The reason your second experiment failed, where you tried to break your argument down into postulates, is because you changed the audience that would react to it.
In the first case, if you write a moderate-length, articulate, well-reasoned argument, you'll get a certain amount of similarly written responses back along with all of the normal internet chaff.
In the second case, you lose the interest of those with something insightful to say, while simultaneously making it more accessible to people that wouldn't have bothered to write a reasonable reply to the first case....Also, your postulates were badly written.
I was on the fence over ad blocking, and had never -- not once -- installed or used AdBlock, until whyfirefoxisblocked.com came along. That cheesed me off just fine and I promptly downloaded and installed ABP, and WOW. It's awesome.
Now, looks like I'll be removing those whitelist entries for Google, too. Tsk.
The best managers I've worked with are the ones that remembered all of the things that had frustrated them as an employee in the past, and took those lessons to heart, and acted on them.
Other than that, management is something that takes trial and error. Some people can pull it off, some never do. Books probably won't help that much; you sort of have to already understand the challenges and resources of a manager before you can really 'get' most of the management books that are out there.
I couldn't disagree more. I've moved around enough to know that various places have their own cultures, and I've lived in places that overwhelmingly have exactly the sort of attitude you're talking about, so I don't fault you for it.
However, I can anecdotally provide myself -- and a number of my close friends -- as examples of people that would have loved to have pursued a college degree, and didn't. For the majority of us, the primary reason was cost, with arrogant disgust at the overall poor quality of community college education as a close second.
I think this sounds like a fantastic program that would increase the overall education of the average American (there'd be no excuse for not having at least some secondary education), which in turn would lead to more innovation in science and industry, which in turn would help the economy, which in turn would lead to better education.
I also don't expect to see it happen in this country in my lifetime.
There's absolutely a deeper understanding to be had of global warming. Much more so than for gravity even. There's also a deeper understanding to be had of evolution and of gravity. For the latter two cases, that deeper understanding is extremely unlikely to overturn previous results in any meaningful way...
I also think it's unlikely that we'll discover one day that, hey, humans have had absolutely zero impact on the world climate.
So, are you advocating that we do nothing until we have the deepest possible understanding of global warming...
No. I'm advocating that we shut up about "belief" and "denial" and "consensus" and just try to figure the thing out. In the meantime, I'm all for reducing our ecological footprints, on the individual and global levels. Not that it should matter, but I've spent an awful lot of time backpacking in remote roadless areas, and I happen to be one of the "Leave No Trace" crowd. Human impact on the environment is an important issue to me.
What I do want is to get rid of all this dogmatic crap around it. The OP had a fair point: in science, there rarely is a complete consensus on any given problem. The issue of global warming has been so extremely politicized that there's little room left for dissent against the popular points. I don't think that's a situation that's worked out very well for string theory, and I don't think it'll work out very well for theories about global warming, either.
It absolutely is a false dichotomy. There's no sane reason for mainstream understanding to deviate from scientific understanding; that's idiotic.
Maybe you were trying to demonstrate exactly that -- on re-reading your post, I can't tell for sure. Even if that's the case, you were still actually reinforcing the idea of denying vs. believing in global warming, and that's still exactly the attitude that keeps the issue from being understood well enough to create the kind of environment that people want to live in.
I don't care if we're talking about the scientific or the mainstream sense: global warming isn't something that people should be "denying" or "believing in", it's something that people should be trying to understand.
You're enforcing a false dichotomy here. From a purely scientific perspective, there's no such thing as "believers" and "deniers", and oh boy howdy do I wish laymen could finally freakin' get that through their heads.
Global warming refers to a specific set of climatological models of our planet. That's it. There are an awful lot of really smart, educated, professional scientists that are busy trying to figure out the details of that model. It goes something like this:
- Is human activity affecting our climate? : Probably.
- How much of an effect is it having? : Uh... let us get back to you on that.
- OK. Assuming it's having a non-negligible effect, can you describe the end results of that effect? : Maybe someday. In the meantime, here's our best guess.
It's not a matter of "denying" or "believing", it's a matter of understanding. Breaking the entire incredibly complex mathematical model down into "you're either with us or against us" is political, and absurd.
Thank you for so beautifully demonstrating the parent's point.
Considering that the first hypotheses about gravity were established in the 4th century -- BC, that is -- and that Newton fleshed out the first descriptions of the laws of gravitation 400 years ago, and physicists are STILL arguing over the finer points of gravitational force, yeah, I'd say there's some room left for further understanding of the properties of global warming.
You fail to understand that popular attitudes like yours are one of the major factors preventing a deeper understanding of global warming.
What, you say there's no deeper understanding to be had, that all of the facts are known? In that case, there's a worldwide community of climatologists that would dearly like to have you present a conference on your global climatological model.
Yep. I've used uf.register4less.com for years, and never had a complaint or problem. ('Course, I haven't been hosting anything controversial, either.)
I'm really surprised that more Slashdot readers didn't chime in to mention these guys. *ahem* Why, back in my day, everybody who read Slashdot read UserFriendly, too...
OpenOffice.org is really jumping the gun here, and I think it's gonna backfire pretty hard.
I do use OpenOffice on a daily basis, and I love it. However, it's still dog-slow and clunky in some parts, unfinished or unpolished in others, and buggy here and there. You have to get to know its individual quirks. I tried getting my Microsoft Office-loyal boss to use it for a while, and he gave it up pretty fast. He found a number of things that he was used to doing in Excel that he couldn't do in OOo.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing the project or the efforts of its contributors, nor can I stand up and say that I've contributed code or money to it. What I am saying is, they haven't reached the level of completeness that Firefox had reached before the Firefox ad came out. Couple that with a typically glacial development and release process, and you'll get hordes of new users checking it out... and being annoyed by it.
And, yeah, ditto the "holy cow, that's an ugly ad" comments, too. It looks very amateurish to me.
I generally agree with you, and the parent, and the "get a grip" commentor, although I wouldn't make any assumptions about how personally identifiable the data is or isn't without being able to see the data myself.
I also don't tend to support slippery-slope arguments, because they're a fallacy.
My issue is with the nature of the requests from the Feds; they're not using the data to pursue a criminal, they're not using the data as evidence in a criminal case, they're not even using the data for purely statistical reasons. They're using the data to try to support their case for a stupid Act that has twice been struck down by appeals courts.
Then there's the fact that the federal government has already received the data it requested from three other major search engines. Why is it so important to them to get Google's, too? What does Google have that the others don't?
For that matter, what grounds does the government have for issuing a subpoena for documents in a non-criminal case? At this point, it looks suspiciously like the federal government is abusing its power in the judicial branch to support its legislative branch.
"A motion to compel compliance with a subpoena, filed yesterday in federal court in San Jose, California, said the government seeks the data to enforce the Child Online Protection Act, designed to protect minors from pornography."
The Feds are not after this data in the matter of a criminal case. They are not after the data because they want to know how many people are searching for porn. They're after the data because they want to use it to bolster their case for the Child Online Protection Act, an act which is a thinly veiled attempt to push anti-porn decency laws.
So, yeah, you might want to think of it as an abuse of power. Whether it's a legitimate abuse of power or not will probably become a matter for the courts very soon.
You're assuming that someone hasn't configured BIOS to not boot from CD and then password-protected the BIOS....Not that I'd know anything about that.:-)
I suspect this is more a side-effect of readers' priorities than anything else.
For example, I'm currently taking a bit of a break from the code mines which allow me to buy groceries. I'll be able to read most of the review, and I might have enough time for a comment (this one), but that's it. When my break's up, I have to go back to work, programming.
The programmers are, for the most part, probably too busy programming to stop and comment on a Slashdot article.
Also, I rarely comment here because either someone's already said what I would say, or because my comment would find its way to the bottom of the comments page where it would stay, largely unread. So, not only do I not have the time to spend much of it rambling on here, but it's a waste of the time I would spend anyway.
OK. I worked for a good cable TV company out of the South Bay Area for a couple of years. They did contract work for hospitals with big budgets, among other things.
I can't talk much about Monster Cable for audio use, but I can speak from experience about its use for TV applications.
Basically, it sucks.
The parent post is correct about shielding, but they fail to mention that shielding is also important at the connector, and they fail to mention the different kinds of shielding available in TV cable, and why it matters.
Let's say you live in an apartment building in a metropolitan area. Channels 2, 4, 5, 11, and 13 are probably being locally broadcast strong enough that a decent antenna will pick them up and give you a watchable picture.
You also have a poorly shielded TV cable running from the TV, to the VCR, one to your game console converter, one to the set-top box if the cable company requires one, one to your DVD player possibly... each one of those cables acts like a weak two-way antenna. On certain channels, you'll pick up interference from PG&E, the local broadcast channels, and whatever your neighbor is doing over his crappy cables.
And, being properly shielded throughout the sheath isn't enough: you need the connecter to fit tightly, and you need it to be attached to the cable correctly. If you split the sheath away from a good TV cable, you'll find an interwoven series of fine aluminum strands, spread over a solid aluminum layer, surrounding a stiff dielectric core. The end of each fitting should be set so that the inner part of the fitting sits between the aluminum layers.
Poor shields include: a real thinly interwoven set of aluminum strands (not thick or tight enough, no solid aluminum layer), four aluminum wires (just plain dumb, this is totally useless), and thin or flimsy dielectric.
Good TV cable will feel stiff if you handle it. The crappy stuff will handle like a wet worm.
Specifically, Monster's TV stuff doesn't have good fittings. I never bothered to take one of their cables apart to inspect the shielding, but great shielding won't make up for their crappy fittings.
Also, the metal in the fittings really doesn't make a bit of difference. Gold-plated fittings are usually junk, you don't want those.
Based on my experience with the TV hardware, I'd never consider buying audio stuff from them.
The parent may have had really really crappy TV cables, and replaced them with slightly less crappy Monsters. That doesn't make Monster's stuff good, though.
It was probably cached, which does nothing to help anyone.
Nah, it has nothing to do with caching of any kind. I fixed the setting, restarted the browser, blew out its cache and tried the link.
It still loaded up the spoofed PayPal.
I haven't seen Cannonball Run I in a long, long time, so I don't remember anything about that scene in it.
In II though, I distinctly remember the lamborghini going into a carwash and coming out a different color. It was like they had used poster paints on the car; it wasn't peelable.
I remember because, at the time, I thought that was a totally cool idea and vowed to do the same to my car.;-)
Doubleclick put Robert Abrams from New York (which, as the article said, had filed suit against Doubleclick), and Lori Fena of TrustE, on their privacy board. Both of these individuals, in the article, were cleverly related to being a force for anti-privacy.
At the end of the news article, michael wrote, "No one from EPIC? No one from the ACLU?"
So put these two pieces together. If there had been an individual from the ACLU on Doubleclick's board, the description might have read thus:
"Slappy Squirrel, a purse-carrying member of the ACLU, who has been directly involved in their privacy advocation activities. Her job at Doubleclick will be to keep the ACLU off of Doubleclick's back while it continues to invade your privacy."
Same for EPIC.
Was this objective journalism, or was it designed to raise up a flurry of sentiment against the company that everyone loves to hate?
Either you're trolling and I'm missing it, or you really aren't Getting It.
These folks aren't doing it for safety. They're doing it for the sheer thrill of doing it (and it _is_ a fairly wicked hardware hack).
It's not meant to be economical, either. Including time spent to perpetrate the hack, you could probably score more power from an older-model iMac for less money.
It ain't gonna end up in businesses, either, 'cause businesses don't work like that.
Also, you don't know your chips so well; the PowerPC chips run way cooler than any Pentium. Which isn't to say that they're exactly minifridges, but cooling is less of a problem. If the chip does get too toasty, it won't do it for a while to come; and when it does fry, then they'll probably just refine the hack a bit more.
I'd love to see you engineer a project with countless interworking systems and attempt to find and nail each and every bug to the wall while on a shoestring budget without the time necessary to do the job right.
Stuff it, already. It's not possible to foresee each and every possible failure; hindsight is 20/20. They've managed to successfully launch and maintain hundreds of other projects, all while their budget continues to dwindle. One mistake, and everyone jumps on their back. Kinda disgusting.
Well, it's not just HR. For the most part (obviously, there are exceptions; I'm making a generalization based on my experience so far), companies aren't designed to work with your Real Programmer. A Real Programmer tends to be a loner, someone who should be handed the project that nobody else can figure and left alone to get it done, and not dragged off to team-building exercises.
The Real Programmer will clash with management, because the Programmer simply can't be managed, and the managers (for the most part), don't realize it.
The Real Programmer will also want to run around the company and fix everything that they see to be broken; companies don't like that. They like to get their business running in a particular fashion, and then just keep throwing resources at it, even after that particular business method has become a crawling dinosaur.
Companies want code grinders and code monkeys, and the occasional pseudo-geek to act as the team's glue. They don't want the Real Programmers, because the Real Programmers won't fit in, and if the Real Programmers are smart, they'll avoid the companies.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason your second experiment failed, where you tried to break your argument down into postulates, is because you changed the audience that would react to it.
...Also, your postulates were badly written.
In the first case, if you write a moderate-length, articulate, well-reasoned argument, you'll get a certain amount of similarly written responses back along with all of the normal internet chaff.
In the second case, you lose the interest of those with something insightful to say, while simultaneously making it more accessible to people that wouldn't have bothered to write a reasonable reply to the first case.
I was on the fence over ad blocking, and had never -- not once -- installed or used AdBlock, until whyfirefoxisblocked.com came along. That cheesed me off just fine and I promptly downloaded and installed ABP, and WOW. It's awesome.
Now, looks like I'll be removing those whitelist entries for Google, too. Tsk.
Believe me, I've weathered far worse. (UID)
The best managers I've worked with are the ones that remembered all of the things that had frustrated them as an employee in the past, and took those lessons to heart, and acted on them.
Other than that, management is something that takes trial and error. Some people can pull it off, some never do. Books probably won't help that much; you sort of have to already understand the challenges and resources of a manager before you can really 'get' most of the management books that are out there.
I couldn't disagree more. I've moved around enough to know that various places have their own cultures, and I've lived in places that overwhelmingly have exactly the sort of attitude you're talking about, so I don't fault you for it.
However, I can anecdotally provide myself -- and a number of my close friends -- as examples of people that would have loved to have pursued a college degree, and didn't. For the majority of us, the primary reason was cost, with arrogant disgust at the overall poor quality of community college education as a close second.
I think this sounds like a fantastic program that would increase the overall education of the average American (there'd be no excuse for not having at least some secondary education), which in turn would lead to more innovation in science and industry, which in turn would help the economy, which in turn would lead to better education.
I also don't expect to see it happen in this country in my lifetime.
I also think it's unlikely that we'll discover one day that, hey, humans have had absolutely zero impact on the world climate.
No. I'm advocating that we shut up about "belief" and "denial" and "consensus" and just try to figure the thing out. In the meantime, I'm all for reducing our ecological footprints, on the individual and global levels. Not that it should matter, but I've spent an awful lot of time backpacking in remote roadless areas, and I happen to be one of the "Leave No Trace" crowd. Human impact on the environment is an important issue to me.
What I do want is to get rid of all this dogmatic crap around it. The OP had a fair point: in science, there rarely is a complete consensus on any given problem. The issue of global warming has been so extremely politicized that there's little room left for dissent against the popular points. I don't think that's a situation that's worked out very well for string theory, and I don't think it'll work out very well for theories about global warming, either.
It absolutely is a false dichotomy. There's no sane reason for mainstream understanding to deviate from scientific understanding; that's idiotic.
Maybe you were trying to demonstrate exactly that -- on re-reading your post, I can't tell for sure. Even if that's the case, you were still actually reinforcing the idea of denying vs. believing in global warming, and that's still exactly the attitude that keeps the issue from being understood well enough to create the kind of environment that people want to live in.
I don't care if we're talking about the scientific or the mainstream sense: global warming isn't something that people should be "denying" or "believing in", it's something that people should be trying to understand.
You're enforcing a false dichotomy here. From a purely scientific perspective, there's no such thing as "believers" and "deniers", and oh boy howdy do I wish laymen could finally freakin' get that through their heads.
... let us get back to you on that.
Global warming refers to a specific set of climatological models of our planet. That's it. There are an awful lot of really smart, educated, professional scientists that are busy trying to figure out the details of that model. It goes something like this:
- Is human activity affecting our climate? : Probably.
- How much of an effect is it having? : Uh
- OK. Assuming it's having a non-negligible effect, can you describe the end results of that effect? : Maybe someday. In the meantime, here's our best guess.
It's not a matter of "denying" or "believing", it's a matter of understanding. Breaking the entire incredibly complex mathematical model down into "you're either with us or against us" is political, and absurd.
Thank you for so beautifully demonstrating the parent's point.
Considering that the first hypotheses about gravity were established in the 4th century -- BC, that is -- and that Newton fleshed out the first descriptions of the laws of gravitation 400 years ago, and physicists are STILL arguing over the finer points of gravitational force, yeah, I'd say there's some room left for further understanding of the properties of global warming.
You fail to understand that popular attitudes like yours are one of the major factors preventing a deeper understanding of global warming.
What, you say there's no deeper understanding to be had, that all of the facts are known? In that case, there's a worldwide community of climatologists that would dearly like to have you present a conference on your global climatological model.
Yep. I've used uf.register4less.com for years, and never had a complaint or problem. ('Course, I haven't been hosting anything controversial, either.)
...
I'm really surprised that more Slashdot readers didn't chime in to mention these guys. *ahem* Why, back in my day, everybody who read Slashdot read UserFriendly, too
OpenOffice.org is really jumping the gun here, and I think it's gonna backfire pretty hard.
... and being annoyed by it.
I do use OpenOffice on a daily basis, and I love it. However, it's still dog-slow and clunky in some parts, unfinished or unpolished in others, and buggy here and there. You have to get to know its individual quirks. I tried getting my Microsoft Office-loyal boss to use it for a while, and he gave it up pretty fast. He found a number of things that he was used to doing in Excel that he couldn't do in OOo.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing the project or the efforts of its contributors, nor can I stand up and say that I've contributed code or money to it. What I am saying is, they haven't reached the level of completeness that Firefox had reached before the Firefox ad came out. Couple that with a typically glacial development and release process, and you'll get hordes of new users checking it out
And, yeah, ditto the "holy cow, that's an ugly ad" comments, too. It looks very amateurish to me.
I generally agree with you, and the parent, and the "get a grip" commentor, although I wouldn't make any assumptions about how personally identifiable the data is or isn't without being able to see the data myself.
I also don't tend to support slippery-slope arguments, because they're a fallacy.
My issue is with the nature of the requests from the Feds; they're not using the data to pursue a criminal, they're not using the data as evidence in a criminal case, they're not even using the data for purely statistical reasons. They're using the data to try to support their case for a stupid Act that has twice been struck down by appeals courts.
Then there's the fact that the federal government has already received the data it requested from three other major search engines. Why is it so important to them to get Google's, too? What does Google have that the others don't?
For that matter, what grounds does the government have for issuing a subpoena for documents in a non-criminal case? At this point, it looks suspiciously like the federal government is abusing its power in the judicial branch to support its legislative branch.
Doesn't that sound like where President Bush is leading us? And I voted for him twice.
You're the first person I've ever heard that expressed regret for voting for him twice. That takes courage. I respect that, FWIW.
From the Google has been sued link in a previous comment:
The Feds are not after this data in the matter of a criminal case. They are not after the data because they want to know how many people are searching for porn. They're after the data because they want to use it to bolster their case for the Child Online Protection Act, an act which is a thinly veiled attempt to push anti-porn decency laws.
So, yeah, you might want to think of it as an abuse of power. Whether it's a legitimate abuse of power or not will probably become a matter for the courts very soon.
Oh, great.
You've gone and mentioned your UID.
Now all the old farts with the five-digit-or-less UIDs are going to come out of the woodwork.
You're assuming that someone hasn't configured BIOS to not boot from CD and then password-protected the BIOS. ...Not that I'd know anything about that. :-)
I suspect this is more a side-effect of readers' priorities than anything else.
For example, I'm currently taking a bit of a break from the code mines which allow me to buy groceries. I'll be able to read most of the review, and I might have enough time for a comment (this one), but that's it. When my break's up, I have to go back to work, programming.
The programmers are, for the most part, probably too busy programming to stop and comment on a Slashdot article.
Also, I rarely comment here because either someone's already said what I would say, or because my comment would find its way to the bottom of the comments page where it would stay, largely unread. So, not only do I not have the time to spend much of it rambling on here, but it's a waste of the time I would spend anyway.
OK. I worked for a good cable TV company out of the South Bay Area for a couple of years. They did contract work for hospitals with big budgets, among other things.
... each one of those cables acts like a weak two-way antenna. On certain channels, you'll pick up interference from PG&E, the local broadcast channels, and whatever your neighbor is doing over his crappy cables.
I can't talk much about Monster Cable for audio use, but I can speak from experience about its use for TV applications.
Basically, it sucks.
The parent post is correct about shielding, but they fail to mention that shielding is also important at the connector, and they fail to mention the different kinds of shielding available in TV cable, and why it matters.
Let's say you live in an apartment building in a metropolitan area. Channels 2, 4, 5, 11, and 13 are probably being locally broadcast strong enough that a decent antenna will pick them up and give you a watchable picture.
You also have a poorly shielded TV cable running from the TV, to the VCR, one to your game console converter, one to the set-top box if the cable company requires one, one to your DVD player possibly
And, being properly shielded throughout the sheath isn't enough: you need the connecter to fit tightly, and you need it to be attached to the cable correctly. If you split the sheath away from a good TV cable, you'll find an interwoven series of fine aluminum strands, spread over a solid aluminum layer, surrounding a stiff dielectric core. The end of each fitting should be set so that the inner part of the fitting sits between the aluminum layers.
Poor shields include: a real thinly interwoven set of aluminum strands (not thick or tight enough, no solid aluminum layer), four aluminum wires (just plain dumb, this is totally useless), and thin or flimsy dielectric.
Good TV cable will feel stiff if you handle it. The crappy stuff will handle like a wet worm.
Specifically, Monster's TV stuff doesn't have good fittings. I never bothered to take one of their cables apart to inspect the shielding, but great shielding won't make up for their crappy fittings.
Also, the metal in the fittings really doesn't make a bit of difference. Gold-plated fittings are usually junk, you don't want those.
Based on my experience with the TV hardware, I'd never consider buying audio stuff from them.
The parent may have had really really crappy TV cables, and replaced them with slightly less crappy Monsters. That doesn't make Monster's stuff good, though.
It was probably cached, which does nothing to help anyone. Nah, it has nothing to do with caching of any kind. I fixed the setting, restarted the browser, blew out its cache and tried the link. It still loaded up the spoofed PayPal.
I haven't seen Cannonball Run I in a long, long time, so I don't remember anything about that scene in it.
;-)
In II though, I distinctly remember the lamborghini going into a carwash and coming out a different color. It was like they had used poster paints on the car; it wasn't peelable.
I remember because, at the time, I thought that was a totally cool idea and vowed to do the same to my car.
Doubleclick put Robert Abrams from New York (which, as the article said, had filed suit against Doubleclick), and Lori Fena of TrustE, on their privacy board. Both of these individuals, in the article, were cleverly related to being a force for anti-privacy.
At the end of the news article, michael wrote, "No one from EPIC? No one from the ACLU?"
So put these two pieces together. If there had been an individual from the ACLU on Doubleclick's board, the description might have read thus:
"Slappy Squirrel, a purse-carrying member of the ACLU, who has been directly involved in their privacy advocation activities. Her job at Doubleclick will be to keep the ACLU off of Doubleclick's back while it continues to invade your privacy."
Same for EPIC.
Was this objective journalism, or was it designed to raise up a flurry of sentiment against the company that everyone loves to hate?
Either you're trolling and I'm missing it, or you really aren't Getting It.
These folks aren't doing it for safety. They're doing it for the sheer thrill of doing it (and it _is_ a fairly wicked hardware hack).
It's not meant to be economical, either. Including time spent to perpetrate the hack, you could probably score more power from an older-model iMac for less money.
It ain't gonna end up in businesses, either, 'cause businesses don't work like that.
Also, you don't know your chips so well; the PowerPC chips run way cooler than any Pentium. Which isn't to say that they're exactly minifridges, but cooling is less of a problem. If the chip does get too toasty, it won't do it for a while to come; and when it does fry, then they'll probably just refine the hack a bit more.
- C. Here, have a Clue. No extra charge. *grin*
Alright. I'm one of those tight-assed people that usually doesn't think much at all of the trolling going on.
But this one made me grin like hell.
Weird, tho, it's actually got a few _points_; intelligent trolls, who'd've thunk it?
- C. "Everybody's posting, but half of them ain't thinking". Hehe.
I'd love to see you engineer a project with countless interworking systems and attempt to find and nail each and every bug to the wall while on a shoestring budget without the time necessary to do the job right.
Stuff it, already. It's not possible to foresee each and every possible failure; hindsight is 20/20. They've managed to successfully launch and maintain hundreds of other projects, all while their budget continues to dwindle. One mistake, and everyone jumps on their back. Kinda disgusting.
Well, it's not just HR. For the most part (obviously, there are exceptions; I'm making a generalization based on my experience so far), companies aren't designed to work with your Real Programmer. A Real Programmer tends to be a loner, someone who should be handed the project that nobody else can figure and left alone to get it done, and not dragged off to team-building exercises.
The Real Programmer will clash with management, because the Programmer simply can't be managed, and the managers (for the most part), don't realize it.
The Real Programmer will also want to run around the company and fix everything that they see to be broken; companies don't like that. They like to get their business running in a particular fashion, and then just keep throwing resources at it, even after that particular business method has become a crawling dinosaur.
Companies want code grinders and code monkeys, and the occasional pseudo-geek to act as the team's glue. They don't want the Real Programmers, because the Real Programmers won't fit in, and if the Real Programmers are smart, they'll avoid the companies.