These guys DID have permanent damage. Prisoners have died.
What should the standard of conduct be for the US government? "At least we didn't use pliers", that's our baseline? Maybe we call up Mubarak and ask him how much torture he did, then we can do even more torture just as long as it's slightly less than the other guys.
This corrupts everything our country was founded on. From ignoring the constitution with perverted logic that it doesn't apply on military bases, ignoring international treaties which have the FULL weight of law in the US according to the constitution, and picking up random people in Afghanistan and detaining them indefinitely without any evidence to bring them to trial all because they're neighbor turned them in to get a cash reward, and so on.
Al Qaeda WON the war here. They destroyed our constitution and turned us into the bad guys.
But the blow back undoes any advantage you got. The enemy knows we torture and uses it as a propaganda tool. Ie, the US does a better job of recruiting for Al Qaeda than Al Qaeda does. Also our friends know we torture and then don't want to be around friends so much (not a problem for US because we think "friend" means "does what we ask with no questions"). And it means that all those other countries out there are saying "hey, if US can torture then we can torture too!", or "if US can violate Geneva convention, then we can too!" And when our soldiers get captured, and they will, the enemy will use the same techniques we use or worse.
That's the main reason why so many in politics just wanted to cover all this up. They know it causes problems for the US, but it's ridiculous to pretend it doesn't exist or that anyone eventually freed from Guantanamo is lying when they claim to be tortured. If we don't want blowback from torture then we shouldn't do it.
Remember these are all interrogation methods disallowed by the army. The army knows there would be blowback. But they're ok for the CIA?
Another problem is that the interrogation techniques were not originally designed to get information. They were originally developed to get captured soldiers to admit to false confessions. Then the US used training for our soldiers so that they could attempt to resist such methods. Then ridiculously the CIA adopts those techniques and think that they would work to get useful intelligence. It's BS. If the CIA does know what it is doing then it is not using these enhanced interrogations to get information but for some other motivation (please the boss, please the political base, make it seem like we're doing something, finally have a suitable job for those who flunked the psych exam at Langley, etc).
Now there's this idiotic justification I do hear, not from politicians but the fanboys of one party or the other. That we treat the prisoners better than so many other countries. Dumb. That's like saying you beat your wife less than the neighbor does. Really, do these morons think that the standard of conduct should be "don't be as bad as North Korea"?
I know too many learned-C++-first-and-stuck-with-it programmers who make every class of theirs a kitchen sink class. I know many programmers who started with C who can do OO much better than most C++ veterans.
One problem though is that if you're used to writing efficient code then it takes a strong mental effort to get used to writing inefficient C++ code style. C is still used in contexts where code efficiency (time and/or space) is still important, whereas most C++ programmers are in an environment where efficiency is considered a distraction.
C++ was a successor, but it kept growing, and growing, and...
Ada could have been, and especially the more recent versions of it are very nice, but too many people just did not like the verbosity, even the department of defense that mandated its use refused to use it. Modula-II could be an alternative but it never really caught on outside of Europe, and Pascal was too limited and not standardized.
Generally the only time I use assembler is when very specific things are needed. Access to an instruction that the compiler doesn't use, like atomic memory operations, cache flushes, context switches, and so on. Basically highly system specific uses rather than optimization.
I use C because it's both the right tool, and because the rest of the team freaks out when mentioning basic C++ and because the code would have to be rewritten.
Basically you use the language that the project is written in, end of story. No one likes the new guy who shows up and tells everyone else that they're doing it wrong. I guarantee that the 50-somethings really don't like the 20-somethings with that attitude.
I worked with a guy once who didn't get this. Freshly minted PhD, on an embedded system, and he spent most of his time convincing us that Java was a better language to use. In 1998 when state of the art JVM was slow as hell on a Sparc, and he wanted one on the sluggish CPU we had. Eventually he quit, and I heard through channels that he gave a Java One keynote talk where he mentioned the luddites he used to work with. Sure, Java is great for some things but it's not best for all possible things.
Gah, my Cortext-M3 had 16K ram and 128K code. I think we could complete the project with double of each. It's a great ARM chip though, Thumb2 is a huge improvement over standard ARM vs Thumb and interwork, and the interrupt system is great, but the size is cramped.
Great, start a new high level language that only uses the high level language from start to finish. No cheating by using C to bootstrap, or using an OS written in C, etc.
There are also the languages that give you a dose of ricin. Everything seems fine until a couple weeks after you ship the product when you get the sniffles.
Bzzt, next you'll be saying that no one should ever use assembler because humans are not prevented from making mistakes in it. It is dangerous because sometimes that is needed. Like a bulldozer, they're dangerous but they are needed therefore we have trained people who use them. But you don't let just anyone who works in the factory drive the forklift, some will hurt themselves.
There is the style of C++ with reduced feature set. Ie Embedded C++ and the like. Like C, but better type checking and code organization, some nice low-bloat features, and minimal retraining for C programmers. Just avoid the difficult stuff likely to bloat up the code, don't copy PC programming style.
Too many coders seem to not see the world outside of the web, PC apps, mobile apps, etc. I suspect many of them think their auto ignition code is in JavaScript or Python.
I think some of the attitude comes from treating programming as the 9 to 5 job only, without an actual passion or interest in the subject.
Stock related though. Companies take that stuff very very seriously. It's the *only* think they take seriously, they don't understand the technology, the operations bores them to tears, but say anything about the stock and they sit up and pay attention. All-hands meetings usually involve 45 minutes talking about stock, 5 minutes talking about sales, and 10 minutes of sports analogies.
In my current job they did a background check through an external agency on new hires. They actually told us about this and gave us the results of the check (credit as well as criminal).
True about the reporters. A clueless bunch of people who don't know how to investigate or fact check any rumors. Most of Silicon Valley is treated like a mythological place by the news media, where everyone is an entrepreneur and talks business deals at cocktail parties, everyone is gainfully employed, everyone is involved in a web based startup, etc.
For politics (which includes immigration) I just look at the liberal media, then the conservative media, then discount both of those stories since the truth is something completely different.
In the late 90s I worked for a place that was rumored (internally) to be involved in several lawsuits against past employees, with several of those being countersuits. The internal word of mouth was that they'd try to screw with you after you left. They also pushed out an abitration agreement to all employees, of the typical sort that have an "I Win" clause in it. Not forced on us but we got no more stock options w/o signing it (I refused and the finance vp thought I was insane). On the other hand a lot of those execs ended up in jail later (though for different reasons) and earned an Ignobel award.
Classic era of broadcast television ads: 3 ads every 15 minutes, with an extra couple at top of hour. We considered this normal, although it was excessive by European standards. People would routinely leave the couch and go do something else while those ads played. Yet they funded the entire industry. Now consider today's ads: you can easily get 100 an hour.
I think so many web site owners don't even know what ads they serve up. They're usually not running a real business, they just have a blog or support site, then they get some third party to supply and manage the ads for them. Mostly so that their hobby can be cheaper or turn a profit. This was never how advertising worked a couple decades ago. If you had a print ad then you paid a lot of money to get published and so you were careful about where you advertised; the demographics between Cosmopolitan and Sports Illustrated were very different. I've actually run into a couple of cases where the web site owner was extremely apologetic once others pointed out what sorts of ads were showing up.
Today the ads are generic and use the shotgun approach; I kept noticing the same Buick ad with the loud annoying music on youtube on the weekend, with no connection whatsoever to the content. Funny Conan clip: Buick. New game preview: Buick. Video of kittens: Buick.
I don't think this has anything to do with France's laws. But since anyone can sue just by filing some papers, such suits will happen. While anyone can sue not everyone can win. These publishers have not even sued yet, they're just "preparing a lawsuit", which is an attempt to get the upperhand in negotiations.
Slashdot Mirror
These guys DID have permanent damage. Prisoners have died.
What should the standard of conduct be for the US government? "At least we didn't use pliers", that's our baseline? Maybe we call up Mubarak and ask him how much torture he did, then we can do even more torture just as long as it's slightly less than the other guys.
This corrupts everything our country was founded on. From ignoring the constitution with perverted logic that it doesn't apply on military bases, ignoring international treaties which have the FULL weight of law in the US according to the constitution, and picking up random people in Afghanistan and detaining them indefinitely without any evidence to bring them to trial all because they're neighbor turned them in to get a cash reward, and so on.
Al Qaeda WON the war here. They destroyed our constitution and turned us into the bad guys.
But the blow back undoes any advantage you got. The enemy knows we torture and uses it as a propaganda tool. Ie, the US does a better job of recruiting for Al Qaeda than Al Qaeda does. Also our friends know we torture and then don't want to be around friends so much (not a problem for US because we think "friend" means "does what we ask with no questions"). And it means that all those other countries out there are saying "hey, if US can torture then we can torture too!", or "if US can violate Geneva convention, then we can too!" And when our soldiers get captured, and they will, the enemy will use the same techniques we use or worse.
That's the main reason why so many in politics just wanted to cover all this up. They know it causes problems for the US, but it's ridiculous to pretend it doesn't exist or that anyone eventually freed from Guantanamo is lying when they claim to be tortured. If we don't want blowback from torture then we shouldn't do it.
Remember these are all interrogation methods disallowed by the army. The army knows there would be blowback. But they're ok for the CIA?
Another problem is that the interrogation techniques were not originally designed to get information. They were originally developed to get captured soldiers to admit to false confessions. Then the US used training for our soldiers so that they could attempt to resist such methods. Then ridiculously the CIA adopts those techniques and think that they would work to get useful intelligence. It's BS. If the CIA does know what it is doing then it is not using these enhanced interrogations to get information but for some other motivation (please the boss, please the political base, make it seem like we're doing something, finally have a suitable job for those who flunked the psych exam at Langley, etc).
Now there's this idiotic justification I do hear, not from politicians but the fanboys of one party or the other. That we treat the prisoners better than so many other countries. Dumb. That's like saying you beat your wife less than the neighbor does. Really, do these morons think that the standard of conduct should be "don't be as bad as North Korea"?
I know too many learned-C++-first-and-stuck-with-it programmers who make every class of theirs a kitchen sink class. I know many programmers who started with C who can do OO much better than most C++ veterans.
One problem though is that if you're used to writing efficient code then it takes a strong mental effort to get used to writing inefficient C++ code style. C is still used in contexts where code efficiency (time and/or space) is still important, whereas most C++ programmers are in an environment where efficiency is considered a distraction.
Don't forget though, this expression is legal C: a[1] == 1[a]
C++ was a successor, but it kept growing, and growing, and...
Ada could have been, and especially the more recent versions of it are very nice, but too many people just did not like the verbosity, even the department of defense that mandated its use refused to use it. Modula-II could be an alternative but it never really caught on outside of Europe, and Pascal was too limited and not standardized.
Generally the only time I use assembler is when very specific things are needed. Access to an instruction that the compiler doesn't use, like atomic memory operations, cache flushes, context switches, and so on. Basically highly system specific uses rather than optimization.
Bah, yer a poseur! Old farts used octal because it mapped better to the PDP opcodes. Hex was new fangled stuff for Apollo missions.
I use C because it's both the right tool, and because the rest of the team freaks out when mentioning basic C++ and because the code would have to be rewritten.
Basically you use the language that the project is written in, end of story. No one likes the new guy who shows up and tells everyone else that they're doing it wrong. I guarantee that the 50-somethings really don't like the 20-somethings with that attitude.
I worked with a guy once who didn't get this. Freshly minted PhD, on an embedded system, and he spent most of his time convincing us that Java was a better language to use. In 1998 when state of the art JVM was slow as hell on a Sparc, and he wanted one on the sluggish CPU we had. Eventually he quit, and I heard through channels that he gave a Java One keynote talk where he mentioned the luddites he used to work with. Sure, Java is great for some things but it's not best for all possible things.
Don't forget about inline assembler!
Gah, my Cortext-M3 had 16K ram and 128K code. I think we could complete the project with double of each. It's a great ARM chip though, Thumb2 is a huge improvement over standard ARM vs Thumb and interwork, and the interrupt system is great, but the size is cramped.
Great, start a new high level language that only uses the high level language from start to finish. No cheating by using C to bootstrap, or using an OS written in C, etc.
There are also the languages that give you a dose of ricin. Everything seems fine until a couple weeks after you ship the product when you get the sniffles.
Bzzt, next you'll be saying that no one should ever use assembler because humans are not prevented from making mistakes in it. It is dangerous because sometimes that is needed. Like a bulldozer, they're dangerous but they are needed therefore we have trained people who use them. But you don't let just anyone who works in the factory drive the forklift, some will hurt themselves.
There is the style of C++ with reduced feature set. Ie Embedded C++ and the like. Like C, but better type checking and code organization, some nice low-bloat features, and minimal retraining for C programmers. Just avoid the difficult stuff likely to bloat up the code, don't copy PC programming style.
Too many coders seem to not see the world outside of the web, PC apps, mobile apps, etc. I suspect many of them think their auto ignition code is in JavaScript or Python.
I think some of the attitude comes from treating programming as the 9 to 5 job only, without an actual passion or interest in the subject.
Stock related though. Companies take that stuff very very seriously. It's the *only* think they take seriously, they don't understand the technology, the operations bores them to tears, but say anything about the stock and they sit up and pay attention. All-hands meetings usually involve 45 minutes talking about stock, 5 minutes talking about sales, and 10 minutes of sports analogies.
In my current job they did a background check through an external agency on new hires. They actually told us about this and gave us the results of the check (credit as well as criminal).
True about the reporters. A clueless bunch of people who don't know how to investigate or fact check any rumors. Most of Silicon Valley is treated like a mythological place by the news media, where everyone is an entrepreneur and talks business deals at cocktail parties, everyone is gainfully employed, everyone is involved in a web based startup, etc.
For politics (which includes immigration) I just look at the liberal media, then the conservative media, then discount both of those stories since the truth is something completely different.
In the late 90s I worked for a place that was rumored (internally) to be involved in several lawsuits against past employees, with several of those being countersuits. The internal word of mouth was that they'd try to screw with you after you left. They also pushed out an abitration agreement to all employees, of the typical sort that have an "I Win" clause in it. Not forced on us but we got no more stock options w/o signing it (I refused and the finance vp thought I was insane). On the other hand a lot of those execs ended up in jail later (though for different reasons) and earned an Ignobel award.
Classic era of broadcast television ads: 3 ads every 15 minutes, with an extra couple at top of hour. We considered this normal, although it was excessive by European standards. People would routinely leave the couch and go do something else while those ads played. Yet they funded the entire industry. Now consider today's ads: you can easily get 100 an hour.
"... Molten Boron"
I think so many web site owners don't even know what ads they serve up. They're usually not running a real business, they just have a blog or support site, then they get some third party to supply and manage the ads for them. Mostly so that their hobby can be cheaper or turn a profit. This was never how advertising worked a couple decades ago. If you had a print ad then you paid a lot of money to get published and so you were careful about where you advertised; the demographics between Cosmopolitan and Sports Illustrated were very different. I've actually run into a couple of cases where the web site owner was extremely apologetic once others pointed out what sorts of ads were showing up.
Today the ads are generic and use the shotgun approach; I kept noticing the same Buick ad with the loud annoying music on youtube on the weekend, with no connection whatsoever to the content. Funny Conan clip: Buick. New game preview: Buick. Video of kittens: Buick.
I don't think this has anything to do with France's laws. But since anyone can sue just by filing some papers, such suits will happen. While anyone can sue not everyone can win. These publishers have not even sued yet, they're just "preparing a lawsuit", which is an attempt to get the upperhand in negotiations.
Or they sue the all electric vehicles and bicycle makers, because they stand in the way of their divinely granted right to make money.
That's what electrician's tape is for: blocking the check engine light, and blocking the ads. No digital interference.