I mostly agree, but I've found on planes having a set of noise cancelling headphones to block out the drone of the engines and wailing of babies really helps.
Then again, I bought those for $10 from one of the airlines, so we're not talking overly expensive.
Wow, default passwords on things connected directly to the internet -- either the people installing these things are lazy, or the companies selling them are giving lousy security advise.
Back then, audio engineers did all they could to put that last decibel of dynamic range to use.
But the key here is range... as in it has highs and lows. Contrast that with someone like Nickelback, where everything is at a constant volume all the time. I found this interesting in terms of showing the differences.
I'm 60 and have been listening to loud rock all my life
And this is what's wrong with the world, old geezers are still in control of rock music. You're supposed to be listening to easy listening or Guy Lombardo by now -- you guys fucked everybody and smoked all of the good drugs, and now we can't do any of that. But it's OK, I'm dealing with it.;-)
But don't worry about the music unless you're the drumer or bass player standing right in front of the speaker for four hours five nights a week. If you are, wear ear protection.
I don't know about that, I've been to a few concerts where the ringing lasted for hours afterwards -- and I really didn't like it. In fact, I really don't want to do it again.
I had an old manager who said he's been to so many concerts that most things sound like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon... an indistinct "wah wah waaah".:-P
If you're listening to headphones loud enough to be causing damage, well, that's your choice. But for concerts and the like? I'll stick with the earplugs myself. It doesn't take all that long to cause damage, and the few times I've had ringing which lasted hours afterwards taught me it's not something I'd like to repeat.
So you install an app that can remotely WIPE your phone. That will stop them in their tracks.
Do you know what would happen to you if you remote wiped a phone the police had taken as evidence? You'd likely be charged with one or more felonies -- and then things would begin to get quite serious.
Give him a copy of "The Psychology of Computer Programming", and tell him to read the bit about egoless programming . ..
This, a thousand times this -- but remember, it works both ways.
The professor I worked with closely in university was a strong proponent of this. Sit down, go over the code, look at what can be made better and why, and what may need to stay crufty because it's arcane, and if someone doesn't understand something that's an excellent time to explain it. Walk through and review everything, and don't let your vanity get in the way of writing better code.
He called it egoless programming back in the 90's (no idea how old your book is), and I've found it extremely handy -- objectively look at your stuff and see if he's right. If he's wrong, explain it to him. In the end, the better solution should win out (unless someone is being stubborn or the 'better' solution is technically feasible, which does happen).
Get over the whole "I'm a code guru who knows everything", and be prepared to explain, justify, or even accept that you're wrong. In the end, you review your code to make sure it is as good as you can make it (within reason) and your junior guys get up to speed and understand things better. You get better code out of it, your junior guys get up to speed faster, and you might even learn something along the way.
It's still how I work with co-workers, and it helps in a lot of ways -- instead of saying "here's the solution", you start with "here's a solution, what have I missed?"
You won't agree about everything, but you can pick your battles and try to reach quorum -- the cats don't need to be herded when they're on-board in the first place.
I've seen really awful, and really good ideas from junior coders -- part of the process is helping them understand which is which. In a year or so when he's got more real experience, and knows he can have the discussion, both you and he might actually be better coders for it.
At this point does any tech savvy user still have the Java Runtime Environment installed?
Sure, but I have No Script installed to keep it from running except when I need it to.
Sadly, I find myself needing Java for a lot of work related stuff. I even have a couple of machines that still have Flash on them because it's occasionally called for.
In the real world, you can't always get away from using it since there's always some company required thing you need to access -- but that doesn't mean I'm prepared to let it run by default on just any web site.
Hell, a lot of the tools I need to run daily for work are in Java.
And it's your kind that makes police behave as badly as they did in this case.
Really? Expecting the police to understand the law and follow it causes the police to violate the law? So by expecting them to live up to a moral standard I cause their bad behavior? How, exactly, does that work in your little fantasy scenario?
Since you know nothing about me or my interactions/relationship with the police, you're mostly just acting like a child who makes claims without anything to support them.
See, the great thing about rights, is they're independent of being an asshat -- freedom doesn't mean I'm free to do just the things you think are OK. Freedom means I'm free to do what I'm legally entitled to do. Or do you think there should be a right to not be offended, annoyed, or seen in public? The freedom is absolute as long as he wasn't breaking any laws, which he wasn't.
And you'll never bother to look in the mirror for the reason, it'll be someone else's fault.
Well, I suggest a little self reflection of your own there skippy -- because you're possibly an idiot who thinks he's being clever but has so far failed to say anything of substance.
You're defending illegal acts by police officers over the hypothetical basis that the guy doing the filming must have intended something bad, and therefore anything the cops subsequently did is good. That's bullshit. Are you seriously suggesting that police should be able to break the law for some ambiguous (and unproven) matter of convenience?
But, go ahead... state your case if you feel the need. In what way is what the police did here legal or right when it's been well established that it's legal to film police doing things in public? Were they enforcing the law? Were they acting within the law? were they respecting this guys legal rights to act within the law? If they needed the video for evidence against the person they were arresting, they could have asked for it. If they just took it, one wonders about their motivations and if they were just covering their own asses.
So far you've utterly failed to give a single rational argument as to why cops breaking the law is okay, and other than a vague hand-waving argument about people behaving poorly (which there is no evidence of in this case until they took his camera), you haven't said anything meaningful yet.
Either you've managed to troll me, or you need to big up and state your case. And if you can't, STFU.
Well, I have no opinion about the latter half of his post -- but from a technology side, his belief of it being more than casual effort to get into his phone might let him down.
Simply locking it doesn't safeguard you. Refusing a search? Well, they might just find other things to charge you for. We're already talking about the bad behavior which can come from cops who don't get their own way and try to find new ways to punish you for it.
The cops are trying to keep asshat who filmed someone having a mental health breakdown from posting a video on youtube. They did it badly.
He filmed police frisking and detaining someone. He did it legally and in public. There was no evidence to suggest he was going to put it on You Tube, and even if he was, IT'S PERFECETLY LEGAL.
The police confiscated his camera, deleted the footage, and are charging him with a HIPAA violation (of which there is no legal basis to charge him). Hell, there's not even any evidence the person was having a mental breakdown -- maybe he was being falsely arrested by these same cops.
But you certainly are in a rush to miss who's the asshat in the story and who just had the best intentions but failed in execution.
You know what? I don't give a crap about the "best intentions" of the police officer in question -- because as soon as she violated the law in order to do what she claims, the rest is irrelevant.
If you truly believe the police should be able to break the law because they had good intentions, file trumped up charges with no legal basis, and delete evidence... well, then I sincerely wish you the logical conclusion of that kind of world. I'm sure Rodney King would agree that taping police misconduct is a bad thing.
Because when the evidence has been deleted, and the police had to be breaking the law for the first part of their story to be even remotely true (there is NO legal basis on which they can confiscate his camera, delete the images, or arrest him for having been there filming, or charge him for a HIPAA violation)... there's little basis to believe the rest of their claims.
Sorry, but on the face of this, the police did illegal things, with possibly-well meaning but irrelevant motives, and have since charged him with something for which there is no legal basis to do so, and in the process deleted some of the evidence.
An increasing number of police departments will arrest you, charge you, and seize your camera/delete the contents for filming them. Until the police are told in no uncertain terms that what they're doing is ILLEGAL, and accept that fact, I know exactly who I think the asshat in this story is.
Everything which comes after illegally seizing his camera is trumped up crap. Telling an officer that he has no legal basis to arrest you isn't resisting arrest.
"Becoming enlightened" seems to involve supernatural goings-on, on his part.
Well, 2500 years ago, audiences liked a good story, but there is no need to believe in magic in Buddhism -- that's the window dressing from the first narratives, but the substance of 'enlightenment' doesn't involve becoming a god as Westerners think. In Zen they say "before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water"... and "after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. You don't suddenly become some magical entity -- at least, not while people are looking.;-)
That's not to say that some people don't treat the Buddhas like gods, but that's not actually universal to Buddhism. That's usually an integration with existing local religions where it grew.
How many Buddhists are willing to say that that entire part of the narrative is BS?
You would be surprised. There is no requirement of being a Buddhist to believe in gods, miracles, or supernatural things. Even the Dalai Lama says some teachings are not meant to be taken literally, and strongly believes in the scientific method -- reality is true, and your beliefs need to match that. Most Buddhists probably gloss over the super-natural stuff as allegorical.
At its core, it's observations about human nature, and the things that do and don't work to help make us suffer less -- which is to say it's a self-help manual, albeit one that's been subject to scrutiny for quite a while.
There's some great stories, but that's not central to the message, and isn't really treated as literal truth by most people. But the meat of it isn't what most people think it is, it's more about fixing your own damned self.
You can be a complete atheist and call yourself a Buddhist. You can also be a practicing Catholic.
That's the problem with trying to use a thin client where the the user really needs a fat client. But today, everbody thinks that everything has to be in the browser
I couldn't agree more -- back in '96 or so, a co-worker said that the web had put back human interface design by about a decade.
Well over a decade later, everybody wants to run everything as a web app, and very often the usability of the software really suffers from it.
I've lost track of the number of crappy web based tools I've been stuck working with.
For a lot of things, the fat client is really the only way to go.
Can the whole world sue the financial industry for the mess they made by taking worthless debt and shuffling it around so that it looked like AAA stuff? You know, all of those worthless mortgages and "Asset Backed Paper Commodity" shit they made to look valuable and pawned off on everybody else?
Because if these guys hadn't skimmed everything off the top, and diluted things which had read value, the whole financial melt-down would have never have happened.
Most people's investments haven't recovered, so how about we hold AIG culpable for part of that?
The fallout from the stupid behavior of all of these international bankers fucked us all... and now we have lawsuits about shareholder profit from the bailout? Asshats.
Right, not counting all of the magic hocus-pocus stuff he did, because he wasn't, really, right?
Believing in any of that isn't a requirement of Buddhism. Lots of it was added after, lots of it should be treated as allegory, and some of it was intended to appeal to existing religious beliefs a very long time ago.
As a Western Buddhist, I don't believe in any of the 'religious' parts of it. In some places it's been around long enough that people do treat it like you can expect miracles and all sorts of things, and that can lead to problems -- really, it comes down to Four Things.
It starts from there, and then from there is pretty broad. Which is why it's compatible with pretty much anything from Hinduism, Judaism, and Atheism -- because at core, there's nothing supernatural to believe in.
It's pretty malleable, and as often as not ends up integrated with local religions. But if you read any of it, and leave out some of the more esoteric bits, it's very much not like a religion. It's kind of more self-help guide than bogeyman.
Unfortunately, nobody has been able to serve papers, and they're not clear on jurisdiction.
And, randomly, Buddha wasn't a world creator. He was a mortal man like you and I -- there *is* no specific creator in Buddhism. Depending on who practices it and where they come from, Buddhism isn't even technically a 'religion'.
Since programmers must maintain code, read it, understand it, and write more than work with the existing code, the top priority of code is to be well written, and easy to understand for humans.
That's nice in theory, but in practice, the "top priority" of code is to meet the deadline and get shipped. Everything after that is secondary.
I've worked in a few places which had some star coder who cranked out endless volumes of shitty, un-maintainable code. And as long as they kept churning out new features and the like, it was fine.
But god forbid that code should need to be maintained or updated -- the original author has moved onto other shiny things, can't remember whatever bit of genius led to the creation, and is often no help in debugging.
This is the kind of thing which is a long-term liability, but overlooked by people with short-term focus.
You can't fix him or his code. You can either cover your ass, or move on somewhere else. And somewhere else is just as likely to have someone of the same ilk.
If management can't/won't rein him in, he'll keep doing it. If he's really been coding longer than you've been alive, you stand no chance -- because either his code is brilliant and you just don't get it, or it's really crap but nobody cares because he can ship a new version on time.
It goes the other way too, I've known coders who were so focused on building something elegant, theoretically good, and built on the latest best practices their code was unusable. Those guys will never actually deliver anything which works, but they'll be able to give you a lengthy discourse on why this code convention is vastly superior to the one you've been using for the last 10 years. And, sometimes, those guys are also horrible at maintaining their code since they can't figure out how it does something any more.
And, since as a group developers tend to be high-strung, self-centered individuals who think they know everything (no slight intended, I used to be the same way) -- there's a reason why it's been compared to herding cats. It takes work to steer coders around, and it sounds like nobody is taking ownership of that where you work.
Well, since most pay raises many of us have seen over the last few years are below inflation, lots of employers are pretending it doesn't exist for their staff.
Slashdot Mirror
Think Larry Niven, not Frank Herbert
Bring on the booster spice. ;-)
I mostly agree, but I've found on planes having a set of noise cancelling headphones to block out the drone of the engines and wailing of babies really helps.
Then again, I bought those for $10 from one of the airlines, so we're not talking overly expensive.
Wow, default passwords on things connected directly to the internet -- either the people installing these things are lazy, or the companies selling them are giving lousy security advise.
But the key here is range ... as in it has highs and lows. Contrast that with someone like Nickelback, where everything is at a constant volume all the time. I found this interesting in terms of showing the differences.
And this is what's wrong with the world, old geezers are still in control of rock music. You're supposed to be listening to easy listening or Guy Lombardo by now -- you guys fucked everybody and smoked all of the good drugs, and now we can't do any of that. But it's OK, I'm dealing with it. ;-)
I don't know about that, I've been to a few concerts where the ringing lasted for hours afterwards -- and I really didn't like it. In fact, I really don't want to do it again.
I had an old manager who said he's been to so many concerts that most things sound like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon ... an indistinct "wah wah waaah". :-P
If you're listening to headphones loud enough to be causing damage, well, that's your choice. But for concerts and the like? I'll stick with the earplugs myself. It doesn't take all that long to cause damage, and the few times I've had ringing which lasted hours afterwards taught me it's not something I'd like to repeat.
Do you know what would happen to you if you remote wiped a phone the police had taken as evidence? You'd likely be charged with one or more felonies -- and then things would begin to get quite serious.
This, a thousand times this -- but remember, it works both ways.
The professor I worked with closely in university was a strong proponent of this. Sit down, go over the code, look at what can be made better and why, and what may need to stay crufty because it's arcane, and if someone doesn't understand something that's an excellent time to explain it. Walk through and review everything, and don't let your vanity get in the way of writing better code.
He called it egoless programming back in the 90's (no idea how old your book is), and I've found it extremely handy -- objectively look at your stuff and see if he's right. If he's wrong, explain it to him. In the end, the better solution should win out (unless someone is being stubborn or the 'better' solution is technically feasible, which does happen).
Get over the whole "I'm a code guru who knows everything", and be prepared to explain, justify, or even accept that you're wrong. In the end, you review your code to make sure it is as good as you can make it (within reason) and your junior guys get up to speed and understand things better. You get better code out of it, your junior guys get up to speed faster, and you might even learn something along the way.
It's still how I work with co-workers, and it helps in a lot of ways -- instead of saying "here's the solution", you start with "here's a solution, what have I missed?"
You won't agree about everything, but you can pick your battles and try to reach quorum -- the cats don't need to be herded when they're on-board in the first place.
I've seen really awful, and really good ideas from junior coders -- part of the process is helping them understand which is which. In a year or so when he's got more real experience, and knows he can have the discussion, both you and he might actually be better coders for it.
Noscript also stops most JavaScript, which is another potential source of nuisance.
I prefer to have everything blocked and controllable by default, if I want it, I'll run it -- otherwise, your flashing monkey isn't going to happen.
Sure, but I have No Script installed to keep it from running except when I need it to.
Sadly, I find myself needing Java for a lot of work related stuff. I even have a couple of machines that still have Flash on them because it's occasionally called for.
In the real world, you can't always get away from using it since there's always some company required thing you need to access -- but that doesn't mean I'm prepared to let it run by default on just any web site.
Hell, a lot of the tools I need to run daily for work are in Java.
Really? Expecting the police to understand the law and follow it causes the police to violate the law? So by expecting them to live up to a moral standard I cause their bad behavior? How, exactly, does that work in your little fantasy scenario?
Since you know nothing about me or my interactions/relationship with the police, you're mostly just acting like a child who makes claims without anything to support them.
See, the great thing about rights, is they're independent of being an asshat -- freedom doesn't mean I'm free to do just the things you think are OK. Freedom means I'm free to do what I'm legally entitled to do. Or do you think there should be a right to not be offended, annoyed, or seen in public? The freedom is absolute as long as he wasn't breaking any laws, which he wasn't.
Well, I suggest a little self reflection of your own there skippy -- because you're possibly an idiot who thinks he's being clever but has so far failed to say anything of substance.
You're defending illegal acts by police officers over the hypothetical basis that the guy doing the filming must have intended something bad, and therefore anything the cops subsequently did is good. That's bullshit. Are you seriously suggesting that police should be able to break the law for some ambiguous (and unproven) matter of convenience?
But, go ahead ... state your case if you feel the need. In what way is what the police did here legal or right when it's been well established that it's legal to film police doing things in public? Were they enforcing the law? Were they acting within the law? were they respecting this guys legal rights to act within the law? If they needed the video for evidence against the person they were arresting, they could have asked for it. If they just took it, one wonders about their motivations and if they were just covering their own asses.
So far you've utterly failed to give a single rational argument as to why cops breaking the law is okay, and other than a vague hand-waving argument about people behaving poorly (which there is no evidence of in this case until they took his camera), you haven't said anything meaningful yet.
Either you've managed to troll me, or you need to big up and state your case. And if you can't, STFU.
Well, I have no opinion about the latter half of his post -- but from a technology side, his belief of it being more than casual effort to get into his phone might let him down.
Simply locking it doesn't safeguard you. Refusing a search? Well, they might just find other things to charge you for. We're already talking about the bad behavior which can come from cops who don't get their own way and try to find new ways to punish you for it.
Actually, no.
Generally, law enforcement is going to get into your phone pretty handily.
He filmed police frisking and detaining someone. He did it legally and in public. There was no evidence to suggest he was going to put it on You Tube, and even if he was, IT'S PERFECETLY LEGAL.
The police confiscated his camera, deleted the footage, and are charging him with a HIPAA violation (of which there is no legal basis to charge him). Hell, there's not even any evidence the person was having a mental breakdown -- maybe he was being falsely arrested by these same cops.
You know what? I don't give a crap about the "best intentions" of the police officer in question -- because as soon as she violated the law in order to do what she claims, the rest is irrelevant.
If you truly believe the police should be able to break the law because they had good intentions, file trumped up charges with no legal basis, and delete evidence ... well, then I sincerely wish you the logical conclusion of that kind of world. I'm sure Rodney King would agree that taping police misconduct is a bad thing.
Because when the evidence has been deleted, and the police had to be breaking the law for the first part of their story to be even remotely true (there is NO legal basis on which they can confiscate his camera, delete the images, or arrest him for having been there filming, or charge him for a HIPAA violation)... there's little basis to believe the rest of their claims.
Sorry, but on the face of this, the police did illegal things, with possibly-well meaning but irrelevant motives, and have since charged him with something for which there is no legal basis to do so, and in the process deleted some of the evidence.
An increasing number of police departments will arrest you, charge you, and seize your camera/delete the contents for filming them. Until the police are told in no uncertain terms that what they're doing is ILLEGAL, and accept that fact, I know exactly who I think the asshat in this story is.
Everything which comes after illegally seizing his camera is trumped up crap. Telling an officer that he has no legal basis to arrest you isn't resisting arrest.
Except there's actually nothing at all which is illegal about what the guy did, and absolutely no legal basis to arrest him on a HIPAA violation.
These are trumped up, bullshit charges. Period.
The cops are being asshats, and should be charged.
Well, 2500 years ago, audiences liked a good story, but there is no need to believe in magic in Buddhism -- that's the window dressing from the first narratives, but the substance of 'enlightenment' doesn't involve becoming a god as Westerners think. In Zen they say "before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water" ... and "after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. You don't suddenly become some magical entity -- at least, not while people are looking. ;-)
That's not to say that some people don't treat the Buddhas like gods, but that's not actually universal to Buddhism. That's usually an integration with existing local religions where it grew.
You would be surprised. There is no requirement of being a Buddhist to believe in gods, miracles, or supernatural things. Even the Dalai Lama says some teachings are not meant to be taken literally, and strongly believes in the scientific method -- reality is true, and your beliefs need to match that. Most Buddhists probably gloss over the super-natural stuff as allegorical.
At its core, it's observations about human nature, and the things that do and don't work to help make us suffer less -- which is to say it's a self-help manual, albeit one that's been subject to scrutiny for quite a while.
There's some great stories, but that's not central to the message, and isn't really treated as literal truth by most people. But the meat of it isn't what most people think it is, it's more about fixing your own damned self.
You can be a complete atheist and call yourself a Buddhist. You can also be a practicing Catholic.
If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.
I couldn't agree more -- back in '96 or so, a co-worker said that the web had put back human interface design by about a decade.
Well over a decade later, everybody wants to run everything as a web app, and very often the usability of the software really suffers from it.
I've lost track of the number of crappy web based tools I've been stuck working with.
For a lot of things, the fat client is really the only way to go.
Until they get a subpeona for someone downloading child porn or downloading music.
If they simply say "well, we have no idea of who is using it for what", some clever lawyer will say they're facilitating this.
No, they're all evil.
Can the whole world sue the financial industry for the mess they made by taking worthless debt and shuffling it around so that it looked like AAA stuff? You know, all of those worthless mortgages and "Asset Backed Paper Commodity" shit they made to look valuable and pawned off on everybody else?
Because if these guys hadn't skimmed everything off the top, and diluted things which had read value, the whole financial melt-down would have never have happened.
Most people's investments haven't recovered, so how about we hold AIG culpable for part of that?
The fallout from the stupid behavior of all of these international bankers fucked us all ... and now we have lawsuits about shareholder profit from the bailout? Asshats.
Believing in any of that isn't a requirement of Buddhism. Lots of it was added after, lots of it should be treated as allegory, and some of it was intended to appeal to existing religious beliefs a very long time ago.
As a Western Buddhist, I don't believe in any of the 'religious' parts of it. In some places it's been around long enough that people do treat it like you can expect miracles and all sorts of things, and that can lead to problems -- really, it comes down to Four Things.
It starts from there, and then from there is pretty broad. Which is why it's compatible with pretty much anything from Hinduism, Judaism, and Atheism -- because at core, there's nothing supernatural to believe in.
It's pretty malleable, and as often as not ends up integrated with local religions. But if you read any of it, and leave out some of the more esoteric bits, it's very much not like a religion. It's kind of more self-help guide than bogeyman.
Unfortunately, nobody has been able to serve papers, and they're not clear on jurisdiction.
And, randomly, Buddha wasn't a world creator. He was a mortal man like you and I -- there *is* no specific creator in Buddhism. Depending on who practices it and where they come from, Buddhism isn't even technically a 'religion'.
My assumption was for a keepalive in the protocol.
Otherwise, packets would stop coming if someone stops talking, and sooner or later the other side would have to assume you've hung up.
Sending the packet for the silence would be the equivalent to "I'm still here".
Masters degree, practically the same thing. ;-)
That's nice in theory, but in practice, the "top priority" of code is to meet the deadline and get shipped. Everything after that is secondary.
I've worked in a few places which had some star coder who cranked out endless volumes of shitty, un-maintainable code. And as long as they kept churning out new features and the like, it was fine.
But god forbid that code should need to be maintained or updated -- the original author has moved onto other shiny things, can't remember whatever bit of genius led to the creation, and is often no help in debugging.
This is the kind of thing which is a long-term liability, but overlooked by people with short-term focus.
You can't fix him or his code. You can either cover your ass, or move on somewhere else. And somewhere else is just as likely to have someone of the same ilk.
If management can't/won't rein him in, he'll keep doing it. If he's really been coding longer than you've been alive, you stand no chance -- because either his code is brilliant and you just don't get it, or it's really crap but nobody cares because he can ship a new version on time.
It goes the other way too, I've known coders who were so focused on building something elegant, theoretically good, and built on the latest best practices their code was unusable. Those guys will never actually deliver anything which works, but they'll be able to give you a lengthy discourse on why this code convention is vastly superior to the one you've been using for the last 10 years. And, sometimes, those guys are also horrible at maintaining their code since they can't figure out how it does something any more.
And, since as a group developers tend to be high-strung, self-centered individuals who think they know everything (no slight intended, I used to be the same way) -- there's a reason why it's been compared to herding cats. It takes work to steer coders around, and it sounds like nobody is taking ownership of that where you work.
Well, since most pay raises many of us have seen over the last few years are below inflation, lots of employers are pretending it doesn't exist for their staff.