I know there are a lot that will disagree, but I honestly feel that MS has at least "mostly" learned their lesson. Sony? leaks customer data like there's no tomorrow. DMCA? Bastards fought tooth and nail for it, then have wantonly violated it with rootkits to "protect" their music CDs. Where's the public outcry on that? Where's anonymous? I could go on, but, I think these very few points suffice. Feel free to add on or disagree.
I think the initial flame was for a misunderstanding (on both sides?) of the return value for printf. On success, it returns the number of characters written. Which, in the context of returning from main, could either result in undefined behavior, depending on the length of the string, or indicating to the OS that an error condition occurred. - I say undefined because under certain circumstances, the OS or even the launching process may reserve certain ranges for their own use. For instance, shells may only give you 16 bits, and give the upper 8 bits as the signal (if any) that process exited with, and the lower 8-bits as a truncated value, the return value from the process - nevermind an int is typically 32 bits. (Apologies for lack of documentation, but I searched the C++11 standard, POSIX, Python subprocess module, and I couldn't find anything uniform or consistent).
I work in a company where it's officially frowned upon (i.e. it's in the employee handbook that alcohol is strictly forbidden). That being said, a blind eye is turned to a handful of us, because, well, we perform. We perform under pressure or not, producing quality code regardless of our state of inebriation. Now, we've been told that if we're drunk, just don't come back to the office (as opposed to buzzing after a few pints). And, hard liquor is off-limits during work hours.
Now, we're not "brogrammers". Yes, the lot of us happen to be all male, but it's not like a frat party gone bad. We go to a pub a block from the office, have our pints, and return. While we're at the pub, we discuss work. Who/what is pissing us off or frustrating us currently, and what not. We verbalize the problems we've been thinking about. The act of verbalizing with a coworker that understands often is sufficient to solve a problem. Or, sometimes, it's the time away when you contemplate and suddenly remember a dark corner of code that is the cause of the problem that you hadn't thought about because you'd forgotten it even exists. Other times, a slight buzz or a stumbling drunkenness loosens your mind enough to see a problem from a totally different angle, enabling a quick, simple, clean and efficient solution that you wouldn't have otherwise seen due to your sober preconceptions about the issue.
Personally, I've fixed numerous production issues while intoxicated. I've produced some of my most elegant code or hardware while drunk. I've fixed issues in x64 inline assembly while drunk (I'm looking at you, ACE). In college, I studied electrical & computer engineering. One project, we were working on MIPS trap handlers to perform IO, if I recall correctly. For whatever reason, the project would not work. No one in the class could figure out how to get it to work. Late one night, over the better part of a bottle of whiskey, I got the project to work. It came down to one magical line, assigning a register a certain mystical hex number, but that one line made the entire thing work. I was the only one to get it to work, yet I couldn't explain how/why, because I don't even remember getting it to work. Another time, I was building an 8-bit ALU for a hardware class. I built all of the logical components: add/sub, and/or/not, logical shifts, multiplier in verilog. It took a little over two hours to do all of that, and I had the bottle of whiskey next to me the entirety of it. My project partner was sitting next to me; when I told him I'd completed a component, he'd say, "yeah, but does it work", so I'd turn right back to the computer and punch out a C program that would generate the verilog code needed to exhaustively test the component, run the test, turn and say back, "yeah, it's perfect."
Point is, drunk coding probably isn't for everyone, and I wouldn't go so far as to endorse it. Yet, for some people, it's another valuable tool in the box. But, that doesn't mean it should be banned.
Looking at some of the analogies to "building a house", etc, may be apt. I'm guessing the authors of those posts/articles assume sobriety of the builders. But, they'd be quickly proven wrong if they'd ever worked even a single summer on a crew. When I was in college, I worked on a siding crew for a company that had around 5 or 6 crews. During that single summer, a number of installers had to be bailed out of jail. More yet missed work or were ineffective because of the extent of their hangovers - they also seemed to have a disproportionately high levels of divorce & delinquent child support payments; further necessitating time off for court appearances.
But, "brogramming" != "drunk programming". "brogramming" seems to be an extension of the frat atmosphere into programming. It's not the same as your developers having a few pints before returning to work. Just because you've had a few pints, doesn't mean you're now going to be misogynistic or on a drug-induced rage when you return to the office or start playing beer pong
Of course there's a beer culture. Members meet at the local pub around 3-6pm, sometimes earlier, depending upon how much their coworkers pissed them off that day. It's sometimes referred to as a "support group".
If you receive a tax deduction on your mortgage, is your house accessible to the taxpaying public? If you receive a tax deduction for dependents, are *they* "accessible" to the taxpaying public? What about those on social security? Welfare? Medicare?
The point is, just because you receive money from the government, doesn't mean everything that money touches belongs to the public or in the public.
Never mind they're objecting over a structure (the Hagia Sophia) that was originally a Christian basilica. And, it's Byzantium architecture, not Persian.
People are more adaptable than machines, and thus have a higher value than them.
Yet machines are more dependable and predictable than humans. The machine will do exactly what programmed to, reliably, faster and with fewer errors than a human doing the same task. Yes, the machine breaks down from time to time and requires maintenance. But, it doesn't work an 8 hour shift, doesn't take sick days and doesn't go on strike. Automation generally reduces costs and increases reliability and reproducibility. While reduced costs in production doesn't necessarily translate to lower prices to the consumer, it does allow maximizing profits. When a competitor does come along and undercuts your price, you now have wiggle room to lower price and remain competitive and profitable. Personally, I wouldn't lower prices given a lower production cost unless I was either facing competitive pressure or trying to gain market share.
A commonly cited object to comments is that you can change the code but not the comments, and then the comments become confusing. In fact that provides me several clues about previous maintainers and possibly even the original design of the code itself.
I don't know that I've ever seen anyone state that you can't change the comments, but rather the objection is that people don't change the comments to properly reflect changes they've made during maintenance.
I'd posit that the vast majority of misleading comments don't come from the initial development, but rather during maintenance cycles.
I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. A lot of developers have personal preferences on their indentation. I worked on a project where distinct devs used 2, 3, 4 and 8 spaces as a single indent. My argument was it was all visual. If we stuck with hard tabs, each could configured their editor of choice to display however they liked, without affecting any other developer. I used to use tabs for alignment, as well, but have since changed to using spaces for that.
I can't see how he values less keypresses over encapsulation/inconsistency.
Especially considering how he insists on prefixing with "get"/"set".
b) What's wrong with returning a reference to bar, ie. "foo.bar() += 3;"? That at least allows you to do something if "bar" has any other dependent variables.
The problem with this is that it, too, breaks encapsulation. You've effectively given a pointer (ok, a reference, but we all know they're really the same thing) to your internal memory. And, to your justification, no, it does not allow you to do some if bar has dependents (unless you're not really returning a reference, but an object providing pseudo-reference behavior, a la std::vector<bool>::iterator).
When you're young and you're not a Democrat, you don't have a heart.
When you're old and you're not a Republican, you don't have a brain.
Mind you, I think this originated in the Reagan era, when being a Republican meant more about being fiscally conservative than the current social conversative/christian fundamentalists that have hijacked the party.
While I prefer this style of bracing, the superfluous comments violate the D.R.Y. (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle. Might as well add a comment "break when x is one", as well. (also "forever" after "for(;;;)" or "while(true)" is again unnecessary and repetitive). I know your example is contrived, but these do serve as a prime example of bad comments. What's even worse is when down the line, "they" decide that you should break when x is two, but the comment remains unchanged. The point of comments that should be hammered home is: tell us not *what* happens, but *why* it happens.
The reason I like the open & close braces, with proper indentation, is that at a glance I can see where the block starts and ends. If you cannot see the start of the block and the end at the same time, the block is too large and should be refactored such that you can.
But actually, if you had a DDoS that wasn't a botnet but instead was millions of pissed off people intentionally slashdotting a site, how could that not be a valid form of protest?
I'd propose that if it was actively performed by willing participants using their own hardware, yes, it could be perceived as a valid protest (and maybe would even require a sworn statement by each willing participant, acknowledging their participation in each staged "protest" in order to ensure honesty) . But, committing criminal activities to create a botnet that will then be used? No, that's a felony criminal act.
I'm going to go off on a deep tangent here and postulate that the very same people that would think this is a valid form of protest also think that there's too much money in politics, yet also contributed to their candidate of choice, and possible a super PAC that is politically aligned.
And lets face it, that is what this is really about: legalizing bot nets as a free speech issue.
This is, with no doubt, the issue. However, this is not free speech. A better analogy than the GP offered with the cars would instead be: Anonymous barges into my house at gun point and forces me into the street to protest. I (in actuality my computer as a botnet slave) am not there willingly. I am being coerced or forced to protest.
Anonymous wants to use DDOS to exercise free speech and affect governmental policy? Fine, spam Congress with emails with your positions. That's what the rest of us do. (and wait for the canned form letter response via snail mail).
DDOS is not free speech. It's more akin to walking into the foyer of Congress armed to the teeth, holding everyone hostage, until Congress agrees to the hostage-taker's demands.
I'm actually developing the website for a company that is booking passenger space on cargo ships to bring over 200-500 men and women with tourist visas from Jakarta, Mumbai, and Abidjan who have agreed to do the job in exchange for free room and board (which might be a tent in Times Square and two bowls of soup each day) until their visas expire.
This kind of sounds like indentured servitude, which is illegal in the US (INAL, but if you assist, you might be construed as aiding & abetting, even it is via a contract).
On another note, I'm guessing (let me repeat that: I'm guessing) the sorts that would resort to professional protesters are likely left-wing types trying to inflate their presence. The same types that routinely rail against monetary abuses in politics. If you want to protest fine. Have the balls to do it yourself, in person, instead of hiring a substitute.
In regards to the petition, no, it's not the same as an in-person protest. A protest is to make yourself & your issue heard. A DDOS does none of that. There is no message with a DDOS. It's impossible to convey a message to those people that are legitimately conducting commerce with the targets. i.e. preventing me from logging into my bank's website to pay my mortgage. In this example, you're not just hurting the institution, you're also hurting private innocent individuals. If anonymous takes down Chase or BofA, you're affecting tens of millions of private citizens trying to pay their bills, credit cards, car loans, mortgages, etc. Missing payments results in penalties, adversely affects credit scores which results in higher borrowing costs down the line. So no, it's not the same as an in-person protest, it's felony vandalism with the potential to cost innocent bystanders millions of dollars as a collective.
Let's be honest: is the outcry due to collateral damage (which nearly universally occurs in any war) or the fact that it's not a manned pilot exposing his or hersself life, but rather what people perceive to be a robot (enter skynet fears here).
I think the real outrage (in the US anyway) comes not from the strikes themselves, but rather that the average idiot (read: the general populace) believes that these drones truly operate autonomously. They don't realize there's a human telling that drone what to do. They see it as Terminator incarnate. I think the average way-person sees it as someone sitting there and all of a sudden hearing "TERRORIST. TERRORIST. TERMINATE." followed by the wooshing sound of that hellfire missile firing. Nevermind in actuality they've likely been watching an individual for weeks, if not longer, confirming it's who they think it is before pulling the trigger.
Then again, most/.'ers are conspiracy nuts, as well.
Except that criminal records are a matter of public record, at least in the USA. They're freely and easily available. Even traffic violations are easily found if you know where to look, despite rules that if you plead guilty/no contest and keep a clean record, etc. they "don't go on your record". There's still the matter of the actual court case (even if you pay the fine and don't go to court, there's still a court case number & record) and your plea.
If the case for something as a speeding or other minor moving violation is a matter of public record, how can you expect that a conviction (or, for that matter an acquittal) would not be on the public record?
Further more, there are explicit laws in place mandating that sex offenders be registered in a publicly accessible manner. Once convicted of a felony, in the US, you lose certain rights otherwise guaranteed. For instance, convicted felons cannot legally vote or own firearms.
So here's a question. Does Samsung get any of its money back? I mean the money it spent and is spending to invalidate this stupid patent? The money it spent on trial over this stupid patent? The money it spent finding the prior art that Apple should have found before filing for this stupid patent? No. Nothing in US patent system is that fair.
I'm not a lawyer, but maybe there's one out there that could answer: couldn't Samsung counter-sue, or the Judge rule in favor of Samsung and order court fees paid? And presumably, wouldn't all expenditures, including any involved with the research and gathering of information in regards to prior art, be covered?
I'll absolutely disagree with this. It's generally considered bad form to overload operators in any language unless the operators provide the exact same semantics as built-in types. I didn't even know Perl 6 allowed user-defined operators - now I hate the language even more. That, even with the built-ins, at the period table of perl operators, that there's even a class titled "ambiguous" ought to be a sign they've gone too far.
This is why I refuse to, and never will submit myself to Perl development or maintenance.
The Python is still more readable.
First, you had to import an extra library (which, ok, python is built upon libraries).
But, what the FUCK does "qw" mean? One can guess, and only guess, for the context that it's some sort of means to delineate a list.
my @whatthefuck =....;
considering that on a lot of perl you're going to see:
my $whatthefuck =...;
and that the @ and $ variables are two different things...
And, you may hear the argument that "those are namespaces". bullshit. they're not namespaces. C++, Java, C# & Python have namespaces. @/$ does not denote a namespace. Especially, given appropriate context, you can use one of the other to change how the variable is treated. That's a cast, not a namespace.
Fact is, Perl is W.O.R.N. language: Write Once Read Never
What always cracks me up with a buffoon like Warren Buffet, is he keeps saying he doesn't pay enough in taxes. Last I looked, there's a line item on your 1040 where you can *donate* money to the federal government for the express purpose of paying the federal debt (you also get to deduct that donation from the following year's taxes).
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't we all just use ISO 8601 and get along?
I know there are a lot that will disagree, but I honestly feel that MS has at least "mostly" learned their lesson. Sony? leaks customer data like there's no tomorrow. DMCA? Bastards fought tooth and nail for it, then have wantonly violated it with rootkits to "protect" their music CDs. Where's the public outcry on that? Where's anonymous? I could go on, but, I think these very few points suffice. Feel free to add on or disagree.
I think the initial flame was for a misunderstanding (on both sides?) of the return value for printf. On success, it returns the number of characters written. Which, in the context of returning from main, could either result in undefined behavior, depending on the length of the string, or indicating to the OS that an error condition occurred. - I say undefined because under certain circumstances, the OS or even the launching process may reserve certain ranges for their own use. For instance, shells may only give you 16 bits, and give the upper 8 bits as the signal (if any) that process exited with, and the lower 8-bits as a truncated value, the return value from the process - nevermind an int is typically 32 bits. (Apologies for lack of documentation, but I searched the C++11 standard, POSIX, Python subprocess module, and I couldn't find anything uniform or consistent).
I work in a company where it's officially frowned upon (i.e. it's in the employee handbook that alcohol is strictly forbidden). That being said, a blind eye is turned to a handful of us, because, well, we perform. We perform under pressure or not, producing quality code regardless of our state of inebriation. Now, we've been told that if we're drunk, just don't come back to the office (as opposed to buzzing after a few pints). And, hard liquor is off-limits during work hours.
Now, we're not "brogrammers". Yes, the lot of us happen to be all male, but it's not like a frat party gone bad. We go to a pub a block from the office, have our pints, and return. While we're at the pub, we discuss work. Who/what is pissing us off or frustrating us currently, and what not. We verbalize the problems we've been thinking about. The act of verbalizing with a coworker that understands often is sufficient to solve a problem. Or, sometimes, it's the time away when you contemplate and suddenly remember a dark corner of code that is the cause of the problem that you hadn't thought about because you'd forgotten it even exists. Other times, a slight buzz or a stumbling drunkenness loosens your mind enough to see a problem from a totally different angle, enabling a quick, simple, clean and efficient solution that you wouldn't have otherwise seen due to your sober preconceptions about the issue.
Personally, I've fixed numerous production issues while intoxicated. I've produced some of my most elegant code or hardware while drunk. I've fixed issues in x64 inline assembly while drunk (I'm looking at you, ACE). In college, I studied electrical & computer engineering. One project, we were working on MIPS trap handlers to perform IO, if I recall correctly. For whatever reason, the project would not work. No one in the class could figure out how to get it to work. Late one night, over the better part of a bottle of whiskey, I got the project to work. It came down to one magical line, assigning a register a certain mystical hex number, but that one line made the entire thing work. I was the only one to get it to work, yet I couldn't explain how/why, because I don't even remember getting it to work. Another time, I was building an 8-bit ALU for a hardware class. I built all of the logical components: add/sub, and/or/not, logical shifts, multiplier in verilog. It took a little over two hours to do all of that, and I had the bottle of whiskey next to me the entirety of it. My project partner was sitting next to me; when I told him I'd completed a component, he'd say, "yeah, but does it work", so I'd turn right back to the computer and punch out a C program that would generate the verilog code needed to exhaustively test the component, run the test, turn and say back, "yeah, it's perfect."
Point is, drunk coding probably isn't for everyone, and I wouldn't go so far as to endorse it. Yet, for some people, it's another valuable tool in the box. But, that doesn't mean it should be banned.
Looking at some of the analogies to "building a house", etc, may be apt. I'm guessing the authors of those posts/articles assume sobriety of the builders. But, they'd be quickly proven wrong if they'd ever worked even a single summer on a crew. When I was in college, I worked on a siding crew for a company that had around 5 or 6 crews. During that single summer, a number of installers had to be bailed out of jail. More yet missed work or were ineffective because of the extent of their hangovers - they also seemed to have a disproportionately high levels of divorce & delinquent child support payments; further necessitating time off for court appearances.
But, "brogramming" != "drunk programming". "brogramming" seems to be an extension of the frat atmosphere into programming. It's not the same as your developers having a few pints before returning to work. Just because you've had a few pints, doesn't mean you're now going to be misogynistic or on a drug-induced rage when you return to the office or start playing beer pong
Of course there's a beer culture. Members meet at the local pub around 3-6pm, sometimes earlier, depending upon how much their coworkers pissed them off that day. It's sometimes referred to as a "support group".
If you receive a tax deduction on your mortgage, is your house accessible to the taxpaying public? If you receive a tax deduction for dependents, are *they* "accessible" to the taxpaying public? What about those on social security? Welfare? Medicare? The point is, just because you receive money from the government, doesn't mean everything that money touches belongs to the public or in the public.
Never mind they're objecting over a structure (the Hagia Sophia) that was originally a Christian basilica. And, it's Byzantium architecture, not Persian.
Meanwhile, those of us that like both Star Wars & Star Trek are thinking, "hrrm, Episode 7 has a chance now of not sucking."
People are more adaptable than machines, and thus have a higher value than them.
Yet machines are more dependable and predictable than humans. The machine will do exactly what programmed to, reliably, faster and with fewer errors than a human doing the same task. Yes, the machine breaks down from time to time and requires maintenance. But, it doesn't work an 8 hour shift, doesn't take sick days and doesn't go on strike. Automation generally reduces costs and increases reliability and reproducibility. While reduced costs in production doesn't necessarily translate to lower prices to the consumer, it does allow maximizing profits. When a competitor does come along and undercuts your price, you now have wiggle room to lower price and remain competitive and profitable. Personally, I wouldn't lower prices given a lower production cost unless I was either facing competitive pressure or trying to gain market share.
Don't worry - we'll still need someone to clean the bathrooms. Haven't seen a robot for that, yet.
A commonly cited object to comments is that you can change the code but not the comments, and then the comments become confusing. In fact that provides me several clues about previous maintainers and possibly even the original design of the code itself.
I don't know that I've ever seen anyone state that you can't change the comments, but rather the objection is that people don't change the comments to properly reflect changes they've made during maintenance.
I'd posit that the vast majority of misleading comments don't come from the initial development, but rather during maintenance cycles.
I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. A lot of developers have personal preferences on their indentation. I worked on a project where distinct devs used 2, 3, 4 and 8 spaces as a single indent. My argument was it was all visual. If we stuck with hard tabs, each could configured their editor of choice to display however they liked, without affecting any other developer. I used to use tabs for alignment, as well, but have since changed to using spaces for that.
Unexpected modification of public values doesn't get any better when its done through a setter function.
True, but I can set a breakpoint on a setter function. Not all debuggers/languages support breakpoints on when a variable changes.
I can't see how he values less keypresses over encapsulation/inconsistency.
Especially considering how he insists on prefixing with "get"/"set".
b) What's wrong with returning a reference to bar, ie. "foo.bar() += 3;"? That at least allows you to do something if "bar" has any other dependent variables.
The problem with this is that it, too, breaks encapsulation. You've effectively given a pointer (ok, a reference, but we all know they're really the same thing) to your internal memory. And, to your justification, no, it does not allow you to do some if bar has dependents (unless you're not really returning a reference, but an object providing pseudo-reference behavior, a la std::vector<bool>::iterator).
When you're young and you're not a Democrat, you don't have a heart.
When you're old and you're not a Republican, you don't have a brain.
Mind you, I think this originated in the Reagan era, when being a Republican meant more about being fiscally conservative than the current social conversative/christian fundamentalists that have hijacked the party.
While I prefer this style of bracing, the superfluous comments violate the D.R.Y. (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle. Might as well add a comment "break when x is one", as well. (also "forever" after "for(;;;)" or "while(true)" is again unnecessary and repetitive). I know your example is contrived, but these do serve as a prime example of bad comments. What's even worse is when down the line, "they" decide that you should break when x is two, but the comment remains unchanged. The point of comments that should be hammered home is: tell us not *what* happens, but *why* it happens.
The reason I like the open & close braces, with proper indentation, is that at a glance I can see where the block starts and ends. If you cannot see the start of the block and the end at the same time, the block is too large and should be refactored such that you can.
But actually, if you had a DDoS that wasn't a botnet but instead was millions of pissed off people intentionally slashdotting a site, how could that not be a valid form of protest?
I'd propose that if it was actively performed by willing participants using their own hardware, yes, it could be perceived as a valid protest (and maybe would even require a sworn statement by each willing participant, acknowledging their participation in each staged "protest" in order to ensure honesty) . But, committing criminal activities to create a botnet that will then be used? No, that's a felony criminal act. I'm going to go off on a deep tangent here and postulate that the very same people that would think this is a valid form of protest also think that there's too much money in politics, yet also contributed to their candidate of choice, and possible a super PAC that is politically aligned.
And lets face it, that is what this is really about: legalizing bot nets as a free speech issue.
This is, with no doubt, the issue. However, this is not free speech. A better analogy than the GP offered with the cars would instead be: Anonymous barges into my house at gun point and forces me into the street to protest. I (in actuality my computer as a botnet slave) am not there willingly. I am being coerced or forced to protest.
Anonymous wants to use DDOS to exercise free speech and affect governmental policy? Fine, spam Congress with emails with your positions. That's what the rest of us do. (and wait for the canned form letter response via snail mail).
DDOS is not free speech. It's more akin to walking into the foyer of Congress armed to the teeth, holding everyone hostage, until Congress agrees to the hostage-taker's demands.
I'm actually developing the website for a company that is booking passenger space on cargo ships to bring over 200-500 men and women with tourist visas from Jakarta, Mumbai, and Abidjan who have agreed to do the job in exchange for free room and board (which might be a tent in Times Square and two bowls of soup each day) until their visas expire.
This kind of sounds like indentured servitude, which is illegal in the US (INAL, but if you assist, you might be construed as aiding & abetting, even it is via a contract).
On another note, I'm guessing (let me repeat that: I'm guessing) the sorts that would resort to professional protesters are likely left-wing types trying to inflate their presence. The same types that routinely rail against monetary abuses in politics. If you want to protest fine. Have the balls to do it yourself, in person, instead of hiring a substitute.
In regards to the petition, no, it's not the same as an in-person protest. A protest is to make yourself & your issue heard. A DDOS does none of that. There is no message with a DDOS. It's impossible to convey a message to those people that are legitimately conducting commerce with the targets. i.e. preventing me from logging into my bank's website to pay my mortgage. In this example, you're not just hurting the institution, you're also hurting private innocent individuals. If anonymous takes down Chase or BofA, you're affecting tens of millions of private citizens trying to pay their bills, credit cards, car loans, mortgages, etc. Missing payments results in penalties, adversely affects credit scores which results in higher borrowing costs down the line. So no, it's not the same as an in-person protest, it's felony vandalism with the potential to cost innocent bystanders millions of dollars as a collective.
Let's be honest: is the outcry due to collateral damage (which nearly universally occurs in any war) or the fact that it's not a manned pilot exposing his or hersself life, but rather what people perceive to be a robot (enter skynet fears here).
I think the real outrage (in the US anyway) comes not from the strikes themselves, but rather that the average idiot (read: the general populace) believes that these drones truly operate autonomously. They don't realize there's a human telling that drone what to do. They see it as Terminator incarnate. I think the average way-person sees it as someone sitting there and all of a sudden hearing "TERRORIST. TERRORIST. TERMINATE." followed by the wooshing sound of that hellfire missile firing. Nevermind in actuality they've likely been watching an individual for weeks, if not longer, confirming it's who they think it is before pulling the trigger.
Then again, most /.'ers are conspiracy nuts, as well.
Except that criminal records are a matter of public record, at least in the USA. They're freely and easily available. Even traffic violations are easily found if you know where to look, despite rules that if you plead guilty/no contest and keep a clean record, etc. they "don't go on your record". There's still the matter of the actual court case (even if you pay the fine and don't go to court, there's still a court case number & record) and your plea. If the case for something as a speeding or other minor moving violation is a matter of public record, how can you expect that a conviction (or, for that matter an acquittal) would not be on the public record? Further more, there are explicit laws in place mandating that sex offenders be registered in a publicly accessible manner. Once convicted of a felony, in the US, you lose certain rights otherwise guaranteed. For instance, convicted felons cannot legally vote or own firearms.
So here's a question. Does Samsung get any of its money back? I mean the money it spent and is spending to invalidate this stupid patent? The money it spent on trial over this stupid patent? The money it spent finding the prior art that Apple should have found before filing for this stupid patent? No. Nothing in US patent system is that fair.
I'm not a lawyer, but maybe there's one out there that could answer: couldn't Samsung counter-sue, or the Judge rule in favor of Samsung and order court fees paid? And presumably, wouldn't all expenditures, including any involved with the research and gathering of information in regards to prior art, be covered?
I'll absolutely disagree with this. It's generally considered bad form to overload operators in any language unless the operators provide the exact same semantics as built-in types. I didn't even know Perl 6 allowed user-defined operators - now I hate the language even more. That, even with the built-ins, at the period table of perl operators, that there's even a class titled "ambiguous" ought to be a sign they've gone too far.
This is why I refuse to, and never will submit myself to Perl development or maintenance.
The Python is still more readable. First, you had to import an extra library (which, ok, python is built upon libraries). But, what the FUCK does "qw" mean? One can guess, and only guess, for the context that it's some sort of means to delineate a list. my @whatthefuck = ....;
considering that on a lot of perl you're going to see:
my $whatthefuck = ...;
and that the @ and $ variables are two different things...
And, you may hear the argument that "those are namespaces". bullshit. they're not namespaces. C++, Java, C# & Python have namespaces. @/$ does not denote a namespace. Especially, given appropriate context, you can use one of the other to change how the variable is treated. That's a cast, not a namespace.
Fact is, Perl is W.O.R.N. language: Write Once Read Never
What always cracks me up with a buffoon like Warren Buffet, is he keeps saying he doesn't pay enough in taxes. Last I looked, there's a line item on your 1040 where you can *donate* money to the federal government for the express purpose of paying the federal debt (you also get to deduct that donation from the following year's taxes).