but bills targeting (or benefiting) specific people/companies/tech/etc. are generally considered illegal no?
We have constitutional protection (pause for laughter) against Bills of Attainder - you can't write a law that targets a specific person or group for fines or other punishment. Justice in individual cases belongs in the judicial branch, not the legislative branch.
Of course, when the Congress passes a law specifically to take back 90% of bonuses paid to banking executives receiving bailouts during the crisis, no one objected, because we seem to care more about the emotion of the moment than slow-but-constant erosion of important limits on government power.
It's not about blame, it's about responsibility. When you can avoid people being killed by choosing a better time, place, or manner in making your point, that's a reasonable expectation. Conspiracy to commit murder is certainly a crime, and it doesn't matter whether it a friend or stranger that you convince to murder someone you don't like, it's still quite reasonable that it's illegal.
We're not talking about publication and censorship here. We're talking about telling people directly to go kill someone now, or indirectly with words that a reasonable person would expect to have the same result.
Inciting to riot is basically a conspiracy charge, however it's a special one because it's being done in public and so violence could theoretically be prevented by law enforcement in some cases (though in practice I doubt it).
Some speech poses a clear and present danger of violence, when you have the attention of an angry crown. "That one over there, he don't look right to me, get him up against the wall!" Specific calls for immediate violence against available targets are really the only place where "prior restraint" makes sense.
There are four good reasons to take a pay cut to switch jobs within a development/IT career when you're older:
1) Small companies trade pay for responsibility. You make less, but you're in charge of more. Short term, that's lose-lose, but in long term it can be vital to moving up the career ladder. For example, the path: "lead" at big company -> manager at small company -> manager at big company is often the fastest path. Same thing to move from a "some coding" job to a full-time coding job, or becoming an architect, or whatever.
2) Specific technical skills lose value over time. If you get too far behind what the market wants, accept that you will take a hit to modernize your skills.
3) You shouldn't expect to make more money just because you get older! For the first 10 years or so, your skills improve noticeably every year, so your pay should go up more than inflation. For the next 10 years: maybe. Improving your ability to contribute isn't just technical any more, and it can be hard to change the things about yourself that you need to, to have more technical influence and reach. But after that? 99% of us top out. Once you grow to your limits, you'll give up any raises (over inflation) whenever you change jobs, because your ability to contribute has plateaued and that's normal.
4) If you've been working as an engineer for 30 years and you still need the money, you're doing it wrong. At some point you'll be seeking interesting, challenging problems, and 20% pay more or less will be less important than that. Eventually you can afford to "follow your heart". Especially once the kids are gone.
It strongly leads you into one design pattern, which might not be a good one. For an expert who understands each approach on its merits, and is comfortable with the approach the UI builder uses for the task at had, it's not a problem. For the new programmer who hasn't really thought about it, it creates the illusion that there is only one way to do things.
For example, UI builders didn't used to give a way to "flow" certain design elements, wrapping them if the screen was narrow. Sometimes you want that behavior - but how do you discover it's possible if you've never thought about the work the UI builder hides from you. Another example is UI elements dynamically generated in response to user action - which can be a great tool for some cases, but if your world is limited to the toolbox the UI builder comes with, you won't have that tool.
To quote the man who invented the phrase "movie plot threat"
The 9/11 terrorists used small pointy things to take over airplanes, so we ban small pointy things from airplanes. Richard Reid tried to hide a bomb in his shoes, so now we all have to take off our shoes. Recently, the Department of Homeland Security said that it might relax airplane security rules. It's not that there's a lessened risk of shoes, or that small pointy things are suddenly less dangerous. It's that those movie plots no longer capture the imagination like they did in the months after 9/11, and everyone is beginning to see how silly (or pointless) they always were...
The problem with movie plot security is that it only works if we guess right. If we spend billions defending our subways, and the terrorists bomb a bus, we've wasted our money. To be sure, defending the subways makes commuting safer. But focusing on subways also has the effect of shifting attacks toward less-defended targets, and the result is that we're no safer overall.
Terrorists don't care if they blow up subways, buses, stadiums, theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, schools, churches, crowded markets or busy intersections. Reasonable arguments can be made that some targets are more attractive than others: airplanes because a small bomb can result in the death of everyone aboard, monuments because of their national significance, national events because of television coverage, and transportation because most people commute daily. But the United States is a big country; we can't defend everything.
There's a whole generation of coders now who "only know Java" and have never actually debugged through object code.
There's nothing wrong with goto in C code - it's really the cleanest approach to making sure you clean up everything that you allocated. Seeing it in more modern languages is a real warning sign, however.
VS makes it easy to build with the IDE, but it doesn't require it, and the easy way really doesn't scale to large projects. That being said, for anything.NET, MS has been moving away from offering a lightweight SDK toolkit for building, and I think you have to download the whole mess just to build.NET stuff these days. That's not really the IDE's fault, however.
It's one thing to know "hey, I should use a thread-safe dictionary class for this", it's another thing entirely to remember the many subtle difference between the standard library class for that in C# and Java.
Well, you don't need Global Entry, there's a program that just takes a criminal background check (but doesn't help with international travel). You just need a Known Traveler Number. So unless your "failure to declare" was actually felony smuggling, you should be good. Assuming, of course, that there's not someone with a similar-sounding name on the arbitraty No Fly List.
The purpose of any government agency is to do the job given to that agency
I admire your charming naivete. I hope life keeps treating you so well that you never develop my hardened cynicism.
As for the knife thing, how exactly do you know?
Well, I respect the opinions of the airline pilots I've discussed this with at length (while the hardened cockpit doors aren't perfect, they're enough), plus there have been a few incidents since 9/11 where passengers perceived a threat and "dogpiled" the supposed hijacker.
What about a plastic container carrying a biological weapon such as smallpox or a modified flu?
Now we're into movie plot threats. What if the terrorists are actually shape-shifting reptoid aliens, like the New Zealand Prime Minister or that Obama bodyguard? I can invent better stories than you, I think.
Utterly false. The primary purpose of any government agency is to increase the reach and the budget of that agency. It is really that simple. Bomb sniffing dogs can find stuff "vacuum sealed" - you'd be amazed how few molecules a good scent hound needs. No one is going to hijack a plane with merely a sharp object while passengers still remember 9/11.
Plus the threat is minor: if we had the courage to simply continue business as usual when a plane blew up, they wouldn't even be terrorist targets: terrorists don't hate airplanes.
Yes, yes, but post-Windows-7 is not what TFA is about. That's no "evil monopolistic practices" any more that Unity is (which fucks your eyeballs with a cactus dipped in tabasco sauce). Anyhow, they fired the CEO and removed the VP in charge of Windows after Metro blew up - what more can you ask? Give em time to correct now that they've seen the error of their ways.
Over half of Americans own stock now. Yes, there's a serious political corruption problem, nearly as bad as the 1880s, but we got through that and we'll get through this. Meanwhile, the "owning class" is gradually becoming "most people".
Since no one has mentioned it: Word was awesome. I remember when people bought Macs (classic) to run Word. For all the geek love for WordPerfect, it wasn't the one with mainstream appeal.
Also, Windows95 was some amazing technology. Sure, every geek in the world had and has good reason to hate it, as it was just so terrible to administer. But it was exactly the product needed to bridge the gap between the segmented memory, non-multi-tasking, no memory protection model that was the norm before it to the true 32-bit, flat memory model with process boundaries and pre-emptive multitasking world that only existed on servers at the time. It was such a crap OS to maintain and administer precisely because it could run freaking 16-bit device drivers written to a no-memory-protection world inside a 32-bit (relatively) modern kernel. There were better options, but none of them would run the existing world of DOS, too
People act like it's MS's monopolistic practices that they hate but seriously, it's the fact the we geeks collectively had to support Win95 that's the raw emotional core of the hate. And it won because it solved the right problem: it was backwards compatible instead of good.
What do you mean? Surely those Slashdot stories about government kill switches for smart phones have nothing at all to do with America! It's just a coincidence.
But if we can stave off the communism here, maybe it won't come to that.
You do realize the during the early industrial revolution people flocked to those jobs because they were so much better than what they had before, right?
Slashdot Mirror
but bills targeting (or benefiting) specific people/companies/tech/etc. are generally considered illegal no?
We have constitutional protection (pause for laughter) against Bills of Attainder - you can't write a law that targets a specific person or group for fines or other punishment. Justice in individual cases belongs in the judicial branch, not the legislative branch.
Of course, when the Congress passes a law specifically to take back 90% of bonuses paid to banking executives receiving bailouts during the crisis, no one objected, because we seem to care more about the emotion of the moment than slow-but-constant erosion of important limits on government power.
It's not about blame, it's about responsibility. When you can avoid people being killed by choosing a better time, place, or manner in making your point, that's a reasonable expectation. Conspiracy to commit murder is certainly a crime, and it doesn't matter whether it a friend or stranger that you convince to murder someone you don't like, it's still quite reasonable that it's illegal.
We're not talking about publication and censorship here. We're talking about telling people directly to go kill someone now, or indirectly with words that a reasonable person would expect to have the same result.
The illusion is that "what the tools can do" == "all that can be done",
Inciting to riot is basically a conspiracy charge, however it's a special one because it's being done in public and so violence could theoretically be prevented by law enforcement in some cases (though in practice I doubt it).
Some speech poses a clear and present danger of violence, when you have the attention of an angry crown. "That one over there, he don't look right to me, get him up against the wall!" Specific calls for immediate violence against available targets are really the only place where "prior restraint" makes sense.
I disagree strongly.
There are four good reasons to take a pay cut to switch jobs within a development/IT career when you're older:
1) Small companies trade pay for responsibility. You make less, but you're in charge of more. Short term, that's lose-lose, but in long term it can be vital to moving up the career ladder. For example, the path: "lead" at big company -> manager at small company -> manager at big company is often the fastest path. Same thing to move from a "some coding" job to a full-time coding job, or becoming an architect, or whatever.
2) Specific technical skills lose value over time. If you get too far behind what the market wants, accept that you will take a hit to modernize your skills.
3) You shouldn't expect to make more money just because you get older! For the first 10 years or so, your skills improve noticeably every year, so your pay should go up more than inflation. For the next 10 years: maybe. Improving your ability to contribute isn't just technical any more, and it can be hard to change the things about yourself that you need to, to have more technical influence and reach. But after that? 99% of us top out. Once you grow to your limits, you'll give up any raises (over inflation) whenever you change jobs, because your ability to contribute has plateaued and that's normal.
4) If you've been working as an engineer for 30 years and you still need the money, you're doing it wrong. At some point you'll be seeking interesting, challenging problems, and 20% pay more or less will be less important than that. Eventually you can afford to "follow your heart". Especially once the kids are gone.
It strongly leads you into one design pattern, which might not be a good one. For an expert who understands each approach on its merits, and is comfortable with the approach the UI builder uses for the task at had, it's not a problem. For the new programmer who hasn't really thought about it, it creates the illusion that there is only one way to do things.
For example, UI builders didn't used to give a way to "flow" certain design elements, wrapping them if the screen was narrow. Sometimes you want that behavior - but how do you discover it's possible if you've never thought about the work the UI builder hides from you. Another example is UI elements dynamically generated in response to user action - which can be a great tool for some cases, but if your world is limited to the toolbox the UI builder comes with, you won't have that tool.
To quote the man who invented the phrase "movie plot threat"
The 9/11 terrorists used small pointy things to take over airplanes, so we ban small pointy things from airplanes. Richard Reid tried to hide a bomb in his shoes, so now we all have to take off our shoes. Recently, the Department of Homeland Security said that it might relax airplane security rules. It's not that there's a lessened risk of shoes, or that small pointy things are suddenly less dangerous. It's that those movie plots no longer capture the imagination like they did in the months after 9/11, and everyone is beginning to see how silly (or pointless) they always were...
The problem with movie plot security is that it only works if we guess right. If we spend billions defending our subways, and the terrorists bomb a bus, we've wasted our money. To be sure, defending the subways makes commuting safer. But focusing on subways also has the effect of shifting attacks toward less-defended targets, and the result is that we're no safer overall.
Terrorists don't care if they blow up subways, buses, stadiums, theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, schools, churches, crowded markets or busy intersections. Reasonable arguments can be made that some targets are more attractive than others: airplanes because a small bomb can result in the death of everyone aboard, monuments because of their national significance, national events because of television coverage, and transportation because most people commute daily. But the United States is a big country; we can't defend everything.
for compilations made desk checking a vital step
Hah! Who else knows what "desk checking" is? Ahh, the bad old days ...
I think he's talking about UI development with drag-and-drop UI builders, a scary thing to mix with C++ now that I remember the bad old days.
There's a whole generation of coders now who "only know Java" and have never actually debugged through object code.
There's nothing wrong with goto in C code - it's really the cleanest approach to making sure you clean up everything that you allocated. Seeing it in more modern languages is a real warning sign, however.
VS makes it easy to build with the IDE, but it doesn't require it, and the easy way really doesn't scale to large projects. That being said, for anything .NET, MS has been moving away from offering a lightweight SDK toolkit for building, and I think you have to download the whole mess just to build .NET stuff these days. That's not really the IDE's fault, however.
It's one thing to know "hey, I should use a thread-safe dictionary class for this", it's another thing entirely to remember the many subtle difference between the standard library class for that in C# and Java.
Well, you don't need Global Entry, there's a program that just takes a criminal background check (but doesn't help with international travel). You just need a Known Traveler Number. So unless your "failure to declare" was actually felony smuggling, you should be good. Assuming, of course, that there's not someone with a similar-sounding name on the arbitraty No Fly List.
The purpose of any government agency is to do the job given to that agency
I admire your charming naivete. I hope life keeps treating you so well that you never develop my hardened cynicism.
As for the knife thing, how exactly do you know?
Well, I respect the opinions of the airline pilots I've discussed this with at length (while the hardened cockpit doors aren't perfect, they're enough), plus there have been a few incidents since 9/11 where passengers perceived a threat and "dogpiled" the supposed hijacker.
What about a plastic container carrying a biological weapon such as smallpox or a modified flu?
Now we're into movie plot threats. What if the terrorists are actually shape-shifting reptoid aliens, like the New Zealand Prime Minister or that Obama bodyguard? I can invent better stories than you, I think.
You do realize they more-or-less do that now, right?
If it was simple it'd be done.
Utterly false. The primary purpose of any government agency is to increase the reach and the budget of that agency. It is really that simple. Bomb sniffing dogs can find stuff "vacuum sealed" - you'd be amazed how few molecules a good scent hound needs. No one is going to hijack a plane with merely a sharp object while passengers still remember 9/11.
Plus the threat is minor: if we had the courage to simply continue business as usual when a plane blew up, they wouldn't even be terrorist targets: terrorists don't hate airplanes.
No, you could not run 16-bit DOS device drivers in OS/2. If wasn't application-layer backwards compatibility that mattered.
Yes, yes, but post-Windows-7 is not what TFA is about. That's no "evil monopolistic practices" any more that Unity is (which fucks your eyeballs with a cactus dipped in tabasco sauce). Anyhow, they fired the CEO and removed the VP in charge of Windows after Metro blew up - what more can you ask? Give em time to correct now that they've seen the error of their ways.
Over half of Americans own stock now. Yes, there's a serious political corruption problem, nearly as bad as the 1880s, but we got through that and we'll get through this. Meanwhile, the "owning class" is gradually becoming "most people".
Since no one has mentioned it: Word was awesome. I remember when people bought Macs (classic) to run Word. For all the geek love for WordPerfect, it wasn't the one with mainstream appeal.
Also, Windows95 was some amazing technology. Sure, every geek in the world had and has good reason to hate it, as it was just so terrible to administer. But it was exactly the product needed to bridge the gap between the segmented memory, non-multi-tasking, no memory protection model that was the norm before it to the true 32-bit, flat memory model with process boundaries and pre-emptive multitasking world that only existed on servers at the time. It was such a crap OS to maintain and administer precisely because it could run freaking 16-bit device drivers written to a no-memory-protection world inside a 32-bit (relatively) modern kernel. There were better options, but none of them would run the existing world of DOS, too
People act like it's MS's monopolistic practices that they hate but seriously, it's the fact the we geeks collectively had to support Win95 that's the raw emotional core of the hate. And it won because it solved the right problem: it was backwards compatible instead of good.
I wish a was more optimistic about America being on the same path, if at a slower pace. Still, we have time left to choose a different way.
When you nationalize the primary industries of your nation, congrats, you're a communist state. Economic collapse is now just a matter of time.
What do you mean? Surely those Slashdot stories about government kill switches for smart phones have nothing at all to do with America! It's just a coincidence.
But if we can stave off the communism here, maybe it won't come to that.
You do realize the during the early industrial revolution people flocked to those jobs because they were so much better than what they had before, right?