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Here's the process to find criminal records in San Francisco:

1) Walk into the courthouse

2) Go find which binder has the first letter of the last name of the applicant

3) Flip through the dot-matrix printed green/white reams of printed papers to see if someone with a first and last name has a court record

4) Write down the case number on a form with a bunch of other info

5) Go wait in line and hand it to the clerk

6a) If it's a record they have, you can go into the back and view it with a clerk watching to make sure you don't steal or adulterate the record. It's the only copy.

6b) If it's not in the courthouse, they'll tell you to come back in a few days while they pull it from the archive.

7) If you had many records to pull, some courts will restrict you to a max of 1-2 per day. So you either have to send lots of people, or just wait. Some courts like Santa Barbra can take 120+ days.

This is true for lots of counties in the US, and it takes getting involved in local politics to fix it. A lot of Americans can't make rent if they don't get their next paycheck, and a long background check can be really stressful.

It's a hard problem, but it's getting better. I could go on :)



Twice I've tried going a year exclusively on Linux. Both times (2009 and 2015) I spent enough time fiddling with things to give up.

Cygwin is pretty good. With sshd and putty you've got a decent setup.

But there are still little things that osx does better. Virtual desktop support finally showed up in Windows about a decade late. But keyboard shortcuts are still a crapshoot.

Text selection and cursor navigation being uniform across everything is nice once it all becomes automatic.

Osx has its own list of problems... But most of them are solvable in a well supported way.

Running Linux desktop full time.. logging in every day is a roll of the dice. The Year of the Linux Desktop(tm) just isn't here yet.


As a teenager in the US, it was one of my main activities, so I can believe the age. I'm not sure about how it would go in SA.


> I'm not sure about how it would go in SA.

In Krugersdorp in the late 1980s? And the police were on the case - both in terms of being tech-savy enough, and not having more pressing concerns? (1)

Let's say that it's an extra-ordinary claim and we'd like a little more weight behind it.

1) http://www.saha.org.za/ecc25/ecc_under_a_state_of_emergency....


The police likely intercepted material delivered via regular post, and worked their way up from there. No need to know how something was ordered, as long as selling it is illegal.


Teenager in the US at the same time.

Yep, this is exactly what we did with our 8-bit machines and modems at the time.

We were global even then.

EDIT- LOL. I guess the HN downvoters have proof this isn't what we were doing back then???


I didn't vote, but my guess would be that this is a me-too comment, which the community discourages. If you wish to echo a parent comment, it's expected that you add a significant contribution.


I'm going to guess that the reason he's saying it's not throttling is because that's the explanation he's been given by his engineering team. Or he said "let's optimize video in a way that isn't throttling."

He's calling it semantics because of Dunning-Kruger. Because he doesn't really know how any of this works, but his ego is so big Superman couldn't lift it, he inflates his surface understanding to expert level.

Tmo should publish a spec that allows any provider to meet their definition of optimized video and therefore qualify for binge on. I'm totally fine with it as long as they don't get to choose who gets unlimited streaming.

As it is, and as a current tmo customer, this is eye opening. Tmo had always seemed to be the voice of reason in American wireless. What they did with contracts was a massive step in the right direction.

But this makes it look like they don't actually get it. They just happened to accidentally get a few things right.


I always thought "Don't make me think" was a bit of a UI reference that everyone should read.


I got a lot of grief from fellow software developers at Progeny (RIP Ian) for having that book lying around.


May I ask why? Is there anything wrong with that book from a developer's point of view?


It makes them think.


Well, somebody's got to do the thinking...


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