It's not just your funeral we're talking about here, but everyone else you share the road with too. If it's my ass on the line out there then you damn well will be licensed just like the rest of us, automated car or not, or you won't be driving on the public right of way. BTW that's the position of the California DMV too. In fact, they're considering additional knowledge and training requirements, similar to those required for the motorcycle endorsement on the class C license, to include knowledge of override procedures and failure modes in the automated driving systems. I agree with that and I think that most other voters here in California would too.
They seem to be sticking their heads in the sand and hoping that EVs go away.
They have a legitimate gripe. The regulators are forcing them to sell the car at a loss by regulating the price in relation to other cars that they sell which forces Fiat to either eat $14,000 for every 500e sold or raise the prices on all of their non-electric vehicles to compensate. Who gets hurt by this? It isn't the rich man driving his luxury Tesla Model S. No, it's the middle and working class Californians who pay for this subsidy with higher prices on low and mid market vehicles. California has found yet another back door way to tax the middle class while leaving the rich untouched. What will they think of next?
Rather than seeing how Tesla is doing and worrying about the affordable model coming in a year or two
The affordable model is always two years away with Tesla. Frankly, I don't think that Musk cares very much about offering something that the average American can afford. Oh, he'll pay lip service to that idea because doing so is politically correct, but privately he almost certainly doesn't care. Actually it makes sense that the Model S costs $70,000+. It's not so much environmentally friendly as it is a way for rich people to enjoy some conspicuous luxury consumption. It's conspicuous because it's Tesla and luxury because it's both expensive and impractical. The rich driver of the Model S is signaling to the average peasant that he can afford to spend $70,000+ on an impractical car, driven on weekends for pleasure, while they are forced to drive a 10 year old beater or take public transportation and struggle to pay the bills.
they just churn out a lazy compliance car by shoving batteries in an ICE car, shove their fingers in their ears and hope no-one buys them.
Which is the most economically sensible thing for them to do. They know that electric cars are money losers for them, so they try to minimize their losses if they cannot avoid them entirely. If I were the CEO of Fiat I would order my production plants to incorporate non-removable weights into the frame of the 500e to further reduce the attractiveness of the car to potential buyers by radically reducing both the range and the cargo capacity.
Fiat Chrysler is a dinosaur, and is going to be killed off by evolution unless it makes a real effort.
I doubt that. Fiat Chrysler makes practical cars that ordinary working people can afford. In fact, the luxury car brands historically end up being bought and owned by the mass market companies. For example, Porsche, Lamborghini and Bugatti are owned by Volkswagen Group while Fiat owns Ferrari. I would be very surprised if the Tesla investors turned down an attractive buy out offer from one of the big auto groups, keen to run Tesla as a luxury brand, in the years ahead.
The only way to fix this is to break the monopoly that public schools have on public education and the best ways to do that are vouchers and charter schools. Everyone except the teachers and their unions can see this but as Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."
When the game makes you do things just right with cheap tricks like an almost unavoidable trap right before boss / end of the level, when it requires pixel-perfect jumps, when it has insanely complex or tedious puzzles to solve, when it has time limits that require you to essentially memorize which buttons to mash and when, when it doesn't allow saves except at completely useless spots
Sounds like Ninja Gaiden. That had to be the most artificially hard game available for the NES. It was just brutal, especially in the later levels.
This is yet one more example illustrating precisely why ad blocking is necessary. The bloggers and others who make their living in the content business howl with righteous indignation at those of us who use these tools, but I submit that their anger is misdirected. On the contrary, it's the advertising networks who rightly deserve their wrath for allowing their business to become a cesspool of infectious viruses, worms and frankly worthless crap. Indeed, it seems that their motto is, "our advertising services are the right thing for anyone with a credit card, no questions asked." So I ask you, why should visiting your site without ad and script blocking enabled be akin to walking into the darkest corner of the bathhouse, bending over and letting everyone have their way with nary a condom nor a reach around in sight?
Maybe so, but one cannot criticize the Koch brothers' political spending while at the same time turning a blind eye to that of Tom Steyer or George Soros or even Gates. If people are against "money in politics" or believe that "money is not speech", which seems to be the new rallying cry of the left, then it's hypocritical to criticize the Kochs while Steyer and other champions of the left get a pass; It's classic, "do as we say and not as we do" limousine liberalism. Do the Koch brothers begrudge Tom Steyer's right to spend his money in politics as he chooses? Of course not. Now some on the left have criticized the "money is not speech" slogan as a glib simplification of a complex problem that is likely to backfire, but that hasn't stopped others of them from repeating it ad nauseam anway. I want to see the Koch bashers stand up and give Tom Steyer the same treatment, which of course they won't because they're hypocrites.
To be fair, some of these costs would exist in any business. There are always capital equipment costs, employee costs, administration costs and in some cases research and development costs. However, you are on the right track with your criticism of artificially high medical device costs. Indeed, these high costs can be seen not just in prosthetic hands or limbs but also in more mundane devices such as hearing aids and prescription eyeglasses. In my estimation there are two main reasons for this:
First, the devices are sold through specialized middlemen who bill your insurance company which in turn bills you and perhaps your employer for premiums. This is the classic third party payer problem that exists throughout the healthcare industry here in the United States and is in no small part responsible for the high costs which are ultimately borne by the consumer in the form of higher premiums and higher out of pocket costs.
Second, and related to the first point, the market for FDA approved medical devices here in the United States is highly regulated and therefore high cost. There is a great deal of regulatory rigmarole and ceremony required to bring a product to market. This imposes costs of course, but it also results in delays while the product winds it's way through the circuitous approval processes. By the time something is approved for sale as a medical device it's not only expensive but often obsolete or at least several generations behind the state of the art technology.
Finally, it ought to be remembered that medical devices are now assessed an additional tax under Obamacare, on top of any previous expenses. It's hard to see how this will lower costs, especially for those who find themselves in need of a medical device. Although, I suppose that "reform" is in the eye, or the hand in this case, of the beholder.
It'll be a long while until gasoline is so expensive that updating the power grid to handle electric cars makes sense.
The same upgraded power grid or the nuclear reactors that would certainly be involved in powering it, since no other method would even come close despite what the wind and solar boosters would have you believe, could also be used to produce artificial gasoline from coal, natural gas or even sea water feedstocks using gas to liquids technologies. The US Navy is exploring these same technologies to produce jet fuel from sea water and have had some success on an experimental scale.
The IRS doesn't want to pre-populate your tax forms, aside from lobbying by self interested tax preparation firms like Intuit or H&R Block, because (1) it might be construed as an "official" invoice of what was owed and therefore "complete and correct" and (2) it might serve to tip off potential tax cheats as to what the IRS does and does not know about their income. The IRS enjoys certain advantages from forcing citizens to fill out the forms themselves, under penalty of law for failure to report, and remaining cagey about what they do and don't know to discourage cheating. It's similar in concept to the panopticon. You know that they could be watching anyone and anything at anytime even if they cannot as a practical matter watch everyone and everything all of the time. Because taxpayers are kept in the dark with regard to what the IRS knows about their income, they behave as if the IRS knows everything and that everyone and everything is being watched all of the time. This panopticon effect magnifies the effectiveness of limited IRS auditing and investigative resources because many people behave themselves, even though they aren't being given special attention, merely because they fear what will happen if the IRS does catch them in a deliberate lie.
Most people are a lot more comfortable and eager to break someone else's code than they are their own.
Not me. I'm just as merciless with my own code as I am with others' when writing tests. Proper testing involves taking on the role of the malicious agent who is actively trying to break the code, feed it bad inputs and generally muck up the works. If the code passes those tests then it stands a much better chance of rolling with the punches in the real world of production.
I've never been paid in foreign currency or paid foreign taxes, so I cannot speak from personal experience, but I think that the basic concept is sound. If you work in Europe say and are paid in Euros and pay European taxes then you ought to be able, at the very least, to write off that amount that you paid in European taxes from your gross income so that your US taxable income reflects the fact that you paid foreign taxes. Otherwise, you're being taxed on taxes and it's tough to argue that relief from that is a "loophole".
A modest refund is alright and I get that your time is valuable and that you have had yearly life events, but when I hear of people who aren't receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit having 3000 refunds it's a bit shocking that they wouldn't rather have an extra 250 dollars per month in their pocket. As you said, you probably won't be buying houses, getting married and having kids every year for the next ten so eventually when things settle down you may want to have another look at that withholding or you estimated tax payments because nobody that I know ever wishes that they put more into the escrow account with Uncle Sam at zero percent.
The brackets in the US are now indexed for inflation which is tracked and published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, so you can get a rough idea of next years tax amounts by looking at this year's tax table and making the appropriate multiplication.
Claiming more allowances than you're entitled to is against the rules. How many an individual is entitled to depends upon work situation, certain life events, whether deductions are itemized or not, household status and other factors. The IRS provides a calculator or you can use publication 505 and the worksheets to figure it out for your specific case. Knowingly providing false information on IRS forms is a crime, but then again you know that because you're a smart ass.
I think that you're right about the W-4. Claiming more allowances than you're entitled to, even if the tax works out to be correct at the end of the year, is against the rules. Whether or not that results in a penalty, I don't know. The over/under payment thing matters more if you have 1099 income from which taxes are not withheld or self employment income and file quarterly estimated tax payments with the IRS.
It would be better to owe $2K each year than to expect refunds.
I don't have the formulas in front of me just now, but a $2K underpayment of taxes would probably result in some kind of penalty. If you have under paid your tax bill by more than about $1K by the time that the IRS is accepting your 1040 for the year, penalties are likely. The penalties for underpayment can be quite severe, easily over 30 percent APR last time I checked, so it behooves you to try and be as accurate as possible when estimating your quarterly tax payments. Overestimating is not good, but underestimating can be just as bad or even worse. As you said, good planning is key.
rather than springing it on everyone after they had already budgeted around receiving their expected tax refund.
If you aren't paying quarterlies then why are you even getting a refund? Adjust your W-4 withholding so that you don't pay them more than you have to in the first place. If you are paying quarterlies then try to improve your income estimates so that you don't give Uncle Sam an interest free loan of your money. I understand that it can be difficult for self employed people with highly variable incomes, but most Americans don't fall into that group and should know their yearly tax liability to within a fifty dollars or so at the beginning of the tax year.
The attempt reveals something about the IRS' attitude.
It's not a matter of attitude. Attitude is irrelevant in this case. The employees of the IRS and government officials working there could theoretically be punished or prosecuted for failing to perform their lawful tax collection duties. It's a matter of law, not attitude.
The United States is one of the few (only?) countries that makes no distinction between income earned at home or income earned abroad for purposes of taxation. If you're a US citizen then all your income is taxable, subject to the US tax codes, regardless of where you earned it or where you lived. That is why you never hear about US "tax exiles" because the only way to end your US tax liability is to renounce your US citizenship which can only be done at a US embassy on foreign soil and only upon presentation of proof of alternative citizenship.
Compared to what? Updating the firmware on millions of production routers and servers because a critical flaw made it into production? Paying out claims against the company that resulted from security breaches associated with the bug? Going back, after the code has already been designed, written and deployed to fix a bug that would have been tens of thousands of times cheaper to fix had it been caught instead by unit tests well before release? Testing has a cost, yes, but gambling that your code will get by without it can wind up costing you more than you'd ever imagined was possible. How would you feel about driving a car with software written according to that philosophy or banking software that get's it mostly right but every once in a while zeros out your balance for some strange reasons?
You refuse to accept types that you cannot identify at runtime or you use a type safe language. Accepting void pointers or the like is just asking for trouble.
What if your bug occurs if one parameter is 37? How do you know in advance that this is a different type to be tested?
Then you test for that. You wrote the code for a specific reason and purpose, right? Well, then you ought to be able to prove that with tests. Knowing what tests you need and how to write them is itself a skill and a worthwhile one at that.
Unit testing would only have caught this if someone had thought to test for an invalid payload length in the incoming request.
Sounds like a good test to me. The length of the payload was an input in this case and it should have been asserted against the true length of the buffer in a test.
Thing is, for networking, those tests need to be right there in the code. Any data coming in off the web needs to be treated like a TSA officer treats a hippie in a 'Legalise Dope' T-shirt.
That is yet another reason why we separate concerns in our code, so that we can plug in mocks and stubs as needed to simulate inputs into or outputs from a module of code. This enables unit testing, but it also leads to better organized and more clearly written code that accurately and concisely expresses the intent of the module. The existence of unit tests is a necessary, although not a sufficient, condition for good code.
Simple code review shows that OpenSSL wasn't doing that.
In hindsight yes but this code was reviewed (supposedly) and this was missed. Code review alone is not enough, you must prove it with tests.
Incorrect. They suspended enforcement while they review the matter. However, if the IRS finds, as a matter of law, that they're obligated to collect these debts, per the meaning of the statute, then they must attempt to collect them unless the law is changed or the courts rule otherwise. I've often heard from those on the left, "Oh, don't worry they're not going to enforce that" or "they're only going to use that against the right people", but here is the perfect example of why the law isn't always the best instrument to use in pursuit of social policy goals. There can be no mercy under the law. It binds all, whether they be high or low, equally. Anything less and the law fails to defend our individual rights and freedoms against the mob or the corrupt rule of the strong over the weak.
No production code without unit tests. Every possible type or class of input must be tested. All assumptions must be tested. All outputs must be verified for each possible combination of inputs. All failure modes must be exercised. No excuses, just do it.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the point if you need to be able to drive?
It's not just your funeral we're talking about here, but everyone else you share the road with too. If it's my ass on the line out there then you damn well will be licensed just like the rest of us, automated car or not, or you won't be driving on the public right of way. BTW that's the position of the California DMV too. In fact, they're considering additional knowledge and training requirements, similar to those required for the motorcycle endorsement on the class C license, to include knowledge of override procedures and failure modes in the automated driving systems. I agree with that and I think that most other voters here in California would too.
They seem to be sticking their heads in the sand and hoping that EVs go away.
They have a legitimate gripe. The regulators are forcing them to sell the car at a loss by regulating the price in relation to other cars that they sell which forces Fiat to either eat $14,000 for every 500e sold or raise the prices on all of their non-electric vehicles to compensate. Who gets hurt by this? It isn't the rich man driving his luxury Tesla Model S. No, it's the middle and working class Californians who pay for this subsidy with higher prices on low and mid market vehicles. California has found yet another back door way to tax the middle class while leaving the rich untouched. What will they think of next?
Rather than seeing how Tesla is doing and worrying about the affordable model coming in a year or two
The affordable model is always two years away with Tesla. Frankly, I don't think that Musk cares very much about offering something that the average American can afford. Oh, he'll pay lip service to that idea because doing so is politically correct, but privately he almost certainly doesn't care. Actually it makes sense that the Model S costs $70,000+. It's not so much environmentally friendly as it is a way for rich people to enjoy some conspicuous luxury consumption. It's conspicuous because it's Tesla and luxury because it's both expensive and impractical. The rich driver of the Model S is signaling to the average peasant that he can afford to spend $70,000+ on an impractical car, driven on weekends for pleasure, while they are forced to drive a 10 year old beater or take public transportation and struggle to pay the bills.
they just churn out a lazy compliance car by shoving batteries in an ICE car, shove their fingers in their ears and hope no-one buys them.
Which is the most economically sensible thing for them to do. They know that electric cars are money losers for them, so they try to minimize their losses if they cannot avoid them entirely. If I were the CEO of Fiat I would order my production plants to incorporate non-removable weights into the frame of the 500e to further reduce the attractiveness of the car to potential buyers by radically reducing both the range and the cargo capacity.
Fiat Chrysler is a dinosaur, and is going to be killed off by evolution unless it makes a real effort.
I doubt that. Fiat Chrysler makes practical cars that ordinary working people can afford. In fact, the luxury car brands historically end up being bought and owned by the mass market companies. For example, Porsche, Lamborghini and Bugatti are owned by Volkswagen Group while Fiat owns Ferrari. I would be very surprised if the Tesla investors turned down an attractive buy out offer from one of the big auto groups, keen to run Tesla as a luxury brand, in the years ahead.
The only way to fix this is to break the monopoly that public schools have on public education and the best ways to do that are vouchers and charter schools. Everyone except the teachers and their unions can see this but as Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."
When the game makes you do things just right with cheap tricks like an almost unavoidable trap right before boss / end of the level, when it requires pixel-perfect jumps, when it has insanely complex or tedious puzzles to solve, when it has time limits that require you to essentially memorize which buttons to mash and when, when it doesn't allow saves except at completely useless spots
Sounds like Ninja Gaiden . That had to be the most artificially hard game available for the NES. It was just brutal, especially in the later levels.
This is yet one more example illustrating precisely why ad blocking is necessary. The bloggers and others who make their living in the content business howl with righteous indignation at those of us who use these tools, but I submit that their anger is misdirected. On the contrary, it's the advertising networks who rightly deserve their wrath for allowing their business to become a cesspool of infectious viruses, worms and frankly worthless crap. Indeed, it seems that their motto is, "our advertising services are the right thing for anyone with a credit card, no questions asked." So I ask you, why should visiting your site without ad and script blocking enabled be akin to walking into the darkest corner of the bathhouse, bending over and letting everyone have their way with nary a condom nor a reach around in sight?
even if they do then spend it on some other crap
Which is precisely what they will do, so I'd rather just keep the money thank you.
All evens out in the end.
Maybe so, but one cannot criticize the Koch brothers' political spending while at the same time turning a blind eye to that of Tom Steyer or George Soros or even Gates. If people are against "money in politics" or believe that "money is not speech", which seems to be the new rallying cry of the left, then it's hypocritical to criticize the Kochs while Steyer and other champions of the left get a pass; It's classic, "do as we say and not as we do" limousine liberalism. Do the Koch brothers begrudge Tom Steyer's right to spend his money in politics as he chooses? Of course not. Now some on the left have criticized the "money is not speech" slogan as a glib simplification of a complex problem that is likely to backfire, but that hasn't stopped others of them from repeating it ad nauseam anway. I want to see the Koch bashers stand up and give Tom Steyer the same treatment, which of course they won't because they're hypocrites.
To be fair, some of these costs would exist in any business. There are always capital equipment costs, employee costs, administration costs and in some cases research and development costs. However, you are on the right track with your criticism of artificially high medical device costs. Indeed, these high costs can be seen not just in prosthetic hands or limbs but also in more mundane devices such as hearing aids and prescription eyeglasses. In my estimation there are two main reasons for this:
First, the devices are sold through specialized middlemen who bill your insurance company which in turn bills you and perhaps your employer for premiums. This is the classic third party payer problem that exists throughout the healthcare industry here in the United States and is in no small part responsible for the high costs which are ultimately borne by the consumer in the form of higher premiums and higher out of pocket costs.
Second, and related to the first point, the market for FDA approved medical devices here in the United States is highly regulated and therefore high cost. There is a great deal of regulatory rigmarole and ceremony required to bring a product to market. This imposes costs of course, but it also results in delays while the product winds it's way through the circuitous approval processes. By the time something is approved for sale as a medical device it's not only expensive but often obsolete or at least several generations behind the state of the art technology.
Finally, it ought to be remembered that medical devices are now assessed an additional tax under Obamacare, on top of any previous expenses. It's hard to see how this will lower costs, especially for those who find themselves in need of a medical device. Although, I suppose that "reform" is in the eye, or the hand in this case, of the beholder.
It'll be a long while until gasoline is so expensive that updating the power grid to handle electric cars makes sense.
The same upgraded power grid or the nuclear reactors that would certainly be involved in powering it, since no other method would even come close despite what the wind and solar boosters would have you believe, could also be used to produce artificial gasoline from coal, natural gas or even sea water feedstocks using gas to liquids technologies. The US Navy is exploring these same technologies to produce jet fuel from sea water and have had some success on an experimental scale.
The IRS doesn't want to pre-populate your tax forms, aside from lobbying by self interested tax preparation firms like Intuit or H&R Block, because (1) it might be construed as an "official" invoice of what was owed and therefore "complete and correct" and (2) it might serve to tip off potential tax cheats as to what the IRS does and does not know about their income. The IRS enjoys certain advantages from forcing citizens to fill out the forms themselves, under penalty of law for failure to report, and remaining cagey about what they do and don't know to discourage cheating. It's similar in concept to the panopticon. You know that they could be watching anyone and anything at anytime even if they cannot as a practical matter watch everyone and everything all of the time. Because taxpayers are kept in the dark with regard to what the IRS knows about their income, they behave as if the IRS knows everything and that everyone and everything is being watched all of the time. This panopticon effect magnifies the effectiveness of limited IRS auditing and investigative resources because many people behave themselves, even though they aren't being given special attention, merely because they fear what will happen if the IRS does catch them in a deliberate lie.
Most people are a lot more comfortable and eager to break someone else's code than they are their own.
Not me. I'm just as merciless with my own code as I am with others' when writing tests. Proper testing involves taking on the role of the malicious agent who is actively trying to break the code, feed it bad inputs and generally muck up the works. If the code passes those tests then it stands a much better chance of rolling with the punches in the real world of production.
I've never been paid in foreign currency or paid foreign taxes, so I cannot speak from personal experience, but I think that the basic concept is sound. If you work in Europe say and are paid in Euros and pay European taxes then you ought to be able, at the very least, to write off that amount that you paid in European taxes from your gross income so that your US taxable income reflects the fact that you paid foreign taxes. Otherwise, you're being taxed on taxes and it's tough to argue that relief from that is a "loophole".
A modest refund is alright and I get that your time is valuable and that you have had yearly life events, but when I hear of people who aren't receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit having 3000 refunds it's a bit shocking that they wouldn't rather have an extra 250 dollars per month in their pocket. As you said, you probably won't be buying houses, getting married and having kids every year for the next ten so eventually when things settle down you may want to have another look at that withholding or you estimated tax payments because nobody that I know ever wishes that they put more into the escrow account with Uncle Sam at zero percent.
The brackets in the US are now indexed for inflation which is tracked and published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, so you can get a rough idea of next years tax amounts by looking at this year's tax table and making the appropriate multiplication.
BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Claiming more allowances than you're entitled to is against the rules. How many an individual is entitled to depends upon work situation, certain life events, whether deductions are itemized or not, household status and other factors. The IRS provides a calculator or you can use publication 505 and the worksheets to figure it out for your specific case. Knowingly providing false information on IRS forms is a crime, but then again you know that because you're a smart ass.
I think that you're right about the W-4. Claiming more allowances than you're entitled to, even if the tax works out to be correct at the end of the year, is against the rules. Whether or not that results in a penalty, I don't know. The over/under payment thing matters more if you have 1099 income from which taxes are not withheld or self employment income and file quarterly estimated tax payments with the IRS.
It would be better to owe $2K each year than to expect refunds.
I don't have the formulas in front of me just now, but a $2K underpayment of taxes would probably result in some kind of penalty. If you have under paid your tax bill by more than about $1K by the time that the IRS is accepting your 1040 for the year, penalties are likely. The penalties for underpayment can be quite severe, easily over 30 percent APR last time I checked, so it behooves you to try and be as accurate as possible when estimating your quarterly tax payments. Overestimating is not good, but underestimating can be just as bad or even worse. As you said, good planning is key.
rather than springing it on everyone after they had already budgeted around receiving their expected tax refund.
If you aren't paying quarterlies then why are you even getting a refund? Adjust your W-4 withholding so that you don't pay them more than you have to in the first place. If you are paying quarterlies then try to improve your income estimates so that you don't give Uncle Sam an interest free loan of your money. I understand that it can be difficult for self employed people with highly variable incomes, but most Americans don't fall into that group and should know their yearly tax liability to within a fifty dollars or so at the beginning of the tax year.
The attempt reveals something about the IRS' attitude.
It's not a matter of attitude. Attitude is irrelevant in this case. The employees of the IRS and government officials working there could theoretically be punished or prosecuted for failing to perform their lawful tax collection duties. It's a matter of law, not attitude.
The United States is one of the few (only?) countries that makes no distinction between income earned at home or income earned abroad for purposes of taxation. If you're a US citizen then all your income is taxable, subject to the US tax codes, regardless of where you earned it or where you lived. That is why you never hear about US "tax exiles" because the only way to end your US tax liability is to renounce your US citizenship which can only be done at a US embassy on foreign soil and only upon presentation of proof of alternative citizenship.
Nope. It's a waste of time.
Compared to what? Updating the firmware on millions of production routers and servers because a critical flaw made it into production? Paying out claims against the company that resulted from security breaches associated with the bug? Going back, after the code has already been designed, written and deployed to fix a bug that would have been tens of thousands of times cheaper to fix had it been caught instead by unit tests well before release? Testing has a cost, yes, but gambling that your code will get by without it can wind up costing you more than you'd ever imagined was possible. How would you feel about driving a car with software written according to that philosophy or banking software that get's it mostly right but every once in a while zeros out your balance for some strange reasons?
How do you know each type?
You refuse to accept types that you cannot identify at runtime or you use a type safe language. Accepting void pointers or the like is just asking for trouble.
What if your bug occurs if one parameter is 37? How do you know in advance that this is a different type to be tested?
Then you test for that. You wrote the code for a specific reason and purpose, right? Well, then you ought to be able to prove that with tests. Knowing what tests you need and how to write them is itself a skill and a worthwhile one at that.
Unit testing would only have caught this if someone had thought to test for an invalid payload length in the incoming request.
Sounds like a good test to me. The length of the payload was an input in this case and it should have been asserted against the true length of the buffer in a test.
Thing is, for networking, those tests need to be right there in the code. Any data coming in off the web needs to be treated like a TSA officer treats a hippie in a 'Legalise Dope' T-shirt.
That is yet another reason why we separate concerns in our code, so that we can plug in mocks and stubs as needed to simulate inputs into or outputs from a module of code. This enables unit testing, but it also leads to better organized and more clearly written code that accurately and concisely expresses the intent of the module. The existence of unit tests is a necessary, although not a sufficient, condition for good code.
Simple code review shows that OpenSSL wasn't doing that.
In hindsight yes but this code was reviewed (supposedly) and this was missed. Code review alone is not enough, you must prove it with tests.
Incorrect. They suspended enforcement while they review the matter. However, if the IRS finds, as a matter of law, that they're obligated to collect these debts, per the meaning of the statute, then they must attempt to collect them unless the law is changed or the courts rule otherwise. I've often heard from those on the left, "Oh, don't worry they're not going to enforce that" or "they're only going to use that against the right people", but here is the perfect example of why the law isn't always the best instrument to use in pursuit of social policy goals. There can be no mercy under the law. It binds all, whether they be high or low, equally. Anything less and the law fails to defend our individual rights and freedoms against the mob or the corrupt rule of the strong over the weak.
No production code without unit tests. Every possible type or class of input must be tested. All assumptions must be tested. All outputs must be verified for each possible combination of inputs. All failure modes must be exercised. No excuses, just do it.