This is a pointless exercise unless they set an expiry date for older bills.
Overseas banks will refuse the older version of the bills at some point in the relatively near future. Domestic banks will cooperate with the Fed to remove old 100's from circulation. The cost of manufacturing fakes will rise, the ability to fence them will decrease, and the amount of time they stay in circulation will also decrease. The overall effect will (hopefully) be to reduce currency dilution.
What's the story here? He blabbed on a security issue without approval...
The firing seems heavy-handed. Don't you want your Chief Information Security Officer participating in industry security conferences, selectively sharing the experiences of your organization with security professionals so as to help find long term solutions? Who knows... maybe he shared some sort of special classified/secret/private data that he really ought not to have, but it sounds like good old bureaucracy + control freaks at the top who think it's all about militaristic need-to-know.
The fun part about the site was laughing at real IT blunders. But Alex and his creative writing team overdid the writing.
Amen... the writing is atrociously self-conceited. Like bad joke-tellers, they'll focus so much energy on the "dramatic" buildup that they mis-deliver the punchline; the conclusion will be ambiguous and forum comments struggle to determine the real WTF. Alex periodically solicits feedback on his site... I'm surprised that he hasn't gotten the hint yet.
Credit where due, though... for all the fake cleverness on TheDailyWTF, I thought "bad code offsets" were a rather good (and intentional) jab at carbon trading.
No, you don't. You can do development in any text editor and compile with mono.
also, there are free (as in beer) licences of VS express.
Clearly you missed the word well when the grandparent said "To do.NET development well...". Text editors aren't IDE's, and even Visual C# express feels pretty limiting when you're used to pro.
The terms free software and open source are synonymous from the developer standpoint. While they originated from slightly separate cultural vantage points and carry nuances that matter to some pedantic speakers (such as RMS), they are essentially two different names for the same thing. (Unlike Microsoft's "shared source", which, as you indicate, is pretty worthless because of the restrictions.)
Thanks for sharing. And don't let the people dissing you for not open sourcing your games bother you. Even if you weren't contributing bugs/patches upstream to open source projects, merely using them rather than a proprietary alternative is a win for the community.
Corps don't pay taxes. Taxes are a cost. Costs get passed on to customers, shareholders and employees. They get passed on to you. You who buy any products made by corporations.
True but meaningless: it's the balance between customers, shareholders, employees, and "society as a whole" that makes taxation policy interesting. Tax too high and you drive away investment and lose jobs. Tax too low and you can't run a society. Etc.
The last paper I saw on it was that the Venus of Willendorf was most likely the result of a female trying to depict herself while pregnant. The artist gazed down at her own torso/belly and transferred the skewed proportions to the statue. They photographed both a model and the statue from this perspective to show the similarities. (I would hunt for the link, but it's probably NSFW given the use of nude model.)
Come up with a generic theory...And then tweak it to match reality.
I'm afraid people do that all the time, each one new and different.
That is how the scientific process is supposed to work. You form a hypothesis based on what you know already, you test it, and as the results of your tests roll in, you modify the hypothesis accordingly. Form and then tweak. This is the essence of all scientific progress we have made to date.
Why do you have a problem with this?
I think you misunderstood the parent's use of generic. When you can tweak the parameters of a theory to match any possible outcome, your theory no longer has any predictive power. For instance, there is a number--a universal constant if you will--that you can add to this post to reveal who killed JFK. This post, therefore, is a "theory" with only one parameter, but since we can find parameters describing all possible suspects, it's sort of a truism in disguise.
The parent was referencing string theory as an example of something that has become too broad... he wasn't endorsing it.
You know what company is shamefully absent? Canonical. It is nowhere to be seen in contributions to the linux kernel. Why won't the biggest name in desktop linux, which is funded by a millionaire, doesn't contribute to the linux kernel?
Free software is about freedom, not about community busybodies telling companies how they should give back. If you're a company who can take free software, respect the licenses, and make a bajillion dollars off of it, then great! That's part of what freedom is about.
It's not a nameless or faceless "terrorist" group that is costing our businesses, shutting down our infrastructure, tangling our air traffic control, our power grid, our hospitals, or stock exchanges and banks. The people promoting Windows and Microsoft technologies have real names and faces and walk among us every day. Take them out and we've won the first round. Why is the military sitting on its hands here?
First, you get a FAIL for invoking the terrorism mantra.
You get a second FAIL for blowing things out of proportion and recommending military action against everyday folks just trying to do their jobs. That's the flawed logic of a police state.
You get your third and final FAIL for singling out Microsoft/Windows in your post, when really the type of software problems that lead to infrastructure failure have more to do with competence than platform choice (read Risks Digest regularly to see what I mean). Software development enfolds numerous areas of competency: requirements gathering, architecture and design, testing strategies and techniques, configuration/build management, deployment/implementation, security [extremely tricky], usability [at the root of most failures], and interpersonal skills... to name a few. Most IT departments are unaware of these needs and have no good ways to evaluate candidates even if they were aware of them.
"Copyfraud" - I like it. Coining a new term is an offensive maneuver, and offense seems like a better political strategy than the defensive whining we always do on slashdot. Now we just need to start floating ridiculous proposals to counterbalance the copyright lobby's ridiculousness and re-center the discussion on what a reasonable public policy should be.
The main difference is that most religious are designed to promote cohesion in society by establishing a theological basis for a hierarchal leadership structure.... [whereas] the Bible seeks to promote cohesion by explaining the benefits of good social behavior and uncovering the lies of society.
Really? Because it seems the Bible is very congruent with hierarchy and authoritarianism: it identifies clear pecking orders (husband/wife, parents/children, master/slaves); repeatedly encourages obedience to rules and rulemakers (the government, church leadership, the Biblical text itself); recommends confrontation, peer pressure, and shunning of group members who do not conform; advocates a shun-or-convert approach to non-believers; and promises big carrot/stick outcomes depending on how people live (heaven/hell in the NT, more barbaric stuff in the OT).
It is convenient for Christian thinkers to "explain away" all other religions by finding some key distinction between their faith and others. Your approach must explain how the Biblical plan for "social cohesiveness" is qualitatively different than normal group-think tactics, because it really sounds like they aren't. This is, after all, the religion that jaw-droppingly consigns all humankind to eternal torture because a great-great-great ancestor disobeyed an arbitrary prescript.
I could see you using this approach for Buddhism or perhaps some other new-agy religions, but not Christianity. I mean, consider this Buddha quote: "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense" [emphasis added]. That's radically different than the Biblical "believe in Jesus or burn" implicit in the Bible.
Finally, Christianity treats the Bible as the inspired output of an omniscient creator-being. You ask us to treat this text in isolation without examining the populations who have most thoroughly embraced and espoused it. That's problematic: if the text is worthless in the real world, if it doesn't actually promote social cohesion or if it is easily exploited by individuals for personal gain, than it's harder to call it credible.
Trying to argue that the spirit of Open Source to recontribute to improve products, and that we've built our company upon that spirit and so we should contribute falls on deaf ears.
Have you tried coming up with a business case? Contributing back can have real benefits:
There is a cost savings with not having to reapply and re-test patches and bug fixes.
Contributing a new feature means that other people can help flesh it out and better integrate it with other aspects of the project. It can also help avoid the situation where the project implements a competing version of the same feature (and now you have to port your code or be stuck on a dead end). Contributing helps shape the destiny of the product in a manner conducive to your company's strategy.
Healthy open source projects attract more stakeholders. More stakeholders means better community support, more features, and better protection from obsolence. It's a virtuous circle, and your company can feed it by contributing.
Maybe the contribution could be tax deductible?
You might also be able to make a "recommendation" to your management. Make a list of all possible contributions (grouping together minor bug fixes so that the list isn't overwhelming), and label each one as CONTRIBUTE or KEEP. KEEP items that (1) give your company a distinct competitive advantage, or (2) cannot be usefully contributed because they are highly specific to your setup. CONTRIBUTE items that would be better maintained by the community. Describe the criteria you used in coming up with this list, and earnestly try to make recommendations in line with your company's best interests.
Incidentally, it might have been a mistake asking permission to post code snippets. Snippets are an inherent part of professional discourse and participation, not a competitive advantage which needs protecting. It's naturally in your company's best interest that you interact with technical peers in this fashion. At least, that's how I would phrase it...
It doesn't matter where the 3 attempts come from. On the 3rd failure, the account is locked
The risk of this type policy (in a corporate IT environment) is that you start locking people out during important sales presentations, during middle-of-the-night production emergencies, during shareholder meetings, and during critical moments of new project go-lives. In an e-commerce environment, obviously, the risk is that you'll drive away customers who can't use your system.
My (large, important) company has a 10-password lockout backed up by a 24/7 1-800 number with an automated system for resetting passwords. Even that's a pain sometime... in the real world people futz up passwords repeatedly because they put their fingers in the wrong place, have the caps lock on, have the wrong keyboard layout selected (dvorak--my personal password beast), or are struggling to remember the new password they chose.
First off, there should NOT be any indication whether the username was valid or not. It's as simple as that.
Why? As others have pointed out, it's not part of the security mechanism. Go ahead and tell the user their account is locked and point them in the right direction. For e-commerce especially... your users have umpteen different logins that they rarely use, and they need some help recalling their username on your site.
So a site dedicated to flagrantly breaking the law, peoples trust, peoples privacy and holding itself above any law or moral standard on the planet gets taken down. Why should anybody be sympathetic?... [Wikileaks doesn't] provide services like the Pirate Bay, all they do is play tattle tale to the world.
Transparency and whistle-blowing sound like pretty good services to me. Do they have best the editorial policies? Are they a good substitute for this thing we used to have called "investigative journalism"? Probably not, but morally, I'd put them on a higher plane than The Pirate Bay.
That's a Google News page with a summary of a wide range of news topics on Shane McConkey...including ads to the right. Hence, Google is monetizing news content that they don't pay for.
This does not seem like a reasonable way to see it. This is not news content, these are search results. If I want the content, I have to go to the site itself. Yawn, this is just another attempt at legal piracy, nothing to see here...
You're arguing from a position of "I like it the old way!"...
We have an in-built psychological reluctance to change, unless we're the one who happened to design or implement that change.:)
Sometimes "I like it the old way" is a valid attitude. Sometimes the benefits of the new way don't outweigh the cost of everyone having to relearn and readjust. Just consider: you'd probably be pretty pissed if the next laptop you ordered came with a Dvorak keyboard layout and the support line told you to "keep an open mind" since it's easier for beginners. Designer experts (whether they do GUI's, API's, or some other type of interface design) take this into account, or they aren't experts.
I call this type of design fallacy "forcing everybody else to accommodate your cute idea". Many of the grandparent examples (rearranging control panels yet again, the Visual Studio tabs-from-the-left, etc.) exhibit this. Microsoft certainly isn't the only culprit (Apple's round mouse comes to mind, as does Gnome's put-the-OK-button-on-the-wrong side), but it's a big part of the frustration with Vista and other Microsoft apps.
It's great that they have ways to weed out some dishonest people - but then you risk turning down genuinely "normal" or "honest" people.
I think you're misunderstanding: at my company, the test isn't used to make a hire/fire decision. We're federally mandated to psychologically evaluate all workers every few years. Sending everyone to a psychologist for an full evaluation would be time and cost-prohibitive, so the MMPI is used to filter out the "obviously okay" masses and send the remaining x% for an psych interview.
Yes, individual companies can misuse this data, but I don't think it's generally used that way. Such a company would be severely shooting itself in the foot if so: the test is not meant to be used by itself and doing so will generate a lot of false positives. I suspect this is especially the case among engineering and programming types (probably because we tend to game the test and--face it--a lot of us are pretty unsocial [but not to the point of mental illness]).
Your response leaves me completely confused as to how I should answer - I shouldn't lie on these tests, but also, I shouldn't be completely truthful because that might mark me out too? Which is it?
The last time I took it, my rules of thumb were (1) don't try to out-think the test; (2) be basically honest and willing to admit to minor faults; (3) don't admit to anything really weird (e.g., like the "thoughts about your mother" question); (4) try to be consistent in how you answer questions [some questions are asked in multiple different ways], but don't go back to previously answered questions and try to scrub them for consistency. This worked for me in that my test scores reflected the right amount of honesty. However, I still got called in for an interview because 3 of the 9 clinical scales were in the top quartile. The guy asked me one question--"What's your story?". I talked for about 45 minutes, and then he cut me off and said "you're not crazy". He reported that back to my company, and that was the end of it. Not the best experience, but I've had drug tests that were worse (another federal requirement at my company).
The sad thing is that people who lie on the test (and are consistent about it) are the ones that are going to get hired.
Take for example, "It would be better if almost all laws were thrown away". Now considering that this test is for the police force, it's obvious that the Human Resource types aren't interested in hiring a civil Libertarian, however purely philosophical he is in his beliefs.
Nothing guarantees that a dishonest HR department won't intercept test answers and try to apply their own interpretation, but in a properly run program, MMPI results are used by a psychologist to screen folks for personality disorders and selectively call high risk folks in for a one-on-one psych interview. If the psychologist says you aren't crazy, then that's the end of the matter. There are nine diagnosis the test tries to detect, as well as several validation measures to try and prevent faking your responses. (At my company, I've heard of one guy getting called for an interview because he was "too normal" and another guy geting called because he was "too honest".)
It's not a good analogy as homicide is a criminal offense and software piracy a civil offense.
Also, one is the abrupt, violent end of another person's existence and the other is a violation of an intangible and somewhat dubious property right. Your moral obligation to act as whistleblower is different between these two situations.
Programmers generally have a personality that is characterized by their belief that because they can write code and others can't (e.g. a securities lawyer) they can do any other job function as well or better than that person. This is just an observation after dealing with programmers for most of my career.
And having dealt with programmers for several years, I suppose you aren't surprised at the responses you're getting in this forum.:-)
It's probably not just the superiority complex, but also professional OCD and a fear of depending on others. The Hans Reiser trial showed the spectacular extreme of this (e.g., continually bickering with his lawyer, flouting judicial instruction, and coming off as "thinking he could outsmart the jury"). Ironically, I think he would be free in a few months had he accepted the plea deal as advised by his lawyers (3 years in jail vs 15).
Slashdot Mirror
Overseas banks will refuse the older version of the bills at some point in the relatively near future. Domestic banks will cooperate with the Fed to remove old 100's from circulation. The cost of manufacturing fakes will rise, the ability to fence them will decrease, and the amount of time they stay in circulation will also decrease. The overall effect will (hopefully) be to reduce currency dilution.
The firing seems heavy-handed. Don't you want your Chief Information Security Officer participating in industry security conferences, selectively sharing the experiences of your organization with security professionals so as to help find long term solutions? Who knows... maybe he shared some sort of special classified/secret/private data that he really ought not to have, but it sounds like good old bureaucracy + control freaks at the top who think it's all about militaristic need-to-know.
Snooze... it is only "interesting" if you believe the human mind to be some sort of mystical phenomenon.
Amen... the writing is atrociously self-conceited. Like bad joke-tellers, they'll focus so much energy on the "dramatic" buildup that they mis-deliver the punchline; the conclusion will be ambiguous and forum comments struggle to determine the real WTF. Alex periodically solicits feedback on his site... I'm surprised that he hasn't gotten the hint yet.
Credit where due, though... for all the fake cleverness on TheDailyWTF, I thought "bad code offsets" were a rather good (and intentional) jab at carbon trading.
Clearly you missed the word well when the grandparent said "To do .NET development well...". Text editors aren't IDE's, and even Visual C# express feels pretty limiting when you're used to pro.
What is the use of have access to the source code when the license forbids you to modify it?
That's the different between Open Source Software and Free Open Source Software.
Wrong. All open source software is modifiable.
The terms free software and open source are synonymous from the developer standpoint. While they originated from slightly separate cultural vantage points and carry nuances that matter to some pedantic speakers (such as RMS), they are essentially two different names for the same thing. (Unlike Microsoft's "shared source", which, as you indicate, is pretty worthless because of the restrictions.)
Thanks for sharing. And don't let the people dissing you for not open sourcing your games bother you. Even if you weren't contributing bugs/patches upstream to open source projects, merely using them rather than a proprietary alternative is a win for the community.
True but meaningless: it's the balance between customers, shareholders, employees, and "society as a whole" that makes taxation policy interesting. Tax too high and you drive away investment and lose jobs. Tax too low and you can't run a society. Etc.
The last paper I saw on it was that the Venus of Willendorf was most likely the result of a female trying to depict herself while pregnant. The artist gazed down at her own torso/belly and transferred the skewed proportions to the statue. They photographed both a model and the statue from this perspective to show the similarities. (I would hunt for the link, but it's probably NSFW given the use of nude model.)
Google is a publicly traded company and it's only obligation is to make a profit for shareholders
Acting on behalf of a publicly traded company does not absolve you of your moral obligations.
Come up with a generic theory...And then tweak it to match reality. I'm afraid people do that all the time, each one new and different.
That is how the scientific process is supposed to work. You form a hypothesis based on what you know already, you test it, and as the results of your tests roll in, you modify the hypothesis accordingly. Form and then tweak. This is the essence of all scientific progress we have made to date. Why do you have a problem with this?
I think you misunderstood the parent's use of generic. When you can tweak the parameters of a theory to match any possible outcome, your theory no longer has any predictive power. For instance, there is a number--a universal constant if you will--that you can add to this post to reveal who killed JFK. This post, therefore, is a "theory" with only one parameter, but since we can find parameters describing all possible suspects, it's sort of a truism in disguise.
The parent was referencing string theory as an example of something that has become too broad... he wasn't endorsing it.
Free software is about freedom, not about community busybodies telling companies how they should give back. If you're a company who can take free software, respect the licenses, and make a bajillion dollars off of it, then great! That's part of what freedom is about.
First, you get a FAIL for invoking the terrorism mantra.
You get a second FAIL for blowing things out of proportion and recommending military action against everyday folks just trying to do their jobs. That's the flawed logic of a police state.
You get your third and final FAIL for singling out Microsoft/Windows in your post, when really the type of software problems that lead to infrastructure failure have more to do with competence than platform choice (read Risks Digest regularly to see what I mean). Software development enfolds numerous areas of competency: requirements gathering, architecture and design, testing strategies and techniques, configuration/build management, deployment/implementation, security [extremely tricky], usability [at the root of most failures], and interpersonal skills... to name a few. Most IT departments are unaware of these needs and have no good ways to evaluate candidates even if they were aware of them.
"Copyfraud" - I like it. Coining a new term is an offensive maneuver, and offense seems like a better political strategy than the defensive whining we always do on slashdot. Now we just need to start floating ridiculous proposals to counterbalance the copyright lobby's ridiculousness and re-center the discussion on what a reasonable public policy should be.
Really? Because it seems the Bible is very congruent with hierarchy and authoritarianism: it identifies clear pecking orders (husband/wife, parents/children, master/slaves); repeatedly encourages obedience to rules and rulemakers (the government, church leadership, the Biblical text itself); recommends confrontation, peer pressure, and shunning of group members who do not conform; advocates a shun-or-convert approach to non-believers; and promises big carrot/stick outcomes depending on how people live (heaven/hell in the NT, more barbaric stuff in the OT).
It is convenient for Christian thinkers to "explain away" all other religions by finding some key distinction between their faith and others. Your approach must explain how the Biblical plan for "social cohesiveness" is qualitatively different than normal group-think tactics, because it really sounds like they aren't. This is, after all, the religion that jaw-droppingly consigns all humankind to eternal torture because a great-great-great ancestor disobeyed an arbitrary prescript.
I could see you using this approach for Buddhism or perhaps some other new-agy religions, but not Christianity. I mean, consider this Buddha quote: "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense" [emphasis added]. That's radically different than the Biblical "believe in Jesus or burn" implicit in the Bible.
Finally, Christianity treats the Bible as the inspired output of an omniscient creator-being. You ask us to treat this text in isolation without examining the populations who have most thoroughly embraced and espoused it. That's problematic: if the text is worthless in the real world, if it doesn't actually promote social cohesion or if it is easily exploited by individuals for personal gain, than it's harder to call it credible.
Have you tried coming up with a business case? Contributing back can have real benefits:
You might also be able to make a "recommendation" to your management. Make a list of all possible contributions (grouping together minor bug fixes so that the list isn't overwhelming), and label each one as CONTRIBUTE or KEEP. KEEP items that (1) give your company a distinct competitive advantage, or (2) cannot be usefully contributed because they are highly specific to your setup. CONTRIBUTE items that would be better maintained by the community. Describe the criteria you used in coming up with this list, and earnestly try to make recommendations in line with your company's best interests.
Incidentally, it might have been a mistake asking permission to post code snippets. Snippets are an inherent part of professional discourse and participation, not a competitive advantage which needs protecting. It's naturally in your company's best interest that you interact with technical peers in this fashion. At least, that's how I would phrase it...
The risk of this type policy (in a corporate IT environment) is that you start locking people out during important sales presentations, during middle-of-the-night production emergencies, during shareholder meetings, and during critical moments of new project go-lives. In an e-commerce environment, obviously, the risk is that you'll drive away customers who can't use your system.
My (large, important) company has a 10-password lockout backed up by a 24/7 1-800 number with an automated system for resetting passwords. Even that's a pain sometime... in the real world people futz up passwords repeatedly because they put their fingers in the wrong place, have the caps lock on, have the wrong keyboard layout selected (dvorak--my personal password beast), or are struggling to remember the new password they chose.
Why? As others have pointed out, it's not part of the security mechanism. Go ahead and tell the user their account is locked and point them in the right direction. For e-commerce especially... your users have umpteen different logins that they rarely use, and they need some help recalling their username on your site.
Because this is a technical site and the means by which computer forensics can be carried out or thwarted is of intrinsic technical interest?
Transparency and whistle-blowing sound like pretty good services to me. Do they have best the editorial policies? Are they a good substitute for this thing we used to have called "investigative journalism"? Probably not, but morally, I'd put them on a higher plane than The Pirate Bay.
This does not seem like a reasonable way to see it. This is not news content, these are search results. If I want the content, I have to go to the site itself. Yawn, this is just another attempt at legal piracy, nothing to see here...
We have an in-built psychological reluctance to change, unless we're the one who happened to design or implement that change. :)
Sometimes "I like it the old way" is a valid attitude. Sometimes the benefits of the new way don't outweigh the cost of everyone having to relearn and readjust. Just consider: you'd probably be pretty pissed if the next laptop you ordered came with a Dvorak keyboard layout and the support line told you to "keep an open mind" since it's easier for beginners. Designer experts (whether they do GUI's, API's, or some other type of interface design) take this into account, or they aren't experts.
I call this type of design fallacy "forcing everybody else to accommodate your cute idea". Many of the grandparent examples (rearranging control panels yet again, the Visual Studio tabs-from-the-left, etc.) exhibit this. Microsoft certainly isn't the only culprit (Apple's round mouse comes to mind, as does Gnome's put-the-OK-button-on-the-wrong side), but it's a big part of the frustration with Vista and other Microsoft apps.
I think you're misunderstanding: at my company, the test isn't used to make a hire/fire decision. We're federally mandated to psychologically evaluate all workers every few years. Sending everyone to a psychologist for an full evaluation would be time and cost-prohibitive, so the MMPI is used to filter out the "obviously okay" masses and send the remaining x% for an psych interview.
Yes, individual companies can misuse this data, but I don't think it's generally used that way. Such a company would be severely shooting itself in the foot if so: the test is not meant to be used by itself and doing so will generate a lot of false positives. I suspect this is especially the case among engineering and programming types (probably because we tend to game the test and--face it--a lot of us are pretty unsocial [but not to the point of mental illness]).
The last time I took it, my rules of thumb were (1) don't try to out-think the test; (2) be basically honest and willing to admit to minor faults; (3) don't admit to anything really weird (e.g., like the "thoughts about your mother" question); (4) try to be consistent in how you answer questions [some questions are asked in multiple different ways], but don't go back to previously answered questions and try to scrub them for consistency. This worked for me in that my test scores reflected the right amount of honesty. However, I still got called in for an interview because 3 of the 9 clinical scales were in the top quartile. The guy asked me one question--"What's your story?". I talked for about 45 minutes, and then he cut me off and said "you're not crazy". He reported that back to my company, and that was the end of it. Not the best experience, but I've had drug tests that were worse (another federal requirement at my company).
Nothing guarantees that a dishonest HR department won't intercept test answers and try to apply their own interpretation, but in a properly run program, MMPI results are used by a psychologist to screen folks for personality disorders and selectively call high risk folks in for a one-on-one psych interview. If the psychologist says you aren't crazy, then that's the end of the matter. There are nine diagnosis the test tries to detect, as well as several validation measures to try and prevent faking your responses. (At my company, I've heard of one guy getting called for an interview because he was "too normal" and another guy geting called because he was "too honest".)
Also, one is the abrupt, violent end of another person's existence and the other is a violation of an intangible and somewhat dubious property right. Your moral obligation to act as whistleblower is different between these two situations.
And having dealt with programmers for several years, I suppose you aren't surprised at the responses you're getting in this forum. :-)
It's probably not just the superiority complex, but also professional OCD and a fear of depending on others. The Hans Reiser trial showed the spectacular extreme of this (e.g., continually bickering with his lawyer, flouting judicial instruction, and coming off as "thinking he could outsmart the jury"). Ironically, I think he would be free in a few months had he accepted the plea deal as advised by his lawyers (3 years in jail vs 15).