There was a famous case where a man was found with a LOT
I think I remember the case you're referring to, and if it's the same case, the man in question was only let go because the law technically wasn't in effect when he was arrested (like, the law went into effect on Tuesday, and the Canadian post office busted him on Monday). The prosecutor was quoted as saying "He sure got lucky, if we'd gotten him a day later, he'd be rotting in jail." There was a case here in the US (Christopher Handley, look it up), where somebody actually did go to jail for possession of same - and I know Canada is way less reasonable than the US on this topic.
Hm - I remember when CP laws started to go overboard, seeing people like the OP say something like, "You know, as vague as these laws are, someday, some teenage girl is going to take a picture of herself and post it on the internet and get arrested for peddling CP." People like you said, "Teenage girls are not the target of the law and you know it. Don't blow this up into something more than it is." Yet here we are in 2009, and teenagers seem to get in trouble for pictures on their phones every week...
It's not so much that you're an awful programmer, it's just that we're better. Fortunately for you, we're pretty happy with the jobs we have right now.
Way to be a total snob while complaining about snobs. Nobody thinks a 4-year-degree is superior to 30 years of experience. Pretty much everybody thinks that a 4-year-degree and 30 years of experience is superior to no degree and 30 years of experience.
In fact, I recently attended a presentation given by an FBI special agent
whose primary job involved investigating CP. He said that was pretty much exactly the
case. I can't remember his exact words, but they were pretty close to: "so what makes a picture illegal?
It has to be 'lascivious'. What makes a picture 'lascivious'? Is a picture
of my child in a tub 'lascivious'? Well, no, but if somebody downloads that picture
for his own gratification, it becomes 'lascivious'". (He pronounced it "lashivus", by
the way, but I knew what he meant).
In other words, the standard is, "You know. Whatever the hell."
And never forget - 90% of the posters on the especially-permissive Slashdot (which means 99% of the rest of the world), think "good riddance, justice was served."
So, they never asked a single professional programmer?
Of course not! Remember, CASE (like every other "silver bullet" technology) replaces programmers. So, there's no point in asking programmers what they think - they'll just badmouth it because they're terrified of being replaced. That's bullet point one of any technology cure-all. It's a "programmer killer"... so there's no reason to involve them in the decision making process.
Almost - the salesman has to say "This product will solve all your problems - and replace all of your expensive programmers!" That way, when a programmer says, "You know, this sounds like a snake oil solution to me..." the salesman confidentially says, "he's just scared because he's just been made obsolete" (wink wink nudge nudge).
I'm all for encryption becoming the norm.
For legitimate law enforcement needs, search warrants and traffic analysis are not impeded.
Umm... yeah, actually I think they are - if Big Content can't snoop on your communications, neither can Big Brother (whether you think this is good or bad is another matter entirely).
Actually, what they're talking about isn't widespread encryption (that's already in place, e.g. SSL), but widespread anonymity. P2P over SSL is no more secure from a record label sniffer than P2P over cleartext - they just attack the P2P network (that's what they do today - they're not actually doing network monitoring). What the British are afraid of is widespread anonymity (like Freenet, for example) - and with that, neither law enforcement nor Geffen records can see what you're downloading or uploading.
That said, they have nothing to worry about. Widespread anonymity will never become the norm. Any truly censorship-resistant scheme, whatever it may be, will be resistant against ALL censorship, not just selective censorship. So if you believe that.mp3's and scientology documents should not be censored, but porn should, you're out of luck if you want a technical solution. And the (sad, IMHO) fact is that most people support censorship of at least some things and will never buy into a system that makes this impossible.
Well, if their goal was to change world politics by pissing off Americans who
are not left-wing fanatical loons, they did a good job of that. So I guess you're
right; they are going to change world politics for the better. They're helping
to mobilize us "evil neocons" for 2012.
unless you actually have, right NOW, two or more derived classes, DON'T MAKE A BASE CLASS!
Amen, brother. I actually (try to) take this a step further and say - unless I can write a function that can operate on the base class, without EVER downcasting, don't make a base class.
the Duct Tape Programmer writes the worst kind of spaghetti code in the world.
That may be true... although personally, I find that when I'm really cursing some other programmer's name and wishing disease and misfortune upon him and his family, it's the work of a "ten-levels-of-inheritance deep wrappers around wrappers that wrap wrappers that generate code on the fly" overengineerer, rather than a spaghetti coder. At least with spaghetti coding, I can walk through it mentally and figure out what's going on (although it may take a while) - with "clever" code, I can't make heads or tails of it without a debugger.
Well, in my defense, I'm too dumb to figure out *how* to use bittorrent, so I don't use it to download anything, legal or illegal. But I'm still rooting for them.
But instead of the clear pro-warez propaganda of all of the Pirate Parties, they should go more for net neutrality, freedom of speech and making people understand why they should be valued and what can happen if those rights are taken away.
"Protecting ourselves with laws is not enough. We must also protect ourselves with mathematics." - Bruce Schneier
employers seem to be under the impression that hiring a foreigner is a hassle. This would not apply to foreigners that get any other kind of visas. Also, the F-1 or J-1 visas do not last forever...Still, to actually get the H-1 visa _is_ a hassle
So... it's like cocaine, then? "The first taste is free..."
Why don't you Americans DO something about this obviously far-from-ideal situation??
Because only a tiny sliver of us recognize this as a far-from-ideal situation. Somebody's running around slashdot with the sig "The first mistake you can make as a libertarian is believing that you represent the people". He's dead-on. Most Americans want to hand the government limitless power in exchange for protecting their precious children from all the big, bad monsters hiding in the bushes just waiting to spring on them. In fact, most of them don't even realize their mistake when they're the ones who's lives are destroyed.
I was listening to the radio yesterday and they were talking about the subject of teenage girls "texting" naked pictures of themselves to teenage boys and a caller called in and pointed out, "and these poor boys will go to jail for having these pictures." Nobody seemed to consider the fact that maybe the law itself was unreasonable, or even seem to be able to comprehend the very possibility. The government is all-knowing, all-powerful, always right and always trustworthy.
Slashdot Mirror
Whew!
I think I remember the case you're referring to, and if it's the same case, the man in question was only let go because the law technically wasn't in effect when he was arrested (like, the law went into effect on Tuesday, and the Canadian post office busted him on Monday). The prosecutor was quoted as saying "He sure got lucky, if we'd gotten him a day later, he'd be rotting in jail." There was a case here in the US (Christopher Handley, look it up), where somebody actually did go to jail for possession of same - and I know Canada is way less reasonable than the US on this topic.
Hm - I remember when CP laws started to go overboard, seeing people like the OP say something like, "You know, as vague as these laws are, someday, some teenage girl is going to take a picture of herself and post it on the internet and get arrested for peddling CP." People like you said, "Teenage girls are not the target of the law and you know it. Don't blow this up into something more than it is." Yet here we are in 2009, and teenagers seem to get in trouble for pictures on their phones every week...
Actually, the OP was pointing that out in a funny, subtle way. Kryptonian Jor-El apparently had to come along and explain the joke.
So let me get this straight... you justify your superiority complex based on the fact that you can't do something that I can?
It's not so much that you're an awful programmer, it's just that we're better. Fortunately for you, we're pretty happy with the jobs we have right now.
FYI - putting "utter" before "bullshit" doesn't make it stronger, it just makes you pretentious.
Way to be a total snob while complaining about snobs. Nobody thinks a 4-year-degree is superior to 30 years of experience. Pretty much everybody thinks that a 4-year-degree and 30 years of experience is superior to no degree and 30 years of experience.
Born in Michigan, Master's degree (computer science) from the University of Texas. Amazed? I get that a lot, actually.
In fact, I recently attended a presentation given by an FBI special agent whose primary job involved investigating CP. He said that was pretty much exactly the case. I can't remember his exact words, but they were pretty close to: "so what makes a picture illegal? It has to be 'lascivious'. What makes a picture 'lascivious'? Is a picture of my child in a tub 'lascivious'? Well, no, but if somebody downloads that picture for his own gratification, it becomes 'lascivious'". (He pronounced it "lashivus", by the way, but I knew what he meant).
In other words, the standard is, "You know. Whatever the hell."
And never forget - 90% of the posters on the especially-permissive Slashdot (which means 99% of the rest of the world), think "good riddance, justice was served."
Of course not! Remember, CASE (like every other "silver bullet" technology) replaces programmers. So, there's no point in asking programmers what they think - they'll just badmouth it because they're terrified of being replaced. That's bullet point one of any technology cure-all. It's a "programmer killer"... so there's no reason to involve them in the decision making process.
Almost - the salesman has to say "This product will solve all your problems - and replace all of your expensive programmers!" That way, when a programmer says, "You know, this sounds like a snake oil solution to me..." the salesman confidentially says, "he's just scared because he's just been made obsolete" (wink wink nudge nudge).
Well, I wish I could share your optimism - here's hoping that you're right and I'm wrong.
Umm... yeah, actually I think they are - if Big Content can't snoop on your communications, neither can Big Brother (whether you think this is good or bad is another matter entirely).
Actually, what they're talking about isn't widespread encryption (that's already in place, e.g. SSL), but widespread anonymity. P2P over SSL is no more secure from a record label sniffer than P2P over cleartext - they just attack the P2P network (that's what they do today - they're not actually doing network monitoring). What the British are afraid of is widespread anonymity (like Freenet, for example) - and with that, neither law enforcement nor Geffen records can see what you're downloading or uploading.
That said, they have nothing to worry about. Widespread anonymity will never become the norm. Any truly censorship-resistant scheme, whatever it may be, will be resistant against ALL censorship, not just selective censorship. So if you believe that .mp3's and scientology documents should not be censored, but porn should, you're out of luck if you want a technical solution. And the (sad, IMHO) fact is that most people support censorship of at least some things and will never buy into a system that makes this impossible.
Yeah! He was in the senate for, what... three whole years?
Well, if their goal was to change world politics by pissing off Americans who are not left-wing fanatical loons, they did a good job of that. So I guess you're right; they are going to change world politics for the better. They're helping to mobilize us "evil neocons" for 2012.
Amen, brother. I actually (try to) take this a step further and say - unless I can write a function that can operate on the base class, without EVER downcasting, don't make a base class.
That may be true... although personally, I find that when I'm really cursing some other programmer's name and wishing disease and misfortune upon him and his family, it's the work of a "ten-levels-of-inheritance deep wrappers around wrappers that wrap wrappers that generate code on the fly" overengineerer, rather than a spaghetti coder. At least with spaghetti coding, I can walk through it mentally and figure out what's going on (although it may take a while) - with "clever" code, I can't make heads or tails of it without a debugger.
Well, in my defense, I'm too dumb to figure out *how* to use bittorrent, so I don't use it to download anything, legal or illegal. But I'm still rooting for them.
"Protecting ourselves with laws is not enough. We must also protect ourselves with mathematics." - Bruce Schneier
So... it's like cocaine, then? "The first taste is free..."
Well, now, it's the dam workers who are supposed to be building the dam, after all.
Because only a tiny sliver of us recognize this as a far-from-ideal situation. Somebody's running around slashdot with the sig "The first mistake you can make as a libertarian is believing that you represent the people". He's dead-on. Most Americans want to hand the government limitless power in exchange for protecting their precious children from all the big, bad monsters hiding in the bushes just waiting to spring on them. In fact, most of them don't even realize their mistake when they're the ones who's lives are destroyed.
I was listening to the radio yesterday and they were talking about the subject of teenage girls "texting" naked pictures of themselves to teenage boys and a caller called in and pointed out, "and these poor boys will go to jail for having these pictures." Nobody seemed to consider the fact that maybe the law itself was unreasonable, or even seem to be able to comprehend the very possibility. The government is all-knowing, all-powerful, always right and always trustworthy.
Hey, that's going to my excuse if I ever get caught, too!