You have an old computer right? Every techie has one. The PIII-700 in the corner.
Yeah - boot only knoppix and only to do your banking on it, and only when your primary PC is disconnected from the network. Make sure it's got it's software firewall on and you're also behind a broadband NAT router.
Now the only question is how to prove to your bank that you used this "banking only" PC instead of your main "possibly infected" PC to do your banking!
What? No Vista with SP9? You're running what? Leenooks? Too bad for you!
> anti-virus version and updates,
Yeah because anti-virus companies are ALWAYS ahead of viruses and keyloggers and browser exploits.
> firewall
Yeah software firewalls are so useful against malware that originates INSIDE your own computer.
I run an unpatched old version of Windows 2000 at home (before that Win98). No AV, no "software firewall". I'm behind a broadband router that doesn't let anything in that doesn't match a request my computer made. It's not a real firewall but it's better than 99.9% of all "on-your-system software security" measures. I don't run outlook (I actually run an old version of Netscape Gold 4.7-something with Java and Javascript turned off) - and I run Firefox with NoScript, flashblock, etc etc etc. I'm running a small program that detects any unauthorized changes to important parts of the registry and sets off alarms. The only times it goes off is when someone like Apple or
I've been running this config for 7-8 years - not one single virus or adware or malware.
It's all about choices.
My choices mean I'm more secure that most nincompoops who use all the "software protection" in the world.
But the Bank's "experts" would take one look at my system and say "nope - you've been haxored!". BS. I want to see them find the actual virus and prove that the virus was "preventable" using known protection mechanisms at the time.
PS: VMWare isn't going to do shit to protect you. You use your regular computer all day, it gets infected, you boot VMWare to connect to the bank and your keystrokes are all still stolen.
You have to do the exact opposite. Use VMWare all day, it gets infected, and then you use another VM to do banking. But OOOPS no-one has a clue how to "isolate" VM systems on their network from each other - evil haxor probably has no problem infecting BOTH VMs and the host operating system.
No - the only real solution is two factor authentication.
I thought Kingdom of Heaven and Gladiator were very good movies. If those are his "worst" movies, then he's gotta be frickin awsome compared to other directors.
Right - because when you run your car or use some of the liquid nitrogen in experiments, you end up having to re-fill the tank with pure gasoline/liquid-nitrogen, which dilutes what little water/oxygen was there. So it never builds up. (drain != empty the tank, can also simply be "use a majority of the liquid and re-fill").
Still, I'm supprised it was never mentioned in the safety seminars.
Well I'll be damned, I don't remember hearing about that in the safety briefings in grad school, but it makes sense once I look at the boiling points of the two liquids.
BUT - I'd bet you'd boil away most of the Nitrogen in doing so. The nitrogen has to cool down the room temperature oxygen to it's temperature, which means it is absorbing heat, boiling it.
And if you're letting that much liquid nitrogen boil away - well then there's something wrong to begin with.
> The camera cannot prevent anything, it can only watch things happening.
Not only that, but if you're not careful what you're doing - it can actually REDUCE the amount of useful policing you can do. Because now for every itty bitty little street crime - you have to go sift through 200 video cameras and all their footage. That wastes a LOT of time and effort.
You might even be so busy doing this that you don't have the officers to spare to follow around (by foot) the two guys who once met with the one known evil bomber.
The same two guys who blew up the trains some time latter.
> PS: Yes, the Madrid bombers used cell phones to detonate the bombs, but they didn't do it by calling the 'phone. They used the alarm clock function.
Hee hee - then maybe another suggested course of action would be for the teco to ring EVERY cellphone along the route before the motorcade leaves the airport!
The *only* reason making guns illegal would not work is because there's already so many in circulation.
Forcing everyone to carry a big 5 lb lump of steel throughout their lives to "ensure their safety" from what's probably a 1 in 20,000 lifetime event is utterly idiotic - especially considering that in places like Canada and Europe the likelyhood of being shot dead is already LESS THAN your rate of gun-crime.
It's so interesting to see everyone all year long decrying the "1984" orwell state appearing in the UK, but as soon as something like this happens you have dozens of people in the forums calling for everyone in the country to be armed and for a hundred HD cameras to be placed throughout every single campus and 100 people to watch all these HD cameras - just to catch that one guy every 30 years who kills 30 people.
All this while drinking while driving is a minor first offence and 40% of everyone doesn't fasten their seatbelts.
I'm usually the first critic of responses and everything in general in life - but in this circumstance it's really easy to understand how it would happen.
It doesn't take long to shoot 50 rounds from a gun and leave the area. The fire department's response time is 4 minutes, police are usually much slower - 5-10 minutes, and that's just the first few officers. That gives TONS of time for someone to quietly leave.
And the residence it started in was for like 800 people - that's huge. There are probably 20 doors on a building like that. If the shooter stopped shooting and/or left his first set of guns behind and quietly left the building 5-10 minutes in, then got a second set of weapons some time latter and started again - it'd be impossible to stop.
The ONLY way you could make it impossible for them to "move on" would be if they cooperated and kept their gun and kept shooting long enough for you to find them, and/or if by co-incidence you had 50 officers right across the street.
(It's just amazing how high people's standards are and how small their ability to think rationally and systematically about the real world is when they're jerking their knees involuntarily)
> I've paid for the research once through my taxes.
And with the revenue *more* research will be done FOR YOU with LESS of your taxes.
Who pays taxes? Mostly citizens through income tax. Who benefits from research? Everyone. What's everyone's share of "taxes" and "benefits"? Who knows exactly where the dividing line is between "average taxpayers" paying more money than benefit derived - vs big corporations paying tax money as compared to benefit they derive.
I'm guessing that very very few individual taxpayers and small corporate taxpayers (who probably pay 90% of the taxes) derive any benefit at all from your proposal. I'm guessing that only big rich companies actually come out ahead by not having to pay "relatively small" fees to use the fruits of research. Why the hell are the 90% (tax wise) of the rest of us funding freebees for big corporations?
"If BackupHDDVD does in fact decrypt encrypted content than per the DMCA it needs a license to do that."
This is the most retarded part of everything. If they had decided to use winzip with a password instead of inventing a new complicated system, would the distribution of winzip suddenly become illegal? Of course not, it's somebody else's software. But exactly how would a court rule on that?
Under exactly what legal rules would a court be able to say that "no you can't file a DMCA tool takedown/lawsuit against winzip corporation"?
Whatever protects winzip should protect us. Or does it all come down to "intent" again. Winzip wasn't built with the "intention" of circumventing protection while this other thing was?
> As shown in Vietnam and the current Iraq situation, America has great difficulty in fighting a loosely-organized resistance.
Only because the standard for winning is set SO FREAKING IMPOSSIBLY HIGH. The US Army would need a 500-1 kill ratio with only 1 civilian caught in the crossfire to "win".
> If we can't identify the enemy, it's a good sign we shouldn't be there.
That's an idiotic statement. You can't tell the IRA apart from the civilians in Northern Ireland. You can't tell the suicidal muslims in England apart from the ones who aren't suicidal. Same goes for the Lebanese who are willing to kill other Lebanese being told apart from the non-hyper-violent Lebanese. Same goes for the Palestinians in Palestine - telling the ones who want to kill each other apart from the ones that want to work together. etc etc etc.
A more useful criteria would be this:
"How many innocent people will be killed by the killers if we're not there PLUS how much of the rest of the civilians will have their universal human rights trampled on (converted to dead human being equivalents, factoring in how much those people care whether their rights are trampled)" VERSUS "how many innocent people will be killed in the crossfire if we ARE there PLUS how many of our own troops will be killed in combat multiplied by some fudge factor which indicates how many times more we value our own soldiers lives over the lives of the innocent civilians"
...and we have to re-evaluate this criteria every 12 months, and we have to try and look back in history and project what kind of messed up crap will happen whether we act or do not act.
Cyber bullying is what the very first person does that results in cyber lynching - and cyber lynching is something we definitely need to get a grip on. And I don't mean just at schools - I mean in general.
Look at how easy and how often cyber lynchings take place on Digg. A single inflamatory article stating one side of a dispute with no 3rd party corroberating evidence or investigative journalism behind it - and someone's getting 200 death threats a day over the phone or tens of thousands of people local to the area are avoiding a single car dealership "because they SO screwed so and so anonymous guy on the web".
The parents aren't in much of a position to see the effect, how often does the cyber bully stand toe to toe to his/her victim in their parents house or yard and heap shit on them? The effect is observable at school.
YES, this EXACT example was prosecuted and convicted in England, and he didn't even get anywhere!!!
It was for a telco tsunami donation website, all he wanted to know was whether or not the site was legit or not so he tried a couple../'s, then he made his donation. They were running an IDS (intrusion detection system) and he was one of the only people whose identities they could identify (because he made a donation) and they zealously prosecuted and the prosecutor was zealous and looking to make a conviction and his lawyer was an idiot and the judge was an idiot. He was convicted. He lost his job and was fined thousands of pounds.
The judicial system has almost zero technical expertise associated with it and so the likelyhood of a miscarrage of justice (as far as all us techies are concerned) is much much higher than average. Combine that with police and prosecutors trying to "make their career" or "up their stats" and you're FUCKED.
It's more like you noticed that his side door is off the hinges, and you're going to tell him about it.
But 2 years latter you notice that it's still off the hinges, and your cousin rents the basement apartment and you're worried about her safety - so you post a message on the community bulletin board to embarass him into fixing the door (the fucking cheapskate - putting your cousin at risk just because he's too fucking cheap to fix the broken door).
The travel guide I was given by my travel agent for my tour through China said Chinese regional airlines would *refuse* baggage that wasn't locked... they can't guarantee it's security from theft otherwise.
Jeezues H C. The proposed pronunciation is even more fucked up than I'd imagined.
What we all know and love as KB/kilobytes (easy to type KB, easy to say kilobytes) is now supposed to be KiB (shift, lowercase, shift - pain in the ass) and ki-bee-bytes or ki-bee-bits.
ki-bee-bytes? What is that, dog food?
Switching to a new system now after 40 years - whose new acronyms and names and pronunciations were choosen by morons -- would create massive amounts of confusion.
Fuck the IEC, they can go to hell. No way am I *ever* using these retarded "bi" words.
Geee, never heard of the IEC before either. And what's this word - "Electrotechnical".
Ooooh, I betcha I know. Let me guess. A front for the very same assholes who want to fuck with the 20-30 year old "kilo/mega/giga" prefixes for their own damn benefit, so the electronics they sell can say "kilo/megal/giga" without actually BEING a power of two - exactly as everyone in the COMPUTER/SOFTWARE world has been using the terms for 30 years.
They can go fuck themselves. The only people who ever had problems where the ones who insisted on using the SI definition for computer jargon.
( Thing is about words in language - they have to be easy to pronounce and remember in that language. You try and pronounce these words 10 times really fast. The repeated b's get stuck on the tounge and they sound retarded to boot. )
You know, they say that extensions past the life of the author "protect the succeeding generations of his family" - but if his work was spectacular enough to be worthy enough of that much of society's resources - wouldn't he have earned enough money during the short life of the original copyright to provide for them?
Also - in today's markets it's entirely feasable for someone with a bug "portfolio" to sell the portfolio copyrights on the open market. If those portfolios have 50 years left on the copyright, they're worth a LOT more money.
So what's to stop an artist from selling his portfolio 20 years before he dies, and blowing all the money on himself?
And if the artist isn't "popular"? The portfolio is worth nearly nothing, and so existing for another 50 years is still worthless. And if your stuff is unpopular, do you think your heirs are going to be out there selling it or earning revenue from it? Hell no, they've got better things to do with their lives.
My conclusion - copyright extensions ONLY BENEFIT THE RICH ARTISTS.
Not only that, but a person that speaks english well and is authorized to HELP the customer instead of hinder - will EARN business.
I bought a 7-11 pay-as-you-go phone, and it was supposed to come with $10 air-credit. It only had $4 on it. I guess someone at the store "broke the seal" and used it a bit. So I called up customer service. It was an American (southern accent) and with no hesitation (after asking when/where I bought it) he threw another full $10 credit on it (giving me $14 credit). The call took all of 2 minutes. That alone EARNED my loyalty. I'll be with them a long long time.
> When I worked with microcontrollers (fairly hefty ones), in actual practice I never lost any sleep over pointer correctness. However, I did sweat bullets over real-time response in my nested interrupt handlers.
So, because something else 10 times closer to the hardware is hard and required tons of "sweating bullets" - there's no reason what-so-ever to use Software Engineering principles to eliminate "bullet dodging" in anything else. Anyone who wants to reduce the "sweating bullets" and "bullet dodging" is therefore a whiny baby?
> There is no salvation to be found among programmers who brag mostly about thinking less.
We don't want to think less, we want fewer bullets flying by our heads so we can spend more time thinking hard about other things.
Slashdot Mirror
How the HELL do you get over 10% of the entire male population "criminalized" enough that they are forced to give up a DNA sample?
Do they take dna in the UK for speeding tickets and late library books?
WTF?
No, you and nietsch are the knee jerk idiots.
All he is doing is pointing out (with personal examples) that in any environment it's human nature for complacency to set in and to lead to accidents.
He's not blaming anyone.
Ah crud, I figured it out.
You have an old computer right? Every techie has one. The PIII-700 in the corner.
Yeah - boot only knoppix and only to do your banking on it, and only when your primary PC is disconnected from the network. Make sure it's got it's software firewall on and you're also behind a broadband NAT router.
Now the only question is how to prove to your bank that you used this "banking only" PC instead of your main "possibly infected" PC to do your banking!
> OS version and patches,
What? No Vista with SP9? You're running what? Leenooks? Too bad for you!
> anti-virus version and updates,
Yeah because anti-virus companies are ALWAYS ahead of viruses and keyloggers and browser exploits.
> firewall
Yeah software firewalls are so useful against malware that originates INSIDE your own computer.
I run an unpatched old version of Windows 2000 at home (before that Win98). No AV, no "software firewall". I'm behind a broadband router that doesn't let anything in that doesn't match a request my computer made. It's not a real firewall but it's better than 99.9% of all "on-your-system software security" measures. I don't run outlook (I actually run an old version of Netscape Gold 4.7-something with Java and Javascript turned off) - and I run Firefox with NoScript, flashblock, etc etc etc. I'm running a small program that detects any unauthorized changes to important parts of the registry and sets off alarms. The only times it goes off is when someone like Apple or
I've been running this config for 7-8 years - not one single virus or adware or malware.
It's all about choices.
My choices mean I'm more secure that most nincompoops who use all the "software protection" in the world.
But the Bank's "experts" would take one look at my system and say "nope - you've been haxored!". BS. I want to see them find the actual virus and prove that the virus was "preventable" using known protection mechanisms at the time.
PS: VMWare isn't going to do shit to protect you. You use your regular computer all day, it gets infected, you boot VMWare to connect to the bank and your keystrokes are all still stolen.
You have to do the exact opposite. Use VMWare all day, it gets infected, and then you use another VM to do banking. But OOOPS no-one has a clue how to "isolate" VM systems on their network from each other - evil haxor probably has no problem infecting BOTH VMs and the host operating system.
No - the only real solution is two factor authentication.
I thought Kingdom of Heaven and Gladiator were very good movies. If those are his "worst" movies, then he's gotta be frickin awsome compared to other directors.
Right - because when you run your car or use some of the liquid nitrogen in experiments, you end up having to re-fill the tank with pure gasoline/liquid-nitrogen, which dilutes what little water/oxygen was there. So it never builds up. (drain != empty the tank, can also simply be "use a majority of the liquid and re-fill").
Still, I'm supprised it was never mentioned in the safety seminars.
Well I'll be damned, I don't remember hearing about that in the safety briefings in grad school, but it makes sense once I look at the boiling points of the two liquids.
BUT - I'd bet you'd boil away most of the Nitrogen in doing so. The nitrogen has to cool down the room temperature oxygen to it's temperature, which means it is absorbing heat, boiling it.
And if you're letting that much liquid nitrogen boil away - well then there's something wrong to begin with.
> The camera cannot prevent anything, it can only watch things happening.
Not only that, but if you're not careful what you're doing - it can actually REDUCE the amount of useful policing you can do. Because now for every itty bitty little street crime - you have to go sift through 200 video cameras and all their footage. That wastes a LOT of time and effort.
You might even be so busy doing this that you don't have the officers to spare to follow around (by foot) the two guys who once met with the one known evil bomber.
The same two guys who blew up the trains some time latter.
> PS: Yes, the Madrid bombers used cell phones to detonate the bombs, but they didn't do it by calling the 'phone. They used the alarm clock function.
Hee hee - then maybe another suggested course of action would be for the teco to ring EVERY cellphone along the route before the motorcade leaves the airport!
> signs that read "do not stop in this area" as you leave the departure gate
I've never noticed that before.
What's the purpose of the signs? To make it that much easier for security trying to spot someone going the wrong way and "getting in"?
> 2. Google has too much power.
Maybe there are too many business selling exactly the same thing?
They can't all be on the front page at the same time.
The *only* reason making guns illegal would not work is because there's already so many in circulation.
Forcing everyone to carry a big 5 lb lump of steel throughout their lives to "ensure their safety" from what's probably a 1 in 20,000 lifetime event is utterly idiotic - especially considering that in places like Canada and Europe the likelyhood of being shot dead is already LESS THAN your rate of gun-crime.
It's so interesting to see everyone all year long decrying the "1984" orwell state appearing in the UK, but as soon as something like this happens you have dozens of people in the forums calling for everyone in the country to be armed and for a hundred HD cameras to be placed throughout every single campus and 100 people to watch all these HD cameras - just to catch that one guy every 30 years who kills 30 people.
All this while drinking while driving is a minor first offence and 40% of everyone doesn't fasten their seatbelts.
God damned morons, all of you.
I'm usually the first critic of responses and everything in general in life - but in this circumstance it's really easy to understand how it would happen.
It doesn't take long to shoot 50 rounds from a gun and leave the area. The fire department's response time is 4 minutes, police are usually much slower - 5-10 minutes, and that's just the first few officers. That gives TONS of time for someone to quietly leave.
And the residence it started in was for like 800 people - that's huge. There are probably 20 doors on a building like that. If the shooter stopped shooting and/or left his first set of guns behind and quietly left the building 5-10 minutes in, then got a second set of weapons some time latter and started again - it'd be impossible to stop.
The ONLY way you could make it impossible for them to "move on" would be if they cooperated and kept their gun and kept shooting long enough for you to find them, and/or if by co-incidence you had 50 officers right across the street.
(It's just amazing how high people's standards are and how small their ability to think rationally and systematically about the real world is when they're jerking their knees involuntarily)
> I've paid for the research once through my taxes.
And with the revenue *more* research will be done FOR YOU with LESS of your taxes.
Who pays taxes? Mostly citizens through income tax. Who benefits from research? Everyone. What's everyone's share of "taxes" and "benefits"? Who knows exactly where the dividing line is between "average taxpayers" paying more money than benefit derived - vs big corporations paying tax money as compared to benefit they derive.
I'm guessing that very very few individual taxpayers and small corporate taxpayers (who probably pay 90% of the taxes) derive any benefit at all from your proposal. I'm guessing that only big rich companies actually come out ahead by not having to pay "relatively small" fees to use the fruits of research. Why the hell are the 90% (tax wise) of the rest of us funding freebees for big corporations?
Fuck yeah make them pay!!
"If BackupHDDVD does in fact decrypt encrypted content than per the DMCA it needs a license to do that."
This is the most retarded part of everything. If they had decided to use winzip with a password instead of inventing a new complicated system, would the distribution of winzip suddenly become illegal? Of course not, it's somebody else's software. But exactly how would a court rule on that?
Under exactly what legal rules would a court be able to say that "no you can't file a DMCA tool takedown/lawsuit against winzip corporation"?
Whatever protects winzip should protect us. Or does it all come down to "intent" again. Winzip wasn't built with the "intention" of circumventing protection while this other thing was?
Only because the standard for winning is set SO FREAKING IMPOSSIBLY HIGH. The US Army would need a 500-1 kill ratio with only 1 civilian caught in the crossfire to "win".
> If we can't identify the enemy, it's a good sign we shouldn't be there.
That's an idiotic statement. You can't tell the IRA apart from the civilians in Northern Ireland. You can't tell the suicidal muslims in England apart from the ones who aren't suicidal. Same goes for the Lebanese who are willing to kill other Lebanese being told apart from the non-hyper-violent Lebanese. Same goes for the Palestinians in Palestine - telling the ones who want to kill each other apart from the ones that want to work together. etc etc etc.
A more useful criteria would be this:
"How many innocent people will be killed by the killers if we're not there PLUS how much of the rest of the civilians will have their universal human rights trampled on (converted to dead human being equivalents, factoring in how much those people care whether their rights are trampled)"
VERSUS
"how many innocent people will be killed in the crossfire if we ARE there PLUS how many of our own troops will be killed in combat multiplied by some fudge factor which indicates how many times more we value our own soldiers lives over the lives of the innocent civilians"
Cyber bullying is what the very first person does that results in cyber lynching - and cyber lynching is something we definitely need to get a grip on. And I don't mean just at schools - I mean in general.
Look at how easy and how often cyber lynchings take place on Digg. A single inflamatory article stating one side of a dispute with no 3rd party corroberating evidence or investigative journalism behind it - and someone's getting 200 death threats a day over the phone or tens of thousands of people local to the area are avoiding a single car dealership "because they SO screwed so and so anonymous guy on the web".
The parents aren't in much of a position to see the effect, how often does the cyber bully stand toe to toe to his/her victim in their parents house or yard and heap shit on them? The effect is observable at school.
Yeah, go get the little bastards.
.
../'s, then he made his donation. They were running an IDS (intrusion detection system) and he was one of the only people whose identities they could identify (because he made a donation) and they zealously prosecuted and the prosecutor was zealous and looking to make a conviction and his lawyer was an idiot and the judge was an idiot. He was convicted. He lost his job and was fined thousands of pounds.
YES, this EXACT example was prosecuted and convicted in England, and he didn't even get anywhere!!!
It was for a telco tsunami donation website, all he wanted to know was whether or not the site was legit or not so he tried a couple
The judicial system has almost zero technical expertise associated with it and so the likelyhood of a miscarrage of justice (as far as all us techies are concerned) is much much higher than average. Combine that with police and prosecutors trying to "make their career" or "up their stats" and you're FUCKED.
.
It's more like you noticed that his side door is off the hinges, and you're going to tell him about it.
But 2 years latter you notice that it's still off the hinges, and your cousin rents the basement apartment and you're worried about her safety - so you post a message on the community bulletin board to embarass him into fixing the door (the fucking cheapskate - putting your cousin at risk just because he's too fucking cheap to fix the broken door).
The travel guide I was given by my travel agent for my tour through China said Chinese regional airlines would *refuse* baggage that wasn't locked ... they can't guarantee it's security from theft otherwise.
.
Jeezues H C. The proposed pronunciation is even more fucked up than I'd imagined.
What we all know and love as KB/kilobytes (easy to type KB, easy to say kilobytes) is now supposed to be KiB (shift, lowercase, shift - pain in the ass) and ki-bee-bytes or ki-bee-bits.
ki-bee-bytes? What is that, dog food?
Switching to a new system now after 40 years - whose new acronyms and names and pronunciations were choosen by morons -- would create massive amounts of confusion.
.
.
Fuck the IEC, they can go to hell. No way am I *ever* using these retarded "bi" words.
Geee, never heard of the IEC before either. And what's this word - "Electrotechnical".
Ooooh, I betcha I know. Let me guess. A front for the very same assholes who want to fuck with the 20-30 year old "kilo/mega/giga" prefixes for their own damn benefit, so the electronics they sell can say "kilo/megal/giga" without actually BEING a power of two - exactly as everyone in the COMPUTER/SOFTWARE world has been using the terms for 30 years.
They can go fuck themselves. The only people who ever had problems where the ones who insisted on using the SI definition for computer jargon.
( Thing is about words in language - they have to be easy to pronounce and remember in that language. You try and pronounce these words 10 times really fast. The repeated b's get stuck on the tounge and they sound retarded to boot. )
.
.
You know, they say that extensions past the life of the author "protect the succeeding generations of his family" - but if his work was spectacular enough to be worthy enough of that much of society's resources - wouldn't he have earned enough money during the short life of the original copyright to provide for them?
Also - in today's markets it's entirely feasable for someone with a bug "portfolio" to sell the portfolio copyrights on the open market. If those portfolios have 50 years left on the copyright, they're worth a LOT more money.
So what's to stop an artist from selling his portfolio 20 years before he dies, and blowing all the money on himself?
And if the artist isn't "popular"? The portfolio is worth nearly nothing, and so existing for another 50 years is still worthless. And if your stuff is unpopular, do you think your heirs are going to be out there selling it or earning revenue from it? Hell no, they've got better things to do with their lives.
My conclusion - copyright extensions ONLY BENEFIT THE RICH ARTISTS.
Poor artists get jack shit.
.
Not only that, but a person that speaks english well and is authorized to HELP the customer instead of hinder - will EARN business.
I bought a 7-11 pay-as-you-go phone, and it was supposed to come with $10 air-credit. It only had $4 on it. I guess someone at the store "broke the seal" and used it a bit. So I called up customer service. It was an American (southern accent) and with no hesitation (after asking when/where I bought it) he threw another full $10 credit on it (giving me $14 credit). The call took all of 2 minutes. That alone EARNED my loyalty. I'll be with them a long long time.
> When I worked with microcontrollers (fairly hefty ones), in actual practice I never lost any sleep over pointer correctness. However, I did sweat bullets over real-time response in my nested interrupt handlers.
So, because something else 10 times closer to the hardware is hard and required tons of "sweating bullets" - there's no reason what-so-ever to use Software Engineering principles to eliminate "bullet dodging" in anything else. Anyone who wants to reduce the "sweating bullets" and "bullet dodging" is therefore a whiny baby?
> There is no salvation to be found among programmers who brag mostly about thinking less.
We don't want to think less, we want fewer bullets flying by our heads so we can spend more time thinking hard about other things.