It does. It all depends on your definition of "environment". I'd like to see humans "print 3D copies of themselves" without a hugely complex ecosystem, let alone a highly specific physical environment, to back them up.
In this case the RepRap'ers have a looser definition of ecosystem/environment than you do. They'd like a tighter definition just like you but in the meantime their machine is, loosely, reproducing. It's all good.
i'm saying you are absurd if you rely on a government organization to protect your privacy for you. regardless of the law.
If they have a back door into your OS encryption is pointless. How confident are you they don't? Given the existence of ECHELON I'm confident that the US government has back doors at least in all the OS' made in the US.
In any case it's all about defense in depth. Good law like privacy guards, good technical tools like encryption, good monitoring by citizens, good implementation by law enforcement, good organizations that fail safe (e.g. no massive centralized databases) etc. The law is just one element and/.'ers are right to be concerned about it just like every other element.
My guess is that the Swedish government is implementing this snooping partly so they can swap data with foreign government snoopers like the US and track down international criminals. Won't somebody think of the children/terrorists/pirates/communists?
---
You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
Studies have found that children are more likely to do better in school if they believe that they're...well, better.
Er, no, that was a popular idea in the 60's but recent science has shown that as students grow up with false praise (to make them think they are better) eventually (early/pre-teens) they realize they're being lied to with counterproductive results including low self esteem and social problems. In the long term it's best to be perfectly honest; by all means praise specific accomplishments at but don't pretend they're doing well when they're not.
If you are interested in discussing morals, ethics and "feelings", you should have kept the company private
Unmitigated nonsense, and typical of bottom feeders who want to rationalize their unethical behavior.
Making a company public does not mystically give the company directors or shareholders a free pass to act unethically.
Ethical and other rules apply to people regardless of whether they are participating in a company or not. Companies are just individuals cooperating to achieve common goals and if those individuals are acting ethically then the company is acting ethically also.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Need not dive in to the expensive airplanes right away...
A good starter option is petrol powered Control line flying. Fast, fun, cheap, crashes usually aren't terminal and the child can design and fly the entire aircraft on their own. I was given a model petrol engine and propeller and did everything else myself. Good fun.
---
A neurotic is the man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. - Jerome Lawrence
Your reactions might be appropriate if the intent was to deceive the ACCC or Australians citizens who might be swayed by the critique. But the article implies that Google's goal was to keep the criticism anonymous from eBay, out of concern for possible retaliation.
Possible retaliation by a competing commercial entity is not a valid reason. Retaliation is another name for competition, something we want to encourage in a free and open market.
I grant you, second order effects, where the company was not anonymous to the ACCC but wanted to be anonymous to the general public including ebay, while the people primarily evaluating the submissions were the ACCC and not the general public, things get murky. On the plus side allowing submissions anonymous to the general public is likely improve objectivity as people/companies otherwise unwilling to make submissions will do so. On the minus side transparency will be lacking (amongst other problems submissions may actively lie with little comeback) and submissions from the public responding will not be as fully informed.
I'm on the fence on that one; in this case ebay is close to a monopoly in their space, it's not a free and open market with multiple equal-powered players and so anonymity may've been appropriate.
So while your feelings about the relative merits of corporations and individuals appear to be very strong, they do not seem to be very relevant to this case. The anonymity was about the interactions between two corporations.
Partly. I was responding mainly to the GP's comment about posting, not the specific circumstances. As other posts have noted GP's comment is not directly relevant to the story and thus my post was not directly relevant either. However the excuse you've given (possible retaliation) in my opinion is not a valid excuse.
(And since you feel very strongly about the idea of disclosure, I will point out that Google is my employer. But my work for them is not connected to this situation, I know nothing about this interaction beyond what I've read in this article, and I'm speaking for myself, not for them.)
Thanks, I appreciate your disclosure. It doesn't belittle your argument and allows all readers to do a more informed evaluation. In the long term this benefits everyone, even yourself and google. On my part I have no connection with Google, EBay or the ACCC, just an interested citizen.
The problem with Google's posting of an opinion, that many probably agree with, is that the use of ad-hominem is so prevalent and accepted that, these days, it is impossible to state something factual and verifiable, or reasonable and well thought out, without it being automatically colored by what people's perceptions of your motives might be.
That is a problem of education. Corporations are privileged legal entities and because of the need for legal transparency and accountability corporations should have no right of anonymity in public discourse at all.
And I don't see this as astroturfing. Posting anonymously is different from posting under a fake identity.
Bullshit. It's posting in a way that's intended to deceive the reader into thinking the message is by an average citizen and not paid propaganda. It's fraud.
Astroturfers are lying scum and should be in jail.
Companies should have no right of anonymity and it's about time the law caught up with them. All communication by corporate entities should be clearly identified as such. Corporations have a privileged legal position and with that privilege comes responsibility. In particular, transparency and accountability.
Think it doesn't matter? It does, or they wouldn't do it.
Corporate tools will claim that readers will not give them a fair hearing if they post under the corporate name. Well hello, guess why. If corporations were trustworthy they wouldn't have a problem.
Others will claim that the message should be evaluated independent of the messenger. Self serving nonsense, context is very important in evaluating the veracity of a message.
You can still have your name@company.com address through their mail servers
Until Google guarantees, in writing, that it will not data mine in any way, ad's or otherwise, or they provide a mechanism all users can use to opt out of all their marketing, gmail cannot be used by companies in most countries with data privacy laws.
Data privacy laws guarantee that private data, including email messages, that a company acquires cannot be used for any purpose other than the original business transaction without warning plus opt out. e.g. Item 2.1(c) in Australia'a national privacy principals. If google does not warn all potential users of this fact in the relevant countries before businesses sign up, and the companies concerned do not do the same, then they are engaged in illegal activity.
If google can't data mine that breaks their business model. Why are they free hosting businesses again?
If it's crazy for the **AA it could be a very good idea for google. Google should ask the courts to give a declaratory judgement to reduce business uncertainty. The public would like them too.
At the very least they should be lobbying congress hard to get sane copyright laws and encouraging other companies to do so as well. Congress needs educating and Google has the resources and business need to do that. For too long the mafiaa has been getting free rein to create whatever type of law they like. They've completely lost in the court of public opinion but unfortunately they have been making "progress" in the legal system.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
Because people, you know, actually use MSN and other formats?
Yeap, and because they're using it today they'll be using tomorrow. And because they'll be using tomorrow they'll be using it the next day. In fact, they'll be using it for the rest of eternity. Particularly if M$ has any say in the matter.
Sometimes short term pain is worth it for long term gain.
I'm using the same but have the anti-phishing features disabled. I have NoScript and several other addons installed. Zero freezes or crashes. The peer post is probably right.
I disable all automatic updates; I find they cause more problems than they solve. Ditto any daemons that do storage scans.
Many programmers need to get a clue that slowing down/stopping the user, like the wrong DNS lookup or a disk scan can do, to do some automatic operation that's probably going to be a noop anyway is a stupid thing to do.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
This is not possible even with a honeypot if they can't find a code security hole and the botnet is using public key signed messages that can only originate from the botnet's trusted masters. Botnets are already using public key encryption.
---
Tax payer funded courses to teach proprietary software product use are an illegal company subsidy.
All they have to do is locate these vulnerabilities and sit on them.
Why would they need to do even that for the vast majority of systems? M$, Apple and IBM are all US companies under US legal jurisdiction. You can be damn sure the that the US government has secretly "asked" (=told) them to put a back doors in. It's just too cheap and too easy. They might even regard it as their "patriotic" duty, it's perfectly legal for the government to secretly force companies to do things for national security reasons, particularly with a perpetual war on, and it's not as if the current government cares much about legality anyway.
Are you willing to pay a subscription fee for all content?
We do anyway. Advertisers are just very inefficient middlemen, who make us pay twice over, once in time/attention to watch/avoid the ad and second in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad. Who do you think pays marketers' salaries? You do.
Modern mass marketing badly distorts the free market by hiding the true costs from the consumer. Parasitic marketers encourage this by pretending advertising supported media is "free". Modern mass marketing also costs billions of man hours. It should be heavily limited. At a bare minimum it should be taxed at the average hourly wage rate for the number of man hours lost to the general community.
---
You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
Considering the available societal alternatives (China, Myanmar, and Cuba come to mind),
Idiotic false dichotomy pushed incessantly by marketing parasites. This one statement shows that you have an agenda. You're either a fraud or an idiot.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Cruise missiles launch, travel thousands of kilometres and "land" within square metres, and terrain follow with radar to boot, all completely automatically. Commercial flights can do the entire flight completely automatically.
Even back in the 60's they were proposing personal planes with computer-assisted controls, where the joystick specified plane orientation rather than rate-of-turn.
The technology is here now. It's more a question of price, political will and organization.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Until a self-driving car can have that level of awareness and make those sorts of predictions and act accordingly, I don't see computers doing any serious driving.
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Copyright affects everybody. The population of Canada is 33 million. The industry is only a tiny fraction of the total population. A representative panel should have maybe ten representatives from the general population for every one industry representative.
Note: Industry representatives should get no special treatment simply because they're rich or because they might be excessively affected by changes in copyright law; companies are just groups of people and should have no special privileges compared to the general population.
Yes, it's tyranny of the majority. Problem is, the only thing worse than that is tyranny of a minority.
---
Some people believe with great fervor preposterous things that just happen to coincide with their self-interest.
-- Judge Frank Easterbrook, Coleman v. CIR (7th Cir 1986) 791 F2d 68 at 69 [and quoted in several subsequent court decisions]
I know it will most likely result in a swift abrasive response but I implore your highness to really spend some time understanding how unit tests can help the really stupid coders (like me).
Ok, here's my abrasive response:-) : Unit tests, as tests, are an almost complete waste of time.
They do nothing more than get a hopefully independent test programmer to replicate exactly the same logic as part of the original program, typically in an incompatible, unstructured language not designed for large systems, and than compare to see if there's any inconsistency in the outputs of the two programs. All the examination, handling and verification of special cases the test programmer does should've been done by the original programmer anyway.
In other words unit testing is just a bastardized version of the explicit n-way programming sometimes done in the aerospace industry. It may be marginally useful but it's costly and those resources are probably better spent on the original program. Or from another point of view unit tests are just a form of bureaucratic oversight, useful to make sure the original programmer toes the line if they're likely to be slack, such as in verifying formal contract requirements. That doesn't work if the two programmers are one and the same.
I rarely unit test. But I do write programs that are paranoid at every step of the way about their inputs and outputs, including the handling of boundary conditions, parallel process coordination and system call status', I don't pretend that a one in a thousand chance is no chance (like many poor programmers do e.g. disk full or inconveniently timed interrupt, race condition or garbage collection; incidentally unit tests rarely cover those) and I do verify and do one-off tests of my code until I am sure I understand it. In a sense I put the units tests in the programs themselves. I don't waste time with pretty but incompatible test languages and frameworks because they add almost no value.
"Unit tests", the terminology, is a partial example of an all too common failing in the software profession, that of confusing terminology with reality. Just because something has a different name (unit test != program) doesn't mean it's a different object. Unfortunately because of the amorphous nature of software, with no well defined boundaries, it's far too easy to create and be confused by such terminology.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
"Machine Prints 3D Copies Of Itself". It doesn't.
It does. It all depends on your definition of "environment". I'd like to see humans "print 3D copies of themselves" without a hugely complex ecosystem, let alone a highly specific physical environment, to back them up.
In this case the RepRap'ers have a looser definition of ecosystem/environment than you do. They'd like a tighter definition just like you but in the meantime their machine is, loosely, reproducing. It's all good.
---
Stop using tab characters in your code!
encrypt if you don't want it snooped on.
How quaint.
i'm saying you are absurd if you rely on a government organization to protect your privacy for you. regardless of the law.
If they have a back door into your OS encryption is pointless. How confident are you they don't? Given the existence of ECHELON I'm confident that the US government has back doors at least in all the OS' made in the US.
In any case it's all about defense in depth. Good law like privacy guards, good technical tools like encryption, good monitoring by citizens, good implementation by law enforcement, good organizations that fail safe (e.g. no massive centralized databases) etc. The law is just one element and /.'ers are right to be concerned about it just like every other element.
My guess is that the Swedish government is implementing this snooping partly so they can swap data with foreign government snoopers like the US and track down international criminals. Won't somebody think of the children/terrorists/pirates/communists?
---
You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
Studies have found that children are more likely to do better in school if they believe that they're...well, better.
Er, no, that was a popular idea in the 60's but recent science has shown that as students grow up with false praise (to make them think they are better) eventually (early/pre-teens) they realize they're being lied to with counterproductive results including low self esteem and social problems. In the long term it's best to be perfectly honest; by all means praise specific accomplishments at but don't pretend they're doing well when they're not.
---
Stop using tab characters in your code!
If you are interested in discussing morals, ethics and "feelings", you should have kept the company private
Unmitigated nonsense, and typical of bottom feeders who want to rationalize their unethical behavior.
Making a company public does not mystically give the company directors or shareholders a free pass to act unethically.
Ethical and other rules apply to people regardless of whether they are participating in a company or not. Companies are just individuals cooperating to achieve common goals and if those individuals are acting ethically then the company is acting ethically also.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Need not dive in to the expensive airplanes right away...
A good starter option is petrol powered Control line flying. Fast, fun, cheap, crashes usually aren't terminal and the child can design and fly the entire aircraft on their own. I was given a model petrol engine and propeller and did everything else myself. Good fun.
---
A neurotic is the man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. - Jerome Lawrence
People should be jailed for speaking anonymously?
Improve your reading comprehension. Not people. Companies and businesses.
Exactly which Godwin reference were you shooting for?
Emotive language intended to distract the reader from valid points.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
Bullshit.
(Sigh) Mostly irrelevant. Why didn't you read my peer post?
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
Your reactions might be appropriate if the intent was to deceive the ACCC or Australians citizens who might be swayed by the critique. But the article implies that Google's goal was to keep the criticism anonymous from eBay, out of concern for possible retaliation.
Possible retaliation by a competing commercial entity is not a valid reason. Retaliation is another name for competition, something we want to encourage in a free and open market.
I grant you, second order effects, where the company was not anonymous to the ACCC but wanted to be anonymous to the general public including ebay, while the people primarily evaluating the submissions were the ACCC and not the general public, things get murky. On the plus side allowing submissions anonymous to the general public is likely improve objectivity as people/companies otherwise unwilling to make submissions will do so. On the minus side transparency will be lacking (amongst other problems submissions may actively lie with little comeback) and submissions from the public responding will not be as fully informed.
I'm on the fence on that one; in this case ebay is close to a monopoly in their space, it's not a free and open market with multiple equal-powered players and so anonymity may've been appropriate.
So while your feelings about the relative merits of corporations and individuals appear to be very strong, they do not seem to be very relevant to this case. The anonymity was about the interactions between two corporations.
Partly. I was responding mainly to the GP's comment about posting, not the specific circumstances. As other posts have noted GP's comment is not directly relevant to the story and thus my post was not directly relevant either. However the excuse you've given (possible retaliation) in my opinion is not a valid excuse.
(And since you feel very strongly about the idea of disclosure, I will point out that Google is my employer. But my work for them is not connected to this situation, I know nothing about this interaction beyond what I've read in this article, and I'm speaking for myself, not for them.)
Thanks, I appreciate your disclosure. It doesn't belittle your argument and allows all readers to do a more informed evaluation. In the long term this benefits everyone, even yourself and google. On my part I have no connection with Google, EBay or the ACCC, just an interested citizen.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
The problem with Google's posting of an opinion, that many probably agree with, is that the use of ad-hominem is so prevalent and accepted that, these days, it is impossible to state something factual and verifiable, or reasonable and well thought out, without it being automatically colored by what people's perceptions of your motives might be.
That is a problem of education. Corporations are privileged legal entities and because of the need for legal transparency and accountability corporations should have no right of anonymity in public discourse at all.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
And I don't see this as astroturfing. Posting anonymously is different from posting under a fake identity.
Bullshit. It's posting in a way that's intended to deceive the reader into thinking the message is by an average citizen and not paid propaganda. It's fraud.
Astroturfers are lying scum and should be in jail.
Companies should have no right of anonymity and it's about time the law caught up with them. All communication by corporate entities should be clearly identified as such. Corporations have a privileged legal position and with that privilege comes responsibility. In particular, transparency and accountability.
Think it doesn't matter? It does, or they wouldn't do it.
Corporate tools will claim that readers will not give them a fair hearing if they post under the corporate name. Well hello, guess why. If corporations were trustworthy they wouldn't have a problem.
Others will claim that the message should be evaluated independent of the messenger. Self serving nonsense, context is very important in evaluating the veracity of a message.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
You can still have your name@company.com address through their mail servers
Until Google guarantees, in writing, that it will not data mine in any way, ad's or otherwise, or they provide a mechanism all users can use to opt out of all their marketing, gmail cannot be used by companies in most countries with data privacy laws.
Data privacy laws guarantee that private data, including email messages, that a company acquires cannot be used for any purpose other than the original business transaction without warning plus opt out. e.g. Item 2.1(c) in Australia'a national privacy principals. If google does not warn all potential users of this fact in the relevant countries before businesses sign up, and the companies concerned do not do the same, then they are engaged in illegal activity.
If google can't data mine that breaks their business model. Why are they free hosting businesses again?
---
Beware deceptive astroturfers.
Other than your steam username and password, there's no DRM, either.
"Other than having DRM there's no DRM either"
Sucker.
---
Don't be fooled, slashdot has many lying astroturfers fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. FUD too.
Don't pretend there is a grey area here, there just isn't.
Actually there is, and your fanaticism isn't helping.
---
Don't be fooled, slashdot has many lying astroturfers fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as third party opinion. FUD too.
**AA would be crazy to try to take on Google.
If it's crazy for the **AA it could be a very good idea for google. Google should ask the courts to give a declaratory judgement to reduce business uncertainty. The public would like them too.
At the very least they should be lobbying congress hard to get sane copyright laws and encouraging other companies to do so as well. Congress needs educating and Google has the resources and business need to do that. For too long the mafiaa has been getting free rein to create whatever type of law they like. They've completely lost in the court of public opinion but unfortunately they have been making "progress" in the legal system.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
Because people, you know, actually use MSN and other formats?
Yeap, and because they're using it today they'll be using tomorrow. And because they'll be using tomorrow they'll be using it the next day. In fact, they'll be using it for the rest of eternity. Particularly if M$ has any say in the matter.
Sometimes short term pain is worth it for long term gain.
---
Beware deceptive astroturfers.
Look, but don't touch.
The trick is to tap with the back of the finger i.e. the fingernail. No mark and can point as needed.
---
Beware deceptive astroturfers.
I'm using the same but have the anti-phishing features disabled. I have NoScript and several other addons installed. Zero freezes or crashes. The peer post is probably right.
I disable all automatic updates; I find they cause more problems than they solve. Ditto any daemons that do storage scans.
Many programmers need to get a clue that slowing down/stopping the user, like the wrong DNS lookup or a disk scan can do, to do some automatic operation that's probably going to be a noop anyway is a stupid thing to do.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
taking control of a large chunk of the botnet
This is not possible even with a honeypot if they can't find a code security hole and the botnet is using public key signed messages that can only originate from the botnet's trusted masters. Botnets are already using public key encryption.
---
Tax payer funded courses to teach proprietary software product use are an illegal company subsidy.
All they have to do is locate these vulnerabilities and sit on them.
Why would they need to do even that for the vast majority of systems? M$, Apple and IBM are all US companies under US legal jurisdiction. You can be damn sure the that the US government has secretly "asked" (=told) them to put a back doors in. It's just too cheap and too easy. They might even regard it as their "patriotic" duty, it's perfectly legal for the government to secretly force companies to do things for national security reasons, particularly with a perpetual war on, and it's not as if the current government cares much about legality anyway.
---
Are you living the American DRM?
Are you willing to pay a subscription fee for all content?
We do anyway. Advertisers are just very inefficient middlemen, who make us pay twice over, once in time/attention to watch/avoid the ad and second in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad. Who do you think pays marketers' salaries? You do.
Modern mass marketing badly distorts the free market by hiding the true costs from the consumer. Parasitic marketers encourage this by pretending advertising supported media is "free". Modern mass marketing also costs billions of man hours. It should be heavily limited. At a bare minimum it should be taxed at the average hourly wage rate for the number of man hours lost to the general community.
---
You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
Considering the available societal alternatives (China, Myanmar, and Cuba come to mind),
Idiotic false dichotomy pushed incessantly by marketing parasites. This one statement shows that you have an agenda. You're either a fraud or an idiot.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Cruise missiles launch, travel thousands of kilometres and "land" within square metres, and terrain follow with radar to boot, all completely automatically. Commercial flights can do the entire flight completely automatically.
Even back in the 60's they were proposing personal planes with computer-assisted controls, where the joystick specified plane orientation rather than rate-of-turn.
The technology is here now. It's more a question of price, political will and organization.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Until a self-driving car can have that level of awareness and make those sorts of predictions and act accordingly, I don't see computers doing any serious driving.
It's closer than you think. Check out No hands across america.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
other side wanted more balance
I agree, it should be more balanced.
We live in a democracy; one person, one vote.
Copyright affects everybody. The population of Canada is 33 million. The industry is only a tiny fraction of the total population. A representative panel should have maybe ten representatives from the general population for every one industry representative.
Note: Industry representatives should get no special treatment simply because they're rich or because they might be excessively affected by changes in copyright law; companies are just groups of people and should have no special privileges compared to the general population.
Yes, it's tyranny of the majority. Problem is, the only thing worse than that is tyranny of a minority.
---
Some people believe with great fervor preposterous things that just happen to coincide with their self-interest.
-- Judge Frank Easterbrook, Coleman v. CIR (7th Cir 1986) 791 F2d 68 at 69 [and quoted in several subsequent court decisions]
I know it will most likely result in a swift abrasive response but I implore your highness to really spend some time understanding how unit tests can help the really stupid coders (like me).
Ok, here's my abrasive response :-) : Unit tests, as tests, are an almost complete waste of time.
They do nothing more than get a hopefully independent test programmer to replicate exactly the same logic as part of the original program, typically in an incompatible, unstructured language not designed for large systems, and than compare to see if there's any inconsistency in the outputs of the two programs. All the examination, handling and verification of special cases the test programmer does should've been done by the original programmer anyway.
In other words unit testing is just a bastardized version of the explicit n-way programming sometimes done in the aerospace industry. It may be marginally useful but it's costly and those resources are probably better spent on the original program. Or from another point of view unit tests are just a form of bureaucratic oversight, useful to make sure the original programmer toes the line if they're likely to be slack, such as in verifying formal contract requirements. That doesn't work if the two programmers are one and the same.
I rarely unit test. But I do write programs that are paranoid at every step of the way about their inputs and outputs, including the handling of boundary conditions, parallel process coordination and system call status', I don't pretend that a one in a thousand chance is no chance (like many poor programmers do e.g. disk full or inconveniently timed interrupt, race condition or garbage collection; incidentally unit tests rarely cover those) and I do verify and do one-off tests of my code until I am sure I understand it. In a sense I put the units tests in the programs themselves. I don't waste time with pretty but incompatible test languages and frameworks because they add almost no value.
"Unit tests", the terminology, is a partial example of an all too common failing in the software profession, that of confusing terminology with reality. Just because something has a different name (unit test != program) doesn't mean it's a different object. Unfortunately because of the amorphous nature of software, with no well defined boundaries, it's far too easy to create and be confused by such terminology.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.