If one understands the syntax, one should typically be able to read a block of code and figure out what it does without the benefit of comments.
That's not necessarily true if you're not aware of the code's place in the larger scheme of the system. Grab a programmer off the street, tell him there's a bug in an uncommented implementation of the Longley-Rice radio field strength prediction algorithm, and then ask him to fix it. Come back in a week and he'll be a quivering mass of Jell-O.
It is entirely irrelevant if some of Josh's obtuse co-workers with a pronounced inferiority complex think that his code is convoluted.
Until he quits, is hit by a bus, or otherwise becomes unavailable to maintain the undocumented, uncommented spaghetti mess that usually comes from these kinds of people. When the total cost of writing and maintaining "brilliant" code exceeds that of "average" code that provides adequate performance, then there's a problem.
On the other hand, I've also had the pleasure of working with developers that are far and beyond my skills, but also are decent people to work with and document their work so that it's understandable without having to spend a week tracing through it. Such people are worth their weight in gold.
"That we allow companies to make their own incompatible internal laws and punish people based on them is the real problem."
Based on the limited info at hand, it sounded to me like the guy was stealing from the company via falsification of his expense reports, and such falsification was proven in a court of law. I'd say the company's approach of "fire him and make an example" was quite a bit better for him than the "have him arrested for fraud" avenue that presumably was also available to them.
I never said I didn't care about the issue, I've just been trying to be polite about saying that you're not as educated about it as you might think, and that your stooping to name-calling just confirms it.
I don't need intellectual charity from the poor, but thanks for offering. Yeah, that was an ad hominem.
I'll take that as a "no" then. Passion isn't an excuse for poor logical arguments and the inability to articulate one's thoughts without name-calling - it instead implies that one is acting on blind emotion and not critically thinking about the position being taken, or is not sufficiently informed about the subject matter to make a reasoned argument.
They should be asking what a contractor is doing putting classified information on his "walking around" laptop.
From the article:
"Clark told WPXI that he doesn't know how sensitive this information is, but he said other military information has been found on the Internet in the past and should be monitored more closely."
Nothing in the article said the information was classified, so it looks to me like it's kind of a "mountain out of a molehill" kind of thing - there's plenty of information about military hardware out there that looks scary to someone that doesn't know anything about the subject matter, but is strategically/tactically useless just the same. Similar information regarding the VC-25 fleet has been out there for some time, and I don't trust a reporter or employee of a peer-to-peer company to be able to evaluate whether something contains full documentation of "entire blueprints and avionics package for Marine One".
I worked for several years for a Navy contractor in their submarine combat systems department. Anything, *anything* that was classified was A.) kept in an area with physical access controls (often including unfriendly guys with guns), B.) if available electronically, was on a separate network physically inaccessible from outside that controlled area, and C.) if anything had to go outside that controlled area (software updates for the boats, for instance), there was a two-man protocol to be followed, with one of our guys and one of the Navy guys in custody 24x7 of whatever media had classified data on it. Even assuming the article is correct and there was truly useful information made available, the problem isn't that file-sharing is bad, or that Windows is insecure - the problem is that both the contractor and the agency they serve had lapses in their security protocol that would let such information anywhere near a non-secured network, and the appropriate security audits weren't taking place.
What he explicitly said is that the kindle creates extra value for the work. In return the people who created the material should share in that extra value.
Why? They played no part and incurred no expense in creating that extra value, and unless the Kindle's speech is being recorded, there's no derivative work being fixed in a tangible medium, which was my understanding of what was required for a copyright claim. I suppose they could stretch and try to call it a "performance", but these guys really need to get a grasp on how greedy it's making the entire content creation industry look to everyone not involved in it.
According to the Authors Guild logic, using a magnifying glass with a normal print book should be illegal, because then one gets large typeface for free?
And be ready with a credit card every time you hit the magnifying glass button in Acrobat Reader.
I doubt they're going to tell any future employer anything more than the dates of employment. However (and this is just me), if you can confirm that they're definitely going to give you the bad reference, it's not going to hurt you to pack your things *today* and walk with no notice - it *is* an at-will state, after all. You've already got another job, so the reference from your current employer isn't as important as it would be otherwise, and I personally would not be in the frame of mind to offer anything more to an employer that attempted to twist my arm like that. Screw 'em.
The Honorable John W. Darrah
United States District Court
219 South Dearborn Street
Chicago, IL 60604
Contact: Kathryn E. Bianchetti
Phone: (312) 435-5619
I would expect such behavior from a big law firm, and to some degree it's to be expected if it's a real trademark action, but I'd expect a federal judge to use a little more discretion and not be so blatantly one-sided. This asshole frankly seems to be in Jones-Day's back pocket, and I wouldn't expect anything resembling a fair hearing from him based on his actions to this point.
Yes, Judge Darrah, I just said I believe you're either either incompetent or crooked. You can choose which one you think represents you best, but either way I don't think you're qualified to be hearing this case.
Oh they knew perfectly well that the Challenger disaster would happen. The breathtaking silliness of using o-rings to seal a solid-rocket booster was discussed more than enough times.
Particularly that morning, when it was cold enough that the engineers were saying, "I sure hope the O-rings work". I must say, it was entertaining being present at one of the Rogers Commission hearings and watching Feynman lay into the Thiokol guys about the O-rings.
obviously this NASA guideline isn't enough and it's *REALLY* hard to prevent failure when a perfect storm of multiple systems experience failure at the same time.
Neither the Challenger nor the Columbia represented simultaneous multiple failures. They *did* represent cascade failures that should have been planned for, but weren't.
Since Apple has fixed their stupid Apple-only filename convention bugs in the SMB client
When did they do that? I pretty much have to use an NFS share to back up my wife's MacBook because of the filename issues, but she's still on 10.4.something. If I could dump NFS it'd be nice.
Well, there is a bit of difference in regional dialects too. Some areas will say, "alls'y'all", while others, such as where my family is from, will be a bit more general with "all y'all". Some are just plain uncultured and will use "y'all" by itself, regardless of the number of people being addressed.
I think you meant to say "copyright infringement is theft", but your argument is still quite valid. Likening "intellectual property" to real property also has the side effect of deflecting attention from an uncomfortable fact - copyright *IS* theft, but it's theft from society with the government's blessing, nothing more. The only thing that allows it to be tolerable in the US is the "limited times" clause of the Constitution. When the term of copyright greatly exceeds the lifespan of an average person, it becomes pretty difficult to argue that it's a "limited time" - there are millions and millions of people for whom that is not true in practice, and somehow I doubt the continued copyright on Elvis Presley's recordings is going to provide sufficient encouragement for him to create any more.
Slashdot Mirror
If one understands the syntax, one should typically be able to read a block of code and figure out what it does without the benefit of comments.
That's not necessarily true if you're not aware of the code's place in the larger scheme of the system. Grab a programmer off the street, tell him there's a bug in an uncommented implementation of the Longley-Rice radio field strength prediction algorithm, and then ask him to fix it. Come back in a week and he'll be a quivering mass of Jell-O.
It is entirely irrelevant if some of Josh's obtuse co-workers with a pronounced inferiority complex think that his code is convoluted.
Until he quits, is hit by a bus, or otherwise becomes unavailable to maintain the undocumented, uncommented spaghetti mess that usually comes from these kinds of people. When the total cost of writing and maintaining "brilliant" code exceeds that of "average" code that provides adequate performance, then there's a problem.
On the other hand, I've also had the pleasure of working with developers that are far and beyond my skills, but also are decent people to work with and document their work so that it's understandable without having to spend a week tracing through it. Such people are worth their weight in gold.
"That we allow companies to make their own incompatible internal laws and punish people based on them is the real problem."
Based on the limited info at hand, it sounded to me like the guy was stealing from the company via falsification of his expense reports, and such falsification was proven in a court of law. I'd say the company's approach of "fire him and make an example" was quite a bit better for him than the "have him arrested for fraud" avenue that presumably was also available to them.
Oh come on Ray, you know you just did it for that sweet Slashdot cred! :-D
I never said I didn't care about the issue, I've just been trying to be polite about saying that you're not as educated about it as you might think, and that your stooping to name-calling just confirms it.
I don't need intellectual charity from the poor, but thanks for offering. Yeah, that was an ad hominem.
I'll take that as a "no" then. Passion isn't an excuse for poor logical arguments and the inability to articulate one's thoughts without name-calling - it instead implies that one is acting on blind emotion and not critically thinking about the position being taken, or is not sufficiently informed about the subject matter to make a reasoned argument.
Aw, can't deal with a bit of criticism, eh?
It's kind of hard to take anyone seriously that can't make a point without resorting to ad homs in the multiple posts made on this topic.
Hehe, no comment. :-)
They should be asking what a contractor is doing putting classified information on his "walking around" laptop.
From the article:
"Clark told WPXI that he doesn't know how sensitive this information is, but he said other military information has been found on the Internet in the past and should be monitored more closely."
Nothing in the article said the information was classified, so it looks to me like it's kind of a "mountain out of a molehill" kind of thing - there's plenty of information about military hardware out there that looks scary to someone that doesn't know anything about the subject matter, but is strategically/tactically useless just the same. Similar information regarding the VC-25 fleet has been out there for some time, and I don't trust a reporter or employee of a peer-to-peer company to be able to evaluate whether something contains full documentation of "entire blueprints and avionics package for Marine One".
I worked for several years for a Navy contractor in their submarine combat systems department. Anything, *anything* that was classified was A.) kept in an area with physical access controls (often including unfriendly guys with guns), B.) if available electronically, was on a separate network physically inaccessible from outside that controlled area, and C.) if anything had to go outside that controlled area (software updates for the boats, for instance), there was a two-man protocol to be followed, with one of our guys and one of the Navy guys in custody 24x7 of whatever media had classified data on it. Even assuming the article is correct and there was truly useful information made available, the problem isn't that file-sharing is bad, or that Windows is insecure - the problem is that both the contractor and the agency they serve had lapses in their security protocol that would let such information anywhere near a non-secured network, and the appropriate security audits weren't taking place.
What he explicitly said is that the kindle creates extra value for the work. In return the people who created the material should share in that extra value.
Why? They played no part and incurred no expense in creating that extra value, and unless the Kindle's speech is being recorded, there's no derivative work being fixed in a tangible medium, which was my understanding of what was required for a copyright claim. I suppose they could stretch and try to call it a "performance", but these guys really need to get a grasp on how greedy it's making the entire content creation industry look to everyone not involved in it.
According to the Authors Guild logic, using a magnifying glass with a normal print book should be illegal, because then one gets large typeface for free?
And be ready with a credit card every time you hit the magnifying glass button in Acrobat Reader.
Ooh, a bad mark! Scary. "This is going on your permanent transcript, son."
Y'know, I can actually see myself saying those exact words to the manager in question.
Its a publicly traded small company ($150MM market cap). Doesn't matter. The GM fired me shortly thereafter.
If you've got proof, it's probably something that local law enforcement and the SEC would be interested in discussing with you.
I doubt they're going to tell any future employer anything more than the dates of employment. However (and this is just me), if you can confirm that they're definitely going to give you the bad reference, it's not going to hurt you to pack your things *today* and walk with no notice - it *is* an at-will state, after all. You've already got another job, so the reference from your current employer isn't as important as it would be otherwise, and I personally would not be in the frame of mind to offer anything more to an employer that attempted to twist my arm like that. Screw 'em.
Let him know then:
The Honorable John W. Darrah
United States District Court
219 South Dearborn Street
Chicago, IL 60604
Contact: Kathryn E. Bianchetti
Phone: (312) 435-5619
I would expect such behavior from a big law firm, and to some degree it's to be expected if it's a real trademark action, but I'd expect a federal judge to use a little more discretion and not be so blatantly one-sided. This asshole frankly seems to be in Jones-Day's back pocket, and I wouldn't expect anything resembling a fair hearing from him based on his actions to this point.
Yes, Judge Darrah, I just said I believe you're either either incompetent or crooked. You can choose which one you think represents you best, but either way I don't think you're qualified to be hearing this case.
Oh they knew perfectly well that the Challenger disaster would happen. The breathtaking silliness of using o-rings to seal a solid-rocket booster was discussed more than enough times.
Particularly that morning, when it was cold enough that the engineers were saying, "I sure hope the O-rings work". I must say, it was entertaining being present at one of the Rogers Commission hearings and watching Feynman lay into the Thiokol guys about the O-rings.
obviously this NASA guideline isn't enough and it's *REALLY* hard to prevent failure when a perfect storm of multiple systems experience failure at the same time.
Neither the Challenger nor the Columbia represented simultaneous multiple failures. They *did* represent cascade failures that should have been planned for, but weren't.
Since Apple has fixed their stupid Apple-only filename convention bugs in the SMB client
When did they do that? I pretty much have to use an NFS share to back up my wife's MacBook because of the filename issues, but she's still on 10.4.something. If I could dump NFS it'd be nice.
He said "EPIC" and not "LEGENDARY", so I'm guessing purple. :-)
Well, there is a bit of difference in regional dialects too. Some areas will say, "alls'y'all", while others, such as where my family is from, will be a bit more general with "all y'all". Some are just plain uncultured and will use "y'all" by itself, regardless of the number of people being addressed.
Mind if I call you "Mike"?
True, but it's warlocks, not mages, that whine the most about rogues being OP.
Your analogy fails. What if you had invested a huge amount of money and time hiring people to program and build the machine?
He'd still have it, and no theft would have occurred.
I think you meant to say "copyright infringement is theft", but your argument is still quite valid. Likening "intellectual property" to real property also has the side effect of deflecting attention from an uncomfortable fact - copyright *IS* theft, but it's theft from society with the government's blessing, nothing more. The only thing that allows it to be tolerable in the US is the "limited times" clause of the Constitution. When the term of copyright greatly exceeds the lifespan of an average person, it becomes pretty difficult to argue that it's a "limited time" - there are millions and millions of people for whom that is not true in practice, and somehow I doubt the continued copyright on Elvis Presley's recordings is going to provide sufficient encouragement for him to create any more.