No. If you roll a six-sided die and you roll five 1s in a row, what's the odds that the sixth roll you make will be a 1? 1 in 6. What you're doing here is called the Gambler's Fallacy.
In fact, the chance it will glide safely past us is 99.99998%
Since the odds of any asteroid of a city-destroying size or larger only hit the Earth every 5,000 years or so... this particular asteroid's odds are 36.5 times better than the average one's.
Friendly bit of free advice: in the future, when someone corrects a false statement you've made, try saying, "thank you, I didn't know that until now," rather than calling them a troll. It will increase your credibility rather than destroying it.
Friendly bit of free advice: In the future, when you're a total condescending shitbag, don't expect someone to be thankful. Because nobody gives a fuck about your credibility once you've disrespected someone who is trying to do good: And explaining complex topics in simple ways that people can relate to is a lot more good than your post, however detailed and correct, ever could have accomplished.
But then, what else can be expected from someone who has spent a career shovelling bullshit around and rationalizing the most idiotic things because "it was the law". The level of intellectual masturbation you lawyer-types engage in regularily causes the section of the brain responsible for empathy and simplicity to simply shrivel up and drop off.
and comes free with Windows. What other game has you endlessly clicking on things, hoping that something will do... anything.
You must have been one of those people who were very bad at reasoning out word puzzles. Random clicking was reserved for when you got stuck because the puzzle made no sense... and back when Myst came out, googling "walk through" wasn't much help... possibly because neither Google nor walk-throughs existed back then. That is not how the game is supposed to be played. And considering that this new game would be using the Unreal 4 engine, one can assume that instead of loading up a pile of CDs worth of bitmaps (because 3D rendering was in it's utter infancy back then) with clickable regions to string together a narrative, we'll now have an interactive polygon-based world where the triggers are a bit more obvious and intuitive.
Don't crap on a game because it hasn't aged well... it was a marvel of narrative and immersive gaming when it debuted, and some would argue games today still lack the substance and storytelling that Myst enjoyed, preferring instead to focus on polygon count and realistic explosions over plot.
Do you have an citation for this alleged "bench rule multiplier"? In all my years of IP practice - and yes, IAAL - I have never encountered such a thing. Did you pull it from a news article, or a copy of some local district rules, or possibly your ass?
I was attempting to simplify shit that's so complex that even lawyers like yourself routinely get lost in it in a way that a layperson could understand. You'll forgive me if I don't vomit up a twenty page legal brief on the subject, given that the audience here does not consist entirely of people who have been through law school. I thought that would be plainly obvious to everyone, but I didn't consider that I might be dealing with a lawyer who makes a living off making things unnecessarily complex, and that attempting to explain these self-induced complexities in simpler terms might cause him to shit a massive brick of text on an internet forum.
The shutdown wasn't really a big deal, sure, but if the US had defaulted on its debt, that would have been catastrophic.
No, it was a big deal. But it wasn't catastrophic, and neither would us defaulting. Because all that means is our credit rating would be downgraded and so we'd have to borrow at a somewhat higher rate. Would this be a problem? Yes. Would it lead to the death of America? No. Catastrophic means unrecoverable to most people. It means a one way trip to fucking doomsday. This isn't that.
But go on thinking that, tin foil hat man, if it helps you stay awake at night. -_- It would not trigger another great depression. It wouldn't be the end of life as we know it. None of these things would happen. And it's not me saying that, it's the Federal Reserve saying that. The very people who oversee the debt.
Their take on it? "Failure of the government to pay its bills could undermine world confidence in the U.S. dollar, and in the extreme could cause a global financial panic." (emphasis mine). Am I saying the default wouldn't be a crisis? No. But to call it catastrophic is just tin foil hat brigade.
If Congress had failed to reach a deal and the U.S. was unable to pay its bills, the results might have been catastrophic, eclipsing the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers five years ago, the domino that could trigger the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression."
Someone's been watching too much "news". The results wouldn't be catastrophic. They'd be annoying. Like everything else the government has done over the past decade. Catastrophic is the entire government collapses, food shortages and water become scarce, and people start killing one another in open anarchy.
Words. They mean shit, Slashdot. Choose them carefully.
Actually, this isn't just the judge. In Capitol v. Thomas, a jury repeatedly awarded more than the judge(s) did in every trial along the way. Because it's not just about how much damage you caused, but how much deterrent value a higher award brings. There were several juries, and they also awarded wildly different amounts; Each time the judge reduced it post-trial.
It can be inferred from this that when ordinary people review these cases, they judge them much more harshly than the judge does. This whole 'discretion' thing you're on about is not only very likely in play here, it's probably more generous than the average person would be given the facts of the case.
Lastly, my statements regarding statutory damages is separate from my quoted figure of $150,000. I said God kills $150,000 worth of kittens. Depending on how much you think God likes kittens, this is either a lotta kittens, or none. Statutory damages are in a range of, as you so nicely quoted, go from $750 to $30,000 -- the judge can't pick a number outside of those ranges. And in the case of 17 USC 504(c), you only quoted part of it.
$750-30,000 is the figure quoted for infringement period. In other words, knowledge or no knowledge, that's how much you're getting slapped with. For this portion, the judge doesn't consider motive -- only and solely the actual value of the work. Should the court find you did so wilfully, they can then go above that previously-calculated amount. Which is why sharing mixes of the boy band in your neighbor's garage is going to get you less of a fine than sharing Michael Jackson's collected works (there's no accounting for taste either in law, unfortunately!).
You've completely misread how the law is actually interpreted. The judge bases the award on the value of the work, not the person's culpability. The culpability is what drives the award upwards. So for example, if the work has a calculated value of $5,000 and the court doesn't feel the infringement was intentional, it stays at $5,000 per work. But if it was deliberate, then they will multiply that by an arbitrary figure, based on how deliberate the judge feels the action was. This new figure caps at $150,000 per infringement. Also not quoted was the bench rules, which vary by each court, and would include how this 'arbitrary' math should be done; California appeals court may say you multiply by a value of 10 to 50... Federal court, maybe 50 to 5 billion. Without a copy of the bench rules, it's difficult to say how strongly the judge felt about your culpability.
Chances are that if YOU personally are injured that you will never see anything close to an equitable judgement.
That's mostly because most judgements aren't against an individual but an insurance company acting on behalf of that individual. Corporations are trying to limit liability for obvious reasons -- sometimes the damage can be so enormous and terrifying to behold that juries will throw millions of dollars out of pity and disgust. Juries don't often award large piles of cash to victims when it is a person versus a person, but against a corporation they are vastly more willing to hand out large judgements.
Justice, contrary to popular belief, isn't blind: It knows when you have money. And the more you have, the more you can expect to lose, regardless of the nature of the civil or criminal act that brought you into court. Is that fair? Maybe.
These absurd COPYRIGHT verdicts are due to statutory damages laws that have no relation whatsoever to any actual real damages. They are in fact a blatant short cut around proving actual damages. They have little in common with some prole being crippled. A crippled prole has to show real damages.
That's not a terribly helpful statement when it comes to answering the question What do we need to do to fix the problem? And to answer that, we must first understand why it got to this point. There are several things that go into a damage award;
First is the actual, literal, damage. Sometimes this can be calculated directly; If I smash your mailbox, the replacement cost is very easy to figure out. But sometimes, the damage is more abstract -- if I put up posters in the neighborhood where you life claiming you're a rapist that "got off on a technicality" and warn parents not to let their children near you, it's hard to calculate in dollars the damage to your reputation. Your therapy bills are an obvious place to start, but the problem here is that some people need it, some people don't. Should you be paid less, as the victim, because you're more resiliant to harm? So in these less concrete examples, the courts go off of guidelines that are based on what the average is. Remember that the point of a civil or criminal action is to "make the victim whole again". This is all an attempt to calculate what it would take to get back to where you were before. It is sometimes clear-cut, but other times anything but.
Next, there's punitive damages. This is often based on the perpetrator's culpability for the act. If you were driving through a hail storm very slowly and carefully, and hit a patch of ice on a corner, left the road, and hit someone on the sidewalk... that's a bona fide accident. You didn't want to hit them, and you couldn't have reasonably been expected to have known the road would be slippery there -- and you were driving slowly due to poor conditions. In cases like this, there probably won't be any punitive damages. On the other hand, if you were piss drunk, blew the stop light, and slammed into the person... the result might be the same, but your state of mind was not. This is usually where juries award big fat paychecks and/or jail time.
Third, there's tort, or contract damages. This is where the contract lays out the terms of the exchange, and the penalties if you don't comply. A star actor that decides to quit mid-season is going to royally fuck a lot of people: Tort damages aren't about calculating how badly... it's just a flat fee for failing to hold up the terms of the contract. These kind of cases are pretty open and shut; If you prove the contract terms were violated, a judgement is usually issued on the spot per the terms of the contract, with immediate effect. The court's only involvement in these is simple contract enforcement, plus legal fees. Other damages may be considered, if the contract allowed it, but often this is the only award handed out. Because you signed it, you don't have a lot of room to argue.
Lastly, there are damages awarded as a deterrent. Y
Still, the settlement seems unfair: The MPAA has asked the court for $110 million, when the MPAA itself admitted that isoHunt only has $5 or $6 million.
The legal system does not hand out punishment on the basis of whether or not the defendant can pay for it; It hands it out on the basis of how much harm was done. If you run someone over and they're a cripple for the rest of their life, the Judge doesn't say "Well, you only got $20 and a cracker... so give me the $20 and we're even." You are fined and jailed on the basis of how much pain and suffering that person endured.
Unfortunately, the law says that every time you share an MP3, god kills $150,000 worth of kittens. Statutory damages don't allow for any discretion on the part of the judge. Thank Congress for that.
And the argument can also be made that proportional damages levied against very wealthy individuals or corporations is good practice, though it doesn't often happen. Fining people for dumping millions of gallons of toxic waste into the ocean the maximum $50,000 per infraction means they just video tape the whole thing, send in the tape and a check for $50,000 because it's cheaper than going to court, and much, much cheaper than disposing of the waste properly. But alas, that is not how the law is written.
The system is totally broken, but let's endeavor to be specific in our criticism of it... rather than simply saying "Oh that's unfair!"... Fairness is relative. Justice shouldn't be.
The inability to target anything near a city was directly inspirational for the development of GPS guided munitions that are in use today.
Ah, small mistake here. The predecessor to GPS was already in development by the time of the Vietnam war. Vietnam didn't trigger it's development, it simply fast-tracked it.
WWII costed roughly 50 million deaths, not a mere few 10 millions. The spanish flue costed close to 200 million deaths, not a mere few 10 million. The US army bombed civilian centers in korea and vietnam, that is after WWII if I recall corectly. Foreign aid of the USA per capita is more or less the same as other civilized nations and far behind scandinavian nations.
First, he said world war ONE. Second, he said "tens of millions", not "ten of million". Third, the US army bombed civilian "centers" (they're called cities, btw) because bombs of that era were dumb. Once you released them, they fell on a ballistic trajectory... which is why we had to send dozens of bombers out to kill a single strategic target. Yes, today we can put a missile through a window or drop a bomb on a dime. We couldn't back then. Most factories, power generation facilities, and other strategic targets, were within a few miles of civilian targets. As well, in both Vietnam and Korea, the enemy wasn't nice enough to wear bright fluorescent kick me signs for us to shoot at -- they dressed as, and blended in with, the non-combatant population. I shouldn't have to explain that this results in higher civilian casualties even if you're trying to avoid them. And lastly, you shifted the goal posts -- he said the United States provides more aid by quantity. You switched it to per capita.
Basically, you not only horribly misread every single point the GP made, but you intentionally misrepresented the facts to buttress your own position, which is apparently "Yell at the guy getting upmodded that he's wrong and hope to get some karma back for all those troll posts I made last week." It's 'trickle down karma-nomics' for Slashdot. The moderators hop in their U-boats and torpedo your ass all the way to -1, Trollololo where you belong.
The united states are so keen to have "drones" and soon semi automatic drones and robots because they realized
They realized that having the largest economy on earth and being the wealthiest country on Earth is something worth protecting, because for as many greedy people we have in this country, there's a fuckton more in other countries who are also jealous. And we got to be the wealthiest country on the planet by spending our wealth wisely. I can think of few things that save lives and dollars with a greater efficiency than drones and robotics.
And don't forget that military spending leads to private-sector profits too -- drones are now being used to provide detailed maps of urban areas and provide instant, real-time traffic reports instead of using expensive helicopters. They have been used to assist in disaster relief efforts both domestically and all over the world. For every dollar spend on our military, the 10 year rate of return in the private sector is something like 2.5 to 1 (I tried google, but it wasn't very helpful in saying anything other than the multiplier effect I'm talking about is real and a good thing, but it lacked an exact figure).
he USA are preparing with all might to dominate their (current) allies (soon enemies),
Sun Tzu to the rescue; A war fought against an unwilling populace always fails. You have to win their hearts and minds -- if you can't do that, it doesn't matter how strong your army is. This has been known since the days when we wrote "You're trolling" on stone tablets and hung them outside the mud huts of the town idiots.
The United States isn't interested in fighting the whole world. We have plenty of crazy people, but we lock them in a giant building called Congress, not the Pentagon. What we're interested in is what basically amounts to a Shangri-La way of life. Basically, we want to create a wealthy utopia that allows us to live carefree, and we're not too particular about how we do that; If we can do it with robotics and automation, fine. But the economics suggest that third world labor is cheaper, so guess what we're going with for now
The mice, without fail, decided to eat the Oreo over the rice cake, proving once and for all that mice like cookies better than tasteless discs with a styrofoamy texture.
Of course, amongst women, the opposite behavior is seen. At least the ones I know. Does this mean that the tasteless discs with a styrofoam-like texture are actually highly addictive? No. Which means it's easier to get addicted to an abstract ideal about beauty than it is an Oreo cookie. Surprised, I am not. In other news, find me a picture of this professor so I can photoshop him into a new meme along the lines of "I don't want to live on this planet anymore." I'd be ashamed if my students arrived at such a far-fetched and obviously wrong solution, and I allowed them to publish it... it would make me wonder if I'd managed to teach them anything at all...
That said, I don't think its really the case that all stream ciphers are totally broken and not trustable. Nor do I expect that will be the case. The lavabit debacle indicates that the encryption itself is likely still good, or else, why bother trying to force key shenanigans?
There's several problems with these statements. First, there's no evidence that stream ciphers as an aggregate group are significantly less secure than block ciphers. You shouldn't have to 'expect' this to be the case -- the GP has failed to provide evidence for his claim, and there are studies and evidence to support yours that is common knowledge: Much of the internet is built on stream ciphers, and while particular implimentations have been shown to be faulty, few cryptography analysts have made the statement that they are, as a group, less secure.
However, suggesting that the government "trying to force key shenanigans" is not evidence one way or the other. This is a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. There may be no relation at all between the government's actions, and the strength of the cryptographic system! In fact, an argument can be made that the government should engage in "shenanigans" even if they possess a low-cost decryption/key recovery method, and can then use plausible deniability when they claim something other than this secret method was used to get the information.
For the NRC inspectors, your point is entirely true. Perhaps that is what you meant to say.
I actually meant it in both regards; There is some lateral movement of plant operators, as there is of the inspectors. What I'm saying is that we can't jump to the conclusion that there is preferential treatment going on, when the reality may be plain old human complacency or lack of experience. We would need to know more about the structure of the NRC and the plant operations to arrive at any conclusions with confidence, though I suspect such information would be cloaked under the guise of 'national security' and is thus inaccessible.
As we are stuck in the position of not only lacking in sufficient information, but that the ability to get sufficient information itself is compromised... the only thing we can say is exactly what has been said: That some plants have more problems than others.
We can't really have a discussion about this, other than to demand more transparency. We need more facts. All we have now is rampant speculation.
Bauer writes that "everything I've seen and heard at the NSA has convinced me that the respect for the Constitution is a key component of the culture there". Aside from the incorrect observation about how the NSA treats the Constitution...
There's no reason to suggest the NSA has any less respect for the Constitution now than it did at time of publication. Culture does not change that quickly in an organization; the "big reveal" of Snowden, et al., may be changing our perception of the NSA and our culture, but I see no reason to believe it has changed the NSA's internal culture significantly. Especially when you consider one of the NSA's central tenets is to assume that all its systems are already compromised. For them, this would simply be evidence in support of the prevailing opinion there.
Much of this radical expansion of surveillance of the internet and telecommunications wasn't initiated internally, but instead by external political pressures. The NSA is still a support agency, and its mandate is to assist the FBI, CIA, DHS, and other law enforcement agencies with their own intelligence needs. The NSA does not have a mandate to pursue things on its own initiative.
Much of this expansion started under the Bush Administration and has continued under Obama -- the changes in the NSA's operational budget and goals is directly tied to changes in political atmosphere. It would be intellectually dishonest to suggest the NSA is responsible for this; They are not the initiators of these activities, they are merely providing the service requested. This is akin to suggesting that tech support broke your computer when you call in... the NSA didn't "break" the Constitution, or the internet, etc. They're just the people executing the orders they're given.
It's not the NSA that is disrespecting the Constitution, but the people using the NSA. Directly, that's the FBI, CIA, DHS, and other major agencies they serve. And in turn, those agencies are following the mandates issued by their executive staff, which in turn reports directly to the President and to Congress.
If we're going to point fingers, point them at the source, not the destination. It is entirely possible to have respect for a thing, while simultaniously being forced into actions which are disrespectful to it. Examples like Snowden's defection demonstrate there is at least some dissent amongst the rank and file within the organization as to the legitimacy of these demands.
You may recall the KGB had similar defections throughout the Cold War, most notably Vasili Mitrokhin, the head librarian of the KGB and a pre-computerization counterpart to Snowden. The Mitrokhin Archive was a major intelligence coup for the United States, and it happened for very similar reasons to Snowden's defection: Disagreement with the leadership over the legitimacy of external political demands, and the leadership trying to meet those demands instead of resisting them.
perhaps because lower-level violations get limited review."
There's a simpler explanation here; Fewer reactors mean less experience for those running them. A system administrator who works with 150,000 workstations and 13,000 servers is going to do things differently than someone who only supports 1,500 workstations and 10 servers.
I think it's premature to suggest that the same agency responsible for oversight of all these different reactors is giving preferential treatment based simply on a single statistic.
Pretty sociopathic to suggest someone should be killed over words.
You made some interesting points- even if I didn't agree with them all- but you lost it here when you start delivering pat psychological diagnoses on the basis of an Internet post.
That's not a denial that you have some mental health issues that need to be addressed.
What one deems "appropriate" is a matter of opinion.
The girls you think death is appropriate for rationalized their behavior similarly.
Then again, this may reflect your empathy with the perpetrators when you comment that...
More likely it reflects my humanity; There are always better uses for a person than dying for the beliefs of another.
You'll forgive me if my utter lack of sympathy for the 14-year-old "survivor" kicked in long ago.
Since you're both basically yelling "You're wrong!" at each other and neither one of you has been blessed with an abundance of facts on this topic, I shall dispense some now;
First, let's start with the definition. Sociopathy is a constellation of behaviors, not any one behavior, and you need to exhibit varying degrees of the majority of them for this to be true. Amongst others, these behaviors are: "failing to conform to society's rules, deceitfulness, impulsiveness, reckless endangerment of self or others, and a lack of remorse." The diagnosis is not made before the age of 15. Source: DSM-IV.
While there is a genetic component, it has been demonstrated that abused and neglected children exhibit significantly higher levels of antisocial personality disorder (APD, known to laymen as 'sociopaths'). Source. Research suggests that sociopathy is more a case of 'nurture' than 'nature' -- significant disruptions to hormonal balance, depression, and emotional trauma have all been identified in a significant portion of the clinical population -- too much to dismiss as coincidence.
In adolescents in particular, the failures often orbit around poor parenting and lack of school engagement. In other words, while the parents are primarily responsible, these children are very often also let down by a community and/or school simply unwilling to pick up the slack, as it were.
It is no surprise that teenagers are particularily suseptible to the development of sociopathy; it's been shown that sociopathy's neurological 'core' is the prefrontal cortex. We can actually put people who are sociopathic in an MRI and chart structural changes in the brain in areas relating to judgment, impulsiveness, aggressiveness and decision-making. It is thought that seratonin is the primary neurochemical. This is the same neurotransmitter targetted by anti-depressants. This part of the brain is undergoing rapid change in the adolescent brain, and as such presents a narrow window of opportunity to correct behavioral problems such as sociopathy... or to cause them. Regardless, once the person is an adult, these behavior changes solidify and become largely permanent -- APD is usually a lifelong diagnosis.
-- Now armed with some suitable facts;
... but that's absolutely nothing like this.
Actually, it's exactly like this. Teenagers are moody because their brains are being rewired while they're using them. Imagine trying to patch the kernel of a system while it's being used. In a computer, this usually results in the system crashing or "unexpected behavior". Unsurprisingly... teenagers exhibit similar randomness as neural pathways are rewired. This is a well-known process called Synaptic pruning and it happens at two points in a person's life: At birth until age 2, and again during puberty. Pruning is widely thought to represent learning.
The fact that she made comments like that even *after* the girl died (due to their bullying) indicates pure sociopathy.
I'm afraid that diagnosis cannot be made. You're operating under a large number of assumptions: Firstly, that everyone reacts to death the same way. Secondly, that the prior existing relationship between those people is immaterial in this reaction. Thirdly, that guilt, remorse, etc., are even bona-fide emotions and not simply social constructs. All three of those assumptions are false. If Obama were to be shot and killed tomorrow, many people would be celebrating his death. That doesn't make those people sociopaths. It makes them a great many other things with less than wonderful connotations, but sociopathy isn't on that list. These girls didn't like this other girl; It's not exactly out of profile that her death would not be taken hard.
And regarding guilt, remorse, etc., these are in fact socially-constructed. Guilt can only come from a person who identifies an action which violated their own s
No, we do not agree. It is sometimes about politics. There is no "always" when dealing with people. It's all shades of grey. It's a glitch in your brain that makes you see only two possibilities when multiple ones exist because you have an emotional need for order and structure. Let go of that emotional need, and you will be closer to the truth.
Reiterating, public policy determines institutions (structure of our government itself) and institutions determine if and how wealth is distributed...
Wealth can be distributed in the absence of government. Many areas in Africa are devoid of any government... but there are still rich people and poor people there.
You seem to want to disagree even with yourself, just for the sake of debate.
No, I am simply very precise in my use of language, and lack the emotional need for a discrete number of possible choices. I run into this really often on Slashdot -- people here have a strong emotional need to have everything reduced to multiple choice or binary. But when they try and apply such an attitude to politics, interpersonal relationships, economics, or any of the social sciences really... the conclusions they reach are so completely and wildly different from what everyone else would as to be in the form of an added scourge. But because they all have this same cognitive blind spot, they can't see it in each other, so when someone like me comes along and says "Dude, you've got a case of black and white thinking!" they take the lack of chatter amongst their peers as evidence that this is not the case. Ironically, that's another cognitive error: Bandwagon thinking. -_-
Sure, of course, why not. It's not like your time is valuable or anything. And naturally, you will make this decision before coding starts, and thus before any measurements that the framework was actually slow, or for that matter that it was part of the perf bottleneck of the system. Nothing says "job security code" like elaborate cryptic algorithms to improve asymptotic performance of some in-memory task on a system where CPU never got above 5% in the first place.
You devoted considerable effort to coming up with a response. Yet you failed in every way to realize that the point being made was that good programmers often depart from guideline, and with good reason. If this was less a list and more an advice column, then I wouldn't have picked it apart. But it comes off as a "dos and don'ts" list, and frankly... such a list has neither educational nor informational value.
But whatever, if you want to continue down this path, okay then; Look smartass, you can't test a framework against your own hand-crafted code because you don't know how your hand-crafted code is going to perform until you build a prototype. So fucking duh, yes, the test happens after. And if you'd sat down on a whiteboard and stenciled out a block diagram of what your app, or at least the part of it you're working on, does... you'd already know which branches are going to be most used, and where special attention needs to be paid towards optimization. I already provided the caveat that where performance is critical. I'm not talking about business apps or databases when I say these things. I'm talking low level shit like how they're building switches that begin writing out a new packet while the previous packet is still incoming to gain precious milliseconds in high frequency trading. You aren't writing that with.NET or whatever framework you're upset I dismissed from consideration. PERIOD.
Also "But if we write our own, then there will surely be some horrific bug in the field that we can work until 4AM to fix, and management will call us heroes!" is about the most moronic thing you can say. Management doesn't consider your project resulting in piles of overtime "heroic". It considers you a poor performer and will be looking to replace you.
Perhaps you missed the part that the author of TFA makes his living answering panicked calls to
Yes, I got that. Wanna know something? Ask a police officer how honest the average person is. They'll tell you the average person is a slimy son of a bitch who's probably packing heat and looking to kill you and everyone you ever loved or knew. Wanna know why? Because that's their day in and day out experience. Ask a surgeon how to fix a problem, and every answer will involve a knife. It's the same everywhere.
You got suckered in by assuming one man's personal experience counted as fact. It doesn't. I recognize that in his particular line of work, he runs into these problems all the time, but that doesn't mean they were bad choices at the time they were made... it means that by the time it got to him, it had become a problem. And that's all.
Look, bottom line here is that when you code professionally, you are engaged in a massive balancing act between deadlines, error checking, other people's contributions, etc., etc. Coding professionally is an organic process, and while everyone knows what the best practices are (documentation, QA, modularity, readability, etc.) these are ideals to strive for, not things we can actually achieve on every single project. That would take a level of super-human ability that nobody yet born possesses. It's like the old adage in IT: "Cheap, Fast, Right. Pick any two."
My own experience/advice lines up with his rather well in this area, I'd say.
My own experience is that a mind intent on something refuses to admit to better things. In programming professionally, I've come to refer to this as target fixation -- they get tunnel
Slashdot Mirror
None. Overdue for one dont-ya-think?
No. If you roll a six-sided die and you roll five 1s in a row, what's the odds that the sixth roll you make will be a 1? 1 in 6. What you're doing here is called the Gambler's Fallacy.
I actually agree with that list.
Don't worry. Your reputation for being disagreeable won't be harmed by this one admission. Unless the mods vote you up a couple more times. :D
In fact, the chance it will glide safely past us is 99.99998%
Since the odds of any asteroid of a city-destroying size or larger only hit the Earth every 5,000 years or so... this particular asteroid's odds are 36.5 times better than the average one's.
Easy: The hardest thing a programmer has to do is explain why what they're doing isn't a simple matter of programming.
Friendly bit of free advice: in the future, when someone corrects a false statement you've made, try saying, "thank you, I didn't know that until now," rather than calling them a troll. It will increase your credibility rather than destroying it.
Friendly bit of free advice: In the future, when you're a total condescending shitbag, don't expect someone to be thankful. Because nobody gives a fuck about your credibility once you've disrespected someone who is trying to do good: And explaining complex topics in simple ways that people can relate to is a lot more good than your post, however detailed and correct, ever could have accomplished.
But then, what else can be expected from someone who has spent a career shovelling bullshit around and rationalizing the most idiotic things because "it was the law". The level of intellectual masturbation you lawyer-types engage in regularily causes the section of the brain responsible for empathy and simplicity to simply shrivel up and drop off.
and comes free with Windows. What other game has you endlessly clicking on things, hoping that something will do... anything.
You must have been one of those people who were very bad at reasoning out word puzzles. Random clicking was reserved for when you got stuck because the puzzle made no sense... and back when Myst came out, googling "walk through" wasn't much help... possibly because neither Google nor walk-throughs existed back then. That is not how the game is supposed to be played. And considering that this new game would be using the Unreal 4 engine, one can assume that instead of loading up a pile of CDs worth of bitmaps (because 3D rendering was in it's utter infancy back then) with clickable regions to string together a narrative, we'll now have an interactive polygon-based world where the triggers are a bit more obvious and intuitive.
Don't crap on a game because it hasn't aged well... it was a marvel of narrative and immersive gaming when it debuted, and some would argue games today still lack the substance and storytelling that Myst enjoyed, preferring instead to focus on polygon count and realistic explosions over plot.
Do you have an citation for this alleged "bench rule multiplier"? In all my years of IP practice - and yes, IAAL - I have never encountered such a thing. Did you pull it from a news article, or a copy of some local district rules, or possibly your ass?
I was attempting to simplify shit that's so complex that even lawyers like yourself routinely get lost in it in a way that a layperson could understand. You'll forgive me if I don't vomit up a twenty page legal brief on the subject, given that the audience here does not consist entirely of people who have been through law school. I thought that would be plainly obvious to everyone, but I didn't consider that I might be dealing with a lawyer who makes a living off making things unnecessarily complex, and that attempting to explain these self-induced complexities in simpler terms might cause him to shit a massive brick of text on an internet forum.
The shutdown wasn't really a big deal, sure, but if the US had defaulted on its debt, that would have been catastrophic.
No, it was a big deal. But it wasn't catastrophic, and neither would us defaulting. Because all that means is our credit rating would be downgraded and so we'd have to borrow at a somewhat higher rate. Would this be a problem? Yes. Would it lead to the death of America? No. Catastrophic means unrecoverable to most people. It means a one way trip to fucking doomsday. This isn't that.
But go on thinking that, tin foil hat man, if it helps you stay awake at night. -_- It would not trigger another great depression. It wouldn't be the end of life as we know it. None of these things would happen. And it's not me saying that, it's the Federal Reserve saying that. The very people who oversee the debt.
Their take on it? "Failure of the government to pay its bills could undermine world confidence in the U.S. dollar, and in the extreme could cause a global financial panic." (emphasis mine). Am I saying the default wouldn't be a crisis? No. But to call it catastrophic is just tin foil hat brigade.
If Congress had failed to reach a deal and the U.S. was unable to pay its bills, the results might have been catastrophic, eclipsing the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers five years ago, the domino that could trigger the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression."
Someone's been watching too much "news". The results wouldn't be catastrophic. They'd be annoying. Like everything else the government has done over the past decade. Catastrophic is the entire government collapses, food shortages and water become scarce, and people start killing one another in open anarchy.
Words. They mean shit, Slashdot. Choose them carefully.
I'm not even going to dignify your wall of text troll with a response.
Actually, this isn't just the judge. In Capitol v. Thomas, a jury repeatedly awarded more than the judge(s) did in every trial along the way. Because it's not just about how much damage you caused, but how much deterrent value a higher award brings. There were several juries, and they also awarded wildly different amounts; Each time the judge reduced it post-trial.
It can be inferred from this that when ordinary people review these cases, they judge them much more harshly than the judge does. This whole 'discretion' thing you're on about is not only very likely in play here, it's probably more generous than the average person would be given the facts of the case.
Lastly, my statements regarding statutory damages is separate from my quoted figure of $150,000. I said God kills $150,000 worth of kittens. Depending on how much you think God likes kittens, this is either a lotta kittens, or none. Statutory damages are in a range of, as you so nicely quoted, go from $750 to $30,000 -- the judge can't pick a number outside of those ranges. And in the case of 17 USC 504(c), you only quoted part of it.
$750-30,000 is the figure quoted for infringement period. In other words, knowledge or no knowledge, that's how much you're getting slapped with. For this portion, the judge doesn't consider motive -- only and solely the actual value of the work. Should the court find you did so wilfully, they can then go above that previously-calculated amount. Which is why sharing mixes of the boy band in your neighbor's garage is going to get you less of a fine than sharing Michael Jackson's collected works (there's no accounting for taste either in law, unfortunately!).
You've completely misread how the law is actually interpreted. The judge bases the award on the value of the work, not the person's culpability. The culpability is what drives the award upwards. So for example, if the work has a calculated value of $5,000 and the court doesn't feel the infringement was intentional, it stays at $5,000 per work. But if it was deliberate, then they will multiply that by an arbitrary figure, based on how deliberate the judge feels the action was. This new figure caps at $150,000 per infringement. Also not quoted was the bench rules, which vary by each court, and would include how this 'arbitrary' math should be done; California appeals court may say you multiply by a value of 10 to 50... Federal court, maybe 50 to 5 billion. Without a copy of the bench rules, it's difficult to say how strongly the judge felt about your culpability.
Chances are that if YOU personally are injured that you will never see anything close to an equitable judgement.
That's mostly because most judgements aren't against an individual but an insurance company acting on behalf of that individual. Corporations are trying to limit liability for obvious reasons -- sometimes the damage can be so enormous and terrifying to behold that juries will throw millions of dollars out of pity and disgust. Juries don't often award large piles of cash to victims when it is a person versus a person, but against a corporation they are vastly more willing to hand out large judgements.
Justice, contrary to popular belief, isn't blind: It knows when you have money. And the more you have, the more you can expect to lose, regardless of the nature of the civil or criminal act that brought you into court. Is that fair? Maybe.
These absurd COPYRIGHT verdicts are due to statutory damages laws that have no relation whatsoever to any actual real damages. They are in fact a blatant short cut around proving actual damages. They have little in common with some prole being crippled. A crippled prole has to show real damages.
That's not a terribly helpful statement when it comes to answering the question What do we need to do to fix the problem? And to answer that, we must first understand why it got to this point. There are several things that go into a damage award;
First is the actual, literal, damage. Sometimes this can be calculated directly; If I smash your mailbox, the replacement cost is very easy to figure out. But sometimes, the damage is more abstract -- if I put up posters in the neighborhood where you life claiming you're a rapist that "got off on a technicality" and warn parents not to let their children near you, it's hard to calculate in dollars the damage to your reputation. Your therapy bills are an obvious place to start, but the problem here is that some people need it, some people don't. Should you be paid less, as the victim, because you're more resiliant to harm? So in these less concrete examples, the courts go off of guidelines that are based on what the average is. Remember that the point of a civil or criminal action is to "make the victim whole again". This is all an attempt to calculate what it would take to get back to where you were before. It is sometimes clear-cut, but other times anything but.
Next, there's punitive damages. This is often based on the perpetrator's culpability for the act. If you were driving through a hail storm very slowly and carefully, and hit a patch of ice on a corner, left the road, and hit someone on the sidewalk... that's a bona fide accident. You didn't want to hit them, and you couldn't have reasonably been expected to have known the road would be slippery there -- and you were driving slowly due to poor conditions. In cases like this, there probably won't be any punitive damages. On the other hand, if you were piss drunk, blew the stop light, and slammed into the person... the result might be the same, but your state of mind was not. This is usually where juries award big fat paychecks and/or jail time.
Third, there's tort, or contract damages. This is where the contract lays out the terms of the exchange, and the penalties if you don't comply. A star actor that decides to quit mid-season is going to royally fuck a lot of people: Tort damages aren't about calculating how badly... it's just a flat fee for failing to hold up the terms of the contract. These kind of cases are pretty open and shut; If you prove the contract terms were violated, a judgement is usually issued on the spot per the terms of the contract, with immediate effect. The court's only involvement in these is simple contract enforcement, plus legal fees. Other damages may be considered, if the contract allowed it, but often this is the only award handed out. Because you signed it, you don't have a lot of room to argue.
Lastly, there are damages awarded as a deterrent. Y
Still, the settlement seems unfair: The MPAA has asked the court for $110 million, when the MPAA itself admitted that isoHunt only has $5 or $6 million.
The legal system does not hand out punishment on the basis of whether or not the defendant can pay for it; It hands it out on the basis of how much harm was done. If you run someone over and they're a cripple for the rest of their life, the Judge doesn't say "Well, you only got $20 and a cracker... so give me the $20 and we're even." You are fined and jailed on the basis of how much pain and suffering that person endured.
Unfortunately, the law says that every time you share an MP3, god kills $150,000 worth of kittens. Statutory damages don't allow for any discretion on the part of the judge. Thank Congress for that.
And the argument can also be made that proportional damages levied against very wealthy individuals or corporations is good practice, though it doesn't often happen. Fining people for dumping millions of gallons of toxic waste into the ocean the maximum $50,000 per infraction means they just video tape the whole thing, send in the tape and a check for $50,000 because it's cheaper than going to court, and much, much cheaper than disposing of the waste properly. But alas, that is not how the law is written.
The system is totally broken, but let's endeavor to be specific in our criticism of it... rather than simply saying "Oh that's unfair!" ... Fairness is relative. Justice shouldn't be.
What language suggestions or tips can you give me?"
Timothy, shame on you. You should know better than to start a holy war.
The inability to target anything near a city was directly inspirational for the development of GPS guided munitions that are in use today.
Ah, small mistake here. The predecessor to GPS was already in development by the time of the Vietnam war. Vietnam didn't trigger it's development, it simply fast-tracked it.
WWII costed roughly 50 million deaths, not a mere few 10 millions.
The spanish flue costed close to 200 million deaths, not a mere few 10 million.
The US army bombed civilian centers in korea and vietnam, that is after WWII if I recall corectly.
Foreign aid of the USA per capita is more or less the same as other civilized nations and far behind scandinavian nations.
First, he said world war ONE. Second, he said "tens of millions", not "ten of million". Third, the US army bombed civilian "centers" (they're called cities, btw) because bombs of that era were dumb. Once you released them, they fell on a ballistic trajectory... which is why we had to send dozens of bombers out to kill a single strategic target. Yes, today we can put a missile through a window or drop a bomb on a dime. We couldn't back then. Most factories, power generation facilities, and other strategic targets, were within a few miles of civilian targets. As well, in both Vietnam and Korea, the enemy wasn't nice enough to wear bright fluorescent kick me signs for us to shoot at -- they dressed as, and blended in with, the non-combatant population. I shouldn't have to explain that this results in higher civilian casualties even if you're trying to avoid them. And lastly, you shifted the goal posts -- he said the United States provides more aid by quantity. You switched it to per capita.
Basically, you not only horribly misread every single point the GP made, but you intentionally misrepresented the facts to buttress your own position, which is apparently "Yell at the guy getting upmodded that he's wrong and hope to get some karma back for all those troll posts I made last week." It's 'trickle down karma-nomics' for Slashdot. The moderators hop in their U-boats and torpedo your ass all the way to -1, Trollololo where you belong.
The united states are so keen to have "drones" and soon semi automatic drones and robots because they realized
They realized that having the largest economy on earth and being the wealthiest country on Earth is something worth protecting, because for as many greedy people we have in this country, there's a fuckton more in other countries who are also jealous. And we got to be the wealthiest country on the planet by spending our wealth wisely. I can think of few things that save lives and dollars with a greater efficiency than drones and robotics.
And don't forget that military spending leads to private-sector profits too -- drones are now being used to provide detailed maps of urban areas and provide instant, real-time traffic reports instead of using expensive helicopters. They have been used to assist in disaster relief efforts both domestically and all over the world. For every dollar spend on our military, the 10 year rate of return in the private sector is something like 2.5 to 1 (I tried google, but it wasn't very helpful in saying anything other than the multiplier effect I'm talking about is real and a good thing, but it lacked an exact figure).
he USA are preparing with all might to dominate their (current) allies (soon enemies),
Sun Tzu to the rescue; A war fought against an unwilling populace always fails. You have to win their hearts and minds -- if you can't do that, it doesn't matter how strong your army is. This has been known since the days when we wrote "You're trolling" on stone tablets and hung them outside the mud huts of the town idiots.
The United States isn't interested in fighting the whole world. We have plenty of crazy people, but we lock them in a giant building called Congress, not the Pentagon. What we're interested in is what basically amounts to a Shangri-La way of life. Basically, we want to create a wealthy utopia that allows us to live carefree, and we're not too particular about how we do that; If we can do it with robotics and automation, fine. But the economics suggest that third world labor is cheaper, so guess what we're going with for now
The mice, without fail, decided to eat the Oreo over the rice cake, proving once and for all that mice like cookies better than tasteless discs with a styrofoamy texture.
Of course, amongst women, the opposite behavior is seen. At least the ones I know. Does this mean that the tasteless discs with a styrofoam-like texture are actually highly addictive? No. Which means it's easier to get addicted to an abstract ideal about beauty than it is an Oreo cookie. Surprised, I am not. In other news, find me a picture of this professor so I can photoshop him into a new meme along the lines of "I don't want to live on this planet anymore." I'd be ashamed if my students arrived at such a far-fetched and obviously wrong solution, and I allowed them to publish it... it would make me wonder if I'd managed to teach them anything at all...
That said, I don't think its really the case that all stream ciphers are totally broken and not trustable. Nor do I expect that will be the case. The lavabit debacle indicates that the encryption itself is likely still good, or else, why bother trying to force key shenanigans?
There's several problems with these statements. First, there's no evidence that stream ciphers as an aggregate group are significantly less secure than block ciphers. You shouldn't have to 'expect' this to be the case -- the GP has failed to provide evidence for his claim, and there are studies and evidence to support yours that is common knowledge: Much of the internet is built on stream ciphers, and while particular implimentations have been shown to be faulty, few cryptography analysts have made the statement that they are, as a group, less secure.
However, suggesting that the government "trying to force key shenanigans" is not evidence one way or the other. This is a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. There may be no relation at all between the government's actions, and the strength of the cryptographic system! In fact, an argument can be made that the government should engage in "shenanigans" even if they possess a low-cost decryption/key recovery method, and can then use plausible deniability when they claim something other than this secret method was used to get the information.
For the NRC inspectors, your point is entirely true. Perhaps that is what you meant to say.
I actually meant it in both regards; There is some lateral movement of plant operators, as there is of the inspectors. What I'm saying is that we can't jump to the conclusion that there is preferential treatment going on, when the reality may be plain old human complacency or lack of experience. We would need to know more about the structure of the NRC and the plant operations to arrive at any conclusions with confidence, though I suspect such information would be cloaked under the guise of 'national security' and is thus inaccessible.
As we are stuck in the position of not only lacking in sufficient information, but that the ability to get sufficient information itself is compromised... the only thing we can say is exactly what has been said: That some plants have more problems than others.
We can't really have a discussion about this, other than to demand more transparency. We need more facts. All we have now is rampant speculation.
Bauer writes that "everything I've seen and heard at the NSA has convinced me that the respect for the Constitution is a key component of the culture there". Aside from the incorrect observation about how the NSA treats the Constitution...
There's no reason to suggest the NSA has any less respect for the Constitution now than it did at time of publication. Culture does not change that quickly in an organization; the "big reveal" of Snowden, et al., may be changing our perception of the NSA and our culture, but I see no reason to believe it has changed the NSA's internal culture significantly. Especially when you consider one of the NSA's central tenets is to assume that all its systems are already compromised. For them, this would simply be evidence in support of the prevailing opinion there.
Much of this radical expansion of surveillance of the internet and telecommunications wasn't initiated internally, but instead by external political pressures. The NSA is still a support agency, and its mandate is to assist the FBI, CIA, DHS, and other law enforcement agencies with their own intelligence needs. The NSA does not have a mandate to pursue things on its own initiative.
Much of this expansion started under the Bush Administration and has continued under Obama -- the changes in the NSA's operational budget and goals is directly tied to changes in political atmosphere. It would be intellectually dishonest to suggest the NSA is responsible for this; They are not the initiators of these activities, they are merely providing the service requested. This is akin to suggesting that tech support broke your computer when you call in... the NSA didn't "break" the Constitution, or the internet, etc. They're just the people executing the orders they're given.
It's not the NSA that is disrespecting the Constitution, but the people using the NSA. Directly, that's the FBI, CIA, DHS, and other major agencies they serve. And in turn, those agencies are following the mandates issued by their executive staff, which in turn reports directly to the President and to Congress.
If we're going to point fingers, point them at the source, not the destination. It is entirely possible to have respect for a thing, while simultaniously being forced into actions which are disrespectful to it. Examples like Snowden's defection demonstrate there is at least some dissent amongst the rank and file within the organization as to the legitimacy of these demands.
You may recall the KGB had similar defections throughout the Cold War, most notably Vasili Mitrokhin, the head librarian of the KGB and a pre-computerization counterpart to Snowden. The Mitrokhin Archive was a major intelligence coup for the United States, and it happened for very similar reasons to Snowden's defection: Disagreement with the leadership over the legitimacy of external political demands, and the leadership trying to meet those demands instead of resisting them.
perhaps because lower-level violations get limited review."
There's a simpler explanation here; Fewer reactors mean less experience for those running them. A system administrator who works with 150,000 workstations and 13,000 servers is going to do things differently than someone who only supports 1,500 workstations and 10 servers.
I think it's premature to suggest that the same agency responsible for oversight of all these different reactors is giving preferential treatment based simply on a single statistic.
Do I think that's what she *deserves*? Yes.
Pretty sociopathic to suggest someone should be killed over words.
You made some interesting points- even if I didn't agree with them all- but you lost it here when you start delivering pat psychological diagnoses on the basis of an Internet post.
That's not a denial that you have some mental health issues that need to be addressed.
What one deems "appropriate" is a matter of opinion.
The girls you think death is appropriate for rationalized their behavior similarly.
Then again, this may reflect your empathy with the perpetrators when you comment that...
More likely it reflects my humanity; There are always better uses for a person than dying for the beliefs of another.
You'll forgive me if my utter lack of sympathy for the 14-year-old "survivor" kicked in long ago.
I'm sorry, I can't do that Dave.
Since you're both basically yelling "You're wrong!" at each other and neither one of you has been blessed with an abundance of facts on this topic, I shall dispense some now;
First, let's start with the definition. Sociopathy is a constellation of behaviors, not any one behavior, and you need to exhibit varying degrees of the majority of them for this to be true. Amongst others, these behaviors are: "failing to conform to society's rules, deceitfulness, impulsiveness, reckless endangerment of self or others, and a lack of remorse." The diagnosis is not made before the age of 15. Source: DSM-IV.
While there is a genetic component, it has been demonstrated that abused and neglected children exhibit significantly higher levels of antisocial personality disorder (APD, known to laymen as 'sociopaths'). Source. Research suggests that sociopathy is more a case of 'nurture' than 'nature' -- significant disruptions to hormonal balance, depression, and emotional trauma have all been identified in a significant portion of the clinical population -- too much to dismiss as coincidence.
In adolescents in particular, the failures often orbit around poor parenting and lack of school engagement. In other words, while the parents are primarily responsible, these children are very often also let down by a community and/or school simply unwilling to pick up the slack, as it were.
It is no surprise that teenagers are particularily suseptible to the development of sociopathy; it's been shown that sociopathy's neurological 'core' is the prefrontal cortex. We can actually put people who are sociopathic in an MRI and chart structural changes in the brain in areas relating to judgment, impulsiveness, aggressiveness and decision-making. It is thought that seratonin is the primary neurochemical. This is the same neurotransmitter targetted by anti-depressants. This part of the brain is undergoing rapid change in the adolescent brain, and as such presents a narrow window of opportunity to correct behavioral problems such as sociopathy... or to cause them. Regardless, once the person is an adult, these behavior changes solidify and become largely permanent -- APD is usually a lifelong diagnosis.
--
Now armed with some suitable facts;
... but that's absolutely nothing like this.
Actually, it's exactly like this. Teenagers are moody because their brains are being rewired while they're using them. Imagine trying to patch the kernel of a system while it's being used. In a computer, this usually results in the system crashing or "unexpected behavior". Unsurprisingly... teenagers exhibit similar randomness as neural pathways are rewired. This is a well-known process called Synaptic pruning and it happens at two points in a person's life: At birth until age 2, and again during puberty. Pruning is widely thought to represent learning.
The fact that she made comments like that even *after* the girl died (due to their bullying) indicates pure sociopathy.
I'm afraid that diagnosis cannot be made. You're operating under a large number of assumptions: Firstly, that everyone reacts to death the same way. Secondly, that the prior existing relationship between those people is immaterial in this reaction. Thirdly, that guilt, remorse, etc., are even bona-fide emotions and not simply social constructs. All three of those assumptions are false. If Obama were to be shot and killed tomorrow, many people would be celebrating his death. That doesn't make those people sociopaths. It makes them a great many other things with less than wonderful connotations, but sociopathy isn't on that list. These girls didn't like this other girl; It's not exactly out of profile that her death would not be taken hard.
And regarding guilt, remorse, etc., these are in fact socially-constructed. Guilt can only come from a person who identifies an action which violated their own s
We agree, it is always about politics.
No, we do not agree. It is sometimes about politics. There is no "always" when dealing with people. It's all shades of grey. It's a glitch in your brain that makes you see only two possibilities when multiple ones exist because you have an emotional need for order and structure. Let go of that emotional need, and you will be closer to the truth.
Reiterating, public policy determines institutions (structure of our government itself) and institutions determine if and how wealth is distributed...
Wealth can be distributed in the absence of government. Many areas in Africa are devoid of any government... but there are still rich people and poor people there.
You seem to want to disagree even with yourself, just for the sake of debate.
No, I am simply very precise in my use of language, and lack the emotional need for a discrete number of possible choices. I run into this really often on Slashdot -- people here have a strong emotional need to have everything reduced to multiple choice or binary. But when they try and apply such an attitude to politics, interpersonal relationships, economics, or any of the social sciences really... the conclusions they reach are so completely and wildly different from what everyone else would as to be in the form of an added scourge. But because they all have this same cognitive blind spot, they can't see it in each other, so when someone like me comes along and says "Dude, you've got a case of black and white thinking!" they take the lack of chatter amongst their peers as evidence that this is not the case. Ironically, that's another cognitive error: Bandwagon thinking. -_-
Sure, of course, why not. It's not like your time is valuable or anything. And naturally, you will make this decision before coding starts, and thus before any measurements that the framework was actually slow, or for that matter that it was part of the perf bottleneck of the system. Nothing says "job security code" like elaborate cryptic algorithms to improve asymptotic performance of some in-memory task on a system where CPU never got above 5% in the first place.
You devoted considerable effort to coming up with a response. Yet you failed in every way to realize that the point being made was that good programmers often depart from guideline, and with good reason. If this was less a list and more an advice column, then I wouldn't have picked it apart. But it comes off as a "dos and don'ts" list, and frankly... such a list has neither educational nor informational value.
But whatever, if you want to continue down this path, okay then; Look smartass, you can't test a framework against your own hand-crafted code because you don't know how your hand-crafted code is going to perform until you build a prototype. So fucking duh, yes, the test happens after. And if you'd sat down on a whiteboard and stenciled out a block diagram of what your app, or at least the part of it you're working on, does... you'd already know which branches are going to be most used, and where special attention needs to be paid towards optimization. I already provided the caveat that where performance is critical. I'm not talking about business apps or databases when I say these things. I'm talking low level shit like how they're building switches that begin writing out a new packet while the previous packet is still incoming to gain precious milliseconds in high frequency trading. You aren't writing that with .NET or whatever framework you're upset I dismissed from consideration. PERIOD.
Also "But if we write our own, then there will surely be some horrific bug in the field that we can work until 4AM to fix, and management will call us heroes!" is about the most moronic thing you can say. Management doesn't consider your project resulting in piles of overtime "heroic". It considers you a poor performer and will be looking to replace you.
Perhaps you missed the part that the author of TFA makes his living answering panicked calls to
Yes, I got that. Wanna know something? Ask a police officer how honest the average person is. They'll tell you the average person is a slimy son of a bitch who's probably packing heat and looking to kill you and everyone you ever loved or knew. Wanna know why? Because that's their day in and day out experience. Ask a surgeon how to fix a problem, and every answer will involve a knife. It's the same everywhere.
You got suckered in by assuming one man's personal experience counted as fact. It doesn't. I recognize that in his particular line of work, he runs into these problems all the time, but that doesn't mean they were bad choices at the time they were made... it means that by the time it got to him, it had become a problem. And that's all.
Look, bottom line here is that when you code professionally, you are engaged in a massive balancing act between deadlines, error checking, other people's contributions, etc., etc. Coding professionally is an organic process, and while everyone knows what the best practices are (documentation, QA, modularity, readability, etc.) these are ideals to strive for, not things we can actually achieve on every single project. That would take a level of super-human ability that nobody yet born possesses. It's like the old adage in IT: "Cheap, Fast, Right. Pick any two."
My own experience/advice lines up with his rather well in this area, I'd say.
My own experience is that a mind intent on something refuses to admit to better things. In programming professionally, I've come to refer to this as target fixation -- they get tunnel