The lack of it isn't going to cause global warming, mass killings, or cute furry kittens to die.
The same could be said about any sort of "art". No, I don't think artificial kiddy porn has particular artistic significance, but I feel pretty much the same way about death metal. At least I'm smart enough to realize that my taste shouldn't decide what other people can see.
Any sort of creative work can (and will, quite frankly) be considered obscene by at least one group of people. The valid argument against kiddy porn, of course, is that you have to exploit real kids to make it. If you can remove the actual kids from the equation, I can't see how you can outlaw it and still turn a blind eye to, say, Grand Theft Auto -- which also simulates the most criminal acts in our society and really doesn't have much artistic value -- unless there is some kind of concrete evidence that looking at the simulated/fake stuff causes people to go after the real thing (and AFAIK there isn't, though I'm certainly no expert).
This is the shit side of the argument, of course, because you're instantly labeled a pedophile, or at the very least against the kids. That's certainly not the case. I just think anytime you ask the government to decide what's "obscene" you're asking for trouble. Let's focus on catching actual child molesters and avoid that mess altogether.
If you run into a hiring manager like this, chances are it's a job you want. The managers and/or leads who take the time to make sure their programmers can code by sitting down and watching them do it are the ones who hire talented folks you'll be happy to work with. During the interview process you'll find out just how much you can expect out of your coworkers by looking at how much the hiring team expects out of you.
(Of course, this isn't always the case -- a few rubes always slip by -- but it's true more often than not.)
Yeah, that's the easy part. The hard part is connecting to a database
No, that's pretty easy too.
and writing queries (combining strings with variables in java is a pain compared to php).
If you're using PreparedStatements in Java, or one of the many PHP database abstractions (PDO, ADODB, PEAR::DB) instead of interpolating variables directly into query strings (tsk, tsk) then it's about the same. Likewise if you just use a higher level ORM library.
As a person who makes a living writing PHP, getting started writing Java web apps isn't much harder. If it weren't for the fact that most distros and/or hosting plans come PHP-ready, it wouldn't be any harder. It's living with Java for the rest of your project that's a pain. Then again, you could easily say the same thing about PHP:P.
I gotta say, I really fucking like to sleep. Disregarding the fact that it's required to live (because I guess it's not going to be anymore, soon enough), I just enjoy actually falling asleep and dreaming.
The fact that the option will be there to not sleep is nice and all, and for some folks this is probably going to be a godsend (long-haul truckers and pilots, for example), but I think I'd off myself if I lived in a world where getting at least some sleep every day just wasn't an option.
Prior to a rather brief recent period, you were who you said you were, and things were dandy.
Things were dandy as long as nobody decided to abuse the system. Things are dandy now as long as nobody abuses the system. Things will always be dandy if nobody abuses the system, no matter what the system. Unfortunately, people abuse the system. IMHO (and the O is very H, since there are people who get paid a lot more than me to do a lot more thinking about this sort of thing than I do), if you're going to truly protect your privacy, the only real way to do so is to divorce your "personal information" from the various accounts you hold and services you use.
For example, there's no need for a bank to have your personal information to run a checking account for you. Sure, they might be able to provide you a certain service if you're willing to provide them with a certain piece of information (e.g. they can mail you your statement if you're willing to divulge your address), but in reality all they should need to verify you're the account holder is your account number and your PIN, and if someone comes in and gives them the required funds to open an account, they should be able to set things up "no questions asked".
With such an account, there's nothing to find out. There's no way to tie the account to a person, other than by going through the purchasing history looking for a lead. Even this would be a major improvement, but the truth is that in a properly constructed anonymous system there's no reason even the bank needs to know what an account holder is buying, or from where. Meanwhile, both the bank and the merchant can be at least as sure that the transaction is authorized by the true account holder as they are now (much more so, provided people could be persuaded to take basic precautions with regards to protecting their PINs/passwords, which right now they just can't).
There are good, practical reasons why this system will never be put into effect without some kind of watershed event happening to galvanize the public into demanding it (such a system would be very unforgiving to simple human error, such as somebody losing their PIN, and any fraud that did happen would be nearly impossible to investigate), but the main one is that everybody leaving an electronic trail of money makes it really easy to track down enemies of the state compared to the previous era.
'The kids don't care,' [he] said, 'because only old people like you and me suffer from the illusion of privacy these days.'
Sadly, this is probably the best attitude to have. With our current models for establishing identity, and our current systems for storing and protecting personal data, the truth is if your information is stored anywhere it might as well be plastered on a billboard. Someone's going to get ahold of it somehow, and it's going to be copied, and copied, and copied until it's everywhere. There's no sign of this changing. Even dramatic advances in things like encryption only close one of the many doors to your data, and as long as a single human has access to that data somehow, it's going to get up and walk away someday, and it will live in the wild forever. Ultimately, if you want to keep this information out of anybody's hands, you need to keep it out of everybody's hands. This just isn't feasible if you don't want to go completely "off the grid" and move into a fallout shelter in Montana (or just find a 3rd world country and disappear). Think how many times you prove your identity to some service (both meatspace and online, they're pretty much the same as far as propagating your data is concerned) in a given day.
If you want to live in a society that has access to the vast databases of knowledge and instant communication ours does, ultimately you need to come to grips with the fact that there's going to be a lot of data about you in those databases, and that this data is going to spread like wildfire. Maybe that means learning to live with no secrets, and people getting comfortable with knowing each others' intimate details rather than just their public facades. Kids seem to be going in this direction already, sharing anything and everything with "friends" they've never met, just because they added them to a list on a website and got a couple pictures in return.
Or maybe we need to completely rethink the concept of identity from the ground up, both online and off, if people truly do value their privacy. We're probably going to have to do it sooner or later due to other technological advances anyway, as is illustrated in so many science fiction books and movies. If we don't kill each other first:)
I suppose it's either one of these choices, or we just smash the grid and go back to banging rocks together:P
Even if this weren't Bill O'Reilly, it would be kind of silly for some multi-millionaire radio/TV personality to claim that normal schmucks (by comparison) don't deal with reality. I may play games, but I still have to worry about paying the bills, where dinner is going to come from, and how I'm going to get to work.
I don't know anything about Bill O'Reilly's origins, since I only watch him for a laugh now and then, but if he were ever part of reality he left it long ago for the greener pastures of celebrity, albeit minor celebrity.
You know, this seems like a stupid idea. Then again, if you've ever driven around Italy, the whole damn concept of driving in that seems like a stupid idea. Italian drivers turn a one way street into a 4 lane highway, drive busses up and down cliffside roads that seem like they shouldn't even have normal cars on them (while smoking!), and don't even seem to notice that there are road signs, much less heed them.
Surprisingly, in my entire time there, including a short stint in Rome, I only saw a single accident. A car hit a puppy. An ambulance showed up and the entire town shut down while everyone tried to console the owner. I think the puppy was okay, actually.
Contrast this with Atlanta, where there have been days where I've seen no less than a dozen separate accidents between the two exits on 75/85 that separate work from my house.
Well, I haven't ever gone looking for a job in another country, but my (US) employer currently has 3 programmers living outside Mumbai working for them. That's in a company of 10-15 people. My last employer had hundreds.
Every day they go to work halfway around the world from us, they check out the code from our servers, do their programming, then check it back in. The product of their work zips around the world several times per day, and when they're done we sell it. Then they provide the end-user support.
Right now you could conceivably, with a piece of outside hardware/software to generate keyboard press events (WoW ties spell casting, movement, and most other combat-useful actions to keyboard events), do most or all of a bot's scripting in Lua. This is, however, not how current WoW bots work (I'm familiar with the code underlying a couple of them, and know the details of more). Moreover, this capability will be removed forever when WoW's 2.0 patch (in a few weeks) greatly restricts the ability for scripts to decide who to cast what spells on.
Here's a secret about big corporate IT deployments (I've worked in a couple very large ones, and observed a few more belonging to equally large "partners"): The tools they use don't really save you that much work.
You wind up maintaining solutions to help you maintain your solutions. You train people to train people. You automate your processes, and in return you get to create a whole slew of new processes to oversee the automation. You lose techs thanks to the new "productivity", but you gain project managers, and regular managers, and admin staff of all other kinds.
What I'm getting at is that scaling up your processes isn't going to magically help you do more with less. I believe -- wholeheartedly, or I would have gotten out of this line of work a long time ago for a nice part time career at Blockbuster Video -- that you can do more with less, but it's not going to be looking at how the big boys do things, because they're just as fucked up as you are.
Look at your business. Try to improve its efficiency based on the intimate knowledge you have of what you do on a daily basis. Just like refactoring code, anywhere you see yourself doing the same thing over and over, see if you can't find a way to remove that redundancy. Go in search of specific solutions for the tasks at hand.
I'm a big Google fanboy. I think their services are great, and I trust them with my personal email. But the summary for this item is really a load of horseshit. If this had been about Microsoft or any other company that draws the Slashdot hivemind's ire the story would have been immediately accepted as gospel.
But since it's Google the claims are dismissed immediately as a publicity stunt.
Slashdot Mirror
People might be sympathetic to the antagonist in your metaphor if the shoe cured cancer...
Or CrossFire?
Fuck it, then.
CAN'T YOU SEE THAT CUBE IS TRUTH???!!! IGNORE ME AND DIE!!!
The same could be said about any sort of "art". No, I don't think artificial kiddy porn has particular artistic significance, but I feel pretty much the same way about death metal. At least I'm smart enough to realize that my taste shouldn't decide what other people can see.
Any sort of creative work can (and will, quite frankly) be considered obscene by at least one group of people. The valid argument against kiddy porn, of course, is that you have to exploit real kids to make it. If you can remove the actual kids from the equation, I can't see how you can outlaw it and still turn a blind eye to, say, Grand Theft Auto -- which also simulates the most criminal acts in our society and really doesn't have much artistic value -- unless there is some kind of concrete evidence that looking at the simulated/fake stuff causes people to go after the real thing (and AFAIK there isn't, though I'm certainly no expert).
This is the shit side of the argument, of course, because you're instantly labeled a pedophile, or at the very least against the kids. That's certainly not the case. I just think anytime you ask the government to decide what's "obscene" you're asking for trouble. Let's focus on catching actual child molesters and avoid that mess altogether.
If you run into a hiring manager like this, chances are it's a job you want. The managers and/or leads who take the time to make sure their programmers can code by sitting down and watching them do it are the ones who hire talented folks you'll be happy to work with. During the interview process you'll find out just how much you can expect out of your coworkers by looking at how much the hiring team expects out of you.
(Of course, this isn't always the case -- a few rubes always slip by -- but it's true more often than not.)
No, that's pretty easy too.
If you're using PreparedStatements in Java, or one of the many PHP database abstractions (PDO, ADODB, PEAR::DB) instead of interpolating variables directly into query strings (tsk, tsk) then it's about the same. Likewise if you just use a higher level ORM library.
As a person who makes a living writing PHP, getting started writing Java web apps isn't much harder. If it weren't for the fact that most distros and/or hosting plans come PHP-ready, it wouldn't be any harder. It's living with Java for the rest of your project that's a pain. Then again, you could easily say the same thing about PHP :P.
The joke's on them. They're going to jail, and you've got all the epics!
I'll be back to discuss this very serious topic ... after Naxx!
I find that being even more evil than your employer is a good way to avoid moral dilemmas.
You could do what I did at Georgia Tech... sleep through your finals :P
I gotta say, I really fucking like to sleep. Disregarding the fact that it's required to live (because I guess it's not going to be anymore, soon enough), I just enjoy actually falling asleep and dreaming.
The fact that the option will be there to not sleep is nice and all, and for some folks this is probably going to be a godsend (long-haul truckers and pilots, for example), but I think I'd off myself if I lived in a world where getting at least some sleep every day just wasn't an option.
Things were dandy as long as nobody decided to abuse the system. Things are dandy now as long as nobody abuses the system. Things will always be dandy if nobody abuses the system, no matter what the system. Unfortunately, people abuse the system. IMHO (and the O is very H, since there are people who get paid a lot more than me to do a lot more thinking about this sort of thing than I do), if you're going to truly protect your privacy, the only real way to do so is to divorce your "personal information" from the various accounts you hold and services you use.
For example, there's no need for a bank to have your personal information to run a checking account for you. Sure, they might be able to provide you a certain service if you're willing to provide them with a certain piece of information (e.g. they can mail you your statement if you're willing to divulge your address), but in reality all they should need to verify you're the account holder is your account number and your PIN, and if someone comes in and gives them the required funds to open an account, they should be able to set things up "no questions asked".
With such an account, there's nothing to find out. There's no way to tie the account to a person, other than by going through the purchasing history looking for a lead. Even this would be a major improvement, but the truth is that in a properly constructed anonymous system there's no reason even the bank needs to know what an account holder is buying, or from where. Meanwhile, both the bank and the merchant can be at least as sure that the transaction is authorized by the true account holder as they are now (much more so, provided people could be persuaded to take basic precautions with regards to protecting their PINs/passwords, which right now they just can't).
There are good, practical reasons why this system will never be put into effect without some kind of watershed event happening to galvanize the public into demanding it (such a system would be very unforgiving to simple human error, such as somebody losing their PIN, and any fraud that did happen would be nearly impossible to investigate), but the main one is that everybody leaving an electronic trail of money makes it really easy to track down enemies of the state compared to the previous era.
Sadly, this is probably the best attitude to have. With our current models for establishing identity, and our current systems for storing and protecting personal data, the truth is if your information is stored anywhere it might as well be plastered on a billboard. Someone's going to get ahold of it somehow, and it's going to be copied, and copied, and copied until it's everywhere. There's no sign of this changing. Even dramatic advances in things like encryption only close one of the many doors to your data, and as long as a single human has access to that data somehow, it's going to get up and walk away someday, and it will live in the wild forever. Ultimately, if you want to keep this information out of anybody's hands, you need to keep it out of everybody's hands. This just isn't feasible if you don't want to go completely "off the grid" and move into a fallout shelter in Montana (or just find a 3rd world country and disappear). Think how many times you prove your identity to some service (both meatspace and online, they're pretty much the same as far as propagating your data is concerned) in a given day.
If you want to live in a society that has access to the vast databases of knowledge and instant communication ours does, ultimately you need to come to grips with the fact that there's going to be a lot of data about you in those databases, and that this data is going to spread like wildfire. Maybe that means learning to live with no secrets, and people getting comfortable with knowing each others' intimate details rather than just their public facades. Kids seem to be going in this direction already, sharing anything and everything with "friends" they've never met, just because they added them to a list on a website and got a couple pictures in return.
Or maybe we need to completely rethink the concept of identity from the ground up, both online and off, if people truly do value their privacy. We're probably going to have to do it sooner or later due to other technological advances anyway, as is illustrated in so many science fiction books and movies. If we don't kill each other first :)
I suppose it's either one of these choices, or we just smash the grid and go back to banging rocks together :P
Even if this weren't Bill O'Reilly, it would be kind of silly for some multi-millionaire radio/TV personality to claim that normal schmucks (by comparison) don't deal with reality. I may play games, but I still have to worry about paying the bills, where dinner is going to come from, and how I'm going to get to work.
I don't know anything about Bill O'Reilly's origins, since I only watch him for a laugh now and then, but if he were ever part of reality he left it long ago for the greener pastures of celebrity, albeit minor celebrity.
I'd vote for him over Hillary or McCain, and I think Bill Gates is evil.
What a sad state of affairs. Maybe Obama will run...
You know, this seems like a stupid idea. Then again, if you've ever driven around Italy, the whole damn concept of driving in that seems like a stupid idea. Italian drivers turn a one way street into a 4 lane highway, drive busses up and down cliffside roads that seem like they shouldn't even have normal cars on them (while smoking!), and don't even seem to notice that there are road signs, much less heed them.
Surprisingly, in my entire time there, including a short stint in Rome, I only saw a single accident. A car hit a puppy. An ambulance showed up and the entire town shut down while everyone tried to console the owner. I think the puppy was okay, actually.
Contrast this with Atlanta, where there have been days where I've seen no less than a dozen separate accidents between the two exits on 75/85 that separate work from my house.
Well, I haven't ever gone looking for a job in another country, but my (US) employer currently has 3 programmers living outside Mumbai working for them. That's in a company of 10-15 people. My last employer had hundreds.
Every day they go to work halfway around the world from us, they check out the code from our servers, do their programming, then check it back in. The product of their work zips around the world several times per day, and when they're done we sell it. Then they provide the end-user support.
Good question. How open does the immigration policy have to be when the labor itself -- minus the actual body -- is so freely moved across borders?
Right now you could conceivably, with a piece of outside hardware/software to generate keyboard press events (WoW ties spell casting, movement, and most other combat-useful actions to keyboard events), do most or all of a bot's scripting in Lua. This is, however, not how current WoW bots work (I'm familiar with the code underlying a couple of them, and know the details of more). Moreover, this capability will be removed forever when WoW's 2.0 patch (in a few weeks) greatly restricts the ability for scripts to decide who to cast what spells on.
This just in, PCs are slower at running Quark Xpress.
If you tag everything "itsatrap", I suppose it's inevitable you'll eventually tag something that is actually a trap.
What else would you expect from Denmark, indeed!
What a coincidence. I am also huge in Japan.
Here's a secret about big corporate IT deployments (I've worked in a couple very large ones, and observed a few more belonging to equally large "partners"): The tools they use don't really save you that much work.
You wind up maintaining solutions to help you maintain your solutions. You train people to train people. You automate your processes, and in return you get to create a whole slew of new processes to oversee the automation. You lose techs thanks to the new "productivity", but you gain project managers, and regular managers, and admin staff of all other kinds.
What I'm getting at is that scaling up your processes isn't going to magically help you do more with less. I believe -- wholeheartedly, or I would have gotten out of this line of work a long time ago for a nice part time career at Blockbuster Video -- that you can do more with less, but it's not going to be looking at how the big boys do things, because they're just as fucked up as you are.
Look at your business. Try to improve its efficiency based on the intimate knowledge you have of what you do on a daily basis. Just like refactoring code, anywhere you see yourself doing the same thing over and over, see if you can't find a way to remove that redundancy. Go in search of specific solutions for the tasks at hand.
I'm a big Google fanboy. I think their services are great, and I trust them with my personal email. But the summary for this item is really a load of horseshit. If this had been about Microsoft or any other company that draws the Slashdot hivemind's ire the story would have been immediately accepted as gospel.
But since it's Google the claims are dismissed immediately as a publicity stunt.
Fuck you, editors.