This is why I hate managers who come from accounting backgrounds. I've worked in two companies where my direct report was an accountant, and so was theirs. It was sheer hell. I've avoided that kind of environment ever since. This means I'm stuck with smaller companies, often run by domineering entrepreneurial A-types... but the A-types rarely consider cost when they see a chance for profit. The workload ends up being about the same, but the work gets a lot more interesting (in both the Chinese and American meanings), and they payoff is usually way, way better.
Best times I ever had was when I had a boss who was a geek. The first one understood that money was important to a certain level, but challenge and learning were what would keep my interest. He had me find my own projects, and as long as my work got done and the projects had a chance of benefiting the company, I could play around with just about anything. Another geek boss dedicated Friday afternoons (when he knew nothing much was likely to get done anyway) to coding challenges. My accounting bosses demanded I work 60 hour weeks and fired me because of office politics. That may have coloured my opinion of accountants as bosses, I guess, but honestly I've enjoyed my work more, and been generally more productive, when not being told to reduce cost.
Hm, good point. Like I said a few posts up, there's good reasons to expect something more like an American Revolution than a Fall of Rome, and you do offer a happy trend that rather encourages me to expect it.
'course, that said, it is a little depressing living in a declining empire... buuuut we have laser beams and jet planes, so I can't find myself moved to tears over how bad things are.;D
While, again, I generally agree with that statement, I would raise two objections. First, while things have always been as bad/good as they are now, excepting technology, argument from fiction isn't particularly convincing. But, that said, I agree with what you've quoted from it pretty substantially. In fact, when theology undergraduates complain about the sexual license of our culture, I point them at Sodom and ancient carved stone sexual aides. Nothing changes.
The other objection I have is that there have historically been very terrible times. The fall of Rome is a good example; things did go downhill, things did collapse, and when Romans and their client states looked around and said "this is terrible and things haven't been bad in a long time," they were right. Similarly, there were critics who, in hindsight, saw exactly what was going on. I'm not claiming to be someone like that, mind. Or, take a look at Medieval Europe between 1250 and 1400; not a collapse, but a significant and noticable decline.
Yes, historically, things don't change much, and every generation thinks they're the best/worst/most depraved/most holy/etc., and they're almost always wrong. I do not argue that we are the worst generation. I do not argue that as technological advancements improve moral quality decreases. In fact, there are several cultures- South Korea for example- that have both increasing technology and maintaining or improving social fiber. I do think that, specifically, America, and its client states Canada and England, are showing particular signs of the slow collapse to which empires are historically prone. I say this as a Canadian, by the way, and without rancor; America isn't an adventuring nation seeking to conquer, it's just large and powerful, and on the world stage it does stuff as a democracy that bears a lot of similarity to what an empire would do. And, frankly, it's doing some of the same things a senescing empire does. Public education decreases, the masses vote themselves grain/welfare, foreign relations shift from "not one penny in tribute" to "dialogue with the barbarians."
Yes, insisting that we don't match the ancestors is wrong and stupid. That doesn't mean we're justified in insisting that since on average things don't change there can't be any variation.
Not necessarily myopia. I agree, people don't get how much better off we are now, but if you reduce the scope to the "Western" world in the last 100 years, and pay attention to the evident character rather than quality of life, there is a disturbing trend away from social and individual responsibility and toward more and more extended childhoods. There are, of course, many brave and good people, many of whom are serving in our militaries, but greed and selfishness are becoming social norms, and that is a disturbing trend when you widen the scope and notice when that usually happens. It's hard to escape the conclusion that, as great as life is right now, we're on the downslope of a great empire, technologically advanced but no longer in possession of the character necessary to maintain leadership for the next couple of centuries.
If we're lucky, and I think there's reason we might be, we'll see something more like the American Revolution than the Fall of Rome.
No law passed by congress should acknowledge religion in any way. Recognizing a religion in any way establishes (verb) that religion as a privileged group.
On the one hand, as I'm a vicious pseudo-libertarian and don't want the government to make many laws at all, and I don't think the government has a right to make laws regarding a particular religion, I kind of agree. On the other hand, laws enshrining religious tolerance- on which legal protection of atheism as well as deism, Christianity, Buddhism, etc., is founded- those acknowledge religion, but they are a great force for social good. Complaining that governments are legally aware of religions in general or a religion in particular doesn't seem all that reasonable to me.
1) I think even Jefferson would object to being called an "atheist with a philosophical bent." Deism != atheism. He professed a belief in a God of some type, though he disagreed with most of the core theologies of Christianity. Washington, whether he was a deist or a Christian, was certainly not an atheist.
2) Why do you keep using that word? I do not think it means what you think it means. The early Americans were eager to avoid a state church, such as Anglicanism, not to avoid churches. The issue was not, for them, that "religious people" might unduly affect the political process, but that the government not require adherence to a particular church. The word "establishment" in "establishment of religion" is a verb, not a noun; they were concerned about not creating (establishing) a state religion, not fighting "the establishment." Also, "respecting" is like "regarding" or "concerning," not "being nice to." They didn't want to ensure that respect was never paid to any religion, but that the government not dictate what people could and could not believe. Point is, it's about not forcing people to adhere to one faith, not about treating any/all faiths or lack thereof execrably.
Apologies if you knew all that, but your post made it seem like you were saying "the government shouldn't make decisions based on a positive attitude toward the established (Christian) religion," which I think is an incorrect reading on all counts.
Actually, I would expect the futureman to respect my beliefs and not try to force his modern culture on me
You'll note how well that worked for Africa between, say, 1600 and 1900.
I would not try to block legislation that would,
Yes, but let's pick something you disagree with on a fundamental moral level- say, (let's presume you favour pro-choice) the futuremen think that abortion is a social wrong, and ban it. You wouldn't lobby to get that law changed? Or a law that says, since murder is property damage, rape is merely vandalism?
If you disagree with the views of a culture or subculture, I have no qualms. If you object to the influence they're having in politics as free agents in a democratic state, as long as they're allowed to speak, I have no qualms. But you seem to have objected to the rabbis' arguments on the basis of the tech level of their core books, not any particular ethical or logical element. I assume you don't disagree with the parts of their books you like, like "don't murder people" and "treat people well-" yet those parts come from the same era as the parts you object to.
What I mean to say is, you seem to be making the argument (in this and the other post I replied to) that being later in time, being scientifically advanced, and having a better grasp of ethics all go together. I don't imagine you mean to say that, since our internet-using society seems to manage plenty of evils, intolerance, and race camps despite having way more jet planes than Stalin or Hitler did.* You disagree with the rabbis, obviously, but why? Your argument is unclear to me.
*Not a Godwin. Not comparing you to Hitler. Just pointing out the disconnection between time, science, and ethics. See also the reduction in European learning between, e.g., 1250 and 1400.
Please note- I also disagree with the rabbis' interpretations of the state of death, and I think donors jumping the queue is a good idea. I think the rabbis are making the same kind of reading error that more recent groups have made about blood donations- being awfully literal about some passages that may not bear it well. But I don't disagree with them because their beliefs are old.
Skin! In my day we dreamed about having skin! We walked around everywhere holding our insides in with our hands. Didn't have blood, either- we hand to pump oxygen into our cells by hand, and that was no easy task, let me tell you. Gripping an oxygen atom without skin on! And web pages, hah! We had to wait for our elders to die and arrange their corpses in pictograms! Those were the days. "Corpse-lying-on-its-side-with-one-arm-outstretched, corpse-half-buried-upside-down, corpse-with-fingers-up-nose. I see the Joneses have been accessing our network again."
Let's do an experiment. Send you 100 years into the future, where they've decided that because of a new technology, your moral code doesn't apply anymore... saaaaaay, they've invented personality uploading and cloning. And since everyone backs up weekly, murder is now considered mere property damage. But you, with your ancient codes of conduct, object, because you don't trust the backups to not be tampered with, and you're not keen on dying even though "you won't remember."
"Piffle" says futureman, "your ancient and obtuse ways of thinking are no longer valid in today's advanced world. In your time, brain surgery was barely more than trepaniation. It's not really a question of life and death, just property rights. Here, let me show you." And he pulls out a gun and shoots you.
My point being that just as new things are neither bad nor good because they are new, old things are neither bad nor good because they are old. "Don't kill people arbitrarily" is a good idea, even though it's old, and while "the heart is still pumping" might be an outdated method of tracking liveliness, the idea of waiting until someone's "dead" before pulling their organs out is a good one. If you'll recall, the US Constitution was written by a bunch of tobacco farmers and hayseeds generations ago- but the concepts written down in it are still useful, n'est-ce pas?
You can modify guns to reduce the trigger pull to nearly nothing. Or they can wear down so the spring doesn't offer as much resistance. Or you can have an old revolver with a lousy safety that doesn't put a physical barrier between the hammer and the cartridge, so that dropping it upside-down on a hard floor will set it off. Yes, metal guns are noticeably heavy, but so are cats and dogs, and toddlers haul them around all the time. Purely hypothetically, it's possible for a toddler to haul a loaded, chambered.38 off a table and either pull a soft trigger or drop it on the ground where it discharges into them. This is why every gun safety course I know has a section on storage, and how cardboard boxes aren't sufficient.
It's the parent's fault no matter how you look at it, but "never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity," right?
My current job, I got handed about 250K lines and told to rewrite it from scratch. The end product was about 40-50K lines, which I've since reduced to 35K lines- and not by being "clever," just by cutting out unnecessary things, and adding useful things- like loops. 9_9 The original coder was so mind-numbingly bad that any other developer at the company that had to deal with his dreck got laughed at, in pity but more in relief. I'm still paranoid that I'm not really a good developer, but I'm now convinced I'm at least an adequate one, and I measure the quality of my code by how easy it is to understand and modify it when I come back four/six/twelve months later to add a feature. If I start going cross-eyed, I don't think "oh, I've lost my touch," I think "what dumb asshole wrote this- oh, right, me."
I'll admit my experience is limited, and I haven't done really complex stuff, but I've never seen code that was hard to read and was written well. That includes my own code.
To address the original issue; reading 40K lines isn't fun. Find a bug report for some peripheral part of the system and start by fixing that. Work your way around and into larger systems, and when you finally reach the core of the code, you'll have a pretty good idea of the developer's style, idiosyncrasies, and what the calls the core is making are doing.
Funny thing about light. You can reflect it, direct it, quick rewrite it- er, anyway. It'll be like that scene in the Mummy sequel, only instead of mirrors, gold, and flesh-eating scarabs, it'll be mirrors, internet, and botnets.:D
Has anyone else noticed the similarity in effect between this and DRM on, say, ebooks? "You can use this, but only if you have the right key. And someone else can turn it off if they're clever. And there's versions out there that work far better without demanding this rigamarole." Gun control seems to share a lot of qualities with DRM, now that I think about it. Trigger locks to stop you or anyone else from using the gun without entering a key, Gun cabinets to stop you or anyone else from accessing a gun without a key, storing your gun and your ammo in separate containers so that you can't use it at your convenience, needing permission to acquire a gun, having licenses to use your guns in certain ways but not others, having a list of your guns kept with a central authority and it being illegal to own a gun off the list, needing permission to transport your gun from one area of use to another, not being allowed to carry the gun around so you can use it when there's an immediate need... It's all about making it harder to use, to make someone else feel safer.
DRM is gun control for software. Gun control is DRM for hardware.
If I went to a foreign country where speeding was punishable by a million-dollar fine, I am pretty sure that the instant someone sent me a letter saying "I caught you speeding, expect a bill shortly," I would be willing to lie, cheat, and steal to escape accusation. Not, mind you, because I am by nature someone who likes to lie, cheat, and steal (or so I hope), but because, faced with a million-dollar ticket my options would be criminal enterprise or jail anyway. I would get my plates changed and paint my car. And if someone came up to me and said "Hey, is this your car? We're pretty sure we caught you speeding," I would bald-facedly answer "nope, couldn't have been me, man."
Besides the "nothing left to lose" element of things at that point, I would not feel guilty about trying to escape an unjust law. If I knew the million-dollar ticket existed because a powerful speed-gun manufacturing lobby had bought the law from congress, I would have no moral compunctions about breaking the law, or about doing otherwise innocent things to escape the law.
I've thought about this too.
I think, once I've got my student loans paid off, and my next couple of degrees finished, that I might look at work in developing nations. Making $15K a year doesn't sound like much, but if you can live well in the area for $10K, it's a good deal; I'd rather have a maid and chauffeur in Bangalore than a 200ft^2 apartment in NYC, know what I mean? The more money I end up making, the more I realize my motivation is to live well and have technical challenges- the actual paycheck is just a barometer for that sort of thing. There will never be an escape from dealing with corporate slime, but in developing nations at least what you're doing is exciting, or new, or important. 20 years from now, who's going to be hiring people for their space flight control center?
As a fellow Canadian, I would like to point out that this failure mode is a pretty good one. Many governments, when not getting along internally, collapse into civil war or goon squads. Some write really stupid laws and shove them down the citizen's throats because "or the terrorists win/how dare you impugn the President." Ours just goes home and sulks.
I have lots of bad things to say about our government, but this, in particular, I like. If you can't have smaller government, lazy government's the next best thing!
Actually, modern willingness to kill is significantly different than ancient willingness to kill. Rates of death in combat didn't exceed 10% until the Napoleonic wars, and didn't reach 50% until the World Wars. David Grossman wrote a couple of books (On Killing, and On Combat) explaining the psychological tools used to increase a soldier's willingness to kill (and ability to avoid or recover from the severe psychological trauma caused by killing). Physical distance is precisely one of those methods, as is technological distance (button-pushing) and psychological distance (seeing the enemy as inhuman). The tendency of a nation or its troops to refer to the enemy in dehumanizing terms (raus, hun, sand nigger) is one example of the soldier's attempt to distance himself from the awareness that he's killing another human being. Modern combat training involves a lot of methods (human-shaped targets, training instinctive reaction, training obedience to orders) meant to create a buffer between the soldier and "the enemy."
If you read the "historical" accounts of most battles, you'll believe that 5,000,000 Persian soldiers invaded ancient Greece, and most of them died. Archeology suggests the numbers were more like 1,000,000 people at most, 100,000 of which at most were combat troops, and only 10,000 of them died before they went back home. War history where we have each sides' records of dead and wounded, and kills attributed to their own soldiers, show that most nations will significantly overestimate how many people they killed. Before Napoleon, despite the bloody accounts of even medieval battles, way more people would die from dysentery than sword wounds.
Today's soldiers are not any more bloodthirsty than Alexander's soldiers were, but they have tools that are much more effective, and significantly psychologically easier for them to use. The two benefits of robot soldiers are that, first, it will reduce the number of human beings on "our side" who are put in harm's way, and second, that it will be considerably easier for someone to push the button marked "kill" if it looks more like Command & Conquer than Apocalypse Now. We can see attrition rates of 80 or 90% today because we've made it psychologically and technically easy enough to kill 1,000 people with the push of one button. The danger, for example, of nukes in the cold war was not that nukes were destructive (though they were), but that they were easy to use. Stalin killed way more people by working them to death than died in Hiroshima- but in Hiroshima they only had to push a button. Killer robots are a lot like that. Easy to use.
Slashdot Mirror
So, what you're saying is, we'd come out even?
This is why I hate managers who come from accounting backgrounds. I've worked in two companies where my direct report was an accountant, and so was theirs. It was sheer hell. I've avoided that kind of environment ever since. This means I'm stuck with smaller companies, often run by domineering entrepreneurial A-types... but the A-types rarely consider cost when they see a chance for profit. The workload ends up being about the same, but the work gets a lot more interesting (in both the Chinese and American meanings), and they payoff is usually way, way better.
Best times I ever had was when I had a boss who was a geek. The first one understood that money was important to a certain level, but challenge and learning were what would keep my interest. He had me find my own projects, and as long as my work got done and the projects had a chance of benefiting the company, I could play around with just about anything. Another geek boss dedicated Friday afternoons (when he knew nothing much was likely to get done anyway) to coding challenges. My accounting bosses demanded I work 60 hour weeks and fired me because of office politics. That may have coloured my opinion of accountants as bosses, I guess, but honestly I've enjoyed my work more, and been generally more productive, when not being told to reduce cost.
Well, since we've now got cheap and easy video analysis, a little camera ought to be able to figure that out.
Hm, good point. Like I said a few posts up, there's good reasons to expect something more like an American Revolution than a Fall of Rome, and you do offer a happy trend that rather encourages me to expect it.
'course, that said, it is a little depressing living in a declining empire... buuuut we have laser beams and jet planes, so I can't find myself moved to tears over how bad things are. ;D
While, again, I generally agree with that statement, I would raise two objections. First, while things have always been as bad/good as they are now, excepting technology, argument from fiction isn't particularly convincing. But, that said, I agree with what you've quoted from it pretty substantially. In fact, when theology undergraduates complain about the sexual license of our culture, I point them at Sodom and ancient carved stone sexual aides. Nothing changes.
The other objection I have is that there have historically been very terrible times. The fall of Rome is a good example; things did go downhill, things did collapse, and when Romans and their client states looked around and said "this is terrible and things haven't been bad in a long time," they were right. Similarly, there were critics who, in hindsight, saw exactly what was going on. I'm not claiming to be someone like that, mind. Or, take a look at Medieval Europe between 1250 and 1400; not a collapse, but a significant and noticable decline.
Yes, historically, things don't change much, and every generation thinks they're the best/worst/most depraved/most holy/etc., and they're almost always wrong. I do not argue that we are the worst generation. I do not argue that as technological advancements improve moral quality decreases. In fact, there are several cultures- South Korea for example- that have both increasing technology and maintaining or improving social fiber. I do think that, specifically, America, and its client states Canada and England, are showing particular signs of the slow collapse to which empires are historically prone. I say this as a Canadian, by the way, and without rancor; America isn't an adventuring nation seeking to conquer, it's just large and powerful, and on the world stage it does stuff as a democracy that bears a lot of similarity to what an empire would do. And, frankly, it's doing some of the same things a senescing empire does. Public education decreases, the masses vote themselves grain/welfare, foreign relations shift from "not one penny in tribute" to "dialogue with the barbarians."
Yes, insisting that we don't match the ancestors is wrong and stupid. That doesn't mean we're justified in insisting that since on average things don't change there can't be any variation.
Not necessarily myopia. I agree, people don't get how much better off we are now, but if you reduce the scope to the "Western" world in the last 100 years, and pay attention to the evident character rather than quality of life, there is a disturbing trend away from social and individual responsibility and toward more and more extended childhoods. There are, of course, many brave and good people, many of whom are serving in our militaries, but greed and selfishness are becoming social norms, and that is a disturbing trend when you widen the scope and notice when that usually happens. It's hard to escape the conclusion that, as great as life is right now, we're on the downslope of a great empire, technologically advanced but no longer in possession of the character necessary to maintain leadership for the next couple of centuries.
If we're lucky, and I think there's reason we might be, we'll see something more like the American Revolution than the Fall of Rome.
No law passed by congress should acknowledge religion in any way. Recognizing a religion in any way establishes (verb) that religion as a privileged group.
On the one hand, as I'm a vicious pseudo-libertarian and don't want the government to make many laws at all, and I don't think the government has a right to make laws regarding a particular religion, I kind of agree. On the other hand, laws enshrining religious tolerance- on which legal protection of atheism as well as deism, Christianity, Buddhism, etc., is founded- those acknowledge religion, but they are a great force for social good. Complaining that governments are legally aware of religions in general or a religion in particular doesn't seem all that reasonable to me.
1) I think even Jefferson would object to being called an "atheist with a philosophical bent." Deism != atheism. He professed a belief in a God of some type, though he disagreed with most of the core theologies of Christianity. Washington, whether he was a deist or a Christian, was certainly not an atheist.
2) Why do you keep using that word? I do not think it means what you think it means. The early Americans were eager to avoid a state church, such as Anglicanism, not to avoid churches. The issue was not, for them, that "religious people" might unduly affect the political process, but that the government not require adherence to a particular church. The word "establishment" in "establishment of religion" is a verb, not a noun; they were concerned about not creating (establishing) a state religion, not fighting "the establishment." Also, "respecting" is like "regarding" or "concerning," not "being nice to." They didn't want to ensure that respect was never paid to any religion, but that the government not dictate what people could and could not believe. Point is, it's about not forcing people to adhere to one faith, not about treating any/all faiths or lack thereof execrably.
Apologies if you knew all that, but your post made it seem like you were saying "the government shouldn't make decisions based on a positive attitude toward the established (Christian) religion," which I think is an incorrect reading on all counts.
FreeCiv!
Actually, I would expect the futureman to respect my beliefs and not try to force his modern culture on me
You'll note how well that worked for Africa between, say, 1600 and 1900.
I would not try to block legislation that would,
Yes, but let's pick something you disagree with on a fundamental moral level- say, (let's presume you favour pro-choice) the futuremen think that abortion is a social wrong, and ban it. You wouldn't lobby to get that law changed? Or a law that says, since murder is property damage, rape is merely vandalism?
If you disagree with the views of a culture or subculture, I have no qualms. If you object to the influence they're having in politics as free agents in a democratic state, as long as they're allowed to speak, I have no qualms. But you seem to have objected to the rabbis' arguments on the basis of the tech level of their core books, not any particular ethical or logical element. I assume you don't disagree with the parts of their books you like, like "don't murder people" and "treat people well-" yet those parts come from the same era as the parts you object to.
What I mean to say is, you seem to be making the argument (in this and the other post I replied to) that being later in time, being scientifically advanced, and having a better grasp of ethics all go together. I don't imagine you mean to say that, since our internet-using society seems to manage plenty of evils, intolerance, and race camps despite having way more jet planes than Stalin or Hitler did.* You disagree with the rabbis, obviously, but why? Your argument is unclear to me.
*Not a Godwin. Not comparing you to Hitler. Just pointing out the disconnection between time, science, and ethics. See also the reduction in European learning between, e.g., 1250 and 1400.
Please note- I also disagree with the rabbis' interpretations of the state of death, and I think donors jumping the queue is a good idea. I think the rabbis are making the same kind of reading error that more recent groups have made about blood donations- being awfully literal about some passages that may not bear it well. But I don't disagree with them because their beliefs are old.
Oh, damn.
Skin! In my day we dreamed about having skin! We walked around everywhere holding our insides in with our hands. Didn't have blood, either- we hand to pump oxygen into our cells by hand, and that was no easy task, let me tell you. Gripping an oxygen atom without skin on! And web pages, hah! We had to wait for our elders to die and arrange their corpses in pictograms! Those were the days. "Corpse-lying-on-its-side-with-one-arm-outstretched, corpse-half-buried-upside-down, corpse-with-fingers-up-nose. I see the Joneses have been accessing our network again."
Let's do an experiment. Send you 100 years into the future, where they've decided that because of a new technology, your moral code doesn't apply anymore... saaaaaay, they've invented personality uploading and cloning. And since everyone backs up weekly, murder is now considered mere property damage. But you, with your ancient codes of conduct, object, because you don't trust the backups to not be tampered with, and you're not keen on dying even though "you won't remember."
"Piffle" says futureman, "your ancient and obtuse ways of thinking are no longer valid in today's advanced world. In your time, brain surgery was barely more than trepaniation. It's not really a question of life and death, just property rights. Here, let me show you." And he pulls out a gun and shoots you.
My point being that just as new things are neither bad nor good because they are new, old things are neither bad nor good because they are old. "Don't kill people arbitrarily" is a good idea, even though it's old, and while "the heart is still pumping" might be an outdated method of tracking liveliness, the idea of waiting until someone's "dead" before pulling their organs out is a good one. If you'll recall, the US Constitution was written by a bunch of tobacco farmers and hayseeds generations ago- but the concepts written down in it are still useful, n'est-ce pas?
You can modify guns to reduce the trigger pull to nearly nothing. Or they can wear down so the spring doesn't offer as much resistance. Or you can have an old revolver with a lousy safety that doesn't put a physical barrier between the hammer and the cartridge, so that dropping it upside-down on a hard floor will set it off. Yes, metal guns are noticeably heavy, but so are cats and dogs, and toddlers haul them around all the time. Purely hypothetically, it's possible for a toddler to haul a loaded, chambered .38 off a table and either pull a soft trigger or drop it on the ground where it discharges into them. This is why every gun safety course I know has a section on storage, and how cardboard boxes aren't sufficient.
It's the parent's fault no matter how you look at it, but "never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity," right?
This.
My current job, I got handed about 250K lines and told to rewrite it from scratch. The end product was about 40-50K lines, which I've since reduced to 35K lines- and not by being "clever," just by cutting out unnecessary things, and adding useful things- like loops. 9_9 The original coder was so mind-numbingly bad that any other developer at the company that had to deal with his dreck got laughed at, in pity but more in relief. I'm still paranoid that I'm not really a good developer, but I'm now convinced I'm at least an adequate one, and I measure the quality of my code by how easy it is to understand and modify it when I come back four/six/twelve months later to add a feature. If I start going cross-eyed, I don't think "oh, I've lost my touch," I think "what dumb asshole wrote this- oh, right, me."
I'll admit my experience is limited, and I haven't done really complex stuff, but I've never seen code that was hard to read and was written well. That includes my own code.
To address the original issue; reading 40K lines isn't fun. Find a bug report for some peripheral part of the system and start by fixing that. Work your way around and into larger systems, and when you finally reach the core of the code, you'll have a pretty good idea of the developer's style, idiosyncrasies, and what the calls the core is making are doing.
No word is a part of speech unless it is used in context.
(But in the typical Canadian context, such as "Great hockey game, eh?" or "Watch out for that moose, eh?", it is an interjection.)
Mod parent up.
Gravity wells are nature's way of making delivery to Earth cheap.
Violent, but cheap.
Funny thing about light. You can reflect it, direct it, quick rewrite it- er, anyway. It'll be like that scene in the Mummy sequel, only instead of mirrors, gold, and flesh-eating scarabs, it'll be mirrors, internet, and botnets. :D
Disco ball of internet! Woo!
Has anyone else noticed the similarity in effect between this and DRM on, say, ebooks? "You can use this, but only if you have the right key. And someone else can turn it off if they're clever. And there's versions out there that work far better without demanding this rigamarole." Gun control seems to share a lot of qualities with DRM, now that I think about it. Trigger locks to stop you or anyone else from using the gun without entering a key, Gun cabinets to stop you or anyone else from accessing a gun without a key, storing your gun and your ammo in separate containers so that you can't use it at your convenience, needing permission to acquire a gun, having licenses to use your guns in certain ways but not others, having a list of your guns kept with a central authority and it being illegal to own a gun off the list, needing permission to transport your gun from one area of use to another, not being allowed to carry the gun around so you can use it when there's an immediate need... It's all about making it harder to use, to make someone else feel safer.
DRM is gun control for software. Gun control is DRM for hardware.
If I went to a foreign country where speeding was punishable by a million-dollar fine, I am pretty sure that the instant someone sent me a letter saying "I caught you speeding, expect a bill shortly," I would be willing to lie, cheat, and steal to escape accusation. Not, mind you, because I am by nature someone who likes to lie, cheat, and steal (or so I hope), but because, faced with a million-dollar ticket my options would be criminal enterprise or jail anyway. I would get my plates changed and paint my car. And if someone came up to me and said "Hey, is this your car? We're pretty sure we caught you speeding," I would bald-facedly answer "nope, couldn't have been me, man."
Besides the "nothing left to lose" element of things at that point, I would not feel guilty about trying to escape an unjust law. If I knew the million-dollar ticket existed because a powerful speed-gun manufacturing lobby had bought the law from congress, I would have no moral compunctions about breaking the law, or about doing otherwise innocent things to escape the law.
I've thought about this too. I think, once I've got my student loans paid off, and my next couple of degrees finished, that I might look at work in developing nations. Making $15K a year doesn't sound like much, but if you can live well in the area for $10K, it's a good deal; I'd rather have a maid and chauffeur in Bangalore than a 200ft^2 apartment in NYC, know what I mean? The more money I end up making, the more I realize my motivation is to live well and have technical challenges- the actual paycheck is just a barometer for that sort of thing. There will never be an escape from dealing with corporate slime, but in developing nations at least what you're doing is exciting, or new, or important. 20 years from now, who's going to be hiring people for their space flight control center?
No big progress in space travel in 40 years.
Sir, I disagree.
As a fellow Canadian, I would like to point out that this failure mode is a pretty good one. Many governments, when not getting along internally, collapse into civil war or goon squads. Some write really stupid laws and shove them down the citizen's throats because "or the terrorists win/how dare you impugn the President." Ours just goes home and sulks. I have lots of bad things to say about our government, but this, in particular, I like. If you can't have smaller government, lazy government's the next best thing!
Actually, modern willingness to kill is significantly different than ancient willingness to kill. Rates of death in combat didn't exceed 10% until the Napoleonic wars, and didn't reach 50% until the World Wars. David Grossman wrote a couple of books (On Killing, and On Combat) explaining the psychological tools used to increase a soldier's willingness to kill (and ability to avoid or recover from the severe psychological trauma caused by killing). Physical distance is precisely one of those methods, as is technological distance (button-pushing) and psychological distance (seeing the enemy as inhuman). The tendency of a nation or its troops to refer to the enemy in dehumanizing terms (raus, hun, sand nigger) is one example of the soldier's attempt to distance himself from the awareness that he's killing another human being. Modern combat training involves a lot of methods (human-shaped targets, training instinctive reaction, training obedience to orders) meant to create a buffer between the soldier and "the enemy."
If you read the "historical" accounts of most battles, you'll believe that 5,000,000 Persian soldiers invaded ancient Greece, and most of them died. Archeology suggests the numbers were more like 1,000,000 people at most, 100,000 of which at most were combat troops, and only 10,000 of them died before they went back home. War history where we have each sides' records of dead and wounded, and kills attributed to their own soldiers, show that most nations will significantly overestimate how many people they killed. Before Napoleon, despite the bloody accounts of even medieval battles, way more people would die from dysentery than sword wounds.
Today's soldiers are not any more bloodthirsty than Alexander's soldiers were, but they have tools that are much more effective, and significantly psychologically easier for them to use. The two benefits of robot soldiers are that, first, it will reduce the number of human beings on "our side" who are put in harm's way, and second, that it will be considerably easier for someone to push the button marked "kill" if it looks more like Command & Conquer than Apocalypse Now. We can see attrition rates of 80 or 90% today because we've made it psychologically and technically easy enough to kill 1,000 people with the push of one button. The danger, for example, of nukes in the cold war was not that nukes were destructive (though they were), but that they were easy to use. Stalin killed way more people by working them to death than died in Hiroshima- but in Hiroshima they only had to push a button. Killer robots are a lot like that. Easy to use.