1) Citizenship - No poverty limitation there. You're basically born into it, are lucky enough to get amnesty, or wait through the bureaucracy. This isn't New Zealand...
Sorry... what?! As a New Zealand citizen (born and raised, but since re-located to the better lifestyle opportunities of mainland Europe), I am somewhat disturbed that you think the poor of my homeland are unable to vote. (fortunately, they're few and far between - lots of middle class with a very small upper and lower class - very very few homeless at all) Care to back up your allegations with something?
As far as GUIs go: for all my projects, I write the back-end as a DLL (.NET assembly), then write 3 separate front-ends - WinForms (for Windows), GTK# (for Linux) and Cocoa# (for MacOSX). For most apps that I do, the GUI is a trivial extra that takes VERY little time to do - as long as my back-end is written to work with Mono (which I always ensure), then doing this is NO problem and gives a very nice native feel on all 3 systems that I target.
Not true... I code.NET for a living (and we always ensure Mono compatibility at every build for the majority of our projects) and we're sticking with.NET 2.0 simply because there's nothing in the 3.0 or 3.5 releases that we're interested in. They just don't do anything we need. This is likely true for a great number of developers judging from other projects I see out there and also the posts from several people here.
I've been scouring around for stuff I wrote when I was very young, but can't beat 1991... May 1994 seems to be the oldest I can find (when I was 14), but there definitely SHOULD be some older stuff than that archived somewhere out there. I'd guess my oldest posts anywhere would date to the late 80s or MAYBE very early 90s, depending on whether the echos I posted to back then were actually part of something larger or not. The '94 posts that I can find are part of the FidoNet feeds, but I probably wasn't really aware of that at the time (an echo was an echo after all).
It's also worth pointing out that Berliners (as in, the food) are only generally called that OUTSIDE of Berlin. In Berlin, they refer to them by another name. Pretty much every German who heard JFK say that would have understood the intent and meaning of the sentence perfectly. It's the same as my friends from Frankfurt being "Frankfurters" and my friends from Hamburg being "Hamburgers" - both of these words are also used in German for the foods also, but there's no confusion for any normal sentence.
I'm sure if a food type got called a "New Yorker", we wouldn't stop calling residents of New York the same thing, and the sentences "I am a New Yorker" and "I'm just heading to the shop to grab a pack of New Yorkers" would both be perfectly okay.
Note: I am not a native German speaker, but I live in Germany (Hannover to be precise) and speak the language pretty well.
Note 2: Just for fun, I have eaten a Hamburger in Hamburg, a Frankfurter in Frankfurt, a Regensburger in Regensburg, worn Cologne in Cologne, petted a Rottweiler in Rottweil, drank Pils in Pilsen (Plzen), and several other similar things. On my list of things still to do though includes a trip to a lovely little village in Austria called "Fucking"... I might need to take a girl with me though, as I'm pretty sure the local ladies would not be so willing to help with my little idea.
I'd say it's a bit of both. To clarify and expand on my last post, I work for an MFP manufacturer (Konica Minolta). Our hardware (print engines/scanners/accessories) tends to have a much longer lifecycle, and you can still see design elements from 10 year old equipment in things we're releasing today (although only if you know what you're looking for). Many models will come out that are only a minor incremental change in hardware while being a huge change in the software/firmware (my side of it).
This pretty much means the same thing as far as those "upgrades" you're talking about on naval vessels (but again, a totally different scale of course). When I gave my "development process" explanation/presentation to the appropriate people in our company, they raised this exact point - how to handle it when the hardware just isn't capable of what we want these software improvements to do - they considered it to be basically a kind of solid limit where no amount of software would get around it. They were right to an extent, but only an extent. I explained to them that the system should be designed from a hardware perspective in the same sort of way as I proposed for software: Much more modular and with less "reliance" on the exact workings of other parts (as long as a common messaging system is understood by both ends, they don't need to know HOW the other end accomplishes its tasks).
Now, I will freely admit I don't know much about Naval Vessels and maybe this concept just wouldn't fit at all, but given the example of comms - everyone has known for a LONG time that comms improve at a rapid pace, they're high-tech. So, when designing a vessel, the comms system should never be so tightly integrated in to it that it's hard to upgrade - even the channels that carry the wires around the ship should be (relatively) easy to access and replace the cables should an upgrade require it. I'm not thinking that one should be able to "swap it all out just like that", but to plan to be able to do a complete comms refit in a matter of weeks with as minimal cost as possible. They KNOW they'll need to do it (as I mentioned, it's blatantly obvious that comms tech improves rapidly, and has been obvious for many decades already), so they should plan ahead for doing so.
The scale is much lesser, and the technology much less cool, but we get the same thing where I work. There's a development lifecycle of a couple of years, and someone somewhere in "Management" decided that they'd go with a Waterfall model of development, where our spec is TOTALLY fixed in stone about 2 years before we release the product. Every product is therefore close to 2 years behind where it really should be. Right now, this also applies to all of our competition (they're all equally as dumb as we are in that regard), so it's not hurting us too much, but I recently gave a presentation to them about how we effectively implement a better development model (I was aiming at a variant of Agile that's tailored to our business) so we can (at least until the competition catch on) be effectively two years ahead of our competition. Perhaps the US Navy should re-consider their design processes also...
I was about to reply the same thing before I saw that you already had. Pretty Hate Machine was good the first time I listened to it (MANY years ago now) through a friend's crappy tape-deck, but it really came to life for me when I listened with headphones from the CD I picked up the following day.
I agree with the posters saying that it really isn't common and for most music, it doesn't make a difference, or could even ruin it, but when the music is actually designed around making use of this kind of thing (as with Pretty Hate Machine), then it really can change the whole experience quite significantly.
If you think USENET is out of date, I started out with FIDO NET! Anybody remember that?
Yep, the BBS I ran carried a FidoNet feed as far back as the late 80s - updated nightly even, unlike the other local BBS that updated every 3 days.
Now, get off my lawn!;-)
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 1
I think SME is "Subject Matter Expert" - it's a term I hear from our training department a lot when they're looking to find someone to check over training material... but yes, I agree with you over the grandparent post 100% - he does sound more like a mindless manager than a tech type.
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 1
Remember, support comes out of a different manager's budget.
Actually, that's something that works really well at my place of employment... development and support come out of the SAME budget (we're different departments, but we're under the same umbrella). That means that we make the best possible software we can the first time around, otherwise it'll hurt us in the support side of it (also, it doesn't help when I have the support guys walking in to my office every 5 minutes to ask about something I wrote, so that tends to motivate me also!)
Thankfully, my direct manager is both a very good manager (of people), as well as being technically competent. He's aware his technical skills don't match 1 to 1 to what his employees do, so doesn't try to micromanage or do our jobs for us, but has enough understanding of the subject matter to be able to tell when someone's bullshitting him about a timeframe, slacking off, or whatever.
Yes... see my post above where I ranted a bit about the spelling... Ambiguities in US English *sigh* (for reference: "pedophile" means the same as "podophile", but without the iPod pun embedded in it. A person who likes children in a bad way is a "pædophile")
While I don't want this to turn in to a language flamewar, I do find the spelling "pedophile" to create an annoying ambiguity in US English. The correct spelling is of course "pædophile" ("paedophile" accepted if your keyboard can't generate "æ" easily) - a "pedophile" is someone who likes feet (as is a "podophile", however, yes I do get the "pod" joke in there).
I live in Germany, but this isn't my home country. The criminal record is from New Zealand, and I've worked in New Zealand, Australia, Netherlands and Germany. My work here in Germany is sort of a special case though, and I didn't go through a normal interview process, so the question never got asked here (basically, it was "almost" like a transfer from the company in Australia - which did ask, and didn't care)
Hmmm... I do move country a lot and never really had any plans to live in the US, but I guess this just gives me one more reason not to - impossible for me to get work! Although, I wonder if the background checks they do would extend to checking foreign records - probably not...
I've noticed they ask the same thing on the entry card when I fly in to some countries for business trips, which is also something I do a lot (I don't recall if the US asks or not, but I think so), and it's never been a problem that I answer yes. About 50% of the time, they'll ask me about it and I give them the 2 minute explanation of it, and then they let me though.
The town I grew up in was hardly rural - it was about 50000 people, so it was neither very large, nor very small. I certainly didn't know everyone. It's more a matter of how much you value physical property vs other less tangible things. I certainly do value my stuff, but I value human decency and kindness a lot higher. As long as I'm not being actually harmed by something, then I'm quite happy to let anyone do anything with my stuff. Sure, that may make me an easier target for thieves, but it also makes life a lot nicer.
In the case in question, I would argue that as long as I felt I could trust the person who did it (which from the accounts given, I would), then there has not been any lost value. Putting myself in the shoes of the university, I'd be saying, "Well, we clearly need to beef up our security, but isn't it nice that this guy showed us how/where we had some issues." - my trust in the guy would be based on the report that he did tell us about the security issues (in a nice report even), and I would tacitly assume he did NOT do any further harm (again, he may have done so, but I'd be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt).
Am I "too trusting"? Probably, yes... but as stated, it's a nicer way to live life, even if occasionally people do take advantage of it.
It's also worth noting I don't actually own a lot of stuff, nor do I ever intend to - I pack up and move country (just for fun) every few years, so having less stuff makes that easier.
My car is a different story - using the car devalues it (slowly, but definitively), so they'd be depriving me of something. If they instead simply noticed my car keys in there, saw it was unlocked, opened the door and left a note for me telling me to be more careful then I'd be thankful. I'd also be relatively okay with someone taking my car for a few hours and returning it with a full tank rather than the half-empty tank it had when they took it.
And yes, I'm being completely honest. I should however mention that I was not raised in a society with a strong sense of "property" - sure, there's the legal concept of it and you would get pissed off if something was genuinely stolen, but it was the sort of place where if you needed to borrow your neighbour's chainsaw, you'd go knock on their door, and if they weren't home, you'd just walk in and take it. You'd also expect that they could do the same the same.
It's almost certainly a cultural difference - those of us who grew up in groups different to mine (e.g. inner big city or yuppie suburbs or whatever), I can certainly imagine having a very different opinion to my own.
I'm on Mr Johnson's side in your scenario actually... Mr Smith did an idiotic thing and Mr Johnson pointed it out to him without causing any harm to Mr Smith or his property. That's a GOOD thing. If I were in Mr Smith's situation, I'd have thanked Mr Johnson and then reprimanded myself for my own stupidity.
I did do it at work (at my previous place of employment - which I left of my own free will, not because of this!)... what I got out of it was a payrise, a few extra duties for a few months (helping the admin fix the problems I found) and a really nice thankyou gift paid from the IT department's budget. Not every company treats their employees like crap. What I did wasn't exactly like this guy, but it did involve exposing weaknesses in the card system we used for security, so it's not totally unrelated.
Is it really that hard to get a job in some places if you have a criminal record? I have a record - for Phreaking of all things (actually, the charge was "Obtains other service credit by fraud"), and it has never had any effect on my ability to find work. Most employers don't ask, and the very few that have have just said, "well, you were young, and it shows technical aptitude" or something along those lines and then never mentioned it again.
Note: I don't live in the US, nor have I ever applied for a job in that country, so it might (or might not be) just a US thing.
Actually, I don't think his English is that bad, considering he's an alien from another time and place. While the grammar may be very odd, his English definitely seems better than a lot of so called "native speakers" that I see here on Slashdot!
Hmmm... the original quote is of course Vader, but the "style" was an attempted mockery of Yoda, which failed miserably and I ranted a bit about it. I'm definitely not a Star Wars geek, but I am well aware of who in the movie used the original phrase.
I never made a point of "trying to figure it out" - it just seems incredibly obvious to me (just as there is no need to "figure out" that sticking a knife through your hand will hurt), and my post was basically me just venting a little frustration that at least a small number of people in the world are just so moronic as to not be able to do so. Phrasing it as "figuring it out" implied I actually took the time to analyse it - I didn't. I've noticed many other people are able to phrase things in a Yoda-like way (see other replies), and I assume that not everyone is as interested in linguistics as I am, so even if they can't express exactly "how" it works, they know what sounds right and what doesn't - i.e. They didn't "figure it out" either, it was just obvious to them as it was to me. My frustration was similar to if people constantly started suggesting that sticking a knife through your hand is a painless experience. My apologies to everyone for the offtopic rant.
I expect if someone actually posted online using their real name, they should expect someone to find those postings and use them against the poster.
The problem is that my real name is "Benjamin de Waal" (yes, that is my real name, and yes, I'm posting it on Slashdot - oh no!). I also commonly go by "Ben". Google for either "Benjamin de Waal" or "Ben de Waal", and you'll find the International Marketing Manager of Captaris (formerly of Adobe, unless that's a different guy), a guy in South Africa, a Black Sabbath fan from the Netherlands, the VP of GPU software at NVIDIA, and a guy who works for Konica Minolta in Germany. Only the last of these is me, all of the others are not. It's probably fairly easy to figure out I'm not the NVIDIA guy or the Adobe/Captaris guy, but if the South African or the Dutchman do anything really stupid, I could easily get mistaken for them.
That said, you'd probably find MORE "bad stuff" that I've posted online than the other guys (as far as I know), because I'm quite happy for people to know quite a lot about me - doesn't bother me at all. (see my post a little below this for an example)
Slashdot Mirror
1) Citizenship - No poverty limitation there. You're basically born into it, are lucky enough to get amnesty, or wait through the bureaucracy. This isn't New Zealand...
Sorry... what?! As a New Zealand citizen (born and raised, but since re-located to the better lifestyle opportunities of mainland Europe), I am somewhat disturbed that you think the poor of my homeland are unable to vote. (fortunately, they're few and far between - lots of middle class with a very small upper and lower class - very very few homeless at all)
Care to back up your allegations with something?
As far as GUIs go: for all my projects, I write the back-end as a DLL (.NET assembly), then write 3 separate front-ends - WinForms (for Windows), GTK# (for Linux) and Cocoa# (for MacOSX). For most apps that I do, the GUI is a trivial extra that takes VERY little time to do - as long as my back-end is written to work with Mono (which I always ensure), then doing this is NO problem and gives a very nice native feel on all 3 systems that I target.
The ones being written now.
Not true... I code .NET for a living (and we always ensure Mono compatibility at every build for the majority of our projects) and we're sticking with .NET 2.0 simply because there's nothing in the 3.0 or 3.5 releases that we're interested in. They just don't do anything we need. This is likely true for a great number of developers judging from other projects I see out there and also the posts from several people here.
Hah! From the front page of that... http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/11/11/1011216
Oh noes - 25 GB, can we trust all that space on a single drive? (queue 640KB jokes here)
It seems people never learn - 2.5TB on this system alone (2 1TB drives and a 0.5 TB drive)
I've been scouring around for stuff I wrote when I was very young, but can't beat 1991... May 1994 seems to be the oldest I can find (when I was 14), but there definitely SHOULD be some older stuff than that archived somewhere out there. I'd guess my oldest posts anywhere would date to the late 80s or MAYBE very early 90s, depending on whether the echos I posted to back then were actually part of something larger or not. The '94 posts that I can find are part of the FidoNet feeds, but I probably wasn't really aware of that at the time (an echo was an echo after all).
It's also worth pointing out that Berliners (as in, the food) are only generally called that OUTSIDE of Berlin. In Berlin, they refer to them by another name. Pretty much every German who heard JFK say that would have understood the intent and meaning of the sentence perfectly. It's the same as my friends from Frankfurt being "Frankfurters" and my friends from Hamburg being "Hamburgers" - both of these words are also used in German for the foods also, but there's no confusion for any normal sentence.
I'm sure if a food type got called a "New Yorker", we wouldn't stop calling residents of New York the same thing, and the sentences "I am a New Yorker" and "I'm just heading to the shop to grab a pack of New Yorkers" would both be perfectly okay.
Note: I am not a native German speaker, but I live in Germany (Hannover to be precise) and speak the language pretty well.
Note 2: Just for fun, I have eaten a Hamburger in Hamburg, a Frankfurter in Frankfurt, a Regensburger in Regensburg, worn Cologne in Cologne, petted a Rottweiler in Rottweil, drank Pils in Pilsen (Plzen), and several other similar things. On my list of things still to do though includes a trip to a lovely little village in Austria called "Fucking"... I might need to take a girl with me though, as I'm pretty sure the local ladies would not be so willing to help with my little idea.
I'd say it's a bit of both. To clarify and expand on my last post, I work for an MFP manufacturer (Konica Minolta). Our hardware (print engines/scanners/accessories) tends to have a much longer lifecycle, and you can still see design elements from 10 year old equipment in things we're releasing today (although only if you know what you're looking for). Many models will come out that are only a minor incremental change in hardware while being a huge change in the software/firmware (my side of it).
This pretty much means the same thing as far as those "upgrades" you're talking about on naval vessels (but again, a totally different scale of course). When I gave my "development process" explanation/presentation to the appropriate people in our company, they raised this exact point - how to handle it when the hardware just isn't capable of what we want these software improvements to do - they considered it to be basically a kind of solid limit where no amount of software would get around it. They were right to an extent, but only an extent. I explained to them that the system should be designed from a hardware perspective in the same sort of way as I proposed for software: Much more modular and with less "reliance" on the exact workings of other parts (as long as a common messaging system is understood by both ends, they don't need to know HOW the other end accomplishes its tasks).
Now, I will freely admit I don't know much about Naval Vessels and maybe this concept just wouldn't fit at all, but given the example of comms - everyone has known for a LONG time that comms improve at a rapid pace, they're high-tech. So, when designing a vessel, the comms system should never be so tightly integrated in to it that it's hard to upgrade - even the channels that carry the wires around the ship should be (relatively) easy to access and replace the cables should an upgrade require it. I'm not thinking that one should be able to "swap it all out just like that", but to plan to be able to do a complete comms refit in a matter of weeks with as minimal cost as possible. They KNOW they'll need to do it (as I mentioned, it's blatantly obvious that comms tech improves rapidly, and has been obvious for many decades already), so they should plan ahead for doing so.
The scale is much lesser, and the technology much less cool, but we get the same thing where I work. There's a development lifecycle of a couple of years, and someone somewhere in "Management" decided that they'd go with a Waterfall model of development, where our spec is TOTALLY fixed in stone about 2 years before we release the product. Every product is therefore close to 2 years behind where it really should be. Right now, this also applies to all of our competition (they're all equally as dumb as we are in that regard), so it's not hurting us too much, but I recently gave a presentation to them about how we effectively implement a better development model (I was aiming at a variant of Agile that's tailored to our business) so we can (at least until the competition catch on) be effectively two years ahead of our competition. Perhaps the US Navy should re-consider their design processes also...
I was about to reply the same thing before I saw that you already had. Pretty Hate Machine was good the first time I listened to it (MANY years ago now) through a friend's crappy tape-deck, but it really came to life for me when I listened with headphones from the CD I picked up the following day.
I agree with the posters saying that it really isn't common and for most music, it doesn't make a difference, or could even ruin it, but when the music is actually designed around making use of this kind of thing (as with Pretty Hate Machine), then it really can change the whole experience quite significantly.
If you think USENET is out of date, I started out with FIDO NET! Anybody remember that?
Yep, the BBS I ran carried a FidoNet feed as far back as the late 80s - updated nightly even, unlike the other local BBS that updated every 3 days.
Now, get off my lawn! ;-)
I think SME is "Subject Matter Expert" - it's a term I hear from our training department a lot when they're looking to find someone to check over training material... but yes, I agree with you over the grandparent post 100% - he does sound more like a mindless manager than a tech type.
Remember, support comes out of a different manager's budget.
Actually, that's something that works really well at my place of employment... development and support come out of the SAME budget (we're different departments, but we're under the same umbrella). That means that we make the best possible software we can the first time around, otherwise it'll hurt us in the support side of it (also, it doesn't help when I have the support guys walking in to my office every 5 minutes to ask about something I wrote, so that tends to motivate me also!)
Thankfully, my direct manager is both a very good manager (of people), as well as being technically competent. He's aware his technical skills don't match 1 to 1 to what his employees do, so doesn't try to micromanage or do our jobs for us, but has enough understanding of the subject matter to be able to tell when someone's bullshitting him about a timeframe, slacking off, or whatever.
Yes... see my post above where I ranted a bit about the spelling... Ambiguities in US English *sigh*
(for reference: "pedophile" means the same as "podophile", but without the iPod pun embedded in it. A person who likes children in a bad way is a "pædophile")
While I don't want this to turn in to a language flamewar, I do find the spelling "pedophile" to create an annoying ambiguity in US English. The correct spelling is of course "pædophile" ("paedophile" accepted if your keyboard can't generate "æ" easily) - a "pedophile" is someone who likes feet (as is a "podophile", however, yes I do get the "pod" joke in there).
I live in Germany, but this isn't my home country. The criminal record is from New Zealand, and I've worked in New Zealand, Australia, Netherlands and Germany. My work here in Germany is sort of a special case though, and I didn't go through a normal interview process, so the question never got asked here (basically, it was "almost" like a transfer from the company in Australia - which did ask, and didn't care)
Hmmm... I do move country a lot and never really had any plans to live in the US, but I guess this just gives me one more reason not to - impossible for me to get work!
Although, I wonder if the background checks they do would extend to checking foreign records - probably not...
I've noticed they ask the same thing on the entry card when I fly in to some countries for business trips, which is also something I do a lot (I don't recall if the US asks or not, but I think so), and it's never been a problem that I answer yes. About 50% of the time, they'll ask me about it and I give them the 2 minute explanation of it, and then they let me though.
The town I grew up in was hardly rural - it was about 50000 people, so it was neither very large, nor very small. I certainly didn't know everyone. It's more a matter of how much you value physical property vs other less tangible things. I certainly do value my stuff, but I value human decency and kindness a lot higher. As long as I'm not being actually harmed by something, then I'm quite happy to let anyone do anything with my stuff. Sure, that may make me an easier target for thieves, but it also makes life a lot nicer.
In the case in question, I would argue that as long as I felt I could trust the person who did it (which from the accounts given, I would), then there has not been any lost value. Putting myself in the shoes of the university, I'd be saying, "Well, we clearly need to beef up our security, but isn't it nice that this guy showed us how/where we had some issues." - my trust in the guy would be based on the report that he did tell us about the security issues (in a nice report even), and I would tacitly assume he did NOT do any further harm (again, he may have done so, but I'd be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt).
Am I "too trusting"? Probably, yes... but as stated, it's a nicer way to live life, even if occasionally people do take advantage of it.
It's also worth noting I don't actually own a lot of stuff, nor do I ever intend to - I pack up and move country (just for fun) every few years, so having less stuff makes that easier.
My car is a different story - using the car devalues it (slowly, but definitively), so they'd be depriving me of something. If they instead simply noticed my car keys in there, saw it was unlocked, opened the door and left a note for me telling me to be more careful then I'd be thankful.
I'd also be relatively okay with someone taking my car for a few hours and returning it with a full tank rather than the half-empty tank it had when they took it.
And yes, I'm being completely honest. I should however mention that I was not raised in a society with a strong sense of "property" - sure, there's the legal concept of it and you would get pissed off if something was genuinely stolen, but it was the sort of place where if you needed to borrow your neighbour's chainsaw, you'd go knock on their door, and if they weren't home, you'd just walk in and take it. You'd also expect that they could do the same the same.
It's almost certainly a cultural difference - those of us who grew up in groups different to mine (e.g. inner big city or yuppie suburbs or whatever), I can certainly imagine having a very different opinion to my own.
I'm on Mr Johnson's side in your scenario actually... Mr Smith did an idiotic thing and Mr Johnson pointed it out to him without causing any harm to Mr Smith or his property. That's a GOOD thing. If I were in Mr Smith's situation, I'd have thanked Mr Johnson and then reprimanded myself for my own stupidity.
I did do it at work (at my previous place of employment - which I left of my own free will, not because of this!)... what I got out of it was a payrise, a few extra duties for a few months (helping the admin fix the problems I found) and a really nice thankyou gift paid from the IT department's budget. Not every company treats their employees like crap. What I did wasn't exactly like this guy, but it did involve exposing weaknesses in the card system we used for security, so it's not totally unrelated.
Is it really that hard to get a job in some places if you have a criminal record? I have a record - for Phreaking of all things (actually, the charge was "Obtains other service credit by fraud"), and it has never had any effect on my ability to find work. Most employers don't ask, and the very few that have have just said, "well, you were young, and it shows technical aptitude" or something along those lines and then never mentioned it again.
Note: I don't live in the US, nor have I ever applied for a job in that country, so it might (or might not be) just a US thing.
Actually, I don't think his English is that bad, considering he's an alien from another time and place. While the grammar may be very odd, his English definitely seems better than a lot of so called "native speakers" that I see here on Slashdot!
Hmmm... the original quote is of course Vader, but the "style" was an attempted mockery of Yoda, which failed miserably and I ranted a bit about it. I'm definitely not a Star Wars geek, but I am well aware of who in the movie used the original phrase.
I never made a point of "trying to figure it out" - it just seems incredibly obvious to me (just as there is no need to "figure out" that sticking a knife through your hand will hurt), and my post was basically me just venting a little frustration that at least a small number of people in the world are just so moronic as to not be able to do so.
Phrasing it as "figuring it out" implied I actually took the time to analyse it - I didn't. I've noticed many other people are able to phrase things in a Yoda-like way (see other replies), and I assume that not everyone is as interested in linguistics as I am, so even if they can't express exactly "how" it works, they know what sounds right and what doesn't - i.e. They didn't "figure it out" either, it was just obvious to them as it was to me. My frustration was similar to if people constantly started suggesting that sticking a knife through your hand is a painless experience.
My apologies to everyone for the offtopic rant.
I expect if someone actually posted online using their real name, they should expect someone to find those postings and use them against the poster.
The problem is that my real name is "Benjamin de Waal" (yes, that is my real name, and yes, I'm posting it on Slashdot - oh no!). I also commonly go by "Ben". Google for either "Benjamin de Waal" or "Ben de Waal", and you'll find the International Marketing Manager of Captaris (formerly of Adobe, unless that's a different guy), a guy in South Africa, a Black Sabbath fan from the Netherlands, the VP of GPU software at NVIDIA, and a guy who works for Konica Minolta in Germany. Only the last of these is me, all of the others are not. It's probably fairly easy to figure out I'm not the NVIDIA guy or the Adobe/Captaris guy, but if the South African or the Dutchman do anything really stupid, I could easily get mistaken for them.
That said, you'd probably find MORE "bad stuff" that I've posted online than the other guys (as far as I know), because I'm quite happy for people to know quite a lot about me - doesn't bother me at all. (see my post a little below this for an example)