Does anyone code for fun after they leave moms basement?
Yes, of course. I own a small (profitable) software company, so I code for work. I also code for fun and lead or contribute to several open-source projects, some of which are completely unrelated to my day job.
FTA: I want the futuristic, liberal, socialised utopia as much as you do, but I acknowledge that what we actually get is the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Capitalism wins, and it’ll drown you in the process if you stand in the way.
What he fails to realize is that rampant, unregulated capitalism caused the subprime mortgage crisis. If banks had been better regulated (as here in Canada, for example), the subprime mortgage crisis might have been averted.
That total FAIL is just a small part of why his screed is total crap.
If we want peace with the Muslim world, we need to go home and quit treating them like subjects who are illegally camped on "our" oil supply.
The West can never have peace with the Muslim world until Islam is significantly reformed. As it is, Islam takes a maximalist view of the world, enjoining its followers to fight to the death until the entire world is under the rule of Islam.
Unless and until Islam goes through that reform, we will never have peace with it. At best, we can hope for relative quiet and mostly keeping the lid on extremist violence.
A long time ago, my tiny company (via a rather aggressive PR consultant) managed to convince a Gartner "analyst" to look at our email security product.
The analyst didn't really understand email and as soon as she heard our annual revenue number, she immediately discounted us and probably put us in the bottom-left of the MQ.
Ten years later, we're still around, doing fairly well (though still very small) with lots of very happy customers who obviously don't take advice from Gartner.
As far as I can read (which is not too far... I didn't dig deeply), the European directive doesn't specify that the data has to be stored electronically. All it says regarding storage requirements is: Member States shall ensure that the data specified in Article 5 are retained in accordance with this Directive in such a way that the data retained and any other necessary information relating to such data can be transmitted upon request to the competent authorities
without undue delay.
So why not spool your old logs onto microfiche? And when you get a demand for logs, hand over all the films and say "Go nuts!"
You believe the banking crisis in 2008 was because of "greedy consumers with an inflated sense of entitlement"?
Not completely. It was mostly due to government negligence and criminally greedy mortgage providers and brokers. But when a skanky mortgage broker advises someone to lie about his/her income in order to buy an unaffordable house, the person buying the house has to take some personal responsibility too.
And the reason we don't need austerity measures like some other countries is that we have a well-regulated banking system that couldn't give dubious loans to greedy consumers with an inflated sense of entitlement.
Canada went through some austerity measures back in the 1990s and our economy is much stronger as a result. The US cannot take the necessary painful steps to fix its economy because the political system in the US is fundamentally broken. Polarizing partisanship coupled with an unworkable political framework ensure that no actual decisions can ever be taken. The US will simply careen from emergency to emergency with no clear plan.
Canada might not be a good choice. Our privacy laws right now might be decent, but the Harper government is selling rights to write our laws to the US and to US lobbyists. Don't count on Canada having sane privacy laws nor "Intellectual Property" laws for much longer.
The MPAA, RIAA, and NSA count more to Harper than citizens.
You're an ace reporter, right? Ever think to stop the car to get your article out?
Again, as an ace reporter, you should understand how to use Google. So why not google for the studies that show cell phones are far more distracting than talking to passengers or listening to the radio?
Oh wait. You're a reporter, so you need to be spoonfed. Here you go.
Actually, that's not true unless the other person in the car is a screaming kid. Studies have shown that talking on a cell phone is much more distracting than talking to a passenger. (Plus, the person on the other end of the cell phone can't yell "watch out for that truck!" at the appropriate moment.)
Texting or emailing while driving is obviously the worst.
IMO, driving while texting should be treated the same as driving with blood alcohol over the limit. First offence should get you a three-month license suspension. Second should get you six months. Third should be a lifetime driving ban.
And that's if no-one is killed or injured. If someone is killed and you were texting or your blood alcohol was over the limit, that's second-degree murder in my book. If society doesn't take these things seriously, we'll continue to kill thousands of people a year.
Not if the FCC in the US and comparable bodies in other countries mandate that the feature can't be disabled. Just refuse to license cellphones that lack the feature or have a way to turn it off.
Most smartphones have a built-in GPS, so have it shut off the phone if it detects that it's moving at more than 20km/h or so.
Yes, this means that passengers, people on trains, etc. won't be able to use their smartphones. Gee, what a tragedy. A few hours of inconvenience is so awful to give up in return for reduced road carnage.
That is the crux (so to speak) of the matter. Christianity has moved past those days. Islam has not, and I believe Islam is structurally incapable of reform in the way that Christianity was.
The Bible does indeed talk about some pretty gruesome things. I'm unaware of any passage in the Bible that says we should emulate God or those who committed the gruesome things.
I don't mean to give Judaism or Christianity a free pass here. But as of today, the empirical evidence is that Islam inspires far more religious violence than any other religion.
According to Islam, the Quran is the ultimate authority and must be taken as truth. Other Abrahamic religions have their fundamentalist nutcases, it is true, but they have much less of a problem with people reinterpreting the religious texts than Islam does.
Also, giving any sort of religious text a free pass because it's "not meant to be taken literally" is a dangerous game. It allows religious adherents to present their religion as moderate to outsiders while revealing its true and violent face to insiders. I don't think any religious text, whether it's Islamic, Christian or Jewish, should be viewed as anything other than hateful if it promotes violence, genocide, etc.
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Does anyone code for fun after they leave moms basement?
Yes, of course. I own a small (profitable) software company, so I code for work. I also code for fun and lead or contribute to several open-source projects, some of which are completely unrelated to my day job.
FTA: I want the futuristic, liberal, socialised utopia as much as you do, but I acknowledge that what we actually get is the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Capitalism wins, and it’ll drown you in the process if you stand in the way.
What he fails to realize is that rampant, unregulated capitalism caused the subprime mortgage crisis. If banks had been better regulated (as here in Canada, for example), the subprime mortgage crisis might have been averted.
That total FAIL is just a small part of why his screed is total crap.
Hello, my login name is dskoll, but my real name is Larry Page. Umm... I mean, Sergey Brin.
If we want peace with the Muslim world, we need to go home and quit treating them like subjects who are illegally camped on "our" oil supply.
The West can never have peace with the Muslim world until Islam is significantly reformed. As it is, Islam takes a maximalist view of the world, enjoining its followers to fight to the death until the entire world is under the rule of Islam.
Unless and until Islam goes through that reform, we will never have peace with it. At best, we can hope for relative quiet and mostly keeping the lid on extremist violence.
A long time ago, my tiny company (via a rather aggressive PR consultant) managed to convince a Gartner "analyst" to look at our email security product.
The analyst didn't really understand email and as soon as she heard our annual revenue number, she immediately discounted us and probably put us in the bottom-left of the MQ.
Ten years later, we're still around, doing fairly well (though still very small) with lots of very happy customers who obviously don't take advice from Gartner.
Instead of:
#define MAGIC 0xB16B00B5
Why not just change it to:
#define MAGIC 2976579765
That will maintain binary compatibility!
As far as I can read (which is not too far... I didn't dig deeply), the European directive doesn't specify that the data has to be stored electronically. All it says regarding storage requirements is: Member States shall ensure that the data specified in Article 5 are retained in accordance with this Directive in such a way that the data retained and any other necessary information relating to such data can be transmitted upon request to the competent authorities without undue delay.
So why not spool your old logs onto microfiche? And when you get a demand for logs, hand over all the films and say "Go nuts!"
You believe the banking crisis in 2008 was because of "greedy consumers with an inflated sense of entitlement"?
Not completely. It was mostly due to government negligence and criminally greedy mortgage providers and brokers. But when a skanky mortgage broker advises someone to lie about his/her income in order to buy an unaffordable house, the person buying the house has to take some personal responsibility too.
Post-secondary education in Canada is not free.
And the reason we don't need austerity measures like some other countries is that we have a well-regulated banking system that couldn't give dubious loans to greedy consumers with an inflated sense of entitlement.
Canada went through some austerity measures back in the 1990s and our economy is much stronger as a result. The US cannot take the necessary painful steps to fix its economy because the political system in the US is fundamentally broken. Polarizing partisanship coupled with an unworkable political framework ensure that no actual decisions can ever be taken. The US will simply careen from emergency to emergency with no clear plan.
Canada might not be a good choice. Our privacy laws right now might be decent, but the Harper government is selling rights to write our laws to the US and to US lobbyists. Don't count on Canada having sane privacy laws nor "Intellectual Property" laws for much longer.
The MPAA, RIAA, and NSA count more to Harper than citizens.
You're an ace reporter, right? Ever think to stop the car to get your article out?
Again, as an ace reporter, you should understand how to use Google. So why not google for the studies that show cell phones are far more distracting than talking to passengers or listening to the radio?
Oh wait. You're a reporter, so you need to be spoonfed. Here you go.
Actually, that's not true unless the other person in the car is a screaming kid. Studies have shown that talking on a cell phone is much more distracting than talking to a passenger. (Plus, the person on the other end of the cell phone can't yell "watch out for that truck!" at the appropriate moment.)
Texting or emailing while driving is obviously the worst.
IMO, driving while texting should be treated the same as driving with blood alcohol over the limit. First offence should get you a three-month license suspension. Second should get you six months. Third should be a lifetime driving ban.
And that's if no-one is killed or injured. If someone is killed and you were texting or your blood alcohol was over the limit, that's second-degree murder in my book. If society doesn't take these things seriously, we'll continue to kill thousands of people a year.
On the contrary, I value my time very much, which is why I like it when random callers can't interrupt my train of thought.
Not if the FCC in the US and comparable bodies in other countries mandate that the feature can't be disabled. Just refuse to license cellphones that lack the feature or have a way to turn it off.
Most smartphones have a built-in GPS, so have it shut off the phone if it detects that it's moving at more than 20km/h or so.
Yes, this means that passengers, people on trains, etc. won't be able to use their smartphones. Gee, what a tragedy. A few hours of inconvenience is so awful to give up in return for reduced road carnage.
Live bookmarks no longer show favicons for bookmarked sites, and "Open All in Tabs" no longer seems to work.
Microsoft, presumably, could decline to sign Red Hat's bootloader. Then what? Suddenly it's not just a "whopping $99" that's the problem.
I got the reference wrong... oops. I was referring to the Massacre of Banu Quraiza. Info on Wikipedia is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banu_Qurayza
I don't think most of your examples were religiously motivated. They were just motivated by pure greed.
That is the crux (so to speak) of the matter. Christianity has moved past those days. Islam has not, and I believe Islam is structurally incapable of reform in the way that Christianity was.
The Bible does indeed talk about some pretty gruesome things. I'm unaware of any passage in the Bible that says we should emulate God or those who committed the gruesome things.
I don't mean to give Judaism or Christianity a free pass here. But as of today, the empirical evidence is that Islam inspires far more religious violence than any other religion.
If a religion's scriptures promote and extol violence, it is absolutely fair to blame that religion when its followers commit violence.
Religiously-inspired Islamic violence is off the charts compared to any other religion. I don't see how you can deny the empirical evidence.
"The moon may be made of green cheese"
"The Earth may be flat"
"A tech journalist may not be lazy"
According to Islam, the Quran is the ultimate authority and must be taken as truth. Other Abrahamic religions have their fundamentalist nutcases, it is true, but they have much less of a problem with people reinterpreting the religious texts than Islam does.
Also, giving any sort of religious text a free pass because it's "not meant to be taken literally" is a dangerous game. It allows religious adherents to present their religion as moderate to outsiders while revealing its true and violent face to insiders. I don't think any religious text, whether it's Islamic, Christian or Jewish, should be viewed as anything other than hateful if it promotes violence, genocide, etc.