Ha? At 6 I was already politically influenced during the Nicaraguan civil war of the 60's and 70's. Totalitarian systems, specially under Communism and Nazism knew the power of political indoctrination of kindergarten kids and first graders.
Another concrete example from my country was after the Sandinista take-over. A common tactic for politically-blessed kindergarten/first grade teachers of the time was to do the following every so often at the start of a class:
Teacher: Ok kids, do you believe in God?
Kids: Yeaahhhh!
Teacher: Do you want candy?
Kids: Yeaaaah!
Teacher: Why don't we pray God for a candy?
Kids would close eyes and pray for a candy
Teacher: Did God give you candy?
Kids: No.
Teacher: Why don't you ask me for candy?
Kids: Teacher, can we have candy????
At that point, the so-called teacher would proceed to give candy followed by an explanation that God was the creation of the oppressive classes, and how the revolution takes care of the proletariat, that they should report their parents if they were counter revolutionaries, that counter revolutionary are dogs and not people (yeah, they'd teach that to 5-6 year old kids), that the Americans were evil and that they would come to kill you if you don't help the revolution (at this point kids have their eyes open wide and you have to ask yourself what kind of animal would say such things to a little kid)... and shit like that... every fucking day of class...
... and sometimes they would see someone is no longer in the neighborhood because he was taken away for being a counter revolutionary with party-blessed graffiti vandalizing the home of such a person.
Say "ha" as you please. You will neither understand the impact these things can have on 5-6 year old kids nor appreciate their ability to capture, understand and reason under such repressive regimes if you have never experienced it.
Perhaps you didn't read what I wrote, Mr. Coward. The performance of Ruby 1.9 is what is improved. I am not referring to JRuby, or Rails, or Java, or whatever else you imagined. I really was talking about the latest version of Ruby, the programming language.
Reading comprehension is important.
Dude, you forgot that this is/. - we don't need reading comprehension, we have straw man frameworks and patterns and meta-patterns for that!!
Re:These techniques are horrid for maintainability
on
Metaprogramming Ruby
·
· Score: 1
So can you give a example of an extreme case where metaprogramming (i.e. dynamically generating code) has an advantage over just using a good old-fashioned precompiled abstraction? (Does it really only work in extreme cases?)
Meta-programming can help when creating frameworks and platforms for a generalized audience (.ie. Rails WRT developers that want to develop apps following a specific architectural pattern). The variables of generality can be captured in *meta-patterns* (I just puked a little by typing that clique - useful, but still a clique).
Meta-programming should not be used for application-specific code where more traditional approaches should suffice.
In other words, if your team is developing a platform or a framework, then meta-programming is ok (perhaps necessary.)
For developing business-specific code, application-specific functionality, then yeah, I'd agree with the anonymous poster above in that I would not want them to be meta-hacking away instead of using less esoteric means, not unless it is something very specific and required (.ie. a meta-programming artifact expected by the underlying framework.)
The simple solution is to just make your kids go to bed earlier. The same irresponsible parents that let their high schoolers stay up too late will likely let them stay up even later after the school schedule is adjusted. The study has some merit, but I doubt that the trends for this school will hold. I suspect the drop in absenteeism is only temporary, and that the rate will go back up in a few short years.
Uh, no. There are well documented physical shifts in teenagers whereby their bodies' sleep cycles shift forward when they hit their teens and back (to normal adult sleep cycles) when they hit their 20's. Any normal teenager will not be able to sleep up until 11 or something like that. They are physically incapable of.
I agree that many parents don't know how to raise their teen kids, but here you are in the wrong. Do yourself a favor and read a bit about human physical development;)
Teens starting school later? Who's going to supervise the teen until they get to school? Won't somebody think of the parents?
Unless you live in a very bad area (rundown neighborhoods, gangs, drugs, etc.), if you raise your kids properly, they won't need 24/7 supervision when they become teenagers.
Actually, even in bad neighborhoods, it is possible to raise good kids that don't require constant supervision. There are shantytowns all over the world teeming with teens that are unsupervised, either at school or working for a living... and they don't get in trouble.
Obviously, I don't mean to say that it is easy under such conditions, nor desirable. And there are situations (.ie. single parents) where it is harder to raise a kid. But it sort of blows a hole into applying the "kidz must can haz teh supervis3r" argument to the general case.
With all things being equal and with teens not having to work for a living, they should get enough sleep. And they do need it, physically.
You might presume to speak for overweight Americans (the larger world), but the world at large most assuredly has not appointed you its spokesperson.
Nice generalization. And you couldn't hope for a better opportunity to spout it out, no? How long were you holding that one inside of you.
When you have to resort to almost-racist generalizations to defend a point of view, that's an indication you didn't have a valid point of view to begin with.
No matter how much people can stretch the definition of freedom of religion, this dude is the fucking dumbest dork I've seen/heard of in a long time. Goddamit, it's even painful to think of this type of dorkiness.
Does the resulting CO2 from burning methane contribute less to greenhouse effect then the pure methane?
Yep. Burning methane in the presence of water releases CO2 and water, and thus the amount of CO2 released from burning a ton of methane is less than a ton of CO2. And, despite the fact that methane breaks down faster than CO2, it seems that one ton of methane can be up to 33 times more a contributing factor on warming than a ton of CO2.
They were jobless and had apparently little to look forward to.
What about looking forward to take care of their baby no matter what? Jesus fucking Christ, there are people out the in Africa and Latin America that virtually find their food in garbage cans and still look forward to take care of their children no matter what. And these two e-tards that were jobless in one of the most affluent developed countries couldn't cope with being unemployed and couldn't look forward to take care of their child?
I think the quote that gets me is: " It's an interesting look back at a time when the Internet was still a novelty and not yet a necessity."
Don't get me wrong, I tend to go into withdrawls if my connections go down for an extended period of time, but, the internet being a necessity? I dunno. There are plenty of people out there that live and breathe and make money with no connection or need to the internet whatsoever. I don't think it is truly a necessity like shelter and food.
While *I* would not want to live without it, people still can pretty easily these days.
Something does not need to be a vital necessity (like shelter and food) for it to be a necessity. We could take its counter-argument to the limit and argue then that electricity is not a necessity.
We have to look at necessities from the point of view of the infrastructure and dependencies (social, economical) that they create (or are the base for their day-to-day operations.) When a commodity reaches a point of usage such that a lack of it would cause great inconvenience or financial loss, then it becomes a necessity.
For example, a large number of people are now using the internet for Job searching and continuing education. This is specially true for IT-related folks that out of work (or for many folks that are unemployed if we reasonably generalize the truth of the situation.) A large section of grad students (specially working grad students) depend on the internet for course delivery. Any disruption to that service will cause in severe consequences. Loss of class time, or even loss of course for the later examples (losses with a clear financial impact). For the former, it could result in a drastic deterioration of one's already precarious financial situation.
Entire industries (for good or bad) utilize the internet for work and collaboration. Our ability to solve edge-case problems in a fast fashion is in large part proportional to having access to google and the like. We have an entire infrastructure of commerce that people depend on in their daily lives.
The internet then is now a financial and infrastructure necessity, just like public transportation systems, public infrastructure and banking are. None of these are vital necessities like food or shelter, but they still remain necessities of a different magnitude. So is the internet now.
So If I want to decorate my dead lawn with old refrigerators and non-working cars your okay with that?
No because that type of metal garbage does constitute a danger to your neighbors.
I see where both of you are going with your arguments. Your argument, which is valid, is that people should not do things that will reasonable can cause a depreciation of others people properties. This I could agree.
But the problem with this country is that this argument is stretched to the point that you no longer have a right to do things that should be reasonable to do with your own property (for example, taking all the grass out and replacing it with wood chips.) Or painting your house different, or putting an antenna, or hanging an old tire, painted in pink, off a tree branch to make it as a swing for your kids... in your own freaking backyard.
Try to open up a restaurant in your own house (which I saw a lot in Tokyo, a very urbane and clean city), even if you have the wherewithal and engineering/hygienic/legal know-hows and you'll get your ass handed because we have this notion of non-commercial zones (one of the main culprits of urban sprawl.) Or not even a restaurant, but, say, a sign that says you are a lawyer or a public notary or something, good luck with that. Try hanging your clothes to dry in your backyard - the sensible, eco-friendly thing to do, and you'll get labeled a lot of non-glamorous (and sometimes near-racist) epitaphs.
So you have one sensible ideal (don't do things in your house that will have a negative impact in your neighbor's properties) getting extended into stupid constrains on your own property, even to the detriment to the environment and just plain common sense.
Slogans, arrogance, classicism and incompetent bureaucracy trumps reason.
So if a bug pops up in the underlying tool and it causes your car to careen off a fucking cliff, do those lines of code not count because they are hidden by abstraction?
Only if the abstraction is sufficiently buggy to be a cause of concern when estimating risk. Most of the abstractions used by these type of industries are solid, with bugs coming more often than not from faulty usage of those abstractions. This line of argument only makes sense if the probability of a serious bug occurs in the presence of a bug in the underlying abstractions.
But on another topic, that little quip at the end basically calling me retarded, I really hate that shit here. Don't even pretend to talk down to me, I'm well versed in embedded programming
Sure.
and yes total count includes ALL code, not just code you wrote and then magically pushed over the fence to a black box.. Why? Because that code can break too.
With what probability? What kind of numbers are we talking about here?
Do you think it matters to the end user if you wrote the code or a tool wrote it for you?
I would have expected an argument better than one of the "think-of-the-children", appeal-to-emotion type.
You are still liable for the end result correct?
Only liable to YOUR code, OR if there was sufficient evidence of a bug in an underlying 3rd-party abstraction and only if you knew about it, and only if you know (or there was sufficient reasons for you to know) that such a bug would be a liability.
Not accepting the patch just because the software being patch had bugs (and thus making you wonder if the patch also has bugs) sounds more like a political statement on your doubt of Toyota's software quality than a rational risk management decision.
It's like not wanting to install a security patch to cover a security hole just because there was a security hole that shouldn't have been in the first place (there was an error before, there must be an error in the patch). No sane sysadmin would operate that way. So why would you, with your car and your life?
It's still 100M lines of code friend, regardless of who or what wrote it.
When you write code and estimate its LOC size, do you also include the LOCs of the trusted libraries you use to build your apps? If you do a printf("%u\n",1), do you count this as one LOC or do you also count the LOCs in printf? When you use a GNU compiler, do you also count the thousands LOCs generated by it in assembler?
Does it really not matter *who/what* wrote it? Pretty myopictardic and useless way of software estimation if you ask me.
Sounds like a problem with sqlite, not SQL in general.
So why can sql code ever be injected on other platforms?
Instead of execute_command("create table X")
I want to see create_table("X")
In a well-defined system, you see create_table("X") in the application layer that gets translated in to the SQL statement "CREATE TABLE X" (which in the sqllite API tha'ts what happen but in a more procedural manner.).
In fact, using your example, proper usage of the sqllite API would entail having an application-specific API (be it procedural or object-oriented), with an application-specific block of code like (I'll use some c-like pseudocode to illustrate):
/* application-specific api */
int createTableThingie()
{
/* call to low-level sqllite api, which gets translated to */ /* the SQL statement "CREATE TABLE THINGIE..." which might fail */ /* in other databases like Oracle if there were other security policies */ /* in place at the db physical server, the db server itself, at the db schema */ /* or at the db table level. Capisce? */
create_table("THINGIE");
return someErrno;
}
Same principles would apply whether you are accessing a DB (be it with SQL or a low-level API). Your gripe about sqllite and SQL is ignorant at best, convoluting defensive programming and plain common sense with OO methodology.
Why would you expect SQL or the sqllite API to provide application-specific security mechanisms. That's your job as an application developer to implement application-specific security to protect resources at lower layers.
Separation of concerns. Does that ring a bell? Since you mentioned OO languages, I would have imagine that you'd realize you could create an app-specific procedural layer in C (or whatever language you are using to access the raw sqllite api), with encapsulation, information hiding and all that good stuff that preceded the arrival of OO languages and stuff...
I have been doing a bit of work with sqlite lately and I am surprised to find that the C api is basically a way to pass in strings containing SQL commands. Now even in C I could imagine an API which allows you to build up queries to do everything SQL does without using commands in text strings.
So your technical indictment of SQL is based on your initial bit of work with sqllite?
And what's wrong with passing SQL command/statements via the API. That's what it's supposed to do. SQL is not just a query language, it's a control language. This is like indicting a *nix shell for letting you do "rm -rf/".
The problem is not that SQL does what it's supposed to do - you tell it to modify, it will; you tell it to delete; it will. The problem is the programmer who doesn't filter the input and allow arbitrary execution of SQL statements. The problem is the DBA who doesn't forbid execution of raw SQL statements in production. The problem is not programming defensively.
It's not fucking rocket science.
With an OO language it should be dead easy.
How naive. I'm not sure you actually know what object-orientation is, what is for and what it does and does not.
> Still upsets me how many developers are anti Stored Procedures
Using stored procedures is harder than just creating the SQL query.
You need to know even more about the DB.
Even it's harder if you have to get the DB guy to do stuff for you.
Yes you can run your own DB in development, but in the production environment, you may depend someone else (DBA) to set up all those stored procedures so that stuff works.
I've never had that problem... that is, having a problem depending on a dba to implement stored procedures at the developer's behalf. Don't know how things are elsewhere, but most of my work was with JEE+Oracle with DBAS strictly separated from developers by well-established procedures (or by strict procedures on what to put on the db when developers were the same as dbas.)
SQL statements would be tested in a development db and then converted into stored procedures. That is, code never executed anything via jdbc that was not a stored procedure. Even if it was a single SELECT COUNT(*) FROM DUAL just for kicks, that'd go into a stored procedure.
On the systest database, it was set up so that the db account used by the application could not execute anything but stored procedures. Here, developers still had the ability to create the store procedures and refine the DDL scripts that creates them. Scripts for rollbacks were created as well. Installations and rollbacks would be rehearsed until we were satisfied with them.
Come time to deployment in production, we would hand over to the DBAs the DDL scripts with instructions on how to run them (and with instructions and DDL scripts for rolling back.) They'd flip their switches, we'd flip ours and voila. Shit is running fine.
But I've also worked with places where working like that is just impossible. Either DBAs being "don't touch my db!" prima dones and developers being "I need full access!!" whores. Very few places have DBA and development teams that can work professionally in tandem.
You spent your entire adult life working for a company,
Age 49 is "your entire adult life"? Maybe in 1870.
Exactly. Entire adult life my ass. My father had to "re-invent" himself several times, even in his mid 50s, working his hands to the bone until he was in his mid 64. No lavish pension plans... which is ok since most people don't have it anyways... not to mention he never had health insurance... which is also very typical. His pension (off his social sec.) is very small, not enough to live in the US, but comfortable now that he retired back to our country of origin. Now, here: he's lucky. Not that many US citizens (naturalized like him or native-born) have that chance to retire overseas and have to makes ends meet with a meager pension or work past their 60s.
Now, I'm not saying this to gain pity for my father or to people in his situation, but to give a big fuck-you to whoever thinks working in the same company for someone of age 49 is "working your entire adult life". Man is still in his prime. And I wish him good luck in getting a similar job with reasonable benefits close home.
But let's not pretend that it is reasonable to retire at 49, with the way the economy has been, with the way the economy will be in years to come. He should work until he's 60, like almost everybody else does.
This is the same problem faced by businesses who need a 'software' person. Without having a good software person in the company already, how can they tell the difference between candidates? They can't.
If you're an organization looking to hire your first expert or two, you do it the old-fashioned
way. You consider their degree and the institution that granted it. You consider their work experience. And perhaps you rely on a referral from a trusted contact who knows more about the field than you do.
If you're looking for some fine-grained specialization in a particular technology, there are a number of certification programs out there. If you're looking for broader skills sets, there are both BS and MS programs available in disciplines such as Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Software Engineering. What does a licensing regime get you that certificates and degree programs do not?
There should be no problem hiring Electrical and Computer Engineers (those that are licensed to be engineers.) The problem is with BS and MS graduates in Computer Science and Software Engineering. Just look around (specially in Enterprise Computing) and you'll find plenty of those who can't code for shit, much less do work analytical/forensic work. This is specially true with those graduating from "Java" universities.
There is no commonly accepted curriculum for CS/SE studies, requirements have been watered down and there are no commonly accepted certificate programs in CS/SE (beyond the few like those provided by SEI.) 15-20 years ago, a person having a BS degree in CS was expected to have done some serious work in school (multiple programming languages and a fair share of systems programming.)
Now, take a random BS graduate with a few years of working experience and chances are he/she only has a superficial knowledge of Java/.NET and web services (God forbid do any type of systems programming work/debugging.)
The only way a company or organization like the NHTSA has for hiring qualified software engineers and CS graduates (with a good chance of them knowing what they should know) is to go the old fashion way (as you said). A degree and a few certificates (which is where I disagree with you), and on top of that several years of work in systems programming or embedded systems, preferably having worked a substantial amount of time with an engineering company.
Degrees and certs alone no longer mean much. A rigorous licensing regime, or at least an standardized passing exam required for graduation (which would guarantee those who graduate have what it takes to work in both systems and application programming of any kind), that's what is needed.
All types of real engineering disciplines have examination exams and licensing regimes. They are bound ethically and legally to know their stuff. They have a fiduciary obligation to be real engineers.
We in the software industry, we have no means by which to enforce these fiduciary, legal and ethical obligations or standards of quality.
They "earn" the right to call themselves engineers. We in the software industry, we have not earn that right. Anyone can program himself to be a software engineer. Engineering in the context of software, it is a diluted term that does not mean anything, nor is a reliable indicator of verifiable credentials.
A true engineering license, that is a reliable indicator. Not an infallible one and not one without its problems, but it is certainly a much better one that the shit we have in the software industry.
Hmmm, depends on what your goals are as you pursue your studies. The best thing (usually) is to write code that is sufficiently large and complex. However, that usually only happens at work or when taking classes beyond the 3000-level (assuming a good school and instructors.)
For n your case (studying part-time while working on a non-programming job), there are a few things I would recommend you to pursue (which I would recommend to any full-time or part-time student.). These I recommend based on my Java experience (10 years out of 15 in development/IT.)
Learn C
It is very hard to be an efficient Java developer without having a good understanding of explicit resource allocation management, and concepts such as passing by value and passing by reference.
In Java the garbage collector does memory allocation for you, but without a good understanding of it and an object's lifecycle (.ie. when its finalizer get called) and pointers, you can still leak resources. This is perhaps the #1 thing f* things up on many poorly-written JEE applications. Having do to do all that crap by hand, specially in C, that will open your eyes on how much elbow grease the JVM does for you. It will help you learn to spot poorly written Java code.
Also (and this is based on observation), it is hard to truly understand Object-Oriented Programming without understanding the fundamentals of Structured Programming and how to write good Procedural code. This will teach you how to spot bad OO code (code that is still procedural or code that tries excessively to model everything as objects.)
Learn Basic Algorithms and Data Structures
I think you are in the right track with this. It would be good if you can learn these in a procedural programming, be it C or Pascal. This is extremely important because a lot of mediocre Java/.NET programmers cannot differentiate between algorithms and ADTs from classes and objects. Algorithms and their associated data structures exist independently of object-oriented constructs.
Learn SQL and Relational Database Theory.
Except for few specialized applications, most Java applications exist to manipulate data on a relational database. There are OR mappers nowadays that do the work for you to map from Java to SQL, but one needs to understand SQL and Relational Database Theory to really know how to get the best of OR mappers.
The crux of concern may be called "privacy" but isn't necessarily privacy. I don't think that he is necessarily concerned with how much of the fingerprint is retained or if it can be released, blah blah blah.
The issue here is one of human dignity. He feels (as do many others) that fingerprinting is a violation of his sense of human dignity. That somehow using your fingerprint in this type of operation makes him feel less human, less respected, more like a criminal, what have you.
Just because he (or anyone) "feels" so, that does not mean that feeling is reasonable, proportionate or grounded in logic.
Only an oversensitive fool with an inflated, semi-religious sense of privacy and a disproportionate sense of self-importance would think that. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ, one could extend that and claim that one feels violated and a bit less human for getting his picture (his likeness) taken for getting a driver license. This is specially true if you work in the Federal/DoD/DoE sectors.
When you apply for many types jobs, you get your fingerprints taken. Big deal. They are not taking a picture of your privates nor asking for proof that you don't like buttsex or what-not. Your fingerprints are not private. They are valid ways for identification for any reasons, be it job-related or for criminal investigations. Same with universal ids (which many democracies have, but the US seem allergic to it as if it were a spawn of the Devil.)
For several jobs I've given my fingerprints. I've given my fingerprints in two countries, and I didn't feel any less assaulted or denigrated. It's just a process. And at no point I conjured Manchurian-candidate scenarios when I did so. There was no evidence, however remote from which one could draw a logical conclusion of their likelihood. Occam's razor for Christ' sake!
One time I also got finger scanned for a gym membership. Neat system and the most convenient thing, not having to carry little barcode cards to get in. That was like, 10 years ago. Many jobs do that just for clocking. It's not like this is something coming out of the blue for the first time.
Imagining Orwellian schemes of a Machiavellian system bent on finding ways to magically tele-transport a homing device up your ass just because some job asks you to provide a fingertip, painting the whole thing as an assault on humanity, that says a lot more about the paranoid, self-aggrandizing ones than the job asking the fingerprint in the first place.
Whatever people think, we are not even close to be in a police state, much less a dictatorial, all-encompassing one. Those who think so and get their panties all curled up for such procedural minutia while crying "peeple don't no think of the ramificationalizations!!1011" have a distopic, miopic sense of self, masturbating too much while reading "1984"... kinda like the distopic cousins of those who get severely depressed after watching "Avatar".
Slashdot Mirror
Ha!
Ha? At 6 I was already politically influenced during the Nicaraguan civil war of the 60's and 70's. Totalitarian systems, specially under Communism and Nazism knew the power of political indoctrination of kindergarten kids and first graders.
Another concrete example from my country was after the Sandinista take-over. A common tactic for politically-blessed kindergarten/first grade teachers of the time was to do the following every so often at the start of a class:
Teacher: Ok kids, do you believe in God?
Kids: Yeaahhhh!
Teacher: Do you want candy?
Kids: Yeaaaah!
Teacher: Why don't we pray God for a candy?
Kids would close eyes and pray for a candy
Teacher: Did God give you candy?
Kids: No.
Teacher: Why don't you ask me for candy?
Kids: Teacher, can we have candy????
At that point, the so-called teacher would proceed to give candy followed by an explanation that God was the creation of the oppressive classes, and how the revolution takes care of the proletariat, that they should report their parents if they were counter revolutionaries, that counter revolutionary are dogs and not people (yeah, they'd teach that to 5-6 year old kids), that the Americans were evil and that they would come to kill you if you don't help the revolution (at this point kids have their eyes open wide and you have to ask yourself what kind of animal would say such things to a little kid)... and shit like that... every fucking day of class...
Say "ha" as you please. You will neither understand the impact these things can have on 5-6 year old kids nor appreciate their ability to capture, understand and reason under such repressive regimes if you have never experienced it.
Perhaps you didn't read what I wrote, Mr. Coward. The performance of Ruby 1.9 is what is improved. I am not referring to JRuby, or Rails, or Java, or whatever else you imagined. I really was talking about the latest version of Ruby, the programming language.
Reading comprehension is important.
Dude, you forgot that this is /. - we don't need reading comprehension, we have straw man frameworks and patterns and meta-patterns for that!!
So can you give a example of an extreme case where metaprogramming (i.e. dynamically generating code) has an advantage over just using a good old-fashioned precompiled abstraction? (Does it really only work in extreme cases?)
Meta-programming can help when creating frameworks and platforms for a generalized audience (.ie. Rails WRT developers that want to develop apps following a specific architectural pattern). The variables of generality can be captured in *meta-patterns* (I just puked a little by typing that clique - useful, but still a clique).
Meta-programming should not be used for application-specific code where more traditional approaches should suffice.
In other words, if your team is developing a platform or a framework, then meta-programming is ok (perhaps necessary.)
For developing business-specific code, application-specific functionality, then yeah, I'd agree with the anonymous poster above in that I would not want them to be meta-hacking away instead of using less esoteric means, not unless it is something very specific and required (.ie. a meta-programming artifact expected by the underlying framework.)
The simple solution is to just make your kids go to bed earlier. The same irresponsible parents that let their high schoolers stay up too late will likely let them stay up even later after the school schedule is adjusted. The study has some merit, but I doubt that the trends for this school will hold. I suspect the drop in absenteeism is only temporary, and that the rate will go back up in a few short years.
Uh, no. There are well documented physical shifts in teenagers whereby their bodies' sleep cycles shift forward when they hit their teens and back (to normal adult sleep cycles) when they hit their 20's. Any normal teenager will not be able to sleep up until 11 or something like that. They are physically incapable of.
I agree that many parents don't know how to raise their teen kids, but here you are in the wrong. Do yourself a favor and read a bit about human physical development ;)
Teens starting school later? Who's going to supervise the teen until they get to school? Won't somebody think of the parents?
Unless you live in a very bad area (rundown neighborhoods, gangs, drugs, etc.), if you raise your kids properly, they won't need 24/7 supervision when they become teenagers.
Actually, even in bad neighborhoods, it is possible to raise good kids that don't require constant supervision. There are shantytowns all over the world teeming with teens that are unsupervised, either at school or working for a living... and they don't get in trouble.
Obviously, I don't mean to say that it is easy under such conditions, nor desirable. And there are situations (.ie. single parents) where it is harder to raise a kid. But it sort of blows a hole into applying the "kidz must can haz teh supervis3r" argument to the general case.
With all things being equal and with teens not having to work for a living, they should get enough sleep. And they do need it, physically.
You might presume to speak for overweight Americans (the larger world), but the world at large most assuredly has not appointed you its spokesperson.
Nice generalization. And you couldn't hope for a better opportunity to spout it out, no? How long were you holding that one inside of you.
When you have to resort to almost-racist generalizations to defend a point of view, that's an indication you didn't have a valid point of view to begin with.
No matter how much people can stretch the definition of freedom of religion, this dude is the fucking dumbest dork I've seen/heard of in a long time. Goddamit, it's even painful to think of this type of dorkiness.
Does the resulting CO2 from burning methane contribute less to greenhouse effect then the pure methane?
Yep. Burning methane in the presence of water releases CO2 and water, and thus the amount of CO2 released from burning a ton of methane is less than a ton of CO2. And, despite the fact that methane breaks down faster than CO2, it seems that one ton of methane can be up to 33 times more a contributing factor on warming than a ton of CO2.
NO ONE CARES
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contradictions
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/tangential
They were jobless and had apparently little to look forward to.
What about looking forward to take care of their baby no matter what? Jesus fucking Christ, there are people out the in Africa and Latin America that virtually find their food in garbage cans and still look forward to take care of their children no matter what. And these two e-tards that were jobless in one of the most affluent developed countries couldn't cope with being unemployed and couldn't look forward to take care of their child?
It boggles the mind.
I think the quote that gets me is: " It's an interesting look back at a time when the Internet was still a novelty and not yet a necessity."
Don't get me wrong, I tend to go into withdrawls if my connections go down for an extended period of time, but, the internet being a necessity? I dunno. There are plenty of people out there that live and breathe and make money with no connection or need to the internet whatsoever. I don't think it is truly a necessity like shelter and food.
While *I* would not want to live without it, people still can pretty easily these days.
Something does not need to be a vital necessity (like shelter and food) for it to be a necessity. We could take its counter-argument to the limit and argue then that electricity is not a necessity.
We have to look at necessities from the point of view of the infrastructure and dependencies (social, economical) that they create (or are the base for their day-to-day operations.) When a commodity reaches a point of usage such that a lack of it would cause great inconvenience or financial loss, then it becomes a necessity.
For example, a large number of people are now using the internet for Job searching and continuing education. This is specially true for IT-related folks that out of work (or for many folks that are unemployed if we reasonably generalize the truth of the situation.) A large section of grad students (specially working grad students) depend on the internet for course delivery. Any disruption to that service will cause in severe consequences. Loss of class time, or even loss of course for the later examples (losses with a clear financial impact). For the former, it could result in a drastic deterioration of one's already precarious financial situation.
Entire industries (for good or bad) utilize the internet for work and collaboration. Our ability to solve edge-case problems in a fast fashion is in large part proportional to having access to google and the like. We have an entire infrastructure of commerce that people depend on in their daily lives.
The internet then is now a financial and infrastructure necessity, just like public transportation systems, public infrastructure and banking are. None of these are vital necessities like food or shelter, but they still remain necessities of a different magnitude. So is the internet now.
I have no fucking clue what all of this means, but I still find it fascinating! Ohhh, uber-cool particle thingies! Shiniiieee!
So If I want to decorate my dead lawn with old refrigerators and non-working cars your okay with that?
No because that type of metal garbage does constitute a danger to your neighbors.
I see where both of you are going with your arguments. Your argument, which is valid, is that people should not do things that will reasonable can cause a depreciation of others people properties. This I could agree.
But the problem with this country is that this argument is stretched to the point that you no longer have a right to do things that should be reasonable to do with your own property (for example, taking all the grass out and replacing it with wood chips.) Or painting your house different, or putting an antenna, or hanging an old tire, painted in pink, off a tree branch to make it as a swing for your kids... in your own freaking backyard.
Try to open up a restaurant in your own house (which I saw a lot in Tokyo, a very urbane and clean city), even if you have the wherewithal and engineering/hygienic/legal know-hows and you'll get your ass handed because we have this notion of non-commercial zones (one of the main culprits of urban sprawl.) Or not even a restaurant, but, say, a sign that says you are a lawyer or a public notary or something, good luck with that. Try hanging your clothes to dry in your backyard - the sensible, eco-friendly thing to do, and you'll get labeled a lot of non-glamorous (and sometimes near-racist) epitaphs.
So you have one sensible ideal (don't do things in your house that will have a negative impact in your neighbor's properties) getting extended into stupid constrains on your own property, even to the detriment to the environment and just plain common sense.
Slogans, arrogance, classicism and incompetent bureaucracy trumps reason.
Fine, fine. You win.
So if a bug pops up in the underlying tool and it causes your car to careen off a fucking cliff, do those lines of code not count because they are hidden by abstraction?
Only if the abstraction is sufficiently buggy to be a cause of concern when estimating risk. Most of the abstractions used by these type of industries are solid, with bugs coming more often than not from faulty usage of those abstractions. This line of argument only makes sense if the probability of a serious bug occurs in the presence of a bug in the underlying abstractions.
But on another topic, that little quip at the end basically calling me retarded, I really hate that shit here. Don't even pretend to talk down to me, I'm well versed in embedded programming
Sure.
and yes total count includes ALL code, not just code you wrote and then magically pushed over the fence to a black box.. Why? Because that code can break too.
With what probability? What kind of numbers are we talking about here?
Do you think it matters to the end user if you wrote the code or a tool wrote it for you?
I would have expected an argument better than one of the "think-of-the-children", appeal-to-emotion type.
You are still liable for the end result correct?
Only liable to YOUR code, OR if there was sufficient evidence of a bug in an underlying 3rd-party abstraction and only if you knew about it, and only if you know (or there was sufficient reasons for you to know) that such a bug would be a liability.
Oh, and one more thing... tard.
It's like not wanting to install a security patch to cover a security hole just because there was a security hole that shouldn't have been in the first place (there was an error before, there must be an error in the patch). No sane sysadmin would operate that way. So why would you, with your car and your life?
It's still 100M lines of code friend, regardless of who or what wrote it.
When you write code and estimate its LOC size, do you also include the LOCs of the trusted libraries you use to build your apps? If you do a printf("%u\n",1), do you count this as one LOC or do you also count the LOCs in printf? When you use a GNU compiler, do you also count the thousands LOCs generated by it in assembler?
Does it really not matter *who/what* wrote it? Pretty myopictardic and useless way of software estimation if you ask me.
Sounds like a problem with sqlite, not SQL in general.
So why can sql code ever be injected on other platforms?
Instead of execute_command("create table X")
I want to see create_table("X")
In a well-defined system, you see create_table("X") in the application layer that gets translated in to the SQL statement "CREATE TABLE X" (which in the sqllite API tha'ts what happen but in a more procedural manner.).
In fact, using your example, proper usage of the sqllite API would entail having an application-specific API (be it procedural or object-oriented), with an application-specific block of code like (I'll use some c-like pseudocode to illustrate):
SomeUserStruc *user = getCurrentUser();
...
/* call to low-level sqllite api, which gets translated to */
/* the SQL statement "CREATE TABLE THINGIE..." which might fail */
/* in other databases like Oracle if there were other security policies */
/* in place at the db physical server, the db server itself, at the db schema */
/* or at the db table level. Capisce? */
char * command = getCommandFromRequest();
if( ( strcmp(command,"CREATE_THINGIES_TABLE") == 0 )
&& isAuthorized(&user, "CREATE_THINGIES_TABLE") ){
errno = createThingieTable();
}
/* application-specific api */
int createTableThingie()
{
create_table("THINGIE");
return someErrno;
}
Same principles would apply whether you are accessing a DB (be it with SQL or a low-level API). Your gripe about sqllite and SQL is ignorant at best, convoluting defensive programming and plain common sense with OO methodology.
Why would you expect SQL or the sqllite API to provide application-specific security mechanisms. That's your job as an application developer to implement application-specific security to protect resources at lower layers.
Separation of concerns. Does that ring a bell? Since you mentioned OO languages, I would have imagine that you'd realize you could create an app-specific procedural layer in C (or whatever language you are using to access the raw sqllite api), with encapsulation, information hiding and all that good stuff that preceded the arrival of OO languages and stuff...
I have been doing a bit of work with sqlite lately and I am surprised to find that the C api is basically a way to pass in strings containing SQL commands. Now even in C I could imagine an API which allows you to build up queries to do everything SQL does without using commands in text strings.
So your technical indictment of SQL is based on your initial bit of work with sqllite?
And what's wrong with passing SQL command/statements via the API. That's what it's supposed to do. SQL is not just a query language, it's a control language. This is like indicting a *nix shell for letting you do "rm -rf /".
The problem is not that SQL does what it's supposed to do - you tell it to modify, it will; you tell it to delete; it will. The problem is the programmer who doesn't filter the input and allow arbitrary execution of SQL statements. The problem is the DBA who doesn't forbid execution of raw SQL statements in production. The problem is not programming defensively.
It's not fucking rocket science.
With an OO language it should be dead easy.
How naive. I'm not sure you actually know what object-orientation is, what is for and what it does and does not.
> Still upsets me how many developers are anti Stored Procedures Using stored procedures is harder than just creating the SQL query. You need to know even more about the DB. Even it's harder if you have to get the DB guy to do stuff for you. Yes you can run your own DB in development, but in the production environment, you may depend someone else (DBA) to set up all those stored procedures so that stuff works.
I've never had that problem... that is, having a problem depending on a dba to implement stored procedures at the developer's behalf. Don't know how things are elsewhere, but most of my work was with JEE+Oracle with DBAS strictly separated from developers by well-established procedures (or by strict procedures on what to put on the db when developers were the same as dbas.)
SQL statements would be tested in a development db and then converted into stored procedures. That is, code never executed anything via jdbc that was not a stored procedure. Even if it was a single SELECT COUNT(*) FROM DUAL just for kicks, that'd go into a stored procedure.
On the systest database, it was set up so that the db account used by the application could not execute anything but stored procedures. Here, developers still had the ability to create the store procedures and refine the DDL scripts that creates them. Scripts for rollbacks were created as well. Installations and rollbacks would be rehearsed until we were satisfied with them.
Come time to deployment in production, we would hand over to the DBAs the DDL scripts with instructions on how to run them (and with instructions and DDL scripts for rolling back.) They'd flip their switches, we'd flip ours and voila. Shit is running fine.
But I've also worked with places where working like that is just impossible. Either DBAs being "don't touch my db!" prima dones and developers being "I need full access!!" whores. Very few places have DBA and development teams that can work professionally in tandem.
You spent your entire adult life working for a company,
Age 49 is "your entire adult life"? Maybe in 1870.
Exactly. Entire adult life my ass. My father had to "re-invent" himself several times, even in his mid 50s, working his hands to the bone until he was in his mid 64. No lavish pension plans... which is ok since most people don't have it anyways... not to mention he never had health insurance... which is also very typical. His pension (off his social sec.) is very small, not enough to live in the US, but comfortable now that he retired back to our country of origin. Now, here: he's lucky. Not that many US citizens (naturalized like him or native-born) have that chance to retire overseas and have to makes ends meet with a meager pension or work past their 60s.
Now, I'm not saying this to gain pity for my father or to people in his situation, but to give a big fuck-you to whoever thinks working in the same company for someone of age 49 is "working your entire adult life". Man is still in his prime. And I wish him good luck in getting a similar job with reasonable benefits close home.
But let's not pretend that it is reasonable to retire at 49, with the way the economy has been, with the way the economy will be in years to come. He should work until he's 60, like almost everybody else does.
This is the same problem faced by businesses who need a 'software' person. Without having a good software person in the company already, how can they tell the difference between candidates? They can't.
If you're an organization looking to hire your first expert or two, you do it the old-fashioned way. You consider their degree and the institution that granted it. You consider their work experience. And perhaps you rely on a referral from a trusted contact who knows more about the field than you do.
If you're looking for some fine-grained specialization in a particular technology, there are a number of certification programs out there. If you're looking for broader skills sets, there are both BS and MS programs available in disciplines such as Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Software Engineering. What does a licensing regime get you that certificates and degree programs do not?
There should be no problem hiring Electrical and Computer Engineers (those that are licensed to be engineers.) The problem is with BS and MS graduates in Computer Science and Software Engineering. Just look around (specially in Enterprise Computing) and you'll find plenty of those who can't code for shit, much less do work analytical/forensic work. This is specially true with those graduating from "Java" universities.
There is no commonly accepted curriculum for CS/SE studies, requirements have been watered down and there are no commonly accepted certificate programs in CS/SE (beyond the few like those provided by SEI.) 15-20 years ago, a person having a BS degree in CS was expected to have done some serious work in school (multiple programming languages and a fair share of systems programming.)
Now, take a random BS graduate with a few years of working experience and chances are he/she only has a superficial knowledge of Java/.NET and web services (God forbid do any type of systems programming work/debugging.)
The only way a company or organization like the NHTSA has for hiring qualified software engineers and CS graduates (with a good chance of them knowing what they should know) is to go the old fashion way (as you said). A degree and a few certificates (which is where I disagree with you), and on top of that several years of work in systems programming or embedded systems, preferably having worked a substantial amount of time with an engineering company.
Degrees and certs alone no longer mean much. A rigorous licensing regime, or at least an standardized passing exam required for graduation (which would guarantee those who graduate have what it takes to work in both systems and application programming of any kind), that's what is needed.
All types of real engineering disciplines have examination exams and licensing regimes. They are bound ethically and legally to know their stuff. They have a fiduciary obligation to be real engineers.
We in the software industry, we have no means by which to enforce these fiduciary, legal and ethical obligations or standards of quality.
They "earn" the right to call themselves engineers. We in the software industry, we have not earn that right. Anyone can program himself to be a software engineer. Engineering in the context of software, it is a diluted term that does not mean anything, nor is a reliable indicator of verifiable credentials.
A true engineering license, that is a reliable indicator. Not an infallible one and not one without its problems, but it is certainly a much better one that the shit we have in the software industry.
After Learning Java Syntax, What Next?
Hmmm, depends on what your goals are as you pursue your studies. The best thing (usually) is to write code that is sufficiently large and complex. However, that usually only happens at work or when taking classes beyond the 3000-level (assuming a good school and instructors.)
For n your case (studying part-time while working on a non-programming job), there are a few things I would recommend you to pursue (which I would recommend to any full-time or part-time student.). These I recommend based on my Java experience (10 years out of 15 in development/IT.)
Learn C
It is very hard to be an efficient Java developer without having a good understanding of explicit resource allocation management, and concepts such as passing by value and passing by reference.
In Java the garbage collector does memory allocation for you, but without a good understanding of it and an object's lifecycle (.ie. when its finalizer get called) and pointers, you can still leak resources. This is perhaps the #1 thing f* things up on many poorly-written JEE applications. Having do to do all that crap by hand, specially in C, that will open your eyes on how much elbow grease the JVM does for you. It will help you learn to spot poorly written Java code.
Also (and this is based on observation), it is hard to truly understand Object-Oriented Programming without understanding the fundamentals of Structured Programming and how to write good Procedural code. This will teach you how to spot bad OO code (code that is still procedural or code that tries excessively to model everything as objects.)
Learn Basic Algorithms and Data Structures
I think you are in the right track with this. It would be good if you can learn these in a procedural programming, be it C or Pascal. This is extremely important because a lot of mediocre Java/.NET programmers cannot differentiate between algorithms and ADTs from classes and objects. Algorithms and their associated data structures exist independently of object-oriented constructs.
Learn SQL and Relational Database Theory.
Except for few specialized applications, most Java applications exist to manipulate data on a relational database. There are OR mappers nowadays that do the work for you to map from Java to SQL, but one needs to understand SQL and Relational Database Theory to really know how to get the best of OR mappers.
My 2c.
The crux of concern may be called "privacy" but isn't necessarily privacy. I don't think that he is necessarily concerned with how much of the fingerprint is retained or if it can be released, blah blah blah.
The issue here is one of human dignity. He feels (as do many others) that fingerprinting is a violation of his sense of human dignity. That somehow using your fingerprint in this type of operation makes him feel less human, less respected, more like a criminal, what have you.
Just because he (or anyone) "feels" so, that does not mean that feeling is reasonable, proportionate or grounded in logic.
Only an oversensitive fool with an inflated, semi-religious sense of privacy and a disproportionate sense of self-importance would think that. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ, one could extend that and claim that one feels violated and a bit less human for getting his picture (his likeness) taken for getting a driver license. This is specially true if you work in the Federal/DoD/DoE sectors.
When you apply for many types jobs, you get your fingerprints taken. Big deal. They are not taking a picture of your privates nor asking for proof that you don't like buttsex or what-not. Your fingerprints are not private. They are valid ways for identification for any reasons, be it job-related or for criminal investigations. Same with universal ids (which many democracies have, but the US seem allergic to it as if it were a spawn of the Devil.)
For several jobs I've given my fingerprints. I've given my fingerprints in two countries, and I didn't feel any less assaulted or denigrated. It's just a process. And at no point I conjured Manchurian-candidate scenarios when I did so. There was no evidence, however remote from which one could draw a logical conclusion of their likelihood. Occam's razor for Christ' sake!
One time I also got finger scanned for a gym membership. Neat system and the most convenient thing, not having to carry little barcode cards to get in. That was like, 10 years ago. Many jobs do that just for clocking. It's not like this is something coming out of the blue for the first time.
Imagining Orwellian schemes of a Machiavellian system bent on finding ways to magically tele-transport a homing device up your ass just because some job asks you to provide a fingertip, painting the whole thing as an assault on humanity, that says a lot more about the paranoid, self-aggrandizing ones than the job asking the fingerprint in the first place.
Whatever people think, we are not even close to be in a police state, much less a dictatorial, all-encompassing one. Those who think so and get their panties all curled up for such procedural minutia while crying "peeple don't no think of the ramificationalizations!!1011" have a distopic, miopic sense of self, masturbating too much while reading "1984" ... kinda like the distopic cousins of those who get severely depressed after watching "Avatar".