zeemonkee

Your boss happens to be a friend of the candidate, or a member of a political party. You are told to vote a certain way or lose your job.

You are turned down for a bank loan because your bank manager doesn't like liberals.

You are refused an apartment because the people on your street don't like conservatives.

You fail at an interview because the interviewer only likes people who vote the way she does.

This is so bloody obvious it shouldn't need to be spelled out. Secret ballots are secret so that people can exercise their democratic rights without fear of discrimination, recrimination or intimidation.

And because it's frankly nobody else's business how I vote ?

My pet hate is contrib.auth - the models used feel seriously out of date and the whole get_profile() thing feels inefficient and hacky. Almost every client I work with does not want usernames but email login these days and I have to use the same damn workarounds each time. I get the feeling there were some bad decisions made early on in the project - maybe to work around the lack of model inheritance back then - and they've stuck, but still somehow need to be defended.

And yes, for crying out loud, South needs to be part of Django itself. This "we shouldn't have opinions" is a crock. Everyone who needs migrations uses South. When we don't have South but we have a highly opinionated - and practically useless - comments app, that argument doesn't hold water.

Like yourself, though, most of the time Django does what I need, I can make it work, and love 90% of it - the ORM, forms, middleware etc "fit my brain" and work nicely. But the framework still needs a lot of work and some serious wart removal.

However, when I've seen a Django project that's a "huge mess" that's largely due to the incompetence of the developer. A more "rails-y" framework probably suits such developers, as it gives them less leeway to screw up.

The Republic of Cyprus is a sovereign state, it's not part of Greece.

With a good design you should be able to customize without losing the integrity of the product, but if you didn't design with that in mind you have a problem. Customer requirements may also go beyond what even a good, decoupled design is capable of. You can therefore end up in the same situation as the consultancies, only with lots of customized, hard to upgrade or refactor versions of your product.

Doctors already do: WHO, Medicins sans frontiers etc. How do you think smallpox and polio were eliminated world-wide ? Now that is "changing the world".

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/North_America...

First prototype completed 100 days after the contract signed. In contrast it took decades to build the Eurofighter. Granted a more complex aircraft, but they didn't have CAD back then either.

When you stand in a queue, you know how long you have to wait. It's fair as everyone knows their position in the line.

G+ is a queue where instead of letting people in according to how long they've waited they pick some people at random from the queue, even if those people have been standing for just a few minutes at the tail of the queue. Nobody knows how long they have to wait.

Limited invites would have been far better - same way they rolled out Gmail. The problem is that the crappy invite system is turning people off - they try their invite, it doesn't work and they don't come back.

I've decided not to bother any more with G+ right now. Maybe I'll come back to it in a few weeks or so but right now it just seems to be full of hard core geeks - the same people I follow on HN or Twitter anyway. None of my immediate friends or family are there so there's very little to keep me there.

From a public relations POV though it's very poorly handled. A better, fairer way would be to give each new member 1 or 2 invites, not hundreds or thousands, and ensure those invites work. I've sent invites out to friends and family a week ago and none are working, so they shrug and go back to Facebook - G+ has become last week's wonder.

Most annoying is the continual "invites open now!" posts popping up here and there - and you know that they won't work for you.

Technical issues or not Google could have and should have had a fair and transparent invite system in place.

But suppose I don't know anything about SEO. How would I judge if the article is bullshit or not ?

If, however, I see "x is an SEO consultant" then I would at least suspect that the author is trying to sell me something rather than inform me.

Are you suggesting people raise their families in dormitories ? It's one thing for students or a military barracks (which are for unmarried soldiers anyway). It's quite another for people wishing to bring up a family in privacy and dignity.

It's called the workhouse. The Victorians tried it. Read Dickens for example.

Actually, it's been a pretty awful thing and led the US to create enemies were none existed before. The alliance with the Mujehaddin in Afghanistan in the 80s is a good example.

(BTW as interesting a discussion as this is it really belongs in Reddit)

- Preview ahead of next week to steal FB's thunder about their "big announcement"

- Invites quickly pulled

- Everybody who doesn't have a G+ invite begging around for one, they're even up for sale on eBay - everyone's just waiting to get onto G+

- On same day as the FB announcement, G+ goes public, everyone invited

- Zuck makes his "big announcement" (I dunno, maybe video chat or something) and everyone shrugs.

Once you're comfortable with Django have a look at some of the other frameworks such as Flask or Tornado - they may suit your way of thinking better and may be more suitable for certain projects (for example GAE stuff). There's no need to get pigeon-holed into one framework.

Whatever you do, however, avoid web2py - it messes with Python internals in nasty ways and will teach you bad habits:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/ex54j/seeking_clarif...

There is much talk of a "sense of entitlement" when talking of young people today. I've not seen much evidence of that, but what I have seen is a "sense of entitlement" among companies - many of whom are certainly not hard up - with regard to taking on untrained employees.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1555697/UK-one-of-wor...

So, you have a pattern where:

- More people are going into higher education

- We are in the middle of a deep recession

- As a consequence of these factors, there is less public money per student, so students have to pay more

- As another consequence, a degree is worth less than in previous decades

- Employers see a college/university degree as a requirement, even for jobs that don't really need them

- Unpaid internships are therefore seen as a differentiating factor when hiring graduates

So, in order to climb that greasy pole, you need a) the money to get a degree and b) the money to work unpaid while you gain experience. In the past, you had the option of starting work as a teenager and working your way up, or being one of the few to go to university and having your costs paid, with a good chance of a higher paid job at the end of it.

In this brave new world, these doors have been firmly closed to kids from poor families. Of course it benefits the rich kids and I wonder, half-jokingly, if this isn't an intended consequence of the richer Boomers ensuring an easier ride for their progeny without competition from the hoi polloi. In any case, I fear for the future of a country where advancement depends on connections and family money rather than ability.

Sure, workers on minimum wage may receive benefits - but they would require less benefits than if there was no minimum wage.

If unpaid internships become the norm, that is it becomes expected that a person has to perform a period of unpaid work as some kind of apprenticeship, then they will be forced to do so if they want a paid job at the end of it.

So I might walk away from an unpaid internship, but I'll still need to work unpaid in another internship until at such point employers deem that I've done my time.

Therefore the individual has no choice but to accept unpaid work - regardless of which company they happen to be working for.

It's a bad precedent that needs to be stamped out.

No, but that's how serfdom started - through voluntary servitude.

The point isn't to equate 21st century Europe or US with pre-19th century Russia. The point is that serfdom is a form of voluntary servitude which people entered into out of desperation. Likewise, nobody works for free (outside of charitable work) unless they are desperate (or they are rich kids, and don't need to care). Companies exploit this through unpaid internships - assuming they can get away with it.

Saying "you're free to walk away" is not a moral argument; if the only way a young person can find work is through doing voluntary servitude then they are stuck in that position until they do so.

Minimum wage laws exist for a number of reasons. If people don't get enough from employers, who pays ? The welfare system, i.e. the rest of us. So employers can exploit the system to boost their profits. Second, how does it fail to protect people ? Since when did a living wage for a day's work become a controversial issue ?