Comments are incredibly, incredibly important. They kinda go along with an overarching "don't be a douche" rule; while you may know what's going on in your own code, if it's at all complicated, tell the reader what it's doing.
Better, don't repeat what it's doing (by definition, the code itself tells the reader that, and does so without any risk of becoming out of date) but add comments describing why it is doing it.
The main difference between the ternary ?: operator and an if block is that one creates a condition expression while the other creates a conditional statement. There are significant advantages to each in a typical programming language that provides both, but they are certainly not equivalent.
That's a good question. If parents and teachers did teach their kids manners, respect for others, and the like, then perhaps we wouldn't have so much childish behaviour in the world of the kind that led to this lawsuit. (Whether the childish behaviour is on the part of the pirates, the DRM advocates, or both is left as an exercise to the reader.)
...and getting rid of the DRM that thinks it has the right to mess with my boot sector. That alone has made buying CS3 a show-stopper for me, even though I run on Windows and I would very much like to have several of the applications. For anyone who dual-boots Windows and Linux, it's pretty much fatal to even installing CS3 on the Windows persona even if you don't have moral objections to supporting DRM-laden software. Does anyone know whether Adobe have seen the light and removed this for CS4?
Anyone who would walk out on the small taste I gave them in the interview wouldn't have lasted a week anyway so the screening process would have been effective.
Just for the avoidance of doubt, it wasn't the interview I was talking about there, it was the part where you sent someone away with homework and expected them to continue to do things for your company on their own time.
IME, most of the good people I'd want to work with will accept an interview process for as long as it remains constructive and proportionate to the level of the position, even if that means attending multiple sessions. On the flip side, most will rapidly end the proceedings if they feel their time is being wasted, for example by giving them silly puzzles, sending in an interviewer who didn't have the courtesy to read their CV ahead of time, or covering the same material repeatedly because different interviewers aren't talking to each other.
Consistently topping the list of offensive interview practices, at least in discussions I've had with friends and colleagues, is either leaving someone alone for ages to fill out some form or expecting them to spend their time on something at home either before or after the interview. In each case, this shows that the company is unwilling to commit one of its own staff for the same length of time they expect from the candidate. About the only more reliable sign that you don't want to work there is when your technical interview turns into you giving training on basic skills to the "senior" developers who are interviewing you.
Or how about we implement a system whereby every several years that politician has to stand for election again, only this time voters will have even better information about the validity of the promises of said candidate?
No, that would never work.
/me glances at his government in Westminster, then across the pond to the US.
Things change. What is a good solution today may not be a good solution tomorrow, or it might still be a good solution but a better one might turn up.
Sure, and I would certainly rather have government leaders who were willing to adapt sensibly to changing circumstances rather than dogmatically sticking to their guns.
No one should be forced to do what they said they'll do four years ago regardless of what happened.
Here's where I think things need to change. If someone is to be voted into office for a period of X years, then voters' decisions should be based on what the candidate intends to do over the course of that time, not just what they pretend they might do in the first six months. I would have no problem voting for a candidate who honestly said that they couldn't give specific details of what they intended to do far into the future, but stated the principles according to which they would make any decisions that became necessary.
What I don't like is the situation at the moment where there is literally nothing to stop a politician from acting completely against his or her stated position before the election, once they have achieved office. The only sanction in most cases is not re-electing them 4–6 years later, and even that isn't much of a stick given the other options available with different electorates to abuse. There is insufficient accountability.
I feel particularly strongly on this because the first time I voted in a general election here in the UK, the MP I helped to elect did turn around within weeks and screw the people who voted for her by voting with her party in Parliament rather than voting for what she said very clearly that she would support. And that's without getting into the lack of separation of powers generally here, so we currently have an entire executive who are unelected and accountable to no-one.
For the record, I am also in favour of a constitution-level law that says that a reasonably large proportion of the population may force a prompt referendum on any proposed law they wish, and that the result of such a referendum absolutely over-rides any legislation passed only by the government itself. It's long past time that parties of any colour with no popular mandate and widespread public opposition to their failed policies could cling to power for several more years because there was no way for the people to get rid of them. Such measures seem to work quite effectively in countries/states that do have them, and while the referenda would incur a modest cost to administer, they'd still be a lot cheaper than letting a government throw away the kind of money they can blow in multiple years of mismanagement.
Come on, that's nuts! Circumstances change and a leader has to be able to adapt. What if he promises not to raise taxes, then WW3 breaks out and you need to pay to defend your own shores? Sorry, you voted for low taxes so go hide out in the basement. An extreme example of course but you take my point.
Exactly. So that makes a blanket statement that you will not raise taxes a pretty stupid campaign pledge, doesn't it?
I would like to think that if such a system ever could become a realistic proposition, politicians would start to express their principles in concise manifestos at election time, and then apply those principles under whatever changing circumstances arose during their time in office. Anything even approximating that concept must be better than today's approach of making numerous fiddly little promises that anyone who had time to check could see they could never keep, on the basis that most people will never have time to check so the politicians will get away with it.
The problem is that you can't vote on actions until after they've been taken.
Personally, I'm in favour of a nice, simple system where if a politician makes a promise before an election and then breaks it, a court can remove him or her from office. I imagine we'd soon see some changes in the way manifestos were presented, and perhaps those who are not just puppets and actually intend to act according to their stated principles would get a bit more recognition since voting for someone based on their campaign pledges would actually mean something. Those who just say whatever the current audience wants to hear but never really promise anything would stand out by a mile.
Well, what we do is closer to blacklisting than whitelisting, it's manual and based on a specific problem for us rather than automatic and based on some arbitrary criteria set by someone else, and if Hotmail get their act together then our systems will happily play nicely with theirs without anyone changing anything on our end. But apart from being completely different, sure, it's basically the same.
IME, Hotmail seems to reject almost all mail from anyone who isn't already whitelisted. Certainly every local group where I help with the IT and my own personal e-mails all get rejected by default, and the sources for those span a whole range of different ISPs and domains.
In some organisations I help, we became so bored of explaining to people with Hotmail accounts that we did send the information they asked for and it's probably in their junk e-mail store that we simply adopted a policy that if someone is stupid enough to use a mail host like Hotmail, that was their problem. We also redirect incoming mail to/dev/null if it tries to tell us we should adopt whatever non-standard, half-baked domain authentication standard the sender's personal ISP is stupid enough to filter on.
I used to feel bad about this: after all, I volunteer to help these organisations, which in turn provide various information to others, for the benefit of the community. It's a shame that some people in that community now lose out. I don't feel so bad these days, though: I just consider services like Hotmail to be broken, and choose to spend my volunteered, uncompensated time on helping those who don't make it difficult for me to do so.
Exactly. If blocking and accepting collateral damage is to be your policy, where do you stop? Blocking whole countries? Whole ISPs? Filtering all content using protocols like Usenet or BitTorrent because some of it is probably inappropriate?
Actually, giving a single company this kind of authority is usually not a bad idea. Spamhaus and email, for example.
I respectfully disagree. Giving a single, unaccountable group the effective power to completely kill some domain's e-mail is a bad idea, too. It's far too easy to game any one blacklist, and it's far too hard to get a domain that was added incorrectly (or that has been taken over by someone new who has no connection to the previous registrant) removed from the list again. I don't believe any sysadmin worth their salt filters based only on input from a single blacklist.
Plus I find they do not scale well for larger application.
And you discovered that through your own experience with functional programming languages, did you? It's remarkable that you could have gained such insight, yet not know how to spell the name of one of the best-known FPLs in town.
I rather suspect that, like many critics of FPLs, you have never actually tried to use them for a big project, and just assume that they won't scale because you read it somewhere.
But today most developopment is for larger application which doesn't necessarly solve problems per-say but create a tool that people can use.
I'll gloss over whether your unverified assertion about "most development" is actually true. Even assuming it is, producing good tools requires things like defining abstractions and building modular libraries to contain them, and these are areas where several of the relatively popular FPLs excel compared to the drek most of us have to use at work.
There are many valid technical and social reasons that the current generation of FPLs have not taken off — Peyton-Jones himself has talked about them insightfully on several occasions — but I can't agree that the reasons you suggested are among them.
Those of us in the UK have been recorded in this way for quite some time now. The police have been happily rolling out nationwide ANPR tracking cameras and databases, and you've guessed it, they rolled it into a neat deal that has managed to avoid much Parliamentary scrutiny using technicalities. There has been a little consternation about that from a few liberal (small 'l') MPs and the Information Commissioner, but right now the good guys are a bit busy to put up serious opposition, what with trying to stop our entire way of life from collapsing because of the impending economic implosion and fighting even nastier surveillance/database measures like the National Identity Register and the National DNA Database.
I'm sorry you feel that way. I don't know you personally, so my comments can only be based on the objective information you gave us here on Slashdot, and I have no reason to lie or to attack you maliciously. However, your reaction to criticism and the defensive nature of your posts do reinforce the initial impression that apparently at least two people formed on reading your previous post.
There is an old poker adage that if you can't immediately identify the weakest player at the table, that's because it's you. You might like to consider that even if you are as technically brilliant as you think you are, it's possible that other experienced people might have valid perspectives from which you could learn something useful.
Just for fun I decided to write FizzBuzz in Java after looking it up earlier today. Took me about 1.5-2 hours. No I'm not incompetent.
I'm very sorry, but if you're being truthful here, then yes, right now you are incompetent for the kind of job I was talking about. You have made a quick, simple task slow and complicated through over-generalisation, over-engineering, premature optimisation and perfectionism, which is a very bad character trait in a lead developer. You also, by your own admissions, took several minutes to debug what sounds like a simple typo and couldn't write the program on paper, which suggests to me that you never grasped the kernel of the problem. And finally, you seem to be over-confident of your own abilities, which is another dangerous character trait in a programmer.
No-one watches the "watchers". An endorsement is worth only as much as the credibility of the endorsing party. A site with endorsements from multiple reputable sources is probably a good source of information. If certain sites choose to endorse certain other sites that some people would find unhelpful, then those people will start to give less credibility to the endorsing site's other recommendations. It's not like Drudge is some sort of authority on anything in real life, so I don't see why just that single endorsement would tell anyone anything useful anyway.
If they passed this test I then brought them in for interviews with 4-6 people, half an hour each, who were given specific areas to drill them on to avoid repeats. Each of these sessions would be a sort of technical test on that interviewer's area of expertise.
A phone screen and a test or two at interview is fair enough, but what you described above starts to sound excessive to me. Perhaps it's appropriate if you really have that many distinct areas of technical expertise in which you need to assess a candidate and it really is conceivable that they might be up to scratch on some but hopeless on others, but I can't conceive of such a position in any place I've ever worked.
If they still looked good and passed that I sent them home with some task I knew they couldn't do yet and a week to complete it and send me some sort of proof. This was to see how they handled learning. Note, I ONLY did this if it was a pass/fail for getting an offer, not before.
On that one, I'm afraid, you would certainly lose me as a candidate. If I turned up to an interview and everything was going fine for both of us, but then as I left I asked you if you could just get one of your paid employees to spend ten hours over the next week doing some free research for me to prove your existing staff was worth joining, how would you react? If you can compare notes at the end of a 2–3 hour interview process including 4–6 technical tests and still not be sure enough to either make an offer or at least to set up another interview with a real person, that says a lot about your respect for the candidate who just gave up some of their valuable time for you at least twice.
Is there really a question whether online anonymity should be possible? I would assume that you would have a firmer stance, Anonymous Brave Guy.
I think there certainly is a question of it, and my stance is certainly against absolute anonymity.
I'm aware of the amusing irony, of course, but I see no real conflict. Sure, I occasionally choose to goof off on Slashdot under a pseudonym. These days, I don't use my real name very much on-line for privacy reasons. I don't believe people should be compelled to give their identity to any old person reading their comments on-line, and I have grave reservations about the data protection and privacy implications of (for example) the current trend for social networking.
However, I consider this a very different thing to people being compelled, as part of due process and under judicial oversight, to accept responsibility for illegal actions in a court of competent authority. With freedom must come responsibility, or there is no compulsion for people given those freedoms to remain civil and act in a socially acceptable way toward others. Anonymity necessarily breaks such a connection, which is tantamount to putting the anonymous actor above the law. Free speech is not an absolute right, despite what a few people around here seem to think, and words very much can be harmful, which is why there are laws against defamation, incitement to murder, leaking classified national security information or details ordered concealed by a court, and so forth.
The only argument for on-line anonymity with any real merit that I have encountered is the argument that we should be able to discuss things the government itself might not like without fear of being identified. On this one I do take a hard line, but it's rather different: if you have a government that does not respect and protect the people's right to discuss that government freely and without fear of reprisal, then the government in that country is broken, and it is already time to move on to the next of the four boxes and remove that government from power. The same would be true of any system of government with inadequate separation of powers and oversight, such that anonymity would be compromised by the courts without just cause. In other words, I support anonymity as the default, but not to the point that it prevents the justice system from acting fairly, and if the justice system can't be trusted with that responsibility, I support taking a lot more action than merely posting anonymous words on a web site.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, just not eyerv time.
Comments are incredibly, incredibly important. They kinda go along with an overarching "don't be a douche" rule; while you may know what's going on in your own code, if it's at all complicated, tell the reader what it's doing.
Better, don't repeat what it's doing (by definition, the code itself tells the reader that, and does so without any risk of becoming out of date) but add comments describing why it is doing it.
The main difference between the ternary ?: operator and an if block is that one creates a condition expression while the other creates a conditional statement. There are significant advantages to each in a typical programming language that provides both, but they are certainly not equivalent.
That's a good question. If parents and teachers did teach their kids manners, respect for others, and the like, then perhaps we wouldn't have so much childish behaviour in the world of the kind that led to this lawsuit. (Whether the childish behaviour is on the part of the pirates, the DRM advocates, or both is left as an exercise to the reader.)
...and getting rid of the DRM that thinks it has the right to mess with my boot sector. That alone has made buying CS3 a show-stopper for me, even though I run on Windows and I would very much like to have several of the applications. For anyone who dual-boots Windows and Linux, it's pretty much fatal to even installing CS3 on the Windows persona even if you don't have moral objections to supporting DRM-laden software. Does anyone know whether Adobe have seen the light and removed this for CS4?
Yeah, but do you hire the guy who replies, "Testing whether a number is prime"? :-)
Anyone who would walk out on the small taste I gave them in the interview wouldn't have lasted a week anyway so the screening process would have been effective.
Just for the avoidance of doubt, it wasn't the interview I was talking about there, it was the part where you sent someone away with homework and expected them to continue to do things for your company on their own time.
IME, most of the good people I'd want to work with will accept an interview process for as long as it remains constructive and proportionate to the level of the position, even if that means attending multiple sessions. On the flip side, most will rapidly end the proceedings if they feel their time is being wasted, for example by giving them silly puzzles, sending in an interviewer who didn't have the courtesy to read their CV ahead of time, or covering the same material repeatedly because different interviewers aren't talking to each other.
Consistently topping the list of offensive interview practices, at least in discussions I've had with friends and colleagues, is either leaving someone alone for ages to fill out some form or expecting them to spend their time on something at home either before or after the interview. In each case, this shows that the company is unwilling to commit one of its own staff for the same length of time they expect from the candidate. About the only more reliable sign that you don't want to work there is when your technical interview turns into you giving training on basic skills to the "senior" developers who are interviewing you.
Or how about we implement a system whereby every several years that politician has to stand for election again, only this time voters will have even better information about the validity of the promises of said candidate?
No, that would never work.
Apparently not.
Things change. What is a good solution today may not be a good solution tomorrow, or it might still be a good solution but a better one might turn up.
Sure, and I would certainly rather have government leaders who were willing to adapt sensibly to changing circumstances rather than dogmatically sticking to their guns.
No one should be forced to do what they said they'll do four years ago regardless of what happened.
Here's where I think things need to change. If someone is to be voted into office for a period of X years, then voters' decisions should be based on what the candidate intends to do over the course of that time, not just what they pretend they might do in the first six months. I would have no problem voting for a candidate who honestly said that they couldn't give specific details of what they intended to do far into the future, but stated the principles according to which they would make any decisions that became necessary.
What I don't like is the situation at the moment where there is literally nothing to stop a politician from acting completely against his or her stated position before the election, once they have achieved office. The only sanction in most cases is not re-electing them 4–6 years later, and even that isn't much of a stick given the other options available with different electorates to abuse. There is insufficient accountability.
I feel particularly strongly on this because the first time I voted in a general election here in the UK, the MP I helped to elect did turn around within weeks and screw the people who voted for her by voting with her party in Parliament rather than voting for what she said very clearly that she would support. And that's without getting into the lack of separation of powers generally here, so we currently have an entire executive who are unelected and accountable to no-one.
For the record, I am also in favour of a constitution-level law that says that a reasonably large proportion of the population may force a prompt referendum on any proposed law they wish, and that the result of such a referendum absolutely over-rides any legislation passed only by the government itself. It's long past time that parties of any colour with no popular mandate and widespread public opposition to their failed policies could cling to power for several more years because there was no way for the people to get rid of them. Such measures seem to work quite effectively in countries/states that do have them, and while the referenda would incur a modest cost to administer, they'd still be a lot cheaper than letting a government throw away the kind of money they can blow in multiple years of mismanagement.
Come on, that's nuts! Circumstances change and a leader has to be able to adapt. What if he promises not to raise taxes, then WW3 breaks out and you need to pay to defend your own shores? Sorry, you voted for low taxes so go hide out in the basement. An extreme example of course but you take my point.
Exactly. So that makes a blanket statement that you will not raise taxes a pretty stupid campaign pledge, doesn't it?
I would like to think that if such a system ever could become a realistic proposition, politicians would start to express their principles in concise manifestos at election time, and then apply those principles under whatever changing circumstances arose during their time in office. Anything even approximating that concept must be better than today's approach of making numerous fiddly little promises that anyone who had time to check could see they could never keep, on the basis that most people will never have time to check so the politicians will get away with it.
The problem is that you can't vote on actions until after they've been taken.
Personally, I'm in favour of a nice, simple system where if a politician makes a promise before an election and then breaks it, a court can remove him or her from office. I imagine we'd soon see some changes in the way manifestos were presented, and perhaps those who are not just puppets and actually intend to act according to their stated principles would get a bit more recognition since voting for someone based on their campaign pledges would actually mean something. Those who just say whatever the current audience wants to hear but never really promise anything would stand out by a mile.
Well, what we do is closer to blacklisting than whitelisting, it's manual and based on a specific problem for us rather than automatic and based on some arbitrary criteria set by someone else, and if Hotmail get their act together then our systems will happily play nicely with theirs without anyone changing anything on our end. But apart from being completely different, sure, it's basically the same.
IME, Hotmail seems to reject almost all mail from anyone who isn't already whitelisted. Certainly every local group where I help with the IT and my own personal e-mails all get rejected by default, and the sources for those span a whole range of different ISPs and domains.
In some organisations I help, we became so bored of explaining to people with Hotmail accounts that we did send the information they asked for and it's probably in their junk e-mail store that we simply adopted a policy that if someone is stupid enough to use a mail host like Hotmail, that was their problem. We also redirect incoming mail to /dev/null if it tries to tell us we should adopt whatever non-standard, half-baked domain authentication standard the sender's personal ISP is stupid enough to filter on.
I used to feel bad about this: after all, I volunteer to help these organisations, which in turn provide various information to others, for the benefit of the community. It's a shame that some people in that community now lose out. I don't feel so bad these days, though: I just consider services like Hotmail to be broken, and choose to spend my volunteered, uncompensated time on helping those who don't make it difficult for me to do so.
Exactly. If blocking and accepting collateral damage is to be your policy, where do you stop? Blocking whole countries? Whole ISPs? Filtering all content using protocols like Usenet or BitTorrent because some of it is probably inappropriate?
Actually, giving a single company this kind of authority is usually not a bad idea. Spamhaus and email, for example.
I respectfully disagree. Giving a single, unaccountable group the effective power to completely kill some domain's e-mail is a bad idea, too. It's far too easy to game any one blacklist, and it's far too hard to get a domain that was added incorrectly (or that has been taken over by someone new who has no connection to the previous registrant) removed from the list again. I don't believe any sysadmin worth their salt filters based only on input from a single blacklist.
Whitespace is Turing complete, too, but I still wouldn't write my next paid job in it. :-)
Plus I find they do not scale well for larger application.
And you discovered that through your own experience with functional programming languages, did you? It's remarkable that you could have gained such insight, yet not know how to spell the name of one of the best-known FPLs in town.
I rather suspect that, like many critics of FPLs, you have never actually tried to use them for a big project, and just assume that they won't scale because you read it somewhere.
But today most developopment is for larger application which doesn't necessarly solve problems per-say but create a tool that people can use.
I'll gloss over whether your unverified assertion about "most development" is actually true. Even assuming it is, producing good tools requires things like defining abstractions and building modular libraries to contain them, and these are areas where several of the relatively popular FPLs excel compared to the drek most of us have to use at work.
There are many valid technical and social reasons that the current generation of FPLs have not taken off — Peyton-Jones himself has talked about them insightfully on several occasions — but I can't agree that the reasons you suggested are among them.
I hope you didn't follow that advice this morning! :-/
Those of us in the UK have been recorded in this way for quite some time now. The police have been happily rolling out nationwide ANPR tracking cameras and databases, and you've guessed it, they rolled it into a neat deal that has managed to avoid much Parliamentary scrutiny using technicalities. There has been a little consternation about that from a few liberal (small 'l') MPs and the Information Commissioner, but right now the good guys are a bit busy to put up serious opposition, what with trying to stop our entire way of life from collapsing because of the impending economic implosion and fighting even nastier surveillance/database measures like the National Identity Register and the National DNA Database.
Ur mai hero! U can haz job eny tim u won.
I'm sorry you feel that way. I don't know you personally, so my comments can only be based on the objective information you gave us here on Slashdot, and I have no reason to lie or to attack you maliciously. However, your reaction to criticism and the defensive nature of your posts do reinforce the initial impression that apparently at least two people formed on reading your previous post.
There is an old poker adage that if you can't immediately identify the weakest player at the table, that's because it's you. You might like to consider that even if you are as technically brilliant as you think you are, it's possible that other experienced people might have valid perspectives from which you could learn something useful.
Just for fun I decided to write FizzBuzz in Java after looking it up earlier today. Took me about 1.5-2 hours. No I'm not incompetent.
I'm very sorry, but if you're being truthful here, then yes, right now you are incompetent for the kind of job I was talking about. You have made a quick, simple task slow and complicated through over-generalisation, over-engineering, premature optimisation and perfectionism, which is a very bad character trait in a lead developer. You also, by your own admissions, took several minutes to debug what sounds like a simple typo and couldn't write the program on paper, which suggests to me that you never grasped the kernel of the problem. And finally, you seem to be over-confident of your own abilities, which is another dangerous character trait in a programmer.
No-one watches the "watchers". An endorsement is worth only as much as the credibility of the endorsing party. A site with endorsements from multiple reputable sources is probably a good source of information. If certain sites choose to endorse certain other sites that some people would find unhelpful, then those people will start to give less credibility to the endorsing site's other recommendations. It's not like Drudge is some sort of authority on anything in real life, so I don't see why just that single endorsement would tell anyone anything useful anyway.
If they passed this test I then brought them in for interviews with 4-6 people, half an hour each, who were given specific areas to drill them on to avoid repeats. Each of these sessions would be a sort of technical test on that interviewer's area of expertise.
A phone screen and a test or two at interview is fair enough, but what you described above starts to sound excessive to me. Perhaps it's appropriate if you really have that many distinct areas of technical expertise in which you need to assess a candidate and it really is conceivable that they might be up to scratch on some but hopeless on others, but I can't conceive of such a position in any place I've ever worked.
If they still looked good and passed that I sent them home with some task I knew they couldn't do yet and a week to complete it and send me some sort of proof. This was to see how they handled learning. Note, I ONLY did this if it was a pass/fail for getting an offer, not before.
On that one, I'm afraid, you would certainly lose me as a candidate. If I turned up to an interview and everything was going fine for both of us, but then as I left I asked you if you could just get one of your paid employees to spend ten hours over the next week doing some free research for me to prove your existing staff was worth joining, how would you react? If you can compare notes at the end of a 2–3 hour interview process including 4–6 technical tests and still not be sure enough to either make an offer or at least to set up another interview with a real person, that says a lot about your respect for the candidate who just gave up some of their valuable time for you at least twice.
Is there really a question whether online anonymity should be possible? I would assume that you would have a firmer stance, Anonymous Brave Guy.
I think there certainly is a question of it, and my stance is certainly against absolute anonymity.
I'm aware of the amusing irony, of course, but I see no real conflict. Sure, I occasionally choose to goof off on Slashdot under a pseudonym. These days, I don't use my real name very much on-line for privacy reasons. I don't believe people should be compelled to give their identity to any old person reading their comments on-line, and I have grave reservations about the data protection and privacy implications of (for example) the current trend for social networking.
However, I consider this a very different thing to people being compelled, as part of due process and under judicial oversight, to accept responsibility for illegal actions in a court of competent authority. With freedom must come responsibility, or there is no compulsion for people given those freedoms to remain civil and act in a socially acceptable way toward others. Anonymity necessarily breaks such a connection, which is tantamount to putting the anonymous actor above the law. Free speech is not an absolute right, despite what a few people around here seem to think, and words very much can be harmful, which is why there are laws against defamation, incitement to murder, leaking classified national security information or details ordered concealed by a court, and so forth.
The only argument for on-line anonymity with any real merit that I have encountered is the argument that we should be able to discuss things the government itself might not like without fear of being identified. On this one I do take a hard line, but it's rather different: if you have a government that does not respect and protect the people's right to discuss that government freely and without fear of reprisal, then the government in that country is broken, and it is already time to move on to the next of the four boxes and remove that government from power. The same would be true of any system of government with inadequate separation of powers and oversight, such that anonymity would be compromised by the courts without just cause. In other words, I support anonymity as the default, but not to the point that it prevents the justice system from acting fairly, and if the justice system can't be trusted with that responsibility, I support taking a lot more action than merely posting anonymous words on a web site.