Of note: According to the FBI crime statistics, violent crime has been dropping steadily from 1993 through 2012. Crime, it seems, is not up at all - the media is just covering every single event with breathless desperation to make us think that there's some sort of massive, unheard-of epidemic going on. It's agenda driven, you can be sure.
I think the USA should be lauded for this kind of progress. There's more work to be done, of course - one shooting is always one too many - but we're definitely on the right trajectory.
You make it sound like the party was colluding against him in dark rooms filled with cigar smoke.
The way I see it, the Libertarian party wasn't being pragmatic at all. You see, there's significant portion of the Republican party that is very, very libertarian leaning. They're concerned about the constitution, the rule of law, and the size of government. When Ted Cruz suspended his campaign, these people had nowhere to go - until Austin Petersen started to court them.
Mr. Petersen started to win these people over in droves. The Blaze, the television network owned by Glenn Beck, even carried the last Libertarian party debate, with several re-run to ensure that many of the conservatives left in the cold could see what was going on, offering them a potential option.
The Libertarians had a chance - a once in a lifetime chance - to grow their party by leaps and bounds with Austin Petersen. He's bright, articulate, extremely dedicated to the rule of law, dedicated to the free exercise of religion, and not doing everything by executive fiat. But the Libertarians decided to puff-puff-pass on him and run Gary, again.
And then there's the whole strip naked on stage thing.
At this point I'm convinced that the Libertarian party isn't serious about electing a president. You cannot win elections when the chairman of your party is stripping naked on stage. It's embarrassing.
On the (R) side we have a crony capitalist progressive who wants to "open up libel laws" so that he can sue people he doesn't like, and on the (D) side we have a marxist criminal progressive who wants to shred the second amendment. What do the Libertarians offer in 2016? Dancing naked and marijuana.
I still think a third party is the answer, but the Libertarian party obviously is not it. They're not serious.
Takes your property without your consent. Prohibits you from leaving. Stops you from saying what you wish to say. Threatens your livelihood or your life. Throws you in jail without a trial. Forces you to interact with it against your will. Executes your entire family for a political view.
Yeah, man! *Puff!* Gotta attack the system, man! *Puff!* Like, dude, the system is keeping us all down, like, dude, it's all part of *Puff!* the military industrial complex, man! I'm so, like, sophisticated in my political views, *Puff!* like, dude, you know? It's all about the system and the man, man! This is strong shit! *Puff!*
The 60s called. It wants its pot smoking hippies back.
Sorry, Phineas, but someone with "sophisticated" political views doesn't talk about "The System." They talk about specific policies, they talk about history, they talk about context and cause and effect. I respect your abilities to compromise computer systems, but if all you have is "fight the system" then you are not ready, at all, to talk about politics.
People may want to hear what Glenn actually said on his radio show last Friday, and again for a little bit on Monday. It's really quite an interesting hour of radio; Glenn was slamming other "conservatives" at the meeting for suggesting affirmative-action-like policies, was very impressed with Mr. Zuckerberg's goals, and was in 100% full support of Facebook being allowed to do whatever it wanted - it is, after all, a private company.
I've had to learn some Ruby to support automated testing written in Ruby and Cucumber.
I hate Ruby.
Ruby feels like someone took Perl and intentionally made it even worse.
The syntax is awful. Pipes and hashes and at symbols everywhere. The documentation is not good. Many packages - I'm sorry, "gems," because we have to be cutesy - don't have documentation at all, not even in the source code. Typing? What's typing? Everything is an object! That's all the type you need, right? Curly braces? Pffft. Those are to passe. You need to close things with an 'end'. Methods with ? in the name? Sure, why not. It gets really fun when you're using that character as a method name and an operator.
I can forgive the anti-curly-brace thing, but everything else about the language feels like it was developed by an 8 year old watching bad hacker movies. So much language-specific crap that does utterly nothing to enhance readability or ease of development.
The day I never have to touch Ruby again will be a great day.
With the ability of technology to do these kinds of things, society is going to be changing. But which direction will it go?
Will we become a more repressed society, afraid to engage in activity that other people don't approve of? A society where we share as little as possible with others out of fear?
Or will society become "anything goes," where people accept that everyone has a past that may not be pretty, and people may engage in activities that we may not appreciate? After all, that camera could be pointed towards us - who are we to judge?
Wicca doesn't oppress women. Nor does neo-Paganism. Nor does Odinism. Nor does Shinto. Nor does Hinduism. Nor do the Native American traditions.
The pattern here seems to be, "Faiths that have emerged from the Middle East," really. And, of course, some areas of Africa, where the whole forced circumcision is a thing.
It used to work for me, most of the time anyway. It would randomly reset itself and I'd have to check it again. But, I've noticed that checking the checkbox no longer seems to do anything at all now. Oh well.
There's more than one issue, and I dare say that when it comes to the issues, H-1B visas are not at the forefront of American politics. Most people outside of the tech industry don't even know what the hell they are. Whatever differences Cruz and Fiorina have regarding H-1B visas really don't matter - it's not a significant part of the platform.
I also find that many applications don't offer anything above and beyond what a decent mobile website could offer, while giving the company a greater ability to snoop on and share my data.
I hate "Apps" with a passion. We have HTML5, the browsers are reasonably fast, and if companies would stop trying to shovel multi-meg sites down the pipe, it would be perfectly adequate for most use cases.
There does need to be some kind of reform when it comes to campaigns and financing and all of that, but it is very difficult to do. See, we have this thing called the First Amendment. Finding the right set of rules that respect the First Amendment, and yet helps prevent money from completely dominating an election cycle, is not an easy thing.
That said...
I would like to note that Bernie Sanders (note that I am not endorsing him) doesn't have a war chest even close to what Clinton has, and if it weren't for the super delegate system, he would be very close to winning the nomination. Or what about Trump (also not endorsing him)? Sure, he's rich, but he hasn't spent much money at all on ads or these kinds of organizations - he doesn't need to, he gets more free news coverage than anyone else, by far.
So it seems that money isn't everything if you have a popular message. Maybe we don't need these rules and laws which spawn these special organizations after all. Maybe all of these campaign finance laws are just there to stop the outsider types from having as good a chance.
Maybe.
It isn't an easy problem to solve and you'll never make everyone happy.
Awesome - thank you! I've seen the jumps in unemployment claims (very expected when there aren't many jobs), but hadn't seen the link to disability. But I suppose it's something we should expect... People willing to abuse one system are going to try to game the other.
This sounded interesting to me, so I decided to take a peek.
It doesn't look like there was a significant jump in claims from 2012 to 2013 - the number of claims actually decreased: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS...
There WAS a significant jump from 2008-2009 (about a 500k increase), but I don't see anything close to a 43% jump.
Can you show me where you got your data, or are we looking at completely different information (maybe claims to state aid instead of federal)?
Why do people always start their own foundation? It's a duplication of effort. You need to hire people to run things, need to do all the legal stuff, etc., etc. Why not take that money and give it to an existing organization? The pride of having YOUR NAME on the effort?
I was also accused of breaking replication at a prior job, and I was told that I should have known better.
Well, I did know better - and I wasn't the person who did it. But for some reason the manager had some kind of personal vendetta against me that I never understood, so when something broke, I was constantly the scapegoat.
What really pissed him off even more was when I proposed (usually very easy) solutions to the things that went wrong so that it wouldn't ever happen again. He really, really hated it when, one day, after a bit of Google-fu, I was able to replicate the functionality of his memory-leaked-so-bad-he-had-to-reboot-the-servers-every-night Windows services (it loaded RTF templates into MSWord and turned them into PDFs) with about 10 lines of bash and a few Linux utilities. That's when he really started gunning for me.
Maybe he thought I was trying to kick his sand castle down, but I really was just trying to make things better. What would you rather have? PDFs where each page of the PDF is an embedded image, creating multiple-megabyte documents, or a 35k PDF with actual text? Would you rather have a service that you have to reboot every night because of memory leaks and took half a minute to generate anything, or would you rather have a simple web service that took a second or two and never had to be restarted, thus always being available?
What I wrote was more reliable (less downtime, less money lost), faster (better use of hardware, saves money) and the documents were significantly smaller (far less network traffic and lots of money saved on storage). My reward was a one hour rant in the conference room with the blinds up so that everyone could see and hear what was going on.
It was good in a way, though. I learned a lot about office politics and sociopaths, I learned about the Cover Your Ass style of working, I struck a good work friendship with the CEO (Leonard, I'll miss you, you were a really nice guy) and other higher-ups, and I made sure to make myself as valuable as possible before dropping off my two weeks' notice. I never felt more free in my life than I did the day I quit.
I doubt he'll ever read this (I don't know if he ever reads Slashdot), but Ron M., thank you for being such an asshole. I'm in a much better place now. People respect me and the work that I do at my current company. It's not as interesting, but the people are nicer, the pay is better, and I don't have people screaming at me over things I never did or trying to punish me because I built something better.
And then there's the one that many of the old guys overlook: nobody knows it all, so everyone can learn from anyone, including the new kid on the team.
I've been doing software for about fifteen years professionally and I love having new people join my team. They bring a fresh perspective and are often the catalysts for change. They don't have the blessing and curse of institutional knowledge and in the course of asking questions, they always get to a point of, "Why do we do that? There's gotta be a better way..." Congratulations, they've just signed themselves up to improve something - and they usually do.
"We want to show there's inequality in safety in our industry,
Want to fix your safety inequality because males tend to be stronger and more aggressive? Start carrying a pistol. Will it solve all problems? No, but being armed can prevent a bad situation from escalating to a Very Bad situation.
When it comes to the people here on Slashdot, then yes, that might work. However the Common Person barely knows what encryption is, what the implications are, and is far more interested in "what free stuff can I get from the government" than keeping their communications safe. Because after all, they're not doing anything wrong, they have nothing to hide, what do they care? Besides, it helps the government get those darn terrorists and child pornographers.
The vast majority of America has fallen asleep and will remain asleep. They honestly don't give a crap as long as they have a roof, warm food, and Dancing With the Stars.
Ideals? Principals? Yeah, right... Good luck on that one.
Slashdot Mirror
This has nothing to do with PHP itself. The issue here is a failure to sanitize input and properly check file write-out locations.
It's typical amateur hour crap that you find with any language.
Both of which are ridiculous.
For your amusement, I present to you the Startup Generator.
Of note: According to the FBI crime statistics, violent crime has been dropping steadily from 1993 through 2012. Crime, it seems, is not up at all - the media is just covering every single event with breathless desperation to make us think that there's some sort of massive, unheard-of epidemic going on. It's agenda driven, you can be sure.
I think the USA should be lauded for this kind of progress. There's more work to be done, of course - one shooting is always one too many - but we're definitely on the right trajectory.
You make it sound like the party was colluding against him in dark rooms filled with cigar smoke.
The way I see it, the Libertarian party wasn't being pragmatic at all. You see, there's significant portion of the Republican party that is very, very libertarian leaning. They're concerned about the constitution, the rule of law, and the size of government. When Ted Cruz suspended his campaign, these people had nowhere to go - until Austin Petersen started to court them.
Mr. Petersen started to win these people over in droves. The Blaze, the television network owned by Glenn Beck, even carried the last Libertarian party debate, with several re-run to ensure that many of the conservatives left in the cold could see what was going on, offering them a potential option.
The Libertarians had a chance - a once in a lifetime chance - to grow their party by leaps and bounds with Austin Petersen. He's bright, articulate, extremely dedicated to the rule of law, dedicated to the free exercise of religion, and not doing everything by executive fiat. But the Libertarians decided to puff-puff-pass on him and run Gary, again.
And then there's the whole strip naked on stage thing.
At this point I'm convinced that the Libertarian party isn't serious about electing a president. You cannot win elections when the chairman of your party is stripping naked on stage. It's embarrassing.
On the (R) side we have a crony capitalist progressive who wants to "open up libel laws" so that he can sue people he doesn't like, and on the (D) side we have a marxist criminal progressive who wants to shred the second amendment. What do the Libertarians offer in 2016? Dancing naked and marijuana.
I still think a third party is the answer, but the Libertarian party obviously is not it. They're not serious.
Let me know the next time Facebook:
Takes your property without your consent.
Prohibits you from leaving.
Stops you from saying what you wish to say.
Threatens your livelihood or your life.
Throws you in jail without a trial.
Forces you to interact with it against your will.
Executes your entire family for a political view.
The 60s called. It wants its pot smoking hippies back.
Sorry, Phineas, but someone with "sophisticated" political views doesn't talk about "The System." They talk about specific policies, they talk about history, they talk about context and cause and effect. I respect your abilities to compromise computer systems, but if all you have is "fight the system" then you are not ready, at all, to talk about politics.
People may want to hear what Glenn actually said on his radio show last Friday, and again for a little bit on Monday. It's really quite an interesting hour of radio; Glenn was slamming other "conservatives" at the meeting for suggesting affirmative-action-like policies, was very impressed with Mr. Zuckerberg's goals, and was in 100% full support of Facebook being allowed to do whatever it wanted - it is, after all, a private company.
I've had to learn some Ruby to support automated testing written in Ruby and Cucumber.
I hate Ruby.
Ruby feels like someone took Perl and intentionally made it even worse.
The syntax is awful. Pipes and hashes and at symbols everywhere. The documentation is not good. Many packages - I'm sorry, "gems," because we have to be cutesy - don't have documentation at all, not even in the source code. Typing? What's typing? Everything is an object! That's all the type you need, right? Curly braces? Pffft. Those are to passe. You need to close things with an 'end'. Methods with ? in the name? Sure, why not. It gets really fun when you're using that character as a method name and an operator.
I can forgive the anti-curly-brace thing, but everything else about the language feels like it was developed by an 8 year old watching bad hacker movies. So much language-specific crap that does utterly nothing to enhance readability or ease of development.
The day I never have to touch Ruby again will be a great day.
Or, perhaps people should have a "don't be an asshole" course instead.
When you have the choice to be an asshole or a reasonable person, why be an asshole?
With the ability of technology to do these kinds of things, society is going to be changing. But which direction will it go?
Will we become a more repressed society, afraid to engage in activity that other people don't approve of? A society where we share as little as possible with others out of fear?
Or will society become "anything goes," where people accept that everyone has a past that may not be pretty, and people may engage in activities that we may not appreciate? After all, that camera could be pointed towards us - who are we to judge?
Wicca doesn't oppress women. Nor does neo-Paganism. Nor does Odinism. Nor does Shinto. Nor does Hinduism. Nor do the Native American traditions.
The pattern here seems to be, "Faiths that have emerged from the Middle East," really. And, of course, some areas of Africa, where the whole forced circumcision is a thing.
It used to work for me, most of the time anyway. It would randomly reset itself and I'd have to check it again. But, I've noticed that checking the checkbox no longer seems to do anything at all now. Oh well.
There's more than one issue, and I dare say that when it comes to the issues, H-1B visas are not at the forefront of American politics. Most people outside of the tech industry don't even know what the hell they are. Whatever differences Cruz and Fiorina have regarding H-1B visas really don't matter - it's not a significant part of the platform.
I also find that many applications don't offer anything above and beyond what a decent mobile website could offer, while giving the company a greater ability to snoop on and share my data.
I hate "Apps" with a passion. We have HTML5, the browsers are reasonably fast, and if companies would stop trying to shovel multi-meg sites down the pipe, it would be perfectly adequate for most use cases.
There does need to be some kind of reform when it comes to campaigns and financing and all of that, but it is very difficult to do. See, we have this thing called the First Amendment. Finding the right set of rules that respect the First Amendment, and yet helps prevent money from completely dominating an election cycle, is not an easy thing.
That said...
I would like to note that Bernie Sanders (note that I am not endorsing him) doesn't have a war chest even close to what Clinton has, and if it weren't for the super delegate system, he would be very close to winning the nomination. Or what about Trump (also not endorsing him)? Sure, he's rich, but he hasn't spent much money at all on ads or these kinds of organizations - he doesn't need to, he gets more free news coverage than anyone else, by far.
So it seems that money isn't everything if you have a popular message. Maybe we don't need these rules and laws which spawn these special organizations after all. Maybe all of these campaign finance laws are just there to stop the outsider types from having as good a chance.
Maybe.
It isn't an easy problem to solve and you'll never make everyone happy.
Awesome - thank you! I've seen the jumps in unemployment claims (very expected when there aren't many jobs), but hadn't seen the link to disability. But I suppose it's something we should expect... People willing to abuse one system are going to try to game the other.
This sounded interesting to me, so I decided to take a peek.
It doesn't look like there was a significant jump in claims from 2012 to 2013 - the number of claims actually decreased: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS...
There WAS a significant jump from 2008-2009 (about a 500k increase), but I don't see anything close to a 43% jump.
Can you show me where you got your data, or are we looking at completely different information (maybe claims to state aid instead of federal)?
Why do people always start their own foundation? It's a duplication of effort. You need to hire people to run things, need to do all the legal stuff, etc., etc. Why not take that money and give it to an existing organization? The pride of having YOUR NAME on the effort?
This is nothing new. Highly successful, rich business people have a long history of trying to affect society and government policy.
I was also accused of breaking replication at a prior job, and I was told that I should have known better.
Well, I did know better - and I wasn't the person who did it. But for some reason the manager had some kind of personal vendetta against me that I never understood, so when something broke, I was constantly the scapegoat.
What really pissed him off even more was when I proposed (usually very easy) solutions to the things that went wrong so that it wouldn't ever happen again. He really, really hated it when, one day, after a bit of Google-fu, I was able to replicate the functionality of his memory-leaked-so-bad-he-had-to-reboot-the-servers-every-night Windows services (it loaded RTF templates into MSWord and turned them into PDFs) with about 10 lines of bash and a few Linux utilities. That's when he really started gunning for me.
Maybe he thought I was trying to kick his sand castle down, but I really was just trying to make things better. What would you rather have? PDFs where each page of the PDF is an embedded image, creating multiple-megabyte documents, or a 35k PDF with actual text? Would you rather have a service that you have to reboot every night because of memory leaks and took half a minute to generate anything, or would you rather have a simple web service that took a second or two and never had to be restarted, thus always being available?
What I wrote was more reliable (less downtime, less money lost), faster (better use of hardware, saves money) and the documents were significantly smaller (far less network traffic and lots of money saved on storage). My reward was a one hour rant in the conference room with the blinds up so that everyone could see and hear what was going on.
It was good in a way, though. I learned a lot about office politics and sociopaths, I learned about the Cover Your Ass style of working, I struck a good work friendship with the CEO (Leonard, I'll miss you, you were a really nice guy) and other higher-ups, and I made sure to make myself as valuable as possible before dropping off my two weeks' notice. I never felt more free in my life than I did the day I quit.
I doubt he'll ever read this (I don't know if he ever reads Slashdot), but Ron M., thank you for being such an asshole. I'm in a much better place now. People respect me and the work that I do at my current company. It's not as interesting, but the people are nicer, the pay is better, and I don't have people screaming at me over things I never did or trying to punish me because I built something better.
I've been doing software for about fifteen years professionally and I love having new people join my team. They bring a fresh perspective and are often the catalysts for change. They don't have the blessing and curse of institutional knowledge and in the course of asking questions, they always get to a point of, "Why do we do that? There's gotta be a better way..." Congratulations, they've just signed themselves up to improve something - and they usually do.
Want to fix your safety inequality because males tend to be stronger and more aggressive? Start carrying a pistol. Will it solve all problems? No, but being armed can prevent a bad situation from escalating to a Very Bad situation.
When people are getting arrested for posts on Twitter and Facebook, then I am quite sure that the freedom of speech in Europe is gone.
When it comes to the people here on Slashdot, then yes, that might work. However the Common Person barely knows what encryption is, what the implications are, and is far more interested in "what free stuff can I get from the government" than keeping their communications safe. Because after all, they're not doing anything wrong, they have nothing to hide, what do they care? Besides, it helps the government get those darn terrorists and child pornographers.
The vast majority of America has fallen asleep and will remain asleep. They honestly don't give a crap as long as they have a roof, warm food, and Dancing With the Stars.
Ideals? Principals? Yeah, right... Good luck on that one.