What, you mean looking like an idiot isn't a great way to get a good paying job?
This may come as a shock to you, but "looking like an idiot" varies quite a bit from place to place. In some shops, nothing less than a suit will do. In others, business casual is the rule. In others, t-shirt and jeans is the standard uniform.
Here in the SF Bay area, being visibly tatooed is much less of a barrier to getting a programming job than wearing a banker-style business suit would be. I know a technology executive here who has a pierced septum and a fondness for wearing skirts. (Not women's clothing, mind you; they're more samurai than suzie q.) Here's it's more important that you look good than whether you look like Ward Cleaver. But what's mainly important is how much talent and what skills you have.
sysadmins are expected to take a lot of flak when things go bad, and keep their mouth shut
That's so true.
Once something usually works, people expect it to always work. Any deviation from that is a problem, so they go to the sysadmin and gripe. If things work normally, nobody things to thank you.
Most people wonder why sysadmins have bad attitudes. I wonder why more sysadmins don't go postal.
It's not just the time spent dealing with the problems. It's the interruption and distraction from your real job.
The AC is so, so, so right.
I'd recommend that you outsource this. Somebody can do the setup and then handle maintenance on a per-hour basis. If your boss is right, you'll have to pay the guy for a couple hours a month, which sounds like a great deal.
But if your boss is foolish enough to saddle you with this, make sure that part of the deal is something that keeps you from being interrupted. E.g., that you have sysadmin office hours from 9-10 am daily, and that unless 3 or more people are completely unable to work, they save their problems until then.
Also make sure that you get compensated for after-hours work. Working a full day as a programmer and then hanging around after everybody else leaves so you can do maintenance will suck, especially if everybody expects you in bright and early the next day to work another full programmer day.
but procedural is a valid way to structure your apps... especially for web-based ones where that have, by nature, a page-based model and a very linear flow. you can write serious software using php4 without oop!
Can and should are two different things.
I've got years of experience with both approaches, and I think that for a hundred lines of code, OO approaches can be overkill, especially for a novice. At a few KLOC, I think the balance tips to OO approaches. And at 20 KLOC and up, I think OO's benefits in maintainability and expressiveness make it a clear winner even for web sites.
But I should note that what I'm comparing here is high-quality procedural code versus high-quality OO code. There are a lot of people out there who think they're at the pinnacle of object-oriented design just because they're using OO languages like Java. That's bullshit. Those people I want to beat with sticks.
This is my basic gripe with PHP. It leads the unfortunate user down a path that suggests that each page is its own island, and any attempt to modularize or componentize that is, by PHP's nature, a secondary affair.
You're absolutely right. On one of my projects, I'm writing a bunch of web code that works with a desktop client being built by another team. One of the desktop guys has worked with PHP and was interested to see my code. It just blew his mind that there was no place he could go to look at the pages, and that the resulting HTML generated was not closely coupled to what the URL happened to be.
And I think it's important that people learn that. URL=page made a lot of sense with the limited technologies available early on in the web's evolution, but it's a big handicap for large, modern, fully dynamic web sites. As far as I'm concerned, URLs are UI, not internal API.
I tried PHP, but I didn't feel it gave me the rigid OO structure and sophisticated APIs I get from Java, JSPs & Servlets. Not trolling, just saying I'm surprised that Java and Servlet hosting isn't as popular as PHP. I'm obviously missing some key point.
As a professional developer with years of experience, I like Java a fair bit, and do 85% of my work in it. But I think that Java's rigid structure and sophisticated APIs are exactly why PHP is so popular.
The thing that PHP (and languages like VB) get right is that they're very, very easy for novices to get started. Your first hour putzing with PHP will let you get pages that do stuff. Your first hour with Java mainly involves figuring out why the goddamn CLASSPATH environment variable looks right but is actually wrong, or where to put your JSPs to get them interpreted, or what those mysterious error messages mean.
Also, a lot of sophisticated Java APIs are, in my mind, about 80% complete. They took a complicated concept (like encryption, or sending email) and came up with an API that is at least as complex as the domain, with some overengineering slathered on top. But they never did the final 20% of the work, which is to put a nice, simple API for basic uses on top of it.
So it ends up that the only people who use Java are professionals, because they're the only people with enough time and motivation to get past Java's terrible new-user experience. That's unfortunate, because I think languages like VB and PHP can teach people a lot of habits that are harmless at the scale of 10-1000 lines of code, dangerous at 10,000, and completely fatal at 100,000 and up.
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
I've never understood the fanaticism of database abstraction. There's good reason to hardcode to a specific database, especially if you hardcode to a Free database like PostgreSQL.
Some of the fanaticism is more on general principles, and sometimes people can get needlessly dogmatic about that, which I agree is annoying. And certainly you can get benefits from departing from the path of vendor neutrality.
But much of the vehemence you hear certainly comes from people who have spent many weary hours switching an app from one database to another. It's no fun, and it feels like a waste of time. Especially so when the there was no good reason to write a tightly coupled app in the first place.
So my advice is: write your app as vendor-neutral from the start. Where specific performance or feature requirements make it much cheaper to couple your design to a particular version of a particular database, go for it. But always keep in mind the cost of that, which is reducing the future agility of your project.
And if you have 100,000 people clamoring to pay 149 bucks for an OS, why wouldn't you sell it?
Well I would. But I'd bet that Steve Jobs wouldn't. He killed off the clone program, where they were selling the OS and the BIOS to clone makers, and OS upgrades to the general public. And remember that OS X used to be NextStep, which was available for Intel. Although the original merger plan was to continue selling NextStep for Intel at the same time they ported it to Mac hardware, he eventually nixed that, too.
Well, they may give it away instead of sell, but you just named one software product of theirs for non-apple computers (iTunes) You can also buy Quicktime Pro for windows.
You're missing my point, which is that software for them is a negligible side business except as it servers their hardware and media interests. ITunes is free, and I hope you're not suggesting that Quicktime Pro for Windows is a big revenue stream for them.
No, Apple is both a software and a hardware company.
Really? I can't think of one software product that they sell except to people in their captive hardware market. Oh, wait, there's the much neglected WebObjects, which they probably still deign to sell you for other platforms, as most sysadmins would smack you if you tried to design a server-side app around a single-source hardware supplier with exactly one server for sale.
If they were really a software company and a hardware company, then they wouldn't have completely screwed both the Mac clone vendors and all of the people using NextStep on non-Mac platforms.
But we'll find out. My bet is that Steve continues to believe that Apple is primarily a hardware company, and so you'll only see OS X for Apple-produced hardware. Secondarily, they'll be media company via iTunes and the iPod. But software for the general market will continue to be negligible.
Really, you make this too easy. I wasn't mocking your "tyopgraphy"; I was mocking your hypocrisy. Until you can summon the energy to proof your own posts, maybe you shouldn't be accusing other people of laziness. Although this does kinda explain why you're leaping to the defense of shoddy editorial work.
then make up a word like "unlazy".
It was the right word, pal. Not all good words are in the dictionary.
When they talk about municipal WiFi networks, do they say, "WiFi, a wireless networking standard"?
You're saying just as many people have heard about WiFi as have heard about Acid2? By my estimation, WiFi's maybe 50 or 100 times more common. If you have some numbers that don't make your analogy look completely ridiculous, bring 'em on. Maybe I missed the aisle of Acid2 hardware at Fry's.
If anything, blame the submitter.
The submitter should have fixed it. The editor also should have fixed it. But only one of them is a paid professional, and one of them has a lot more experience in this. If blame assignment is a game you like playing, then it makes more sense to blame the guy whose job it is.
It isn't "News for people who are too lasy to learn things on their own", now is it?
Well, just as long as it's news for people too lazy to learn to spell, you're in the clear.
But really, if we take your argument and run with it, there's no point in a news summary site. Truly unlazy people would already have found all this stuff out by the time it hits Slashdot. So since we're already supporting laziness, maybe the editors could finish the job and include links or parenthetical phrases like "a CSS validation test".
They know that, without a union, the money would not be spent on important aspects of their jobs, and that, when things went wrong, the mechanics would be the first ones to take the blame.
Do you have any evidence for this? It seems a little implausible to me to argue that the airlines would say, "Gosh, maintenance on our planes isn't so important; it's ok if a few crash now and then." And it's doubly implausible that the FAA would be chill about that.
That's not so say that unions aren't beneficial; I'm just not buying the argument that the primary benefit is public safety. I think they're great when there are a few large purchasers of a particular sort of labor; collectivising allows the employees to negotiate on an equal footing. The airline industry is a fine example of that.
Managers and PHBs will cut costs until wires are sparking and nobody is left working at the company who knows how to use whatever program the business is 90% dependent upon.
Then they company is fucked, and some smarter competitor will wipe the floor with them. Evolution in action.
I don't know how it compares to books24x7.com, butI'm pretty happy with my subscription to O'Reilly's Safari online library. Most stuff that I need to know is on the web, but a couple times a month I really need a good book on the topic, and O'Reilly usually has what I need.
Database Options: MySQL [...] Oracle [...] SQL Server [...]
And lets not forget that an SQL database is only one way to store your data, from files to LDAP and beyond. Many important networked applications don't use SQL databases, and with good reason.
If they need to focus on improving interactions with computers they shouldn't be considering at the programming level what is and isn't possible, it can hurt HCI innovation.
Agreed! Also, painters should know very little about the paint or canvas they use. Poets should ideally be semi-literate or non-native speakers and just describe to somebody else the effect they want to create.
The best interface designers I know all have a solid understanding of the medium they work in. They may not be the best programmers, but they all can program when they have to.
This is a sign that Bill Gates is getting more mature. Now he's comfortable with his world domination, so his inner three year old no longer compels him to label everything "mine".
If someone honestly wants to go camping without technology, instead of just "playing camp" like some wiener yuppie trying out a new hobby, they'll have to do it my way, and that starts with a pair of pliers and a full set of black market lymph nodes from Angola.
And let's not forget all of the camping techniques he may have learned over the years. Some of that could well be patented intellectual property. While he's getting the new lymph nodes installed, he should see if he can get a discount on a quick stir of his frontal lobes.
Last I checked, Microsoft won't "be responsible" either, in terms of cleaning up messes they allow to be created through bugs in their software.
And they aren't real good about fixing the bugs, either. While working on a web app for a company in the Fortune 25, I discovered an ugly bug in Microsoft's MIME encoding of file uploads under certain circumstances. Despite the backing of a massive support contract, it took me maybe 50 hours of effort to get to somebody smart enough to actually understand the problem and file a bug report.
God knows what would happen if an actual consumer called up with a problem like that. The people handling the Firefox bug tracker will probably be no more friendly, but they're much more likely to have a clue, and won't charge you a big fee just to condescend to you.
Well speaking for a small computer shop. The bulk of our income isn't from those who walk in the door. But from doing business with other businesses. Hardware, software, and services.
Ok, same thing. Do you want to sell MS Office to businesses, or tell them, "You know, just take this free CD. We don't need your business"?
Well, if small business owners buy all their hardware from you because you throw in OpenOffice for cheap or free where the competitors make them pay for MS Office, then you may get a lot of business that goes to competitors.
Businesses, once they find a good vendor, tend to stick. For them, the money spent comparison shopping and dealing with multiple vendors is high enough that they're glad to pay a little extra to somebody who is reliable. Even if my competitors eventually catch on and do the same, I've still gained a bunch of clients.
And not everybody will take a free OpenOffice over a for-pay MS Office. It's different than what they're used to, it's still not as good, and many people aren't sure that free is worth it. I know some guys who make a download-for-free MMORPG, and they're coming out with a boxed set for just those sorts of people.
Make the same trip with a couple of wool blankets, a sack full of dried corn and forage for food on the trail (not that the USFS would appreciate that last part). That would be leaving technology behind.
Not really. Wool blankets and a woven sack are both clearly technology; neither one grows directly on trees, and both arts took centuries to perfect.
And now that I think about it, both the wool and the corn are the result of thousands of years of artificial genetic modification, so they're advanced tech, too.
The problem with your analogy is driver's ed is mostly optional, but most sex ed is mandatory in most cases. If I don't want my kid to learn to drive a car because I think cars are an environmental evil and I want them to rely on mass transit, I have that right. As long as sex ed is mandatory, it should conform to the LCD of morality. Since there are very very few people who believe it is immoral to wait for marriage, that is what sex ed should teach.
Wow, that's a pretty warped argument.
As long as least common denominators and majority opinions are your yardstick, it would make just as much sense to argue that they should teach kids that they should have sex in high school or early college, as the vast majority of people do, and rutting like monkeys is clearly a lowest common denominator.
Instead, schools should stay out of the morality business. They're there to teach the facts that kids need to know to be responsible citizens. A large portion of those kids will be having sex in a few years, so they should teach them how to handle that responsibly. if that's what they choose But they should also explain that many people will wait, and explain the reasons why those people wait.
If you're concerned that kids aren't getting enough moral education, don't talk to the schools, talk to the parents. The government has no business indoctrinating children with any particular morality.
So it's your contention that one projectile colliding with another projectile on a consistent basis is impossible?
Hi! A quick tip: some language is used for rhetorical, metaphorical, or evocative effect, whereas other language is meant to be taken literally.
For example, if the fellow you're reponding to looks at your reply calls you a "big fucking prick" he is not suggesting that you are a sentient 5' phallus, currently engaged in sexual congress while also discussing things through the internet. Instead, he'd more likely be trying to convey that you were being needlessly contrary.
[...] eventually, there WILL be another war with a state with ICBM technology, and you'll be very happy if we achieve an effective missile defense system before this happens. So I think it's worth the money. If you don't, fine, it's a valid opinion, but don't give me bullshit like "it's impossible to do".
A more likely interpretation of what he's saying is that although it's theoretically possible to stop in-flight missles, both his calculations and the progress so far suggest that it's wildly improbable that we'll be able to develop an effective missile defense, especially given the relative cost and difficulty of their countermeasures and our counter-countermeasures.
In other words, he may be saying it's a practical impossibility, rather than a theoretical one.
Big fucking deal. You don't need to be of high moral virtue (whatever that might mean) to deserve sufficient privacy to keep private information off the net.
This is true, but it seems weird to let loons take and run around with nude pictures of you and then blame a third party for hosting the pictures. I'd say that unless she has a written contract with the ex-boyfriend about those pictures, she doesn't have any privacy rights over those photos.
Of course, even if Yahoo is legally allowed to leave the photos up, the polite and kind thing for them to do is to take them down promptly.
Slashdot Mirror
What, you mean looking like an idiot isn't a great way to get a good paying job?
This may come as a shock to you, but "looking like an idiot" varies quite a bit from place to place. In some shops, nothing less than a suit will do. In others, business casual is the rule. In others, t-shirt and jeans is the standard uniform.
Here in the SF Bay area, being visibly tatooed is much less of a barrier to getting a programming job than wearing a banker-style business suit would be. I know a technology executive here who has a pierced septum and a fondness for wearing skirts. (Not women's clothing, mind you; they're more samurai than suzie q.) Here's it's more important that you look good than whether you look like Ward Cleaver. But what's mainly important is how much talent and what skills you have.
sysadmins are expected to take a lot of flak when things go bad, and keep their mouth shut
That's so true.
Once something usually works, people expect it to always work. Any deviation from that is a problem, so they go to the sysadmin and gripe. If things work normally, nobody things to thank you.
Most people wonder why sysadmins have bad attitudes. I wonder why more sysadmins don't go postal.
It's not just the time spent dealing with the problems. It's the interruption and distraction from your real job.
The AC is so, so, so right.
I'd recommend that you outsource this. Somebody can do the setup and then handle maintenance on a per-hour basis. If your boss is right, you'll have to pay the guy for a couple hours a month, which sounds like a great deal.
But if your boss is foolish enough to saddle you with this, make sure that part of the deal is something that keeps you from being interrupted. E.g., that you have sysadmin office hours from 9-10 am daily, and that unless 3 or more people are completely unable to work, they save their problems until then.
Also make sure that you get compensated for after-hours work. Working a full day as a programmer and then hanging around after everybody else leaves so you can do maintenance will suck, especially if everybody expects you in bright and early the next day to work another full programmer day.
but procedural is a valid way to structure your apps... especially for web-based ones where that have, by nature, a page-based model and a very linear flow. you can write serious software using php4 without oop!
Can and should are two different things.
I've got years of experience with both approaches, and I think that for a hundred lines of code, OO approaches can be overkill, especially for a novice. At a few KLOC, I think the balance tips to OO approaches. And at 20 KLOC and up, I think OO's benefits in maintainability and expressiveness make it a clear winner even for web sites.
But I should note that what I'm comparing here is high-quality procedural code versus high-quality OO code. There are a lot of people out there who think they're at the pinnacle of object-oriented design just because they're using OO languages like Java. That's bullshit. Those people I want to beat with sticks.
This is my basic gripe with PHP. It leads the unfortunate user down a path that suggests that each page is its own island, and any attempt to modularize or componentize that is, by PHP's nature, a secondary affair.
You're absolutely right. On one of my projects, I'm writing a bunch of web code that works with a desktop client being built by another team. One of the desktop guys has worked with PHP and was interested to see my code. It just blew his mind that there was no place he could go to look at the pages, and that the resulting HTML generated was not closely coupled to what the URL happened to be.
And I think it's important that people learn that. URL=page made a lot of sense with the limited technologies available early on in the web's evolution, but it's a big handicap for large, modern, fully dynamic web sites. As far as I'm concerned, URLs are UI, not internal API.
I tried PHP, but I didn't feel it gave me the rigid OO structure and sophisticated APIs I get from Java, JSPs & Servlets. Not trolling, just saying I'm surprised that Java and Servlet hosting isn't as popular as PHP. I'm obviously missing some key point.
As a professional developer with years of experience, I like Java a fair bit, and do 85% of my work in it. But I think that Java's rigid structure and sophisticated APIs are exactly why PHP is so popular.
The thing that PHP (and languages like VB) get right is that they're very, very easy for novices to get started. Your first hour putzing with PHP will let you get pages that do stuff. Your first hour with Java mainly involves figuring out why the goddamn CLASSPATH environment variable looks right but is actually wrong, or where to put your JSPs to get them interpreted, or what those mysterious error messages mean.
Also, a lot of sophisticated Java APIs are, in my mind, about 80% complete. They took a complicated concept (like encryption, or sending email) and came up with an API that is at least as complex as the domain, with some overengineering slathered on top. But they never did the final 20% of the work, which is to put a nice, simple API for basic uses on top of it.
So it ends up that the only people who use Java are professionals, because they're the only people with enough time and motivation to get past Java's terrible new-user experience. That's unfortunate, because I think languages like VB and PHP can teach people a lot of habits that are harmless at the scale of 10-1000 lines of code, dangerous at 10,000, and completely fatal at 100,000 and up.
I've never understood the fanaticism of database abstraction. There's good reason to hardcode to a specific database, especially if you hardcode to a Free database like PostgreSQL.
Some of the fanaticism is more on general principles, and sometimes people can get needlessly dogmatic about that, which I agree is annoying. And certainly you can get benefits from departing from the path of vendor neutrality.
But much of the vehemence you hear certainly comes from people who have spent many weary hours switching an app from one database to another. It's no fun, and it feels like a waste of time. Especially so when the there was no good reason to write a tightly coupled app in the first place.
So my advice is: write your app as vendor-neutral from the start. Where specific performance or feature requirements make it much cheaper to couple your design to a particular version of a particular database, go for it. But always keep in mind the cost of that, which is reducing the future agility of your project.
And if you have 100,000 people clamoring to pay 149 bucks for an OS, why wouldn't you sell it?
Well I would. But I'd bet that Steve Jobs wouldn't. He killed off the clone program, where they were selling the OS and the BIOS to clone makers, and OS upgrades to the general public. And remember that OS X used to be NextStep, which was available for Intel. Although the original merger plan was to continue selling NextStep for Intel at the same time they ported it to Mac hardware, he eventually nixed that, too.
Well, they may give it away instead of sell, but you just named one software product of theirs for non-apple computers (iTunes)
You can also buy Quicktime Pro for windows.
You're missing my point, which is that software for them is a negligible side business except as it servers their hardware and media interests. ITunes is free, and I hope you're not suggesting that Quicktime Pro for Windows is a big revenue stream for them.
No, Apple is both a software and a hardware company.
Really? I can't think of one software product that they sell except to people in their captive hardware market. Oh, wait, there's the much neglected WebObjects, which they probably still deign to sell you for other platforms, as most sysadmins would smack you if you tried to design a server-side app around a single-source hardware supplier with exactly one server for sale.
If they were really a software company and a hardware company, then they wouldn't have completely screwed both the Mac clone vendors and all of the people using NextStep on non-Mac platforms.
But we'll find out. My bet is that Steve continues to believe that Apple is primarily a hardware company, and so you'll only see OS X for Apple-produced hardware. Secondarily, they'll be media company via iTunes and the iPod. But software for the general market will continue to be negligible.
You want to mock my tyopgraphical error,
Really, you make this too easy. I wasn't mocking your "tyopgraphy"; I was mocking your hypocrisy. Until you can summon the energy to proof your own posts, maybe you shouldn't be accusing other people of laziness. Although this does kinda explain why you're leaping to the defense of shoddy editorial work.
then make up a word like "unlazy".
It was the right word, pal. Not all good words are in the dictionary.
When they talk about municipal WiFi networks, do they say, "WiFi, a wireless networking standard"?
You're saying just as many people have heard about WiFi as have heard about Acid2? By my estimation, WiFi's maybe 50 or 100 times more common. If you have some numbers that don't make your analogy look completely ridiculous, bring 'em on. Maybe I missed the aisle of Acid2 hardware at Fry's.
If anything, blame the submitter.
The submitter should have fixed it. The editor also should have fixed it. But only one of them is a paid professional, and one of them has a lot more experience in this. If blame assignment is a game you like playing, then it makes more sense to blame the guy whose job it is.
It isn't "News for people who are too lasy to learn things on their own", now is it?
Well, just as long as it's news for people too lazy to learn to spell, you're in the clear.
But really, if we take your argument and run with it, there's no point in a news summary site. Truly unlazy people would already have found all this stuff out by the time it hits Slashdot. So since we're already supporting laziness, maybe the editors could finish the job and include links or parenthetical phrases like "a CSS validation test".
They know that, without a union, the money would not be spent on important aspects of their jobs, and that, when things went wrong, the mechanics would be the first ones to take the blame.
Do you have any evidence for this? It seems a little implausible to me to argue that the airlines would say, "Gosh, maintenance on our planes isn't so important; it's ok if a few crash now and then." And it's doubly implausible that the FAA would be chill about that.
That's not so say that unions aren't beneficial; I'm just not buying the argument that the primary benefit is public safety. I think they're great when there are a few large purchasers of a particular sort of labor; collectivising allows the employees to negotiate on an equal footing. The airline industry is a fine example of that.
Managers and PHBs will cut costs until wires are sparking and nobody is left working at the company who knows how to use whatever program the business is 90% dependent upon.
Then they company is fucked, and some smarter competitor will wipe the floor with them. Evolution in action.
I don't know how it compares to books24x7.com, butI'm pretty happy with my subscription to O'Reilly's Safari online library. Most stuff that I need to know is on the web, but a couple times a month I really need a good book on the topic, and O'Reilly usually has what I need.
Paper mockups and pseudocode for code.
One great book on the topic is Paper Prototyping. The shopping list alone is worth the price of the book.
Database Options: MySQL [...] Oracle [...] SQL Server [...]
And lets not forget that an SQL database is only one way to store your data, from files to LDAP and beyond. Many important networked applications don't use SQL databases, and with good reason.
If they need to focus on improving interactions with computers they shouldn't be considering at the programming level what is and isn't possible, it can hurt HCI innovation.
Agreed! Also, painters should know very little about the paint or canvas they use. Poets should ideally be semi-literate or non-native speakers and just describe to somebody else the effect they want to create.
The best interface designers I know all have a solid understanding of the medium they work in. They may not be the best programmers, but they all can program when they have to.
This is a sign that Bill Gates is getting more mature. Now he's comfortable with his world domination, so his inner three year old no longer compels him to label everything "mine".
If someone honestly wants to go camping without technology, instead of just "playing camp" like some wiener yuppie trying out a new hobby, they'll have to do it my way, and that starts with a pair of pliers and a full set of black market lymph nodes from Angola.
And let's not forget all of the camping techniques he may have learned over the years. Some of that could well be patented intellectual property. While he's getting the new lymph nodes installed, he should see if he can get a discount on a quick stir of his frontal lobes.
Last I checked, Microsoft won't "be responsible" either, in terms of cleaning up messes they allow to be created through bugs in their software.
And they aren't real good about fixing the bugs, either. While working on a web app for a company in the Fortune 25, I discovered an ugly bug in Microsoft's MIME encoding of file uploads under certain circumstances. Despite the backing of a massive support contract, it took me maybe 50 hours of effort to get to somebody smart enough to actually understand the problem and file a bug report.
God knows what would happen if an actual consumer called up with a problem like that. The people handling the Firefox bug tracker will probably be no more friendly, but they're much more likely to have a clue, and won't charge you a big fee just to condescend to you.
Well, if small business owners buy all their hardware from you because you throw in OpenOffice for cheap or free where the competitors make them pay for MS Office, then you may get a lot of business that goes to competitors.
Businesses, once they find a good vendor, tend to stick. For them, the money spent comparison shopping and dealing with multiple vendors is high enough that they're glad to pay a little extra to somebody who is reliable. Even if my competitors eventually catch on and do the same, I've still gained a bunch of clients.
And not everybody will take a free OpenOffice over a for-pay MS Office. It's different than what they're used to, it's still not as good, and many people aren't sure that free is worth it. I know some guys who make a download-for-free MMORPG, and they're coming out with a boxed set for just those sorts of people.
Make the same trip with a couple of wool blankets, a sack full of dried corn and forage for food on the trail (not that the USFS would appreciate that last part). That would be leaving technology behind.
Not really. Wool blankets and a woven sack are both clearly technology; neither one grows directly on trees, and both arts took centuries to perfect.
And now that I think about it, both the wool and the corn are the result of thousands of years of artificial genetic modification, so they're advanced tech, too.
The problem with your analogy is driver's ed is mostly optional, but most sex ed is mandatory in most cases. If I don't want my kid to learn to drive a car because I think cars are an environmental evil and I want them to rely on mass transit, I have that right. As long as sex ed is mandatory, it should conform to the LCD of morality. Since there are very very few people who believe it is immoral to wait for marriage, that is what sex ed should teach.
Wow, that's a pretty warped argument.
As long as least common denominators and majority opinions are your yardstick, it would make just as much sense to argue that they should teach kids that they should have sex in high school or early college, as the vast majority of people do, and rutting like monkeys is clearly a lowest common denominator.
Instead, schools should stay out of the morality business. They're there to teach the facts that kids need to know to be responsible citizens. A large portion of those kids will be having sex in a few years, so they should teach them how to handle that responsibly. if that's what they choose But they should also explain that many people will wait, and explain the reasons why those people wait.
If you're concerned that kids aren't getting enough moral education, don't talk to the schools, talk to the parents. The government has no business indoctrinating children with any particular morality.
Hi! A quick tip: some language is used for rhetorical, metaphorical, or evocative effect, whereas other language is meant to be taken literally.
For example, if the fellow you're reponding to looks at your reply calls you a "big fucking prick" he is not suggesting that you are a sentient 5' phallus, currently engaged in sexual congress while also discussing things through the internet. Instead, he'd more likely be trying to convey that you were being needlessly contrary.
[...] eventually, there WILL be another war with a state with ICBM technology, and you'll be very happy if we achieve an effective missile defense system before this happens. So I think it's worth the money. If you don't, fine, it's a valid opinion, but don't give me bullshit like "it's impossible to do".
A more likely interpretation of what he's saying is that although it's theoretically possible to stop in-flight missles, both his calculations and the progress so far suggest that it's wildly improbable that we'll be able to develop an effective missile defense, especially given the relative cost and difficulty of their countermeasures and our counter-countermeasures.
In other words, he may be saying it's a practical impossibility, rather than a theoretical one.
Big fucking deal. You don't need to be of high moral virtue (whatever that might mean) to deserve sufficient privacy to keep private information off the net.
This is true, but it seems weird to let loons take and run around with nude pictures of you and then blame a third party for hosting the pictures. I'd say that unless she has a written contract with the ex-boyfriend about those pictures, she doesn't have any privacy rights over those photos.
Of course, even if Yahoo is legally allowed to leave the photos up, the polite and kind thing for them to do is to take them down promptly.