I'm no fan of Sony but I hope this guy is banged up for a long time for stealing all that private data. And before any wannabe heros mod me down you might want to consider that YOUR data could be part of it.
It's just data. His crime is worthy of punishment, but what's prison going to accomplish? Apart from satisfying your sense of revenge, it'll just introduce him to a bunch of people I think we'd all rather he didn't know. If he's abused while in prison, he'll either have a psychotic break or he'll come out of there a seriously mean, violent son of a bitch. Either way, once released he is not going to be a model citizen.
I really don't want to pay the price of having one more prison-hardened, embittered ex-con walking around, just because it makes you feel better about something that can't be changed now. We need prisons so that we have a place to send people who commit violence against society. They aren't supposed to be future violent criminal training grounds.
For this guy, I'd say several years of monitoring of his every movement, and some kind of conditional ban on using certain kinds of electronic devices is what's necessary. Let him feel a bit of anguish that way.
I conducted a survey where I told ten different puns to a group of senior citizens. I wanted to see if any of the puns could make the people laugh. No pun in ten did.
Pair programming perpetuates the insipid idea that it's possible to do something right the first time around.
No, pair programming posits that it is possible to do something better the first time around.
Even if one partner does absolutely nothing but LOOK at the code the other partner is writing, it is the equivalent of a code review by a peer. The effort is not wasted, unless you suck at doing it.
Because such a train of thought leads nowhere useful. The end of this line of thought is, "Everything may, or may not be real, including me." Well... okay. Now what?
I do not see how my belief in a creator undermines the engineering of this missile launcher I'm working on.
It isn't your belief in a creator which matters, but your non-belief in the process of evolution (which, by the way, is not incompatible with the concept of a supreme being). The latter is indicative of a systemic inability to evaluate evidence in a rational manner. Those who cannot think rationally about the world cannot be effective scientists or engineers.
Even if you constrain your irrational thinking to only this single topic, it is a symptom of mental illness, no different than disputing the color of the sky.
The elder programmers have seen many programming fads come and go, many claims for the "one true way" to greater efficiency and reducing bugs. Like most fad/pop things, pair programming probably worked in a specific environment, with specific people doing a specific type of task... but is probably not a universal solution.
I have to disagree. At its most basic, pair programming is simply having somebody directly help you to accomplish a task, and also, observe your actions as you make them. The concept of using a helper is not a fad, trend, or technique. A better term for it would be "no brainer." The reason it sometimes fails is because of the personalities involved, and it's the same reason certain people can't work together doing ANYTHING (for instance, repairing a car).
It's true that programming often requirements moments or even extended periods of intense, solitary concentration. Your partner just has to know when to shut up. Even with compatible personalities it still takes practice.
But really, it's just two humans working together on something, which is not a "fad."
For reference, 0.189 Hz is roughly once cycle per five seconds. Take a finger and raise it for 2.5 seconds, then lower it for 2.5 seconds.
I am having a hard time imagining how, physiologically, the human voice mechanism could be capable of producing a vibration at such a frequency. Frankly it sounds like bullshit to me.
We're stuck on this planet for the moment, and limited by the resources available on, or near, the surface. Life is made of carbon. The temperature of the planet's surface is moderated by it. You're talking about taking the stuff life is made of, and which protects all life from sub-Antarctic temperatures, and blasting it permanently away from the planet. That sounds like a tremendously BAD idea. Excess CO2 is not some terrible toxin, it's simply life-stuff that is currently in a chemical form that has some problematic properties. We need to figure out how to turn it back into biomatter, not discard it from our planet.
Ah, the war cry of censorship-lovers. Did you know that you are also free to murder in this country? You just aren't free from the consequences! Amazing.
It's popular to have a food allergy. Growing up, I never even heard of gluten intolerance much less knew anybody who suffered from it. Now it seems like half the people in any given room are gluten "intolerant." usually they claim they were diagnosed by a naturopath. Gluten intolerance is real, but what the fuck happened in the last ten years so that suddenly a big fraction of the population suffers from it? Something is up with this.
Some people's mouths are simply immune to tooth decay. According to my dentist, who could be wrong, about 5-10% of people simply never have problems no matter how/if they brush. I've gone weeks without brushing (think long backpacking trips) and the only ill effect is pungent breath and a film that takes 20 minutes of good brushing later to remove. I normally brush every day but only so my breath doesn't stink. I know it isn't dietary, because my wife and I eat the same diet and she still gets cavities, despite being an even more fastidious tooth brusher than I am.
I have to agree about the ribbon. I spend most of my writing code in either an IDE or a text editor, and I use keyboard shortcuts. If I do use another app, it's usually some Office app. I like the ribbon because it groups functions according to most likely use, not category. I can never remember what commands to invoke, much less memorize keyboard shortcuts. It's basically a tabbed toolbar. I have a feeling a lot of the people bitching about ribbons don't actually use apps which have them
If you are just measuring raw activity, the measure to use is CHANGED lines of code. A deleted line, added line, or modified line all score the same. If reduction in SLOC is interpreted as negative productivity, then refactoring is impossible. And your company deserves their fate!
People who have real character don't become "a different person" when drunk or high.
This was exactly the argument I used to make to myself back when I was in denial of my own alcoholism. "It has nothing to do with alcohol, this is just how I am and the alcohol exposes it." This method of thinking allowed me to pretend that alcohol was not a problem and that all it was doing was revealing what was already there under the surface. If it's in my nature to behave in this way or that way, what does it matter whether I'm drunk when I do it?
It was not until I realized that the alcohol was in fact part of the problem that I was able to see my situation clearly for the first time, and then I understood that I needed to give it up completely.
You may be in the same position I was in, trying desperately to blame anything other than the substance (including your "character," a nebulous concept with no objective reality), in an effort to justify the ongoing use of the substance. If that is the case, I hope you connect the dots sooner rather than later.
All the while destroying other people's lives while they're high
Point conceded here. Some drugs do cause people to behave monstrously. And alcohol even more so.
breaking into people's homes so they can steal to feed their habit
Point NOT conceded. A great number of people are alcoholics. However, there is no great wave of crime due to alcoholics breaking into people's homes to steal their liquor and/or money to buy more alcohol. Why is this? Two reasons. First, it is legal and therefore, moderately cheap. If you can hold down a job, you can afford to be a drunk. Second, alcohol use is socially accepted, for the most part, and thus a boozer is more likely to be able to hold a job as long as he's not falling down drunk at work. This ability to hold a job, due to social acceptance, is what enables the drunk to continue to purchase alcohol without robbing people.
You are allowing you anger to dictate possible solutions, instead of thinking about the actual outcomes. Would a death penalty on all drug traffickers actually cause a decrease in the amount of drugs consumed? That's nothing but a hypothesis. A mountain of evidence is available which suggests that the death penalty does nothing to deter criminals. They don't think they're going to get caught in the first place, so what matter is it what the punishment is? The death penalty gives you an adrenaline rush: "Justice, fuck yeah!" But that's all it does.
You are obviously uninterested in actually solving the problem, and more interested in watching people die.
If you take 2,000,000,000 dollars, buying a 10 dollar meal, you could have bought 200,000,000 people meals.
Hunger is a social/political problem. It is not due to a lack of food resources. You could drop $2 billion that way, and the next day, all those people would still be hungry. If you're going to spend $2 billion to stop hunger I can think of, well, about an infinite number of ways to do it that would be more productive than that.
"Cloud" is a fucked up retarded marketing term. It is not any different, or more special, than any other group of servers that have load balancing, virtualization, redundancy, hot fail overs, redundancy across multiple data servers, etc.
"Computer" is a fucked up retarded marketing term. It is not any different, or more special, than any other assembly of various printed circuit boards, ICs, memory modules, spinning magnetic media, various buses running to and fro, etc.
Or maybe... perhaps... The word "computer" has been invented to stand for those concepts, so that when we want to talk about something which is composed of all those parts, we only have to say a single word and everyone knows what we mean, instead of having to recite a fuckin' book.
It's the same reason security researchers publish ANY kind of exploit. To force those who are responsible to fix the bug. Would you rather they all stopped doing that and let the black hats have a monopoly on such exploits?
Why do people keep saying that? The court in Oregon where he did it ruled that it was protected speech.
That doesn't mean it can only be protected speech in Oregon. Do it in other states, and other states' courts will rule on it too.
Oregon is a bit, er, different. The Supreme Court of Oregon has explicitly ruled that erotic/sexual displays are a form of protected speech. That ruling has led to Oregon's status as the strip club capital of the USA, with more strip clubs per capita than anywhere else, including Las Vegas (though most of them are in the Portland area). Portland has an annual Naked Bike Ride event. The police who follow the riders are there to protect them, not arrest them.
That's not to say some other state couldn't take the same view of things, but this decision is very typically an Oregonian decision. There is a clear distinction between lewdness and nudity, and Oregonians for the most part know how to make this distinction.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you actually going to say that any child with a belief in a higher power is doomed to a substandard life?
Since when is belief in a higher power the same as Creationism?
I'm no fan of Sony but I hope this guy is banged up for a long time for stealing all that private data. And before any wannabe heros mod me down you might want to consider that YOUR data could be part of it.
It's just data. His crime is worthy of punishment, but what's prison going to accomplish? Apart from satisfying your sense of revenge, it'll just introduce him to a bunch of people I think we'd all rather he didn't know. If he's abused while in prison, he'll either have a psychotic break or he'll come out of there a seriously mean, violent son of a bitch. Either way, once released he is not going to be a model citizen.
I really don't want to pay the price of having one more prison-hardened, embittered ex-con walking around, just because it makes you feel better about something that can't be changed now. We need prisons so that we have a place to send people who commit violence against society. They aren't supposed to be future violent criminal training grounds.
For this guy, I'd say several years of monitoring of his every movement, and some kind of conditional ban on using certain kinds of electronic devices is what's necessary. Let him feel a bit of anguish that way.
I conducted a survey where I told ten different puns to a group of senior citizens. I wanted to see if any of the puns could make the people laugh. No pun in ten did.
So, your theory is that suicide bombers are rewarded after death with 72 MALE virgins? I think I like this theory.
"We are born. We live. We die." Well... okay. Now what?
This conclusion is also unhelpful. That's the point -- let's stick to discussing things which have some utility.
Pair programming perpetuates the insipid idea that it's possible to do something right the first time around.
No, pair programming posits that it is possible to do something better the first time around.
Even if one partner does absolutely nothing but LOOK at the code the other partner is writing, it is the equivalent of a code review by a peer. The effort is not wasted, unless you suck at doing it.
Why is it "crap"? Why does it not matter?
Because such a train of thought leads nowhere useful. The end of this line of thought is, "Everything may, or may not be real, including me." Well... okay. Now what?
I do not see how my belief in a creator undermines the engineering of this missile launcher I'm working on.
It isn't your belief in a creator which matters, but your non-belief in the process of evolution (which, by the way, is not incompatible with the concept of a supreme being). The latter is indicative of a systemic inability to evaluate evidence in a rational manner. Those who cannot think rationally about the world cannot be effective scientists or engineers.
Even if you constrain your irrational thinking to only this single topic, it is a symptom of mental illness, no different than disputing the color of the sky.
The elder programmers have seen many programming fads come and go, many claims for the "one true way" to greater efficiency and reducing bugs. Like most fad/pop things, pair programming probably worked in a specific environment, with specific people doing a specific type of task ... but is probably not a universal solution.
I have to disagree. At its most basic, pair programming is simply having somebody directly help you to accomplish a task, and also, observe your actions as you make them. The concept of using a helper is not a fad, trend, or technique. A better term for it would be "no brainer." The reason it sometimes fails is because of the personalities involved, and it's the same reason certain people can't work together doing ANYTHING (for instance, repairing a car).
It's true that programming often requirements moments or even extended periods of intense, solitary concentration. Your partner just has to know when to shut up. Even with compatible personalities it still takes practice.
But really, it's just two humans working together on something, which is not a "fad."
For reference, 0.189 Hz is roughly once cycle per five seconds. Take a finger and raise it for 2.5 seconds, then lower it for 2.5 seconds.
I am having a hard time imagining how, physiologically, the human voice mechanism could be capable of producing a vibration at such a frequency. Frankly it sounds like bullshit to me.
We're stuck on this planet for the moment, and limited by the resources available on, or near, the surface. Life is made of carbon. The temperature of the planet's surface is moderated by it. You're talking about taking the stuff life is made of, and which protects all life from sub-Antarctic temperatures, and blasting it permanently away from the planet. That sounds like a tremendously BAD idea. Excess CO2 is not some terrible toxin, it's simply life-stuff that is currently in a chemical form that has some problematic properties. We need to figure out how to turn it back into biomatter, not discard it from our planet.
Ah, the war cry of censorship-lovers. Did you know that you are also free to murder in this country? You just aren't free from the consequences! Amazing.
It's popular to have a food allergy. Growing up, I never even heard of gluten intolerance much less knew anybody who suffered from it. Now it seems like half the people in any given room are gluten "intolerant." usually they claim they were diagnosed by a naturopath. Gluten intolerance is real, but what the fuck happened in the last ten years so that suddenly a big fraction of the population suffers from it? Something is up with this.
Some people's mouths are simply immune to tooth decay. According to my dentist, who could be wrong, about 5-10% of people simply never have problems no matter how/if they brush. I've gone weeks without brushing (think long backpacking trips) and the only ill effect is pungent breath and a film that takes 20 minutes of good brushing later to remove. I normally brush every day but only so my breath doesn't stink. I know it isn't dietary, because my wife and I eat the same diet and she still gets cavities, despite being an even more fastidious tooth brusher than I am.
The price of gold changed in the early 80's because the value of the dollar fluctuated wildly. Congrats on proving the parent post's point though.
I have to agree about the ribbon. I spend most of my writing code in either an IDE or a text editor, and I use keyboard shortcuts. If I do use another app, it's usually some Office app. I like the ribbon because it groups functions according to most likely use, not category. I can never remember what commands to invoke, much less memorize keyboard shortcuts. It's basically a tabbed toolbar. I have a feeling a lot of the people bitching about ribbons don't actually use apps which have them
If you are just measuring raw activity, the measure to use is CHANGED lines of code. A deleted line, added line, or modified line all score the same. If reduction in SLOC is interpreted as negative productivity, then refactoring is impossible. And your company deserves their fate!
People who have real character don't become "a different person" when drunk or high.
This was exactly the argument I used to make to myself back when I was in denial of my own alcoholism. "It has nothing to do with alcohol, this is just how I am and the alcohol exposes it." This method of thinking allowed me to pretend that alcohol was not a problem and that all it was doing was revealing what was already there under the surface. If it's in my nature to behave in this way or that way, what does it matter whether I'm drunk when I do it?
It was not until I realized that the alcohol was in fact part of the problem that I was able to see my situation clearly for the first time, and then I understood that I needed to give it up completely.
You may be in the same position I was in, trying desperately to blame anything other than the substance (including your "character," a nebulous concept with no objective reality), in an effort to justify the ongoing use of the substance. If that is the case, I hope you connect the dots sooner rather than later.
All the while destroying other people's lives while they're high
Point conceded here. Some drugs do cause people to behave monstrously. And alcohol even more so.
breaking into people's homes so they can steal to feed their habit
Point NOT conceded. A great number of people are alcoholics. However, there is no great wave of crime due to alcoholics breaking into people's homes to steal their liquor and/or money to buy more alcohol. Why is this? Two reasons. First, it is legal and therefore, moderately cheap. If you can hold down a job, you can afford to be a drunk. Second, alcohol use is socially accepted, for the most part, and thus a boozer is more likely to be able to hold a job as long as he's not falling down drunk at work. This ability to hold a job, due to social acceptance, is what enables the drunk to continue to purchase alcohol without robbing people.
You are allowing you anger to dictate possible solutions, instead of thinking about the actual outcomes. Would a death penalty on all drug traffickers actually cause a decrease in the amount of drugs consumed? That's nothing but a hypothesis. A mountain of evidence is available which suggests that the death penalty does nothing to deter criminals. They don't think they're going to get caught in the first place, so what matter is it what the punishment is? The death penalty gives you an adrenaline rush: "Justice, fuck yeah!" But that's all it does.
You are obviously uninterested in actually solving the problem, and more interested in watching people die.
If you take 2,000,000,000 dollars, buying a 10 dollar meal, you could have bought 200,000,000 people meals.
Hunger is a social/political problem. It is not due to a lack of food resources. You could drop $2 billion that way, and the next day, all those people would still be hungry. If you're going to spend $2 billion to stop hunger I can think of, well, about an infinite number of ways to do it that would be more productive than that.
"Cloud" is a fucked up retarded marketing term. It is not any different, or more special, than any other group of servers that have load balancing, virtualization, redundancy, hot fail overs, redundancy across multiple data servers, etc.
"Computer" is a fucked up retarded marketing term. It is not any different, or more special, than any other assembly of various printed circuit boards, ICs, memory modules, spinning magnetic media, various buses running to and fro, etc.
Or maybe... perhaps... The word "computer" has been invented to stand for those concepts, so that when we want to talk about something which is composed of all those parts, we only have to say a single word and everyone knows what we mean, instead of having to recite a fuckin' book.
What the hell are you talking about? The DMCA went into effect in 1998. YouTube was created in 2005. There is no such thing as "what we had before."
It's the same reason security researchers publish ANY kind of exploit. To force those who are responsible to fix the bug. Would you rather they all stopped doing that and let the black hats have a monopoly on such exploits?
Removing ones clothing, and detonating a massive bomb in front of a building full of people, are equivalent acts in your mind?
Why do people keep saying that? The court in Oregon where he did it ruled that it was protected speech. That doesn't mean it can only be protected speech in Oregon. Do it in other states, and other states' courts will rule on it too.
Oregon is a bit, er, different. The Supreme Court of Oregon has explicitly ruled that erotic/sexual displays are a form of protected speech. That ruling has led to Oregon's status as the strip club capital of the USA, with more strip clubs per capita than anywhere else, including Las Vegas (though most of them are in the Portland area). Portland has an annual Naked Bike Ride event. The police who follow the riders are there to protect them, not arrest them.
That's not to say some other state couldn't take the same view of things, but this decision is very typically an Oregonian decision. There is a clear distinction between lewdness and nudity, and Oregonians for the most part know how to make this distinction.