.

Although Hedegaard explained that he did not intend to accuse the majority of Muslim men of abusive behavior, Denmark’s Office of Public Prosecutions deemed his reflections on the incidence of family rape and the commonness of misogyny in Muslim-dominated areas to be criminally insulting.

via The Death of Free Speech, Continued – Karen Lugo – National Review Online.

The judge must have gone to the pub with the prosecutor for a beer after the case, where I can just imagine how they must have laughed and laughed to have perpetrated such a legalistic fraud to have codified by precedent the offense of “criminal insult.”

Upon receiving the guilty verdict, Hedegaard noted that “the real losers [were] freedom of speech and Muslim women,” and wondered how women could be protected “if we risk getting a state sanctioned label of racism” when drawing attention to their plight.

Indeed.

Getting the XBox made me finally bite the bullet and buy an HDTV. While I was at it, I bought two. Nice ones. The problem is that the XBox still looks like crap. Now, I’m glad I got the TV for DirectTV, because that looks fantastic, but I could have just kept the TV for the XBox. (It ran at 480.) Turns out that XBoxes run at 720 internally, and then up-convert the video. I’m used to playing at full 1080 on my PC (and usually pegged at the 60 FPS cap), and I’m finding I can’t get used to the lower resolution, lower texture quality, and the slowdowns. That’s strike 1.

I’ve avoided consoles because I love using the keyboard and mouse for gaming. I was (at one point) very competitive at online FPS games, and you can do things with this setup you can never do on a console controller. The XBox controllers are great, but you can only ratchet down the sensitivity one notch, and it’s a HUGE difference. On the other hand, I can ratchet UP about 5 notches. I think the slider ought to start in the middle, and I think it ought to have a smaller difference at each position. Given that you have to control your motion with the same physical object that you use to aim, one little twitch sends your crosshair much further than you intended. That’s strike 2.

Now, I predicated buying the XBox on buying Modern Warfare 3, which was the “hot” game all my friends were playing. I did, and I’ve played it in co-op with my best friend, and that’s been fine. I’ve jumped online a couple times, and had predictable results, and I’m thinking that I just don’t want to put the time in to get competent at it.

Anyway, being an XBox, I figured it was time to get some version of Halo for it. I found a limited edition of Reach for sale for less than you can buy the regular game used at GameStop, so I took the plunge. Ug. What a mistake.

Where shall I start? Driving ANY vehicle feels like you’re trying to maneuver on ice, they get stuck on small obstructions, they ramp straight up in the air on the slightest bump if you’re traveling at any speed, and the AI team members get in and man the gun about a 3rd of the time. Let’s see. I constantly die with no indication of what killed me, or even where it came from so that I can know where to look next time. Enemy AI’s are bunny hoppers. Most annoyingly, I run out of ammo ALL the time. Like, several times a round. Clearly, this is a mechanic Bungie intended, but I’m not enjoying it. Like, at all. In fact, I’m not enjoying the game much at all. It feels like work.

I really expected more from the flagship title for the console, especially after their 4th installment. I felt comfortable buying it, sight unseen, because all the reviews are glowing. What a gyp! I want to sue. If this game were on the PC, it’d get a mid-70′s Metacritic score.

So that’s strike 3.

I had hoped to move my gaming to the XBox so that I could finally delete my Windows partition, and run all Linux, all the time, on my PC. I’ve finally concluded that neither my dual video cards nor my Windows partition are going anywhere any time soon.

The government would be able to search information it collects under CISPA for the purposes of investigating American citizens with complete immunity from all privacy protections as long as they can claim someone committed a “cybersecurity crime”. Basically it says the 4th Amendment does not apply online, at all.

via Insanity: CISPA Just Got Way Worse, And Then Passed On Rushed Vote | Techdirt.

We already know that Federal agencies have been scouring everything that goes over the wires or the air for at least 25 or 30 years now. This law is doing nothing other than making it retroactively legal for the government, directly, just like they did for the telcos when it was found out that they had been helping all along.

Yes, people are now realizing that The United States has officially jumped the shark, but I think it happened under Lincoln during the Civil War. Everything else has been a slow, but steady, descent into total federal control since then. Don’t let the breathless words at Techdirt scare you: we lost the 4th and 5th Amendment protections under Bush II with the Patriot Act.

At least the egregious 2nd Amendment encroachments passed under Clinton expired.

If you think you can hide online using encryption, there are some court cases pending that will convince you otherwise. There’s no way the Federal Government is going to allow you to hide behind a passphrase. They will make it legal to force it out of you under threat of Contempt.

Even worse for the unions is the fact that Walker’s reforms are working. Last November, the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators released a report on the classroom-level effects of Walker’s policies. Net, 1,200 more teachers were hired than were laid off. And the bulk of the state’s layoffs occurred in large urban districts such as Kenosha and Janesville, which had written their contracts before the reforms took effect. “Just look at the difference between those school districts that took advantage of our reforms and those that didn’t,” Walker says.

via Walker’s Recall Showdown – Brian Bolduc – National Review Online.

The real stinker is further up in the piece.

Walker predicts he’ll need to raise $25 million, almost double the $13 million he raised in 2010 — then an all-time record for a Wisconsin race. He’ll need every penny, considering that the unions spent $44 million in their efforts to recall six Republican state senators last year.

You see comments like these all over the place when talking about elections. The implication is that elections are simply purchased. I would like to see the government set a budget for elections, paid for by taxes. Give each winner of their party’s primaries an equal amount, and see what happens. The cost of these elections are nothing compared with state and national budgets. It would take the “money in politics” argument off the table.