>The current theme does look like it's from the 1990s.
That's a good thing. Go look at Reddit; it looks even more like an interface from the 1990s, and it's excellent. No tons of bullshit whitespace, just lots of text packed in for those of us who are able to read and don't need a lot of stupid pictures and videos.
>so that means that current users need to unblock ads (and actually click on a few), or Dice needs to attract a new crowd that will.
Like Digg did? Oh wait, Digg died.
Meanwhile, Reddit doesn't bitch about users blocking ads, and they're doing excellent financially, with not one but two offices (one in SanFran, one in NYC).
It's a slippery slope. You really want the government setting up detailed regulations governing software development and how software projects are to be managed?
You don't think it's a real problem if people can't get along civilly inside an airplane where there's no possibility of changing seats or going outside to cool down? In other public places, if people can't get along, one of the parties can simply leave, be asked to leave, or be escorted out by police. None of these are true in an airplane; ideas for keeping people calm should be considered, otherwise things could turn very ugly.
There's no easy answer. People are responsible for themselves (once they're an adult; less so before that), but they're also a product of their environment and upbringing and circumstance. Hitler was horrible, but if his early life hadn't been so bad, it's quite likely he wouldn't have been such a monster, and might have even been a decent person. This doesn't mean we don't hold him responsible for his crimes and atrocities.
If someone's a serial killer, but his parents pushed him to be a serial killer through a horribly abusive upbringing over his entire childhood, who do you blame? Both.
Unfortunately, that's not true. "Correct" English is defined by its usage: if enough people use it a certain way, that way becomes correct. There is no central authority for the language, unlike French.
For your "knight" example, it really depends on how many people mispronounced it. If enough people mispronounce a word a certain way, that becomes the correct form (this is usually called "corruption"). Lots of our modern English words are mutated forms of earlier words, frequently borrowed from other languages.
Of course, if it's only a small group of morons who mispronounce a word, and it never takes root and becomes popular, then it's just wrong.
It's kinda like revolutionaries: if you try to take over the government and you succeed, you're a "freedom fighter" or "revolutionary", and become revered as a "Founding Father". If you fail, you're a "terrorist" or a "traitor", and you're executed and become infamous and despised.
So in this case they look to blame one engineer for something as a scapegoat instead of the company taking the blame as the error was likely a "group effort", lol.
I'm not disagreeing that companies would like to do this, but this depends on someone willing to be the fall guy. Why would any software engineers sign up for this job? They won't (not many, at least, not enough for this plan to be realized).
Look at the Slashdot article yesterday about airline pilots. The industry has been paying them terribly, and the cost to get trained are very high, and now the FAA changed the rules requiring more hours, and as a result, not many people bother with the profession and there's huge shortages. Corporations can't force people to work; they can only screw over their workforce so much before it bites them in the ass.
How do you do that? Private companies have no real power to fine people and collect those fines. Moreover, how would they even fine the correct person? What are you going to do, demand to see the offender's ID? What if he refuses? (No, you can't go by seating assignment, because the offender can just claim he changed seats and someone else was the offender.)
It won't change until we all collectively believe it *can* change, and demand change, and refuse to allow those that refuse to change to work in this industry.
There's no way to change that without adopting Stalinism, where the government owns and runs the corporations.
When management shortens deadlines without input from the team, or does other boneheaded things which result in poor-quality software, there's nothing that can be done. They're called "management" for a reason: they run the company. They've been picked by the company's owners to run the company; if you don't like the way they manage things, you can either quit (if you're an employee) or not buy that company's products (if you're a customer). That's it. Employees (the people who write the software) do not have any power to force management to change its ways, other than by quitting.
It's different with hospitals because lives are on the line and there's specific laws created to deal with the liability involved there. Also, the structure is entirely different: surgeons at hospitals (at least in the US) are NOT employees of the hospital. They work for themselves, and basically contract with the hospital. That's why you get separate bills from the doctor/surgeon and from the hospital. (I imagine this is different in socialized healthcare countries, but they probably have better laws and regulations to prevent abuses, just like those countries generally have much more stringent regulations governing employee treatment in all industries.)
Again, there's nothing you can do to change management, except by perhaps enacting government regulation on them (which sounds like it'd be rather micromanagerial and ineffective), or by doing a better job certifying the company's products and dealing with liability for them. If a company's software products are life-critical, that company likely suffers a certain level of liability that other software companies don't, and can be sued if their products fail. This is why, for example, the aviation industry has the DO-178 standard for software development for avionics software.
But when I am actually doing a run, and tens of thousands of pages are being processed, and ONE causes the program to crash: is that a bug? If you had no way to anticipate that one particular, strange bit of text that was different from all the rest?
I'm just going off a quick reading of your posts in this thread, but this seems to be to definitely be a "bug". A program should never crash, ever, unless perhaps some cosmic radiation has flipped a bit or there's some other hardware fault. A program should never crash because of bad input data; it should be able to handle that, even if it just means rejecting it, logging an error, etc. Of course, this is theoretical, but this seems like a pretty basic requirement for an input parser, to be able to handle any input data at all without crashing. If the data is total garbage, it can flag an error and quit, but that's not the same as "crashing". Crashing is always a bug: it means you've dereferenced a bad pointer or done something else of that nature and not handled an error correctly. Programs should never crash.
If anything, a model like the Germans have for engineering in general --a licensed engineer must sign off on the design, and he's personally liable for provable factory defects-- might work eventually... once we figure out what reasonable standards for software engineering would be.
This model doesn't even make sense though. How is one guy supposed to be able to verify that everything in a design is correct, and also that everything in the final manufactured product is correct. Let's look at bridges for example: how is some engineer supposed to certify that all the construction workers did exactly what they're supposed to, and didn't make any mistakes and cover them up? It's impossible. So why should he be personally liable for that? His company should be liable, sure, but him personally? Why should he take the blame, and not the overpaid executives running the company, who certainly make far more money than he does? It's management's job to double-check everything and oversee employees. If you isolate the engineer's liability to the design itself, that would make more sense, as bridge designs are generally well-understood and can be verified through simulation, load analysis, etc.
With software, none of this makes sense. There's no way a single person can certify that every single line of code in a 1M+ line program is correct. The magnitude of complexity is so high, and so many people are involved in such a project, there's no way any one person can really assume responsibility for it.
Ok, then how do you propose the airline handle things when a passenger violates their policy, if they don't have the ability to allow the air marshall to beat him and put him in cuffs? A rule with no ability to enforce it is worthless. I suppose you could make it so violating airline policy is a crime, which would then allow the air marshall to tase the person and cuff him, but that's not much different from just making this law, plus it creates a slippery slope where violating *any* policy is a crime and could get you tased, even very minor infractions.like staying in the toilet too long.
Can I not talk to someone sitting next to me now because it might annoy the precious fucking snowflake behind me? Why does it matter if I talk into a phone or to a person next to me?
Because it's not the same. When you talk to someone next to you, you generally just talk loud enough for them to hear. When you (or at least many people, you might be an exception) talk on the phone, YOU TALK REALLY REALLY LOUD. That's why people are singling phones out. Because a bunch of morons for some stupid reason feel the need to shout on the phone.
Um, no, they don't. Again, you seem to not be paying attention, or just denying reality.
Which party is the one that wants to legislate reproductive rights? That's the Republicans.
Which party wants prayer in schools? That's the Republicans.
Which party wants abstinence-only education? That's the Republicans.
The only time they talk about preventing government interference is in business and economic matters: they're anti-regulation (on business), for the most part. This is nothing new; it's the way the Republicans have been for at least 30 or 40 years: business-friendly, but big on legislating morality.
The Democrats have made a show of trying to be the reverse of this, acting like they want to give everyone social freedom, but supportive of strong regulations on business. Of course, this is all BS too, because the Dems never did anything to repeal drug prohibitions, and they're famous for being cozy with the finance and media industries (like with the big bank bailouts).
Legislating good behavior on airline flights is pretty well in keeping with traditional Republican politics, as it falls under legislating morality. And in this case, they might actually have a somewhat good case for it IMO for a change since the last thing we need at 30,000 feet is people getting into brawls because some asshole can't stop talking loudly on his cellphone. Making a law of it does seem excessive though, but unlike theaters, you can't just walk out and demand a refund in the middle of the flight (which is all you can do in a theater, since no one wants to confront rude customers any more).
There's no Constitutional separation of church and state at the state level; back in the old days, many states had official religions and churches. Many colonies were formed, in fact, to allow religious groups to practice their religion free of "oppression" in Europe (where they were not the dominant religion); when they came here, they formed their own colonies with their own rules, including official churches that everyone had to be part of.
If a majority of people in your state think that Creationism should be taught to your kids, then as a democracy, they have every right to force this on you. If you don't like it, you should move to a state where people agree with you, and stop tilting at windmills.
Republicans are all about legislating morality; where'd you ever get the idea they were against the government telling us how to live our lives? You're thinking of the Libertarians, which the Republicans are not like (though they like to give lip service to some libertarian ideals).
Of course, the Democrats like to tell us how to live our lives too, just in different ways.
It's simple: when people talk on the phone, they talk several times louder than they do to someone sitting next to them. I don't know why this is, but it just is.
Idiots on a bus = People who don't have enough money to fly = Fewer people used them = Not as big a problem.
Not true. Have you looked at the prices for Greyhound tickets? It's really no bargain, especially when you consider the ridiculous amount of time it takes to get anywhere since they stop at every podunk town in between.
The people who ride the bus are people who aren't able to fly for various reasons, usually because they don't have proper ID (e.g., illegal immigrants).
They're so concerned about people making calls, yet they've had airline phones for years.
Those were never a problem because no one ever used those phones. They were so ridiculously expensive that no one bothered. I really wonder how much money was wasted outfitting planes with those things, only to remove them later (I haven't seen a plane with those in years). With the new rules allowing the use of phones on planes at all times, people will start using them for talking during the flight, which will annoy the piss out of other passengers and maybe lead to altercations during the flight, which could get really ugly.
And how is it any worse to be trapped on a plane with such idiots than on a bus? At least on a plane you're only stuck with them for a couple hours, not all day on an overland trip.
Because no one rides the bus (for all-day overland trips) these days except drug addicts and illegal immigrants.
I mostly agree with you, but on public transportation, you actually do have the luxury of using headphones to isolate yourself from others, as well as the inherent noise of the aircraft. I've done it many times. Noise-cancelling headphones would be even better.
He's got a point there. There's no law saying you can't talk in the middle of a theater (during a showing); such a thing would probably violate the 1st Amendment. However, theater owners are free to implement policies against such disruptions, and are able to throw you out if you violate their policies, and this is the reason you can't actually talk in a movie: you'll be asked to leave (maybe, these days a lot of theaters do a terrible job of enforcing such rules).
Talking on an airplane should be covered by the same method: airline policy should prohibit it. However, what do you do when people ignore the rule? Ask them to leave? You can't do that since there's nowhere to go when you're at 30,000 feet. And look at how bad the theater experience has gotten these days; the only recourse at most places when people talk too much is to go ask for your money back, because the theater doesn't want to confront anyone. This is probably why people are demanding a law.
It does seem quite sad and questionable why airlines don't simply make this a policy, instead of it needing to be made federal law. I guess no one really trusts the airlines to do something sensible like that.
Slashdot Mirror
>The current theme does look like it's from the 1990s.
That's a good thing. Go look at Reddit; it looks even more like an interface from the 1990s, and it's excellent. No tons of bullshit whitespace, just lots of text packed in for those of us who are able to read and don't need a lot of stupid pictures and videos.
>so that means that current users need to unblock ads (and actually click on a few), or Dice needs to attract a new crowd that will.
Like Digg did? Oh wait, Digg died.
Meanwhile, Reddit doesn't bitch about users blocking ads, and they're doing excellent financially, with not one but two offices (one in SanFran, one in NYC).
It's a slippery slope. You really want the government setting up detailed regulations governing software development and how software projects are to be managed?
You don't think it's a real problem if people can't get along civilly inside an airplane where there's no possibility of changing seats or going outside to cool down? In other public places, if people can't get along, one of the parties can simply leave, be asked to leave, or be escorted out by police. None of these are true in an airplane; ideas for keeping people calm should be considered, otherwise things could turn very ugly.
America has always had a lot more ignorance and stupidity than it should have. Have you forgotten about the Scopes "Monkey" Trial?
There's no easy answer. People are responsible for themselves (once they're an adult; less so before that), but they're also a product of their environment and upbringing and circumstance. Hitler was horrible, but if his early life hadn't been so bad, it's quite likely he wouldn't have been such a monster, and might have even been a decent person. This doesn't mean we don't hold him responsible for his crimes and atrocities.
If someone's a serial killer, but his parents pushed him to be a serial killer through a horribly abusive upbringing over his entire childhood, who do you blame? Both.
Unfortunately, that's not true. "Correct" English is defined by its usage: if enough people use it a certain way, that way becomes correct. There is no central authority for the language, unlike French.
For your "knight" example, it really depends on how many people mispronounced it. If enough people mispronounce a word a certain way, that becomes the correct form (this is usually called "corruption"). Lots of our modern English words are mutated forms of earlier words, frequently borrowed from other languages.
Of course, if it's only a small group of morons who mispronounce a word, and it never takes root and becomes popular, then it's just wrong.
It's kinda like revolutionaries: if you try to take over the government and you succeed, you're a "freedom fighter" or "revolutionary", and become revered as a "Founding Father". If you fail, you're a "terrorist" or a "traitor", and you're executed and become infamous and despised.
So in this case they look to blame one engineer for something as a scapegoat
instead of the company taking the blame as the error was likely a "group effort", lol.
I'm not disagreeing that companies would like to do this, but this depends on someone willing to be the fall guy. Why would any software engineers sign up for this job? They won't (not many, at least, not enough for this plan to be realized).
Look at the Slashdot article yesterday about airline pilots. The industry has been paying them terribly, and the cost to get trained are very high, and now the FAA changed the rules requiring more hours, and as a result, not many people bother with the profession and there's huge shortages. Corporations can't force people to work; they can only screw over their workforce so much before it bites them in the ass.
How do you do that? Private companies have no real power to fine people and collect those fines. Moreover, how would they even fine the correct person? What are you going to do, demand to see the offender's ID? What if he refuses? (No, you can't go by seating assignment, because the offender can just claim he changed seats and someone else was the offender.)
It won't change until we all collectively believe it *can* change, and demand change, and refuse to allow those that refuse to change to work in this industry.
There's no way to change that without adopting Stalinism, where the government owns and runs the corporations.
When management shortens deadlines without input from the team, or does other boneheaded things which result in poor-quality software, there's nothing that can be done. They're called "management" for a reason: they run the company. They've been picked by the company's owners to run the company; if you don't like the way they manage things, you can either quit (if you're an employee) or not buy that company's products (if you're a customer). That's it. Employees (the people who write the software) do not have any power to force management to change its ways, other than by quitting.
It's different with hospitals because lives are on the line and there's specific laws created to deal with the liability involved there. Also, the structure is entirely different: surgeons at hospitals (at least in the US) are NOT employees of the hospital. They work for themselves, and basically contract with the hospital. That's why you get separate bills from the doctor/surgeon and from the hospital. (I imagine this is different in socialized healthcare countries, but they probably have better laws and regulations to prevent abuses, just like those countries generally have much more stringent regulations governing employee treatment in all industries.)
Again, there's nothing you can do to change management, except by perhaps enacting government regulation on them (which sounds like it'd be rather micromanagerial and ineffective), or by doing a better job certifying the company's products and dealing with liability for them. If a company's software products are life-critical, that company likely suffers a certain level of liability that other software companies don't, and can be sued if their products fail. This is why, for example, the aviation industry has the DO-178 standard for software development for avionics software.
But when I am actually doing a run, and tens of thousands of pages are being processed, and ONE causes the program to crash: is that a bug? If you had no way to anticipate that one particular, strange bit of text that was different from all the rest?
I'm just going off a quick reading of your posts in this thread, but this seems to be to definitely be a "bug". A program should never crash, ever, unless perhaps some cosmic radiation has flipped a bit or there's some other hardware fault. A program should never crash because of bad input data; it should be able to handle that, even if it just means rejecting it, logging an error, etc. Of course, this is theoretical, but this seems like a pretty basic requirement for an input parser, to be able to handle any input data at all without crashing. If the data is total garbage, it can flag an error and quit, but that's not the same as "crashing". Crashing is always a bug: it means you've dereferenced a bad pointer or done something else of that nature and not handled an error correctly. Programs should never crash.
If anything, a model like the Germans have for engineering in general --a licensed engineer must sign off on the design, and he's personally liable for provable factory defects-- might work eventually... once we figure out what reasonable standards for software engineering would be.
This model doesn't even make sense though. How is one guy supposed to be able to verify that everything in a design is correct, and also that everything in the final manufactured product is correct. Let's look at bridges for example: how is some engineer supposed to certify that all the construction workers did exactly what they're supposed to, and didn't make any mistakes and cover them up? It's impossible. So why should he be personally liable for that? His company should be liable, sure, but him personally? Why should he take the blame, and not the overpaid executives running the company, who certainly make far more money than he does? It's management's job to double-check everything and oversee employees. If you isolate the engineer's liability to the design itself, that would make more sense, as bridge designs are generally well-understood and can be verified through simulation, load analysis, etc.
With software, none of this makes sense. There's no way a single person can certify that every single line of code in a 1M+ line program is correct. The magnitude of complexity is so high, and so many people are involved in such a project, there's no way any one person can really assume responsibility for it.
Ok, then how do you propose the airline handle things when a passenger violates their policy, if they don't have the ability to allow the air marshall to beat him and put him in cuffs? A rule with no ability to enforce it is worthless. I suppose you could make it so violating airline policy is a crime, which would then allow the air marshall to tase the person and cuff him, but that's not much different from just making this law, plus it creates a slippery slope where violating *any* policy is a crime and could get you tased, even very minor infractions.like staying in the toilet too long.
Cool, thanks for the explanation (esp. #2).
However, this doesn't change the fact that too many people talk too loudly on their phones, which on planes is going to be a real problem.
Can I not talk to someone sitting next to me now because it might annoy the precious fucking snowflake behind me? Why does it matter if I talk into a phone or to a person next to me?
Because it's not the same. When you talk to someone next to you, you generally just talk loud enough for them to hear. When you (or at least many people, you might be an exception) talk on the phone, YOU TALK REALLY REALLY LOUD. That's why people are singling phones out. Because a bunch of morons for some stupid reason feel the need to shout on the phone.
If there's far more idiots around than people like you, it's futile.
Um, no, they don't. Again, you seem to not be paying attention, or just denying reality.
Which party is the one that wants to legislate reproductive rights? That's the Republicans.
Which party wants prayer in schools? That's the Republicans.
Which party wants abstinence-only education? That's the Republicans.
The only time they talk about preventing government interference is in business and economic matters: they're anti-regulation (on business), for the most part. This is nothing new; it's the way the Republicans have been for at least 30 or 40 years: business-friendly, but big on legislating morality.
The Democrats have made a show of trying to be the reverse of this, acting like they want to give everyone social freedom, but supportive of strong regulations on business. Of course, this is all BS too, because the Dems never did anything to repeal drug prohibitions, and they're famous for being cozy with the finance and media industries (like with the big bank bailouts).
Legislating good behavior on airline flights is pretty well in keeping with traditional Republican politics, as it falls under legislating morality. And in this case, they might actually have a somewhat good case for it IMO for a change since the last thing we need at 30,000 feet is people getting into brawls because some asshole can't stop talking loudly on his cellphone. Making a law of it does seem excessive though, but unlike theaters, you can't just walk out and demand a refund in the middle of the flight (which is all you can do in a theater, since no one wants to confront rude customers any more).
There's no Constitutional separation of church and state at the state level; back in the old days, many states had official religions and churches. Many colonies were formed, in fact, to allow religious groups to practice their religion free of "oppression" in Europe (where they were not the dominant religion); when they came here, they formed their own colonies with their own rules, including official churches that everyone had to be part of.
If a majority of people in your state think that Creationism should be taught to your kids, then as a democracy, they have every right to force this on you. If you don't like it, you should move to a state where people agree with you, and stop tilting at windmills.
Republicans are all about legislating morality; where'd you ever get the idea they were against the government telling us how to live our lives? You're thinking of the Libertarians, which the Republicans are not like (though they like to give lip service to some libertarian ideals).
Of course, the Democrats like to tell us how to live our lives too, just in different ways.
It's simple: when people talk on the phone, they talk several times louder than they do to someone sitting next to them. I don't know why this is, but it just is.
Idiots on a bus = People who don't have enough money to fly = Fewer people used them = Not as big a problem.
Not true. Have you looked at the prices for Greyhound tickets? It's really no bargain, especially when you consider the ridiculous amount of time it takes to get anywhere since they stop at every podunk town in between.
The people who ride the bus are people who aren't able to fly for various reasons, usually because they don't have proper ID (e.g., illegal immigrants).
They're so concerned about people making calls, yet they've had airline phones for years.
Those were never a problem because no one ever used those phones. They were so ridiculously expensive that no one bothered. I really wonder how much money was wasted outfitting planes with those things, only to remove them later (I haven't seen a plane with those in years). With the new rules allowing the use of phones on planes at all times, people will start using them for talking during the flight, which will annoy the piss out of other passengers and maybe lead to altercations during the flight, which could get really ugly.
And how is it any worse to be trapped on a plane with such idiots than on a bus? At least on a plane you're only stuck with them for a couple hours, not all day on an overland trip.
Because no one rides the bus (for all-day overland trips) these days except drug addicts and illegal immigrants.
Hey, don't forget to ban ugly flight attendants and especially male flight attendants.
I mostly agree with you, but on public transportation, you actually do have the luxury of using headphones to isolate yourself from others, as well as the inherent noise of the aircraft. I've done it many times. Noise-cancelling headphones would be even better.
He's got a point there. There's no law saying you can't talk in the middle of a theater (during a showing); such a thing would probably violate the 1st Amendment. However, theater owners are free to implement policies against such disruptions, and are able to throw you out if you violate their policies, and this is the reason you can't actually talk in a movie: you'll be asked to leave (maybe, these days a lot of theaters do a terrible job of enforcing such rules).
Talking on an airplane should be covered by the same method: airline policy should prohibit it. However, what do you do when people ignore the rule? Ask them to leave? You can't do that since there's nowhere to go when you're at 30,000 feet. And look at how bad the theater experience has gotten these days; the only recourse at most places when people talk too much is to go ask for your money back, because the theater doesn't want to confront anyone. This is probably why people are demanding a law.
It does seem quite sad and questionable why airlines don't simply make this a policy, instead of it needing to be made federal law. I guess no one really trusts the airlines to do something sensible like that.