Wiretapping laws are usually written fairly loosely. It made sense when the only applicable situation was telephone wire tapping. But now we have these portable things that can record anything anywhere. The wording of the law is broad enough that you could charge someone with "wiretapping" even when there is no wire to tap.
You act in a way that violates a badly worded law, you get charged with whatever the law says the crime is called.
Kinda like going to a flea market and buying some good deals, then the cops come looking for you because the items were stolen. You can be charged with "receiving stolen property" even though what you actually did was "buy stuff from a flea market, legitimately".
Whether you get out of it is up to the judicial system, but what you get charged with is up to the executive branch, based on what the legislators called it when they wrote the law.
I'm trying. I got an EVO 3D. I take the most boring 3D pictures/movies you have ever seen, but I'll have some beter stuff soon. The phone shows the scene as 3D, so I know what it will look like, and doesn't require glasses. It does have a narrow viewing angle, so two people can't look at the same time.
I got it mostly because it was free after corporate discounts, porting rebate, instant rebate. I could have gotten the other EVO with the slide out keyboard, but I don't text enough to make it worthwhile.
Anyway, yes it's gimmicky, but I'll figure out what I like in 3D and what doesn't work. I have piles of red/blue glasses from various places, and magenta/green from the Coraline DVD, so I can post-process to match any situation. And if you hate yourself you can do side by side Right-Left on a widescreen TV (cross your eyes to get the effect). One day I'll have dual polarized projectors so I can watch my nonexistent grandkids blow out their candles on my wall, in glorious 3D.
I'm not waiting for someone else to make the content, I'm making it myself. And yes, it will be terrible at first, but it will be important to me.
I leave sites when they require JS, and follow up by sending them a screenshot of me placing an order on a competitor's web site (with certain identifying information blanked out).
Depending on their site design, I also point out how they spent more effort blocking script-less usage than it would have taken to have a graceful fallback. That's not always the case, but it helps.
I never get a reply, but I don't expect one either.
Who is the audience? What should they learn? What should they not learn? I don't think you answered these questions first.
Being able to put javascript: code in the address bar and pull out stuff like all of the links in the page is pretty cool. You don't even need a compiler, web page, or save a file. Use the address bar, and if Firefox then the error console too. Change pages, add stylesheets, learn Greasemonkey. jQuery has some interesting additions as well, interesting syntax to learn. Given how much programming involves the web, I don't see any reason not to learn it first.
anyone remember the Publish 27 Commando PvP of pointing the heavy weapon down, holding down the fire button, and then running at the person you wanted to kill?
What people forget about regarding speed traps is, they do give the opportunity to pull someone over and run their plates and license. To the police force, it makes sense that people who commit crimes are going to speed. Traffic duty is essentially a "search everyone you possibly can" exercise.
I'm not defending it, especially since so many laws are dependent on what the officer thinks smells like alcohol or whatever else. A speeding ticket quickly turns into a car search, and you get an arrest out of it.
I got pulled over for speeding and saw it firsthand - when I said no to a search, the officer concluded I had something to hide, and used that as grounds to search the car. They are taught to do that, every opportunity to look at everything you do, and speed traps are pretty much the easiest way to get someone clearly guilty of at least one offense, so you can look for more.
It's much worse looked at this way than as "for the money"
I've never understood this. If you're not reading code, you're missing probably the greatest learning opportunity there is in the field. Dry examples or tutorials rarely show complex use cases, and most examples I've seen use poor style, or are completely insecure. Reading other people's code gives you a real-world, (hopefully) working example. And if it's something you never had to do, or never thought of doing, you might learn something.
What code reviews miss is, only the coder gave real thought to the solution / implementation. Code reviews can miss very important things, because the readers are not (always) considering the same things the author did.
I see generalizations all over the place when it really depends on the people. When you have a weak link, code reviews catch problems. But only if you have someone good enough to *read* code, if not write it. When you have an all-star team, everyone gets to bring the others up to speed on the code changes, but an all-star team also should be able to read the code for themselves without hand-holding.
Instead of code reviews, I'm developing the idea that two people should write code independently, and then review each other's results. What one person misses might be found with another take on the implementation. Even if they come up with the same thing, you've validated that the solution appears to be correct.
This is not team programming, it is not code review, it is duplication of effort, which is expensive. But if you want good results, expensive once is better than cheap twice or more. This eliminates the major issues behind code reviews:
1) Code writers are not always good readers 2) A given solution may miss edge cases 3) Reviewers don't dedicate as much thought as writers
"McDonald's Hamburgers" is a trademark (#1179646) but that's the two words together. An attempt was made on "cheeseburger" but it's not clear what happened.
"Expectation of privacy" is not the only issue surrounding unreasonable searches. This case is not purely about the expectation of privacy.
As long as I'm on the subject though, I do believe that there is a certain expectation of privacy, even in public. Every cheating spouse expects to get away with their dalliance by a form of "security through obscurity", which would fall apart under constant GPS surveillance. Why is there a strong correlation between your location and this other person Thursday mornings? I did not expect you do know that.
If the government can record where you go, and match it to place names, and even correlate other people's locations, they can put together a snapshot of everything you're doing. Who you meet with could reveal connections you didn't even know about yourself.
If they have enough on you to get a warrant for this, I have no problem. But if they just want to dig through minutae looking for something to justify a warrant, that's unreasonable.
Look at this another way. I used to work with a guy I met while teaching, long time ago. He got his job through someone I already worked with, and was friends with. As it turns out, he's also a drug dealer, or was at the time. I called him a few times, stopped by his house a few times building an arcade cabinet. That seems like enough evidence to get me a warrantless GPS, to get evidence needed to bust down my door looking for drugs. If they don't have enough for a real warrant, trying to get it via GPS is, yes, unreasonable.
It sounds to me like they had enough on this guy and just didn't bother getting the warrant, but would have been able to if they tried. Maybe fail once and lean on the next judge so it looks good on paper, but get the warrant. Anything else is unreasonable.
If you're in public and every second of what you're doing is recorded for later evidence, is that unreasonable? It's Orwellian, and the whole point of the book 1984 was to warn people. The UK government, and US is trying to catch up, is using it as a blueprint. If it's not unreasonable, what was 1984 about?
In general, people will want clocks that pretty much point to the minute at which the next television show will appear. They should therefore synced instead to the broadcast signal time. Keeping your DVR and wall clock in sync with the broadcasting stations reduces the possibility of DVR drift, where you miss the first or last few seconds of a show, or reality drift where you turn the tv on a few seconds late.
Could you file some bug reports, or send some patches? It seems to be open source, so changing the implementation without altering the interface should benefit everyone. I think we'd all be thankful for your efforts.
Odd, I rather enjoyed that. It felt tingly for a bit, although at the time I didn't associate it with being late on a dose. And the vivid dreams - I remember when the hand of God (bright orange and obviously not corporeal) reached down and fed my friend's goldfish.
You can suffer a little every day, or you can get off of it. You got two choices. One, take a dose 1 extra hour apart every week, so if it's 6 hours then do 7 for a week, 8 the next, and so on, or 10 minutes per does, or something. Or, expect you'll feel bad and drop your dosage once a week. Or find a different doctor whoe only purpose is to get you off of it.
Bottom line, inform your doctor you want help getting off of it as quickly as possible and if s/he doesn't figure it out, either you or another professional will. Fortunately, I haven't felt like I needed to get back to it or anything like it since then, well over 5 years ago, so maybe it did help.
You and the two replies beneath you are probably missing good candidates that way. Always talk to the candidate in these cases.
He may not be interested in learning at school, but would prefer to read and explore on his own. Someone looking for shortcuts may be exactly the kind of person who can find more efficient ways to do things. If he picks up quickly, he'd be the perfect candidate for a position with advancement opportunities.
You've all three changed "I want to focus on what I like" into "I refuse to spend time on anything else."
The best approach with someone like this is to focus on things like these in the interview:
We have mandatory hours of training every year, and there's only so much in your field available. What else might you turn to in order to fill out those required hours?
All employees are required to take certain company-wide training, like ethics, harrassment in the workplace, and maybe safety. Can you explain to me how knowing these things, which aren't in your field, contributes to both your own success and the company's?
Also maybe start a discussion on applied mathematics, which is basically what most programming is, at its core, once you get past the interface. Things like the Antikythera mechanism (the oldest calculator, and history), Ptolemaic model (geometry, and astronomy), Golden Ratio (architecture and aesthetics mostly, applicable to design work and financial modeling). And it never hurts to bring up Plato's Republic, in which people do the work they are best suited for (the CEO being the Philoshoper-King), with application to career advancement.
If the person you are interviewing shows no interest or cannot intelligently discuss, and doesn't even ask questions, they may be a genuine one-trick pony that you don't want working for you. But they may learn about these things along the way, and you have a genuine jewel-in-the-rough on your hands.
My question to you is, how much effort do you put in to get the best candidates? It sounds like I would not want to work for any of you, because you filter out some of the best and brightest based on assumptions, or as a shortcut to finding someone acceptable.
Videos and music do it the same way anything else does. A simple malformed data packet, buffer overflow, and you're compromised. Most players do a good job santiy-checking buffers, but the iPod was compromised.
Also, the old trick of having an executable with the filename "Bandname Songname.mp3.exe" and the icon set to WMP's MP3 icon would fool most folks. Drag-and-drop would give just an error message, but double-clicking would get you the UAC "Are you sure you want to run this?" to which people say yes (or turn it off) and it runs. That's more likely what GP was talking about. Download something that looks promising, and you can see it's suspicious so you delete it, annoyed and sick of it.
"Go download the codec is popular", as well as the WMA popups about needing to unlock the DRM, although I think WMA DRM hole has been fixed for a while.
BT viruses do work on the honor system - you download piles of stuff, make one mistake, and you have virus. But people continue to fall for it. There are viruses still circulating 5 years after being discovered. People have not updated their signatures, or disabled antivirus completely. These people can figure out hulu, the same way they get infected - click everything you can find and say OK.
I agree, but you're horribly misguided. FBI does not know who is doing what, or which servers host which data. They are not going to send a letter looking for the hosted clients' data, since the host could be the one with the website they are after.
In other words, the host is a suspect, and until they figure all that out, everyone hosted there is a suspect as well. Except that they don't care who is a suspect, they just know they want the data, so everyone's data goes out the door.
You have a warrant to sieze information, then you don't know what information to request specifically (racks 1-2 out of 4 is not something you can know in advance).
Yes it is disruptive, so do yourself a favor when getting a hosting company. Look for one that specifically can restore within a reasonable timeframe from offsite backup, or hosts in multiple companies. That's the only way out of this. Paying the lowest price possible means you're wide open to this, and filing a lawsuit against the government when your small business is dead is not going to help.
Pretty funny, considering I never was "taught" C++, I learned to program by reading source code. Eventually I was able to tell good code from bad, and got better. At this point, documentation just slows me down and I dive into the code. C/C++/C#/JavaScript/Java/SQL/whatever.
People need to consider this like any other field. If you can't understand what others in the field are writing, and especially if you don't read what others are writing, you need practice reading.
*(Unless you're talking about PERL, which was designed to be write-only, written in ink on unseekable media. If the program doesn't work, start over I think is what Larry recommends)
If you're in it for the lulz, can you think of anything more hilarious than attacking the big guys, and arbitrarily choosing one of the smaller players to defend?
That's funny to me. And yes, they are trolling. They might have been the attackers behind Sega, making it all the more hilarious. It's not supposed to make sense. Making sense of it screws up the whole plan.
(Argue about Sega being smaller all you want - they used to make hardware, now they don't)
Remember when Britain would ask citizens of the colonies to house British soldiers, and soldiers could search houses at any time to ensure the colonists were not up to something the Crown would disapprove of?
Then we fought them off, using guerrilla warfare compared to their organized military style, and gained our own independence?
And we set up rules about how we would be governed, and what the governmnet specifically could not do, based on our experience with the British government doing things we didn't like?
Well, fuck all that because now the Us of A can do whatever it likes, whenever it likes, to whomever it likes. Just ask Jose Padilla. Nearly al of the bill of rights are neutered or plain old cancelled. The only one clearly standing is separation of church and state, unless you are a Republican, so that's about 50% gone.
The US government now exists to perpetuate itself, not to govern the people for, by, and of the people. Transparency is gone, accountability is gone, and along with them your guaranteed rights. There is no America, only the same policies that brought down every regime too large for its own good. And we're next.
Every time I hit a blog that links to an article, I keep advertising disabled on slashdot.
I have good enough karma to check the "disable advertising" box, I just browse without being logged in and keep noscript enabled.
I want information, and I am willing and capable of paying for it. But crap like this means I not only don't pay you, I load the page and don't load advertising for the article. Then I spend slashdot resources bitching about crapticles. Great business model.
It's not like the algorithm is going to say "well, I'm only going to compare this face to faces in your group of friends".
And you know this because you wrote the algorithm? The intent is to make tagging your friends easier. I find it hard to believe it would compare every user it has rather than just the subset which are your friends.
It could certainly be applied in the way you think it is, and might be in the future, but you can't put an assertion like that one out here as support for your paranoia. Especially when it is counter-intuitive and ignores the purpose of the feature.
Here follows my clear mistake. Like a professor correcting a student, I answered,
Justice, we are not making an empirical claim at all. Nothing in our copyright clause claim hangs upon the empirical assertion about impeding progress. Our only argument is, this is a structural limit necessary to assure that what would be an effectively perpetual term not be permitted under the copyright laws.
That was a correct answer, but it wasn't the right answer. The right answer was to say that there was an obvious and profound harm. Any number of briefs had been written about it. Kennedy wanted to hear it. And here was where Don Ayer's advice should have mattered. This was a softball; my answer was a swing and a miss.
Personally, I think this would be more interestingly argued as an unconstitutional taking from the public without just compensation in violation of the fifth amendment.
Especially since that is an argument as to why we can't un-do the recent copyright extensions. They have already been granted, and you can't take stuff away. With this argument, if the extensions stay then the public domain status also stays. Reinstating the copyright was an unconstitutional taking that has to be reversed.
Or, we could put stuff back into copyright, and remove the copyright term extensions. But I doubt this would stand up.
Slashdot Mirror
Wiretapping laws are usually written fairly loosely. It made sense when the only applicable situation was telephone wire tapping. But now we have these portable things that can record anything anywhere. The wording of the law is broad enough that you could charge someone with "wiretapping" even when there is no wire to tap.
You act in a way that violates a badly worded law, you get charged with whatever the law says the crime is called.
Kinda like going to a flea market and buying some good deals, then the cops come looking for you because the items were stolen. You can be charged with "receiving stolen property" even though what you actually did was "buy stuff from a flea market, legitimately".
Whether you get out of it is up to the judicial system, but what you get charged with is up to the executive branch, based on what the legislators called it when they wrote the law.
I'm trying. I got an EVO 3D. I take the most boring 3D pictures/movies you have ever seen, but I'll have some beter stuff soon. The phone shows the scene as 3D, so I know what it will look like, and doesn't require glasses. It does have a narrow viewing angle, so two people can't look at the same time.
I got it mostly because it was free after corporate discounts, porting rebate, instant rebate. I could have gotten the other EVO with the slide out keyboard, but I don't text enough to make it worthwhile.
Anyway, yes it's gimmicky, but I'll figure out what I like in 3D and what doesn't work. I have piles of red/blue glasses from various places, and magenta/green from the Coraline DVD, so I can post-process to match any situation. And if you hate yourself you can do side by side Right-Left on a widescreen TV (cross your eyes to get the effect). One day I'll have dual polarized projectors so I can watch my nonexistent grandkids blow out their candles on my wall, in glorious 3D.
I'm not waiting for someone else to make the content, I'm making it myself. And yes, it will be terrible at first, but it will be important to me.
I leave sites when they require JS, and follow up by sending them a screenshot of me placing an order on a competitor's web site (with certain identifying information blanked out).
Depending on their site design, I also point out how they spent more effort blocking script-less usage than it would have taken to have a graceful fallback. That's not always the case, but it helps.
I never get a reply, but I don't expect one either.
Sure, buy a lot of Kindles and change pages twice a year. A two-page PDF with one black and one blank page will do the trick.
A Duck!
Who is the audience? What should they learn? What should they not learn? I don't think you answered these questions first.
Being able to put javascript: code in the address bar and pull out stuff like all of the links in the page is pretty cool. You don't even need a compiler, web page, or save a file. Use the address bar, and if Firefox then the error console too. Change pages, add stylesheets, learn Greasemonkey. jQuery has some interesting additions as well, interesting syntax to learn. Given how much programming involves the web, I don't see any reason not to learn it first.
No, because I never played it. Please, go on.
What people forget about regarding speed traps is, they do give the opportunity to pull someone over and run their plates and license. To the police force, it makes sense that people who commit crimes are going to speed. Traffic duty is essentially a "search everyone you possibly can" exercise.
I'm not defending it, especially since so many laws are dependent on what the officer thinks smells like alcohol or whatever else. A speeding ticket quickly turns into a car search, and you get an arrest out of it.
I got pulled over for speeding and saw it firsthand - when I said no to a search, the officer concluded I had something to hide, and used that as grounds to search the car. They are taught to do that, every opportunity to look at everything you do, and speed traps are pretty much the easiest way to get someone clearly guilty of at least one offense, so you can look for more.
It's much worse looked at this way than as "for the money"
I've never understood this. If you're not reading code, you're missing probably the greatest learning opportunity there is in the field. Dry examples or tutorials rarely show complex use cases, and most examples I've seen use poor style, or are completely insecure. Reading other people's code gives you a real-world, (hopefully) working example. And if it's something you never had to do, or never thought of doing, you might learn something.
What code reviews miss is, only the coder gave real thought to the solution / implementation. Code reviews can miss very important things, because the readers are not (always) considering the same things the author did.
I see generalizations all over the place when it really depends on the people. When you have a weak link, code reviews catch problems. But only if you have someone good enough to *read* code, if not write it. When you have an all-star team, everyone gets to bring the others up to speed on the code changes, but an all-star team also should be able to read the code for themselves without hand-holding.
Instead of code reviews, I'm developing the idea that two people should write code independently, and then review each other's results. What one person misses might be found with another take on the implementation. Even if they come up with the same thing, you've validated that the solution appears to be correct.
This is not team programming, it is not code review, it is duplication of effort, which is expensive. But if you want good results, expensive once is better than cheap twice or more. This eliminates the major issues behind code reviews:
1) Code writers are not always good readers
2) A given solution may miss edge cases
3) Reviewers don't dedicate as much thought as writers
"McDonald's Hamburgers" is a trademark (#1179646) but that's the two words together. An attempt was made on "cheeseburger" but it's not clear what happened.
"Expectation of privacy" is not the only issue surrounding unreasonable searches. This case is not purely about the expectation of privacy.
As long as I'm on the subject though, I do believe that there is a certain expectation of privacy, even in public. Every cheating spouse expects to get away with their dalliance by a form of "security through obscurity", which would fall apart under constant GPS surveillance. Why is there a strong correlation between your location and this other person Thursday mornings? I did not expect you do know that.
If the government can record where you go, and match it to place names, and even correlate other people's locations, they can put together a snapshot of everything you're doing. Who you meet with could reveal connections you didn't even know about yourself.
If they have enough on you to get a warrant for this, I have no problem. But if they just want to dig through minutae looking for something to justify a warrant, that's unreasonable.
Look at this another way. I used to work with a guy I met while teaching, long time ago. He got his job through someone I already worked with, and was friends with. As it turns out, he's also a drug dealer, or was at the time. I called him a few times, stopped by his house a few times building an arcade cabinet. That seems like enough evidence to get me a warrantless GPS, to get evidence needed to bust down my door looking for drugs. If they don't have enough for a real warrant, trying to get it via GPS is, yes, unreasonable.
It sounds to me like they had enough on this guy and just didn't bother getting the warrant, but would have been able to if they tried. Maybe fail once and lean on the next judge so it looks good on paper, but get the warrant. Anything else is unreasonable.
If you're in public and every second of what you're doing is recorded for later evidence, is that unreasonable? It's Orwellian, and the whole point of the book 1984 was to warn people. The UK government, and US is trying to catch up, is using it as a blueprint. If it's not unreasonable, what was 1984 about?
In general, people will want clocks that pretty much point to the minute at which the next television show will appear. They should therefore synced instead to the broadcast signal time. Keeping your DVR and wall clock in sync with the broadcasting stations reduces the possibility of DVR drift, where you miss the first or last few seconds of a show, or reality drift where you turn the tv on a few seconds late.
Could you file some bug reports, or send some patches? It seems to be open source, so changing the implementation without altering the interface should benefit everyone. I think we'd all be thankful for your efforts.
http://bugzilla.libsdl.org/
It's possible that the Windows implementation people are not experts at optimization, and might appreciate your tips.
Odd, I rather enjoyed that. It felt tingly for a bit, although at the time I didn't associate it with being late on a dose. And the vivid dreams - I remember when the hand of God (bright orange and obviously not corporeal) reached down and fed my friend's goldfish.
You can suffer a little every day, or you can get off of it. You got two choices. One, take a dose 1 extra hour apart every week, so if it's 6 hours then do 7 for a week, 8 the next, and so on, or 10 minutes per does, or something. Or, expect you'll feel bad and drop your dosage once a week. Or find a different doctor whoe only purpose is to get you off of it.
Bottom line, inform your doctor you want help getting off of it as quickly as possible and if s/he doesn't figure it out, either you or another professional will. Fortunately, I haven't felt like I needed to get back to it or anything like it since then, well over 5 years ago, so maybe it did help.
You and the two replies beneath you are probably missing good candidates that way. Always talk to the candidate in these cases.
He may not be interested in learning at school, but would prefer to read and explore on his own. Someone looking for shortcuts may be exactly the kind of person who can find more efficient ways to do things. If he picks up quickly, he'd be the perfect candidate for a position with advancement opportunities.
You've all three changed "I want to focus on what I like" into "I refuse to spend time on anything else."
The best approach with someone like this is to focus on things like these in the interview:
We have mandatory hours of training every year, and there's only so much in your field available. What else might you turn to in order to fill out those required hours?
All employees are required to take certain company-wide training, like ethics, harrassment in the workplace, and maybe safety. Can you explain to me how knowing these things, which aren't in your field, contributes to both your own success and the company's?
Also maybe start a discussion on applied mathematics, which is basically what most programming is, at its core, once you get past the interface. Things like the Antikythera mechanism (the oldest calculator, and history), Ptolemaic model (geometry, and astronomy), Golden Ratio (architecture and aesthetics mostly, applicable to design work and financial modeling). And it never hurts to bring up Plato's Republic, in which people do the work they are best suited for (the CEO being the Philoshoper-King), with application to career advancement.
If the person you are interviewing shows no interest or cannot intelligently discuss, and doesn't even ask questions, they may be a genuine one-trick pony that you don't want working for you. But they may learn about these things along the way, and you have a genuine jewel-in-the-rough on your hands.
My question to you is, how much effort do you put in to get the best candidates? It sounds like I would not want to work for any of you, because you filter out some of the best and brightest based on assumptions, or as a shortcut to finding someone acceptable.
Videos and music do it the same way anything else does. A simple malformed data packet, buffer overflow, and you're compromised. Most players do a good job santiy-checking buffers, but the iPod was compromised.
http://bilb02.livejournal.com/373.html
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/823
Also, the old trick of having an executable with the filename "Bandname Songname.mp3.exe" and the icon set to WMP's MP3 icon would fool most folks. Drag-and-drop would give just an error message, but double-clicking would get you the UAC "Are you sure you want to run this?" to which people say yes (or turn it off) and it runs. That's more likely what GP was talking about. Download something that looks promising, and you can see it's suspicious so you delete it, annoyed and sick of it.
"Go download the codec is popular", as well as the WMA popups about needing to unlock the DRM, although I think WMA DRM hole has been fixed for a while.
BT viruses do work on the honor system - you download piles of stuff, make one mistake, and you have virus. But people continue to fall for it. There are viruses still circulating 5 years after being discovered. People have not updated their signatures, or disabled antivirus completely. These people can figure out hulu, the same way they get infected - click everything you can find and say OK.
I agree, but you're horribly misguided. FBI does not know who is doing what, or which servers host which data. They are not going to send a letter looking for the hosted clients' data, since the host could be the one with the website they are after.
In other words, the host is a suspect, and until they figure all that out, everyone hosted there is a suspect as well. Except that they don't care who is a suspect, they just know they want the data, so everyone's data goes out the door.
You have a warrant to sieze information, then you don't know what information to request specifically (racks 1-2 out of 4 is not something you can know in advance).
Yes it is disruptive, so do yourself a favor when getting a hosting company. Look for one that specifically can restore within a reasonable timeframe from offsite backup, or hosts in multiple companies. That's the only way out of this. Paying the lowest price possible means you're wide open to this, and filing a lawsuit against the government when your small business is dead is not going to help.
Pretty funny, considering I never was "taught" C++, I learned to program by reading source code. Eventually I was able to tell good code from bad, and got better. At this point, documentation just slows me down and I dive into the code. C/C++/C#/JavaScript/Java/SQL/whatever.
People need to consider this like any other field. If you can't understand what others in the field are writing, and especially if you don't read what others are writing, you need practice reading.
*(Unless you're talking about PERL, which was designed to be write-only, written in ink on unseekable media. If the program doesn't work, start over I think is what Larry recommends)
If you're in it for the lulz, can you think of anything more hilarious than attacking the big guys, and arbitrarily choosing one of the smaller players to defend?
That's funny to me. And yes, they are trolling. They might have been the attackers behind Sega, making it all the more hilarious. It's not supposed to make sense. Making sense of it screws up the whole plan.
(Argue about Sega being smaller all you want - they used to make hardware, now they don't)
Remember when Britain would ask citizens of the colonies to house British soldiers, and soldiers could search houses at any time to ensure the colonists were not up to something the Crown would disapprove of?
Then we fought them off, using guerrilla warfare compared to their organized military style, and gained our own independence?
And we set up rules about how we would be governed, and what the governmnet specifically could not do, based on our experience with the British government doing things we didn't like?
Well, fuck all that because now the Us of A can do whatever it likes, whenever it likes, to whomever it likes. Just ask Jose Padilla. Nearly al of the bill of rights are neutered or plain old cancelled. The only one clearly standing is separation of church and state, unless you are a Republican, so that's about 50% gone.
The US government now exists to perpetuate itself, not to govern the people for, by, and of the people. Transparency is gone, accountability is gone, and along with them your guaranteed rights. There is no America, only the same policies that brought down every regime too large for its own good. And we're next.
Every time I hit a blog that links to an article, I keep advertising disabled on slashdot.
I have good enough karma to check the "disable advertising" box, I just browse without being logged in and keep noscript enabled.
I want information, and I am willing and capable of paying for it. But crap like this means I not only don't pay you, I load the page and don't load advertising for the article. Then I spend slashdot resources bitching about crapticles. Great business model.
And you know this because you wrote the algorithm? The intent is to make tagging your friends easier. I find it hard to believe it would compare every user it has rather than just the subset which are your friends.
It could certainly be applied in the way you think it is, and might be in the future, but you can't put an assertion like that one out here as support for your paranoia. Especially when it is counter-intuitive and ignores the purpose of the feature.
http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_lessig_marapr04.msp
Especially since that is an argument as to why we can't un-do the recent copyright extensions. They have already been granted, and you can't take stuff away. With this argument, if the extensions stay then the public domain status also stays. Reinstating the copyright was an unconstitutional taking that has to be reversed.
Or, we could put stuff back into copyright, and remove the copyright term extensions. But I doubt this would stand up.