I guess it's the physical keyboard that gives it the edge over Android for things like terminal and SSH access given that Android does also allow these things? How would an unlocked and rooted Android device with a similar physical keyboard compare?
"Touchscreen typing is inferior to a keyboard no matter how limited."
I think this depends, if you're typing command line commands or code with lots of switches, brackets, braces and so forth then I think you're absolutely right.
In fact, I used to agree with you in general, but now I use swype on my Android phone I actually think it's far faster and far superior to typing on a phone sized keyboard if you're typing general text such as SMS messages, e-mails, Slashdot posts...
I'm certainly a convert in this respect to touchscreen keyboards, Swype is the only input device I've ever encountered that allows me to reach near full-sized keyboard input speeds when typing plain English text. I certainly used to think touchscreens would always be shit, but Swype and Swype like keyboards are genius and completely changed the touchscreen input game.
Agile is such a varied and broad list of principles which you can pick and choose from that it's flexible enough that you shouldn't really have any problems from it.
Effectively, if you take waterfall and apply some of the most simple agile principles, like the idea of regular client engagement to ensure that what you understood from the original spec, and what the client understood from it (because everything is always open to interpretation, no matter how hard you hammer down the initial spec) match correctly and that the end project will be what is expected then you've still improved waterfall. If something isn't working there then it's not really the fault of agile, agile wont magically fix a failing team, but it can certainly improve processes.
I agree there are a lot of advocates of specific well defined agile methods like SCRUM that will moan and bitch at you if you don't do anything to the letter, and I agree that in the agile community that there are lots of petty pointless arguments of what "to the letter" even is.
But fundamentally I've never once seen a scenario where waterfall couldn't be improved by at least some of the ideas that are encompassed in the agile ideology - even if it's just allowing your developers to timebox if they work better that way, or to have retrospectives every now and then to figure out what went wrong, why, and how it can be avoided in future.
Agile works best when you pick and choose elements that best suit your environment and in fact, if you choose to move towards SCRUM I found this better in general, moving one idea at a time, than moving directly from waterfall to full on SCRUM or whatever.
As a counter to your "you're doing it wrong" jibe I've similarly found that the only thing consistent about people who complain about agile is that they've doing it wrong, largely because they haven't learnt enough about it, haven't spent the effort figuring out how it fits in for their work patterns, and haven't bothered to explain it to their team properly and make sure their team gets it. It works both ways. It's a bit like taking a team of Java programmers and then telling them from tomorrow everything will have to be done in assembly - it's not a change you can make overnight, some developers are going to struggle with the transition and changes, and your entire tool chain is going to have to change and so forth. A lot of people who have tried and failed simply don't get that and blame agile, rather than their poorly researched understanding and poor planning for the changes. If you really want to do the move then nothing beats some professional training from a genuinely good trainer, but many just try to hack it in with no planning based on nothing more than a few shitty articles they've read on the internet. The other common reason for complaints I've seen have been from development leads who have misfunctioning teams that keep failing and/or doing a bad job and expect agile to be a magic fix, then blame it when it isn't, and when in reality they needed to solve the inherent problems with their team, be that lack of cohesion, incompetence, demotivation, or whatever.
It's not that I'm some agile fanboy or something, where I work now we're still primarily waterfall oriented and haven't made the move and I don't really have a problem with it, but I've done some decent agile training, have worked places where it does work, have worked places where a hash up was made of it, and have successfully transitioned teams to it. I also understand that as in my current place of work, it's a large initial time and cost investment to move over to it successfully precisely because you do have to do it right and that right now, we just don't have the free time for that level of investment and have a strong enough team of only senior developers and up that the current status quo is working okay despite the flaws in the methodology which we're experienced enough to work around (often by using elements of agile informally
"He wants people who actually have a life outside work hours. You know, the kind of people whose lives revolve around more than just pizza, cola, and Call of Duty."
But why? It's not like there's any evidence that demonstrates these people as being generally worse employees. It's just mindless stereotyping.
I'm sure we all have personal anecdotes of such people being useless, but I know that I at least have just as many anecdotes of married individuals knocking off early "for the kids" and leaving a job half done whilst the single guy is left to finish off the job and clean up the outstanding mess, or simply not giving a shit generally because said person is just after an easy ride to retirement at that point in their life and not bothered about doing a good job to maximise career potential.
You get bad workers in all demographics, stereotyping full stop is stupid and I agree with the GP, the guy in TFA is an idiot for doing so. If the best candidates about all happen to be "brogrammers" (whatever the fuck that even means) then so be it. Don't write them off if they're the best candidates just because this idiot has some kind of ageist bias against younger candidates himself.
I think you need to learn to read a little better before flying off the handle at people. I said I'm somewhat supportive of some of the goals of their cause, which in no way implies I'm supportive of their actions (especially as I explicitly stated I don't support their actions).
I'm also supportive of a reworking of the UK's tax system, something which some far right parties support, but it doesn't in any way mean I support the far right or their violent protests, and on the contrary think they're like a vile disease. Similarly I'm supportive of reduced levels of US power projection in the world, but that doesn't mean I support Iran, North Korea, or Al Qaeda even though they would like the same. It's not a difficult concept really.
It is actually possible for even the most politically opposed people to still sometimes reach common ground on some issues you know, or are you one of those dumb binary-minded wingnuts that views everything in black and white and is blind to the infinite number of shades of grey in between?
You bemoan violence and cry out for logical, proof, and reason whilst spouting insults and completely and utterly fail to grasp what is written before you in a logical rational manner. You at least realise the hypocrisy of that I hope?
"It's also kind of funny how Apple "needs" to come up with new ideas, when no other company seems to have the same need... or at least no-one ever says they do."
That's because Apple keeps it's product plans secret so people assume it's doing nothing, whilst Google has been open about glass and Samsung has been open about the fact it's building a smart watch.
People aren't saying other companies need new ideas, because we already know they have them and are pursuing them, with Apple we've no idea, for all we know they may well not be doing anything at all, though that's unlikely.
"I could see some Al Qaeda presence in Iran among some part of the Sunni population, but I have a hard time imagining the state itself would assist or hide them."
At absolute minimum it's fairly well documented and supported that Iran held a number of Al Qaeda under house arrest since they fled there from Afghanistan, and that some were given greater freedom of movement after a deal that freed a high profile Iranian that was kidnapped by the Pakistani Taliban and that at very least some of those members were able to carry out fundraising activities from Iran despite having been under the constant watch of the Iranian authorities- i.e. something they couldn't do without Iran's blessing.
But other evidence that points to Iranian support for at least some elements of Al Qaeda include Al Qaeda operatives caught red handed crossing the Iranian border to Afghanistan with Iranian arms which would've been difficult for them to acquire, again, given that some such elements had been under Iranian observation during their time there without Iranian support.
Part the problem in Iran is that there are a number of groups with different views and agendas. The Republican Guard often act independently of the will of the leadership, but the leadership tolerates this as the Republican Guard are also the only ones preventing them from being overthrown. It's possible that even if the Iranian leadership hate Al Qaeda that the RG are happy with the idea with a handful of it's elements blowing up Western soldiers in Afghanistan to keep the nation destabilised and prevent a strong nation ever growing up on their doorstep.
Fundamentally they have ideological differences with Al Qaeda, but keeping two of their largest neighbours weak through destabilisation is going to be more important to them than taking sides and I think the Republican Guard seem to get this.
For what it's worth, it's a similar predicament to Pakistan in this respect - the Pakistani civilian administration doesn't like Al Qaeda because it wants them overthrown and replaced with an Islamic dictatorship, but the ISI and elements of the Army do support them, because they can use them to a) Destabilise Afghanistan and keep it weak, and b) Carry out proxy attacks against countries like India, and c) support Pakistan as a useful rear action guerilla force should war break out and India push into Pakistan.
I'm a disgrace to humanity because I'm against animal testing when it's used unnecessarily (as opposed to when it's the only option which I'm okay with) and because I think wrecking labs and risking uncontrolled release of biological hazards is a bad thing?
Okay then. You might want to get your head checked.
"Does anyone think these funded projects will not get funding and a new set of animals to test on again?"
To be fair, potentially not. I suspect this sort of catastrophe is enough to put an end to some experiments and labs.
I'm somewhat supportive of the cause of reducing animal testing because I think sometimes it is use unnecessarily and is done in an unnecessarily inhumane way, but I agree, this is the wrong way to go about minimising it's use and to screw up active experiments like this could be quite dangerous and could do more harm if infected animals escape and release manufactured or natural diseases into the reach of wild populations.
It's believed the UK's last major foot and mouth outbreak may have been the result of escaped strains of the virus from a research lab and that was just a result of generally poor controls. These protesters could be putting far more animals at risk causing this kind of chaos and risking such uncontrolled escape of diseases and so forth.
"So...exactly how powerful is a Wahabbi Sunni sect in an iron-fisted Shiite country? Think they have the bandwidth to help idiots in Canada (not the US) do some questionable damage?"
After 9/11 Iran actually offered to support the US for precisely this reason, but the US rejected the support and declared Iran part of the problem - part of the axis of evil.
The problem is, having been cast into this role, Iran then seemed to come to the conclusion that it may as well play up to it. Iran did give refuge to some senior members of Al Qaeda who fled Afghanistan, and by about 2005 there was evidence of both Iran, and it's ally Syria supporting some elements of Al Qaeda against the US.
It seems to be one of those rather misguided "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" scenarios, which Syria learnt to it's detriment given that many of the Al Qaeda affiliated militants it gave sanctuary, training, arms, and a base to launch attacks against the US and the new Iraqi administration to are now the same folks fighting the Syrian government.
Alliances change frequently and are odd things sometimes - don't forget that it was only about 25 - 30 years ago that America was funding, training, and equipping Al Qaeda against the Afghans and that even in Libya and now Syria America finds itself on the same side as Al Qaeda in wanting the overthrow of then Gaddafi, and now Assad.
So don't assume religious differences are enough to preclude any possibility of cooperation - all sides have shown they're willing to back the other when the situation suits. Al Qaeda and Iran have worked together in the past, and even if they weren't working together now, that doesn't preclude the possibility that they at least came from Iran, having gone idle there.
It's likely, as much as anything, that Iran at least still tolerates a presence of Al Qaeda in certain areas allowing them to retain a decent amount of strength on the off-chance that they become a useful tool in carrying out war by proxy, even if it doesn't give them active material assistance any more.
That definition would imply computers are more intelligent than humans as various data mining algorithms have a much greater capability to predict the future from historical information and make the most logical choice based on that than a human ever could.
"No taking Guns out of "equation" means that you are much more likely to have violence done to you, often with the same guns you disarmed from law abiding citizens."
There's absolutely no evidence of this, if it were remotely true then in the UK we would have far more gun deaths, and in the US, Mexico and South Africa violent crime would be largely a solved problem and yet they're some of the most violent Westernised countries on Earth.
"Just look at the crime statistics of any major City where they have extremely restrictive gun laws (Washington DC, Chicago, NY etc or the UK, incidents of violent crime are way higher)."
Sure, if you cherry pick outliers you can prove anything. FWIW the UK's violent crime incidents consist almost entirely of alcohol related brawls and football hooliganism, gun crime is such a small component that it's pretty much immeasurable in the stats.
"Guns are a great equalizer. Criminals want easy targets."
Right, and how does a gun make you not an easy target? Do your guns give you magical psychic abilities that let you know when someone is approaching from behind? Are criminals in America special such that they just happen to be the only segment of society that draws slower than everyone else and is less able to pull the trigger when pointing at another human being?
How do you reconcile your NRA sponsored world view with the idea that the leaked gun registry lists a few months back put the owners of those properties of being burgled? Surely all gun owners should have their address and fire arms publicly listed because criminals wont touch houses with guns right because they deter crime? Obviously the MIT cop didn't die to the Boston bombers the other day either as they'd never attack someone like him, a trained firearms user and holder. Oh wait.
Honestly, you don't need to give me the propaganda treatment, I've heard it all before and I'm fully aware of the logical inconsistencies and FUD required to give it at least some semblance of a valid argument as pointed out above. The FUD is tiresome, it makes no sense due to often being contradictory, and has no statistical merit.
Come back when you have some evidence of value for your point rather than hearsay and arguments that can be trivially pointed out as nonsense with only a few seconds of critical thinking.
You're somewhat right but it's still self-correcting overall because if a minority gets given too much say in a policy such that it ticks off the population then that party that formed the coalition will suffer a world of hurt next election and rapidly learn not to form coalitions that mean giving too much leeway to unpopular minorities. It's not unprecedented for the biggest minority in a PR based state to go ahead with a minority government and just focus on passing stuff that they can get consensus from the other parties on. This is healthy because unpopular measures are easily tossed out and the minority government is kept on constant edge and must watch where they tread. That's exactly how you want a government to have to work rather than be given a free reign to go nuts and fuck everything up.
Fundamentally even with it's flaws it's better than most of the alternatives, particularly our first past the post in the UK where as little as 30% of the vote can get you an effective 100% of the power given that it can be enough to give you a parliamentary majority.
Is there really something valiant and courageous about ID'ing the person who just turned you into an amputee?
I'm not belittling the man, I feel awful for him as that's one of the most horrendous life changing things I can imagine happening, but I'm not entirely sure what heroic act this man has performed, he's done what anyone in his situation would do - the maximum he can to exact revenge.
Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but the bravado being shown regarding people who did what anyone would expect them to do between this and the poor MIT officer who got shot dead without being given chance to defend himself strikes me as a little odd.
I would argue, the heroes, if any, are those who rushed to the aid of the injured without knowing if they themselves could become victims of another bomb or attack as they did so, not the poor sods who died or are led in hospital beds - they're unfortunate victims. Is no one allowed to be a victim in America? Must every victim be made a hero whilst the real heroes go unnamed and unknown?
Certainly I imagine that if this is what heroism is, the guy led missing his legs would rather be one of the unknown and unnamed.
"His accuser hates Castro? That must mean she works for the CIA!
Everyone who opposes Castro definitively works for the CIA! She worked with a group, who is connected to one member who hates Castro, and thusly was backed by the CIA! It's all proof!"
Um, no. Read his post again. This wasn't some tenuous link, this was the government of Cuba kicking her out as they determined her to be a CIA asset. Millions of holiday makers from the West go to Cuba as a holiday destination each year (outside the US it has a massive tourist industry), few to none of them like Castro, but none of them get kicked out for being CIA assets.
You accuse the GP of confirmation bias and claim that it weakens his point, the fact you have to resort to rewriting what happened and completely distort what he said doesn't exactly do anything to strengthen your point.
"He assumes everyone can do something about the problems once they are revealed when in actuality only certain people can do anything about these sorts of problems."
Who are these certain people that are the only ones that can do anything about certain problems? Can you give some examples?
"He assumes that information should be used to create just behavior but just behavior is subjective, and we cannot always agree on that."
No, he explicitly states that it's subjective, but that he believes just behaviour arises from the ability to both provide transparency (i.e. whistleblow safely), and act on objective information (i.e. not manipulated by biased media).
"We have seen war images going back to Vietnam but that hasn't stopped Iraq did it? The media or fourth estate actually has very limited power in the USA for example. You can go to the media about something, millions of people can know it's happening, and they can't do a damn thing about it."
I think the problem is you're making the very human mistake of expecting things to happen on your timescale, but the world, the universe doesn't work on our timescales, it's much bigger than that.
You suggest that nothing has been done because of Vietnam, because of Iraq, but I don't think that's true. I think international and national disgust for what happened with Iraq has crippled Americas ability to carry out similar wars. Public understanding of how flawed the Iraq war was across the globe has caused America's international reputation to absolutely plummet making it hard for it to justify much military action. If Iraq had never happened and it's international reputation remained at pre-War on Terror levels I suspect America would've hit Iran and intervened in Syria now. Since the intervention in Iraq, US intervention overseas has been massively limited, to simply providing support in places like Libya where there was vast international support and only really Russia as a major player aired distaste for it, but didn't outright block it at the UN.
It's about political capital, and political capital is something you gain by doing things that are popular, and lose by doing things that are unpopular. Political capital doesn't exist as a tangible currency, but exists in the form of international opinion weighted on different components of the individual - for example, if just the population of Fiji objected to America intervening in Syria they wouldn't care, if it was the population of Russia they'd listen a little bit more, and if it was there allies - the EU, then they'd listen much much more again. The problem with Iraq is that even nearly all their allies were against it, and that's why it cost so much in political capital to go ahead with it, and that's why America has yet to regain the political capital required to do that again.
But here is, where I think, Assange is concerned - he is concerned that whilst political capital expenditure on things like the war in Iraq are transparent and open for the world to make up their own mind, other things are not. For example, America deserved to suffer a loss in political capital for extraordinary rendition, and for waterboarding, but it tried to keep these things secret - whistleblowing on these issues so that they were discovered ensured that the correct political expenditure was made to limit the possibility of repeating this sort of thing.
Consider the hypothetical scenario that the conspiracy theorists were right, and that Obama did order that the CIA give Hugo Chavez his cancer - if that was kept hidden Obama could carry on as is, as if nothing had happened, but if a whistleblower leaked evidence that it was true, then this would destroy Obama's remaining political capital and possibly see him removed from office. It would deter any president from ever doing anything like that again any time soon.
You see, it's not about any one individual, it's about making sure information is known so that global opinion, although subjective for each individual, can be a reasonable measure of the legitimacy of an action, or leader, but for that to be possible, the world population has to be informed, they have to know the facts, and it is for that reason that Assange sees whistleblowing as important.
I don't think you realise how much technical infrastructure was involved in the design of Wikileaks. You also realise that Assange when he was younger was jailed for hacking into Nortel and the Pentagon right? That he was active in the hacker scene of the 80s in writing some fairly prominent philosophical hacker ideals?
You know after he got out of jail he helped Australian police as an expert witness against an internet based paedophile ring? that he also developed a number of crypto applications, contributed to some FOSS projects like PostgreSQL?
If you don't think Assange has any technical ability or has had any technical impact then you must be a child of the noughties or something who only knows him in relation to the Wikileaks drama.
Love him or loathe him, he's a guy who has been both political and technologically active and to some degree influential for 3 decades. Most of the famous hackers of the 80s (hackers being the classic white hat type that hacked for knowledge and information), ended up doing one of three things - went legit and went commercial, went to jail, or went to the truly dark side and started working for the likes of the Russian mafia. Assange is one of the very few who stuck to hacker ethic of the 80s and never stopped pursuing that quest for information and I think he deserves credit for that at least. Few people dedicate their whole lives to what they believe in.
Even if you disagree with everything he's done I think it's hard to argue he hasn't been one of the more influential technologists of our time.
That's because his organisation has seen first hand the fundamental problem with the way the existing monetary infrastructure is set up - it's controlled by a select few, who can shut down access to it at will and hence block participation of legitimate causes that the select few have a personal distaste for even if the whole thing is conducted outside the borders those few live in.
When you have Visa and Mastercard basically holding a duopoly on global monetary transfer, it's no wonder he supports a system that takes control out of the hands of the select few and puts it back into the hands of the man.
The only credibility that has been lost is from people who assume Java is intended to run arbitrary code and do not understand it's security model.
There are still distinct limitations on what the JVM allows to be executed from browser plugins without signing and executing a signed application gives you all the security prompts you'd expect and is in fact really not all that different to a download link where the user gets a "save" or "open" button that lets them execute genuinely arbitrary code. Or in other words, to run arbitrary code you by definition have to explicitly give consent for your trust in the source. The things Java can do in an untrusted environment are really not any greater than what JavaScript can do nowadays and that exists natively in just about every browser.
I don't pretend to defend Oracle, not least it's handling of Java, and the apparent increase in insecurity since it's takeover of Sun, but is it really so hard to get just a little bit of an understanding in the way Java works rather than making incorrect comments and modding them up to +5 just to stick it the Oracle man? There's plenty you can attack them over without that. Talking shit just gives them ammunition to pretend their detractors don't know what they're on about.
Right, but all of those things you have a much higher chance of defending yourself against, can simply run from, and cannot kill so many in such great numbers.
That means that when guns are taken out the equation you're far less likely to be killed.
Yes, yes, if you have a gun you're more likely to be able to stop them, yeah, except they're the ones attacking you, which means they get the jump, they shoot first, or worse, they take the gun off you before you even realise you're being attacked and shoot you with your own gun.
There's simply no escaping the fact that more guns = more deaths as much as NRA propaganda would like to pretend otherwise. I have no problem with the argument from the US that guns are essential to defend liberty or whatever, and that's fine, if you want to make that argument you can. But don't try and parrot the arguments that are blatantly false. You've only got to look at homicide rates to see at very least guns do absolutely nothing to reduce homicide rates, and may well be the cause for increased homicide rates in countries where gun ownership is prolific. Correlation may not be causation, but in a decent sample size (like every country in the world) it's a pretty good indicator and powerful enough to show with a strong degree of confidence that gun ownership most certainly does not decrease homicide rates.
You don't even have to prove it was true in the UK, merely that you had reasonable grounds to believe it was true - this is why Lord McAlpine's case is on pretty shakey grounds and why he dropped it against many bloggers, because given the fact most of them could prove they believed he was a paedophile because they'd heard it from normally authoritive sources (i.e. the media and prominent public figures) he'd have no way to counter their evidence that this was the case. This is also why he's continued his campaign against others like Sally Bercow, because they were some of the sources others believed were authorative.
Libel law in the UK is still only such that it can be used against people who were talking shit, or can't prove that they weren't. I'd prefer it to be the other way around all the same to retain the principle of innocent until proven guilty, but it's not as bad as some make out.
Sure, my point was though that there are also groupings of just about any religion (and even atheism when you consider sections of the far right) who also fall under that same category.
The problem is he isn't just singling out violent groups, but is focussing entirely on Islam as a whole and it's that that fundamentally separates him from being someone examining the genuine problem of violent subgroupings of Islam and someone whose pursuing the far right mindset without any degree of rationality.
I have no problem with people focussing on violent groups, but to just write off 1.3bn people as terrorists requires a certain degree of mental retardation.
"Read the Qur'an and listen to the words of Muslim clerics and you will see how anyone who believes in tolerance, equality, justice for all, and freedom of expression should opose Islam"
But that's just it isn't it? These things are all open to interpretation and whatever is said in the Koran, or by extremist preachers is really irrelevant - that says nothing about the followers as a whole, that does nothing to justify your generalisation of all 1.3bn muslims.
As I have pointed out to you, right now there are Buddhists attacking and killing muslims in places like Burma, do you really not see that even if the teachings of Buddhism can be interpreted in such a way as to justify violence that anything can? That it's not the text, that kills people, it's simply people who are often brought up in a world of turmoil, violence, and anger - the same sort of anger you're preaching, which is precisely the type of anger that creates far right extremists. You seem entirely oblivious that your distortion of the facts, your preaching of select points and ideas (i.e. you never make mention of the billion odd muslims who behave and even do genuine good in the world) is exactly the same as what those Islamic preachers you so hate do?
You may think you're doing right, you may think you're doing good, but in reality you're exactly the same as the likes of Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada, you just thankfully haven't found the platform and hence do not have the listeners to do the same damage they do.
Are you really so oblivious to the fact you're doing exactly what they do in generalising about muslims as they generalise about Westerners and preaching hate towards them? If you don't recognise this then tell me, what do you think is different? the mere fact your preaching hasn't led to a terrorist incident yet but theirs has?
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I guess it's the physical keyboard that gives it the edge over Android for things like terminal and SSH access given that Android does also allow these things? How would an unlocked and rooted Android device with a similar physical keyboard compare?
"Touchscreen typing is inferior to a keyboard no matter how limited."
I think this depends, if you're typing command line commands or code with lots of switches, brackets, braces and so forth then I think you're absolutely right.
In fact, I used to agree with you in general, but now I use swype on my Android phone I actually think it's far faster and far superior to typing on a phone sized keyboard if you're typing general text such as SMS messages, e-mails, Slashdot posts...
I'm certainly a convert in this respect to touchscreen keyboards, Swype is the only input device I've ever encountered that allows me to reach near full-sized keyboard input speeds when typing plain English text. I certainly used to think touchscreens would always be shit, but Swype and Swype like keyboards are genius and completely changed the touchscreen input game.
Well that's probably because it's true.
Agile is such a varied and broad list of principles which you can pick and choose from that it's flexible enough that you shouldn't really have any problems from it.
Effectively, if you take waterfall and apply some of the most simple agile principles, like the idea of regular client engagement to ensure that what you understood from the original spec, and what the client understood from it (because everything is always open to interpretation, no matter how hard you hammer down the initial spec) match correctly and that the end project will be what is expected then you've still improved waterfall. If something isn't working there then it's not really the fault of agile, agile wont magically fix a failing team, but it can certainly improve processes.
I agree there are a lot of advocates of specific well defined agile methods like SCRUM that will moan and bitch at you if you don't do anything to the letter, and I agree that in the agile community that there are lots of petty pointless arguments of what "to the letter" even is.
But fundamentally I've never once seen a scenario where waterfall couldn't be improved by at least some of the ideas that are encompassed in the agile ideology - even if it's just allowing your developers to timebox if they work better that way, or to have retrospectives every now and then to figure out what went wrong, why, and how it can be avoided in future.
Agile works best when you pick and choose elements that best suit your environment and in fact, if you choose to move towards SCRUM I found this better in general, moving one idea at a time, than moving directly from waterfall to full on SCRUM or whatever.
As a counter to your "you're doing it wrong" jibe I've similarly found that the only thing consistent about people who complain about agile is that they've doing it wrong, largely because they haven't learnt enough about it, haven't spent the effort figuring out how it fits in for their work patterns, and haven't bothered to explain it to their team properly and make sure their team gets it. It works both ways. It's a bit like taking a team of Java programmers and then telling them from tomorrow everything will have to be done in assembly - it's not a change you can make overnight, some developers are going to struggle with the transition and changes, and your entire tool chain is going to have to change and so forth. A lot of people who have tried and failed simply don't get that and blame agile, rather than their poorly researched understanding and poor planning for the changes. If you really want to do the move then nothing beats some professional training from a genuinely good trainer, but many just try to hack it in with no planning based on nothing more than a few shitty articles they've read on the internet. The other common reason for complaints I've seen have been from development leads who have misfunctioning teams that keep failing and/or doing a bad job and expect agile to be a magic fix, then blame it when it isn't, and when in reality they needed to solve the inherent problems with their team, be that lack of cohesion, incompetence, demotivation, or whatever.
It's not that I'm some agile fanboy or something, where I work now we're still primarily waterfall oriented and haven't made the move and I don't really have a problem with it, but I've done some decent agile training, have worked places where it does work, have worked places where a hash up was made of it, and have successfully transitioned teams to it. I also understand that as in my current place of work, it's a large initial time and cost investment to move over to it successfully precisely because you do have to do it right and that right now, we just don't have the free time for that level of investment and have a strong enough team of only senior developers and up that the current status quo is working okay despite the flaws in the methodology which we're experienced enough to work around (often by using elements of agile informally
What is so magical about it that you N900 fanboys keep going on about it exactly. I mean, what does it do that no other phone can?
"He wants people who actually have a life outside work hours. You know, the kind of people whose lives revolve around more than just pizza, cola, and Call of Duty."
But why? It's not like there's any evidence that demonstrates these people as being generally worse employees. It's just mindless stereotyping.
I'm sure we all have personal anecdotes of such people being useless, but I know that I at least have just as many anecdotes of married individuals knocking off early "for the kids" and leaving a job half done whilst the single guy is left to finish off the job and clean up the outstanding mess, or simply not giving a shit generally because said person is just after an easy ride to retirement at that point in their life and not bothered about doing a good job to maximise career potential.
You get bad workers in all demographics, stereotyping full stop is stupid and I agree with the GP, the guy in TFA is an idiot for doing so. If the best candidates about all happen to be "brogrammers" (whatever the fuck that even means) then so be it. Don't write them off if they're the best candidates just because this idiot has some kind of ageist bias against younger candidates himself.
I think you need to learn to read a little better before flying off the handle at people. I said I'm somewhat supportive of some of the goals of their cause, which in no way implies I'm supportive of their actions (especially as I explicitly stated I don't support their actions).
I'm also supportive of a reworking of the UK's tax system, something which some far right parties support, but it doesn't in any way mean I support the far right or their violent protests, and on the contrary think they're like a vile disease. Similarly I'm supportive of reduced levels of US power projection in the world, but that doesn't mean I support Iran, North Korea, or Al Qaeda even though they would like the same. It's not a difficult concept really.
It is actually possible for even the most politically opposed people to still sometimes reach common ground on some issues you know, or are you one of those dumb binary-minded wingnuts that views everything in black and white and is blind to the infinite number of shades of grey in between?
You bemoan violence and cry out for logical, proof, and reason whilst spouting insults and completely and utterly fail to grasp what is written before you in a logical rational manner. You at least realise the hypocrisy of that I hope?
"It's also kind of funny how Apple "needs" to come up with new ideas, when no other company seems to have the same need... or at least no-one ever says they do."
That's because Apple keeps it's product plans secret so people assume it's doing nothing, whilst Google has been open about glass and Samsung has been open about the fact it's building a smart watch.
People aren't saying other companies need new ideas, because we already know they have them and are pursuing them, with Apple we've no idea, for all we know they may well not be doing anything at all, though that's unlikely.
"I could see some Al Qaeda presence in Iran among some part of the Sunni population, but I have a hard time imagining the state itself would assist or hide them."
At absolute minimum it's fairly well documented and supported that Iran held a number of Al Qaeda under house arrest since they fled there from Afghanistan, and that some were given greater freedom of movement after a deal that freed a high profile Iranian that was kidnapped by the Pakistani Taliban and that at very least some of those members were able to carry out fundraising activities from Iran despite having been under the constant watch of the Iranian authorities- i.e. something they couldn't do without Iran's blessing.
But other evidence that points to Iranian support for at least some elements of Al Qaeda include Al Qaeda operatives caught red handed crossing the Iranian border to Afghanistan with Iranian arms which would've been difficult for them to acquire, again, given that some such elements had been under Iranian observation during their time there without Iranian support.
Part the problem in Iran is that there are a number of groups with different views and agendas. The Republican Guard often act independently of the will of the leadership, but the leadership tolerates this as the Republican Guard are also the only ones preventing them from being overthrown. It's possible that even if the Iranian leadership hate Al Qaeda that the RG are happy with the idea with a handful of it's elements blowing up Western soldiers in Afghanistan to keep the nation destabilised and prevent a strong nation ever growing up on their doorstep.
Fundamentally they have ideological differences with Al Qaeda, but keeping two of their largest neighbours weak through destabilisation is going to be more important to them than taking sides and I think the Republican Guard seem to get this.
For what it's worth, it's a similar predicament to Pakistan in this respect - the Pakistani civilian administration doesn't like Al Qaeda because it wants them overthrown and replaced with an Islamic dictatorship, but the ISI and elements of the Army do support them, because they can use them to a) Destabilise Afghanistan and keep it weak, and b) Carry out proxy attacks against countries like India, and c) support Pakistan as a useful rear action guerilla force should war break out and India push into Pakistan.
I'm a disgrace to humanity because I'm against animal testing when it's used unnecessarily (as opposed to when it's the only option which I'm okay with) and because I think wrecking labs and risking uncontrolled release of biological hazards is a bad thing?
Okay then. You might want to get your head checked.
"Does anyone think these funded projects will not get funding and a new set of animals to test on again?"
To be fair, potentially not. I suspect this sort of catastrophe is enough to put an end to some experiments and labs.
I'm somewhat supportive of the cause of reducing animal testing because I think sometimes it is use unnecessarily and is done in an unnecessarily inhumane way, but I agree, this is the wrong way to go about minimising it's use and to screw up active experiments like this could be quite dangerous and could do more harm if infected animals escape and release manufactured or natural diseases into the reach of wild populations.
It's believed the UK's last major foot and mouth outbreak may have been the result of escaped strains of the virus from a research lab and that was just a result of generally poor controls. These protesters could be putting far more animals at risk causing this kind of chaos and risking such uncontrolled escape of diseases and so forth.
"So...exactly how powerful is a Wahabbi Sunni sect in an iron-fisted Shiite country? Think they have the bandwidth to help idiots in Canada (not the US) do some questionable damage?"
After 9/11 Iran actually offered to support the US for precisely this reason, but the US rejected the support and declared Iran part of the problem - part of the axis of evil.
The problem is, having been cast into this role, Iran then seemed to come to the conclusion that it may as well play up to it. Iran did give refuge to some senior members of Al Qaeda who fled Afghanistan, and by about 2005 there was evidence of both Iran, and it's ally Syria supporting some elements of Al Qaeda against the US.
It seems to be one of those rather misguided "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" scenarios, which Syria learnt to it's detriment given that many of the Al Qaeda affiliated militants it gave sanctuary, training, arms, and a base to launch attacks against the US and the new Iraqi administration to are now the same folks fighting the Syrian government.
Alliances change frequently and are odd things sometimes - don't forget that it was only about 25 - 30 years ago that America was funding, training, and equipping Al Qaeda against the Afghans and that even in Libya and now Syria America finds itself on the same side as Al Qaeda in wanting the overthrow of then Gaddafi, and now Assad.
So don't assume religious differences are enough to preclude any possibility of cooperation - all sides have shown they're willing to back the other when the situation suits. Al Qaeda and Iran have worked together in the past, and even if they weren't working together now, that doesn't preclude the possibility that they at least came from Iran, having gone idle there.
It's likely, as much as anything, that Iran at least still tolerates a presence of Al Qaeda in certain areas allowing them to retain a decent amount of strength on the off-chance that they become a useful tool in carrying out war by proxy, even if it doesn't give them active material assistance any more.
That definition would imply computers are more intelligent than humans as various data mining algorithms have a much greater capability to predict the future from historical information and make the most logical choice based on that than a human ever could.
So it doesn't work, there's more to it than that.
You know Al Qaeda does actually have a media wing and publishes a regular magazine called "Inspire" right?
Those are the same tired old lies.
"No taking Guns out of "equation" means that you are much more likely to have violence done to you, often with the same guns you disarmed from law abiding citizens."
There's absolutely no evidence of this, if it were remotely true then in the UK we would have far more gun deaths, and in the US, Mexico and South Africa violent crime would be largely a solved problem and yet they're some of the most violent Westernised countries on Earth.
"Just look at the crime statistics of any major City where they have extremely restrictive gun laws (Washington DC, Chicago, NY etc or the UK, incidents of violent crime are way higher)."
Sure, if you cherry pick outliers you can prove anything. FWIW the UK's violent crime incidents consist almost entirely of alcohol related brawls and football hooliganism, gun crime is such a small component that it's pretty much immeasurable in the stats.
"Guns are a great equalizer. Criminals want easy targets."
Right, and how does a gun make you not an easy target? Do your guns give you magical psychic abilities that let you know when someone is approaching from behind? Are criminals in America special such that they just happen to be the only segment of society that draws slower than everyone else and is less able to pull the trigger when pointing at another human being?
How do you reconcile your NRA sponsored world view with the idea that the leaked gun registry lists a few months back put the owners of those properties of being burgled? Surely all gun owners should have their address and fire arms publicly listed because criminals wont touch houses with guns right because they deter crime? Obviously the MIT cop didn't die to the Boston bombers the other day either as they'd never attack someone like him, a trained firearms user and holder. Oh wait.
Honestly, you don't need to give me the propaganda treatment, I've heard it all before and I'm fully aware of the logical inconsistencies and FUD required to give it at least some semblance of a valid argument as pointed out above. The FUD is tiresome, it makes no sense due to often being contradictory, and has no statistical merit.
Come back when you have some evidence of value for your point rather than hearsay and arguments that can be trivially pointed out as nonsense with only a few seconds of critical thinking.
You're somewhat right but it's still self-correcting overall because if a minority gets given too much say in a policy such that it ticks off the population then that party that formed the coalition will suffer a world of hurt next election and rapidly learn not to form coalitions that mean giving too much leeway to unpopular minorities. It's not unprecedented for the biggest minority in a PR based state to go ahead with a minority government and just focus on passing stuff that they can get consensus from the other parties on. This is healthy because unpopular measures are easily tossed out and the minority government is kept on constant edge and must watch where they tread. That's exactly how you want a government to have to work rather than be given a free reign to go nuts and fuck everything up.
Fundamentally even with it's flaws it's better than most of the alternatives, particularly our first past the post in the UK where as little as 30% of the vote can get you an effective 100% of the power given that it can be enough to give you a parliamentary majority.
Is there really something valiant and courageous about ID'ing the person who just turned you into an amputee?
I'm not belittling the man, I feel awful for him as that's one of the most horrendous life changing things I can imagine happening, but I'm not entirely sure what heroic act this man has performed, he's done what anyone in his situation would do - the maximum he can to exact revenge.
Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but the bravado being shown regarding people who did what anyone would expect them to do between this and the poor MIT officer who got shot dead without being given chance to defend himself strikes me as a little odd.
I would argue, the heroes, if any, are those who rushed to the aid of the injured without knowing if they themselves could become victims of another bomb or attack as they did so, not the poor sods who died or are led in hospital beds - they're unfortunate victims. Is no one allowed to be a victim in America? Must every victim be made a hero whilst the real heroes go unnamed and unknown?
Certainly I imagine that if this is what heroism is, the guy led missing his legs would rather be one of the unknown and unnamed.
"His accuser hates Castro? That must mean she works for the CIA!
Everyone who opposes Castro definitively works for the CIA! She worked with a group, who is connected to one member who hates Castro, and thusly was backed by the CIA! It's all proof!"
Um, no. Read his post again. This wasn't some tenuous link, this was the government of Cuba kicking her out as they determined her to be a CIA asset. Millions of holiday makers from the West go to Cuba as a holiday destination each year (outside the US it has a massive tourist industry), few to none of them like Castro, but none of them get kicked out for being CIA assets.
You accuse the GP of confirmation bias and claim that it weakens his point, the fact you have to resort to rewriting what happened and completely distort what he said doesn't exactly do anything to strengthen your point.
"He assumes everyone can do something about the problems once they are revealed when in actuality only certain people can do anything about these sorts of problems."
Who are these certain people that are the only ones that can do anything about certain problems? Can you give some examples?
"He assumes that information should be used to create just behavior but just behavior is subjective, and we cannot always agree on that."
No, he explicitly states that it's subjective, but that he believes just behaviour arises from the ability to both provide transparency (i.e. whistleblow safely), and act on objective information (i.e. not manipulated by biased media).
"We have seen war images going back to Vietnam but that hasn't stopped Iraq did it? The media or fourth estate actually has very limited power in the USA for example. You can go to the media about something, millions of people can know it's happening, and they can't do a damn thing about it."
I think the problem is you're making the very human mistake of expecting things to happen on your timescale, but the world, the universe doesn't work on our timescales, it's much bigger than that.
You suggest that nothing has been done because of Vietnam, because of Iraq, but I don't think that's true. I think international and national disgust for what happened with Iraq has crippled Americas ability to carry out similar wars. Public understanding of how flawed the Iraq war was across the globe has caused America's international reputation to absolutely plummet making it hard for it to justify much military action. If Iraq had never happened and it's international reputation remained at pre-War on Terror levels I suspect America would've hit Iran and intervened in Syria now. Since the intervention in Iraq, US intervention overseas has been massively limited, to simply providing support in places like Libya where there was vast international support and only really Russia as a major player aired distaste for it, but didn't outright block it at the UN.
It's about political capital, and political capital is something you gain by doing things that are popular, and lose by doing things that are unpopular. Political capital doesn't exist as a tangible currency, but exists in the form of international opinion weighted on different components of the individual - for example, if just the population of Fiji objected to America intervening in Syria they wouldn't care, if it was the population of Russia they'd listen a little bit more, and if it was there allies - the EU, then they'd listen much much more again. The problem with Iraq is that even nearly all their allies were against it, and that's why it cost so much in political capital to go ahead with it, and that's why America has yet to regain the political capital required to do that again.
But here is, where I think, Assange is concerned - he is concerned that whilst political capital expenditure on things like the war in Iraq are transparent and open for the world to make up their own mind, other things are not. For example, America deserved to suffer a loss in political capital for extraordinary rendition, and for waterboarding, but it tried to keep these things secret - whistleblowing on these issues so that they were discovered ensured that the correct political expenditure was made to limit the possibility of repeating this sort of thing.
Consider the hypothetical scenario that the conspiracy theorists were right, and that Obama did order that the CIA give Hugo Chavez his cancer - if that was kept hidden Obama could carry on as is, as if nothing had happened, but if a whistleblower leaked evidence that it was true, then this would destroy Obama's remaining political capital and possibly see him removed from office. It would deter any president from ever doing anything like that again any time soon.
You see, it's not about any one individual, it's about making sure information is known so that global opinion, although subjective for each individual, can be a reasonable measure of the legitimacy of an action, or leader, but for that to be possible, the world population has to be informed, they have to know the facts, and it is for that reason that Assange sees whistleblowing as important.
I don't think you realise how much technical infrastructure was involved in the design of Wikileaks. You also realise that Assange when he was younger was jailed for hacking into Nortel and the Pentagon right? That he was active in the hacker scene of the 80s in writing some fairly prominent philosophical hacker ideals?
You know after he got out of jail he helped Australian police as an expert witness against an internet based paedophile ring? that he also developed a number of crypto applications, contributed to some FOSS projects like PostgreSQL?
If you don't think Assange has any technical ability or has had any technical impact then you must be a child of the noughties or something who only knows him in relation to the Wikileaks drama.
Love him or loathe him, he's a guy who has been both political and technologically active and to some degree influential for 3 decades. Most of the famous hackers of the 80s (hackers being the classic white hat type that hacked for knowledge and information), ended up doing one of three things - went legit and went commercial, went to jail, or went to the truly dark side and started working for the likes of the Russian mafia. Assange is one of the very few who stuck to hacker ethic of the 80s and never stopped pursuing that quest for information and I think he deserves credit for that at least. Few people dedicate their whole lives to what they believe in.
Even if you disagree with everything he's done I think it's hard to argue he hasn't been one of the more influential technologists of our time.
That's because his organisation has seen first hand the fundamental problem with the way the existing monetary infrastructure is set up - it's controlled by a select few, who can shut down access to it at will and hence block participation of legitimate causes that the select few have a personal distaste for even if the whole thing is conducted outside the borders those few live in.
When you have Visa and Mastercard basically holding a duopoly on global monetary transfer, it's no wonder he supports a system that takes control out of the hands of the select few and puts it back into the hands of the man.
The only credibility that has been lost is from people who assume Java is intended to run arbitrary code and do not understand it's security model.
There are still distinct limitations on what the JVM allows to be executed from browser plugins without signing and executing a signed application gives you all the security prompts you'd expect and is in fact really not all that different to a download link where the user gets a "save" or "open" button that lets them execute genuinely arbitrary code. Or in other words, to run arbitrary code you by definition have to explicitly give consent for your trust in the source. The things Java can do in an untrusted environment are really not any greater than what JavaScript can do nowadays and that exists natively in just about every browser.
I don't pretend to defend Oracle, not least it's handling of Java, and the apparent increase in insecurity since it's takeover of Sun, but is it really so hard to get just a little bit of an understanding in the way Java works rather than making incorrect comments and modding them up to +5 just to stick it the Oracle man? There's plenty you can attack them over without that. Talking shit just gives them ammunition to pretend their detractors don't know what they're on about.
Right, but all of those things you have a much higher chance of defending yourself against, can simply run from, and cannot kill so many in such great numbers.
That means that when guns are taken out the equation you're far less likely to be killed.
Yes, yes, if you have a gun you're more likely to be able to stop them, yeah, except they're the ones attacking you, which means they get the jump, they shoot first, or worse, they take the gun off you before you even realise you're being attacked and shoot you with your own gun.
There's simply no escaping the fact that more guns = more deaths as much as NRA propaganda would like to pretend otherwise. I have no problem with the argument from the US that guns are essential to defend liberty or whatever, and that's fine, if you want to make that argument you can. But don't try and parrot the arguments that are blatantly false. You've only got to look at homicide rates to see at very least guns do absolutely nothing to reduce homicide rates, and may well be the cause for increased homicide rates in countries where gun ownership is prolific. Correlation may not be causation, but in a decent sample size (like every country in the world) it's a pretty good indicator and powerful enough to show with a strong degree of confidence that gun ownership most certainly does not decrease homicide rates.
You don't even have to prove it was true in the UK, merely that you had reasonable grounds to believe it was true - this is why Lord McAlpine's case is on pretty shakey grounds and why he dropped it against many bloggers, because given the fact most of them could prove they believed he was a paedophile because they'd heard it from normally authoritive sources (i.e. the media and prominent public figures) he'd have no way to counter their evidence that this was the case. This is also why he's continued his campaign against others like Sally Bercow, because they were some of the sources others believed were authorative.
Libel law in the UK is still only such that it can be used against people who were talking shit, or can't prove that they weren't. I'd prefer it to be the other way around all the same to retain the principle of innocent until proven guilty, but it's not as bad as some make out.
Sure, my point was though that there are also groupings of just about any religion (and even atheism when you consider sections of the far right) who also fall under that same category.
The problem is he isn't just singling out violent groups, but is focussing entirely on Islam as a whole and it's that that fundamentally separates him from being someone examining the genuine problem of violent subgroupings of Islam and someone whose pursuing the far right mindset without any degree of rationality.
I have no problem with people focussing on violent groups, but to just write off 1.3bn people as terrorists requires a certain degree of mental retardation.
"Read the Qur'an and listen to the words of Muslim clerics and you will see how anyone who believes in tolerance, equality, justice for all, and freedom of expression should opose Islam"
But that's just it isn't it? These things are all open to interpretation and whatever is said in the Koran, or by extremist preachers is really irrelevant - that says nothing about the followers as a whole, that does nothing to justify your generalisation of all 1.3bn muslims.
As I have pointed out to you, right now there are Buddhists attacking and killing muslims in places like Burma, do you really not see that even if the teachings of Buddhism can be interpreted in such a way as to justify violence that anything can? That it's not the text, that kills people, it's simply people who are often brought up in a world of turmoil, violence, and anger - the same sort of anger you're preaching, which is precisely the type of anger that creates far right extremists. You seem entirely oblivious that your distortion of the facts, your preaching of select points and ideas (i.e. you never make mention of the billion odd muslims who behave and even do genuine good in the world) is exactly the same as what those Islamic preachers you so hate do?
You may think you're doing right, you may think you're doing good, but in reality you're exactly the same as the likes of Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada, you just thankfully haven't found the platform and hence do not have the listeners to do the same damage they do.
Are you really so oblivious to the fact you're doing exactly what they do in generalising about muslims as they generalise about Westerners and preaching hate towards them? If you don't recognise this then tell me, what do you think is different? the mere fact your preaching hasn't led to a terrorist incident yet but theirs has?