Choosing not to do business in an unfavorable climate is not censorship, even when the business you're choosing not to do is news reporting. Censorship would be remaining in the news reporting business, but shutting down the reporting of specific news that doesn't fit your agenda.
Precisely. Software development--every aspect of it, not just the coding--is a knowledge-worker field. Unskilled laborers are fungible the way he's talking about, ("a headcount business",) but skilled laborers are not, and management failing to understand that is one of the easiest ways to destroy both morale and product quality on a team of skilled laborers.
A long time ago in a Web community far, far away, one of my fellow forumers called me "the guy with the biggest balls out of all of us" for using my real name rather than a handle. I was a bit confused by that, and to be honest I still am. I just sort of figure it's basic sociability.
The comfort level of Seattle citizens may not be where it once was, however, not after watching the city being extorted into handing the control of body cam footage over to someone who still lives with his parents.
So when congressmen invoke The Basement Dweller it's an offensive stereotype, but when a tech-savvy person does something you disagree with, just look how quickly it gets trotted out...
Has harassment been stopped in the real world, that she's complaining about it online?
What is it about online interaction that makes people think it's somehow distinct from that which is "real"?
I have friends who met online, fell in love, proposed, and then met "for real" for the first time. They're now happily and successfully married and have been for several years. It doesn't get much more real than that!
And when you think about it, they're not too far off. I mean, seriously: as a professional software developer, my vocation is to produce highly abstract formulae in an arcane language, ordered around priorities and concepts that are meaningless and counterintuitive to those not initiated in the Art, that, when invoked, alter reality according to the wishes of the person using the formula.
Not true. The insurance companies are able to negotiate down prices, so they end up paying much less than you or I ever could for the exact same service.
Not true; it's rather the opposite in fact.
Q: What you call the person who pays all the bills? A: Boss
The first and most important thing to keep in mind is that medical "insurance" is not an insurance product at all; it doesn't operate anything like an actual insurance product. What it is is something far more sinister: the mechanism by which the financial industry took over the health care industry.
Insurance is calling the shots now, in a very real way. By determining what procedures are and are not covered, they decide what treatments are and are not available, and ultimately, in many cases, can literally wield the power of choosing "who lives and who dies."
Exorbitant pricing is a big part of this. It's a twist on classical anti-competitive behavior. They don't negotiate prices down; they negotiate them up for everyone else, to price the competition (people trying to obtain health care without going through them) out of the market.
Sure, it's basically a protection racket, but just like when dealing with Chicago gangsters, paying for 'protection' is better than the alternative.
This is so much worse than a protection racket. This is... imagine if Al Capone and his cronies ended up as the Mayor and City Council of Chicago. It's a wholly illegitimate and evil system, and the only satisfactory resolution will be to remove them from power. With them literally holding the power of life and death in their hands, and driven by profit motive rather than any form of compassion, virtue or basic human decency, it literally is "us or them." It's just that most of us haven't realized that yet.
The thing is, health care costs a million dollars an instance because of health "insurance". It doesn't cost the insurance companies anywhere near that much, but they've taken over the hospitals and gotten them to price anyone without their "insurance" out of the market. Get rid of them, and the price would drop to realistic levels.
A Canadian couple was charged nearly $1 million for giving birth in the US. Blue Cross said it denied them coverage due to a pre-existing condition.
Wait, isn't the ACA supposed to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions? Wasn't that specifically touted as one of the benefits that Obamacare would bring?
As I've said before, medical "insurance"... isn't. It behaves nothing like any other form of insurance we know. (Just imagine if you got into a fender bender, and you had to be careful where you took your car to get fixed up because Ralph's Collision Repair was in your network but John's Body Shop was not!) If we truly want to fix the health care crisis in this country, there are two things we need to do first and foremost:
1. Get rid of medical "insurance" as we know it. Nuke the whole concept from orbit; it's actively contributing to the problem. 2. Get rid of pharmaceutical patents. They're granted (and defended) on a fraudulent rationale: that the patent protection is necessary to recoup high R&D costs. In actuality, in many, many cases, most of this research is already paid for by We The People; the price gouging that patent protection affords the pharma companies is simply double-dipping.
Destroy those two concepts, and the rest will be able to work itself out without too much trouble.
There's a comment in the sidebar right now that today's a horrible day to be American.
I have to disagree. Today is a proud day for Americans: it's the day that we finally did the right thing. (Even if, as some might argue, we did so after trying everything else, as per Churchill.)
No, they may not narrate their adulteries, but they may actually give away lots of information that, say, could be used to suggest adultery, which might then be used to blackmail someone. Or to push them to commit suicide.
You know, when you say "suggest" like that, it carries this unspoken air of a false suggestion, a malicious slander through innuendo.
When you then present as a backing link the case of a man who, for all the good that he did, actually was cheating on his wife left, right and center, and who famously died of something that was most definitely not suicide, doesn't it kind of undermine your point?
"Assembly" isn't a language as such; it's a one-to-one mnemonic mapping of the machine code for a given processor architecture. There's no such thing as "the ASM programming language;" rather, there's x86 assembler, x64 assembler, ARM assembler, and so on.
And even if we granted that it's a real programming language, it still doesn't fit my criteria. When's the last time you heard of a program being written in assembly?
In my daily job at a major software company, we are constantly having to deal with memory & CPU cycle limitations. On modern desktop machines.
And I'd bet that most of your dealing with it consists of fixing architectural problems, (such as refactoring bad algorithms to better ones with lower big-O complexity, and replacing inefficient data structures with better ones), and not micro-optimization. As a developer with extensive experience in both low-level and high-level work, I've observed that around 90% of the time that's where the big gains are found.
You should use the right language for the job, and to write off one of the most popular languages on the planet (considering C and C++ as if they were a single language) as always the wrong choice is just as wrong as saying it's always the right choice.
I'm sure a job might hypothetically exist somewhere, for which C is the right choice. I have yet to actually see it.
For C++, on the other hand, I don't believe any such job exists or ever could exist. It may not be the worst programming language ever created, but it is without a doubt the worst ever to be taken seriously.
But you don't have to take my word for it; check out what one of the most accomplished computer scientists of all time had to say on the subject, when he was honored with the Turing Award. The excuse about language-level safety being a necessary trade-off to be given away due to constrained resources was well-known to be bogus way back in the 60s, many years (and Moore cycles) before C, and I would suspect, though I don't have any documents to show as evidence, that it was invented by the folks at Bell Labs to hand-wave away the horrendous flaws in the language they inflicted upon the world.
C/C++ was designed for low and mid-level programming tasks (technically, to write operating systems in) and excels at that.
If by "excels" you mean "does a terrible job," then sure. As a former coworker of mine used to say, "Dennis Ritchie's true legacy is the buffer overflow." I have yet to see an OS written in C/C++ that did not require regular patching to deal with an unending stream of security vulnerabilities, the vast majority of which were directly the result of language flaws.
Sorry, that is totally an exaggeration. There are many languages that are less protective than those.
Such as? In order to ensure a fair, apples-to-apples comparison, please restrict yourself to serious languages with a non-trivial market share. Anyone can create a crap language, but actually getting it accepted by the community takes some real doing. (Such as corporate sponsorship by AT&T!)
Reliance on the language itself to enforce software quality is one of the hallmarks of substandard software development.
Not at all. It's a manifestation of the whole point of building computers in the first place: to automate tasks that are repetitive and boring, easily automated, and make sure they're done right every time.
It's a sign of humility, which, Larry Wall notwithstanding, is one of the highest virtues a programmer can manifest: demonstrating that they know when something is beyond their abilities and not trying to reinvent the wheel when an existing well-proven system can do it for them?
However, using those languages presents a lot of technical trade-offs in terms of memory and CPU cycle use, determinism, and other such things. Depending on the project, those tradeoffs may be unacceptable.
That argument made sense back in the 80s. In the age of Raspberry Pis and Arduinos, it's a much less valid excuse.
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Re:
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Re:
On the post: No, Tech Companies Can't Easily Create A 'ContentID' For Harassment, And It Would Be A Disaster If They Did
Re:
A long time ago in a Web community far, far away, one of my fellow forumers called me "the guy with the biggest balls out of all of us" for using my real name rather than a handle. I was a bit confused by that, and to be honest I still am. I just sort of figure it's basic sociability.
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Re: Re:
On the post: Seattle Privacy Activist Attempts To Kill Accountability With Transparency
So when congressmen invoke The Basement Dweller it's an offensive stereotype, but when a tech-savvy person does something you disagree with, just look how quickly it gets trotted out...
On the post: Former CIA Director Hayden: We Didn't Lie About Interrogation Program. Torture Report: Yeah, You Did. REPEATEDLY.
Re: Never attribute to Malice
On the post: No, Tech Companies Can't Easily Create A 'ContentID' For Harassment, And It Would Be A Disaster If They Did
Valenti, eh?
On the post: No, Tech Companies Can't Easily Create A 'ContentID' For Harassment, And It Would Be A Disaster If They Did
Re:
What is it about online interaction that makes people think it's somehow distinct from that which is "real"?
I have friends who met online, fell in love, proposed, and then met "for real" for the first time. They're now happily and successfully married and have been for several years. It doesn't get much more real than that!
On the post: No, Tech Companies Can't Easily Create A 'ContentID' For Harassment, And It Would Be A Disaster If They Did
Re: The downside of Asimov's law
And when you think about it, they're not too far off. I mean, seriously: as a professional software developer, my vocation is to produce highly abstract formulae in an arcane language, ordered around priorities and concepts that are meaningless and counterintuitive to those not initiated in the Art, that, when invoked, alter reality according to the wishes of the person using the formula.
How am I not a mage? ;)
On the post: DailyDirt: How Much Is That MRI In The Window?
Re: Re:
Not true; it's rather the opposite in fact.
Q: What you call the person who pays all the bills?
A: Boss
The first and most important thing to keep in mind is that medical "insurance" is not an insurance product at all; it doesn't operate anything like an actual insurance product. What it is is something far more sinister: the mechanism by which the financial industry took over the health care industry.
Insurance is calling the shots now, in a very real way. By determining what procedures are and are not covered, they decide what treatments are and are not available, and ultimately, in many cases, can literally wield the power of choosing "who lives and who dies."
Exorbitant pricing is a big part of this. It's a twist on classical anti-competitive behavior. They don't negotiate prices down; they negotiate them up for everyone else, to price the competition (people trying to obtain health care without going through them) out of the market.
This is so much worse than a protection racket. This is... imagine if Al Capone and his cronies ended up as the Mayor and City Council of Chicago. It's a wholly illegitimate and evil system, and the only satisfactory resolution will be to remove them from power. With them literally holding the power of life and death in their hands, and driven by profit motive rather than any form of compassion, virtue or basic human decency, it literally is "us or them." It's just that most of us haven't realized that yet.
On the post: DailyDirt: How Much Is That MRI In The Window?
Re: Re:
On the post: DailyDirt: How Much Is That MRI In The Window?
Wait, isn't the ACA supposed to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions? Wasn't that specifically touted as one of the benefits that Obamacare would bring?
As I've said before, medical "insurance"... isn't. It behaves nothing like any other form of insurance we know. (Just imagine if you got into a fender bender, and you had to be careful where you took your car to get fixed up because Ralph's Collision Repair was in your network but John's Body Shop was not!) If we truly want to fix the health care crisis in this country, there are two things we need to do first and foremost:
1. Get rid of medical "insurance" as we know it. Nuke the whole concept from orbit; it's actively contributing to the problem.
2. Get rid of pharmaceutical patents. They're granted (and defended) on a fraudulent rationale: that the patent protection is necessary to recoup high R&D costs. In actuality, in many, many cases, most of this research is already paid for by We The People; the price gouging that patent protection affords the pharma companies is simply double-dipping.
Destroy those two concepts, and the rest will be able to work itself out without too much trouble.
On the post: An Inside View On The Purpose And Implications Of The Torture Report
Re: Re: torture?
On the post: An Inside View On The Purpose And Implications Of The Torture Report
I have to disagree. Today is a proud day for Americans: it's the day that we finally did the right thing. (Even if, as some might argue, we did so after trying everything else, as per Churchill.)
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You know, when you say "suggest" like that, it carries this unspoken air of a false suggestion, a malicious slander through innuendo.
When you then present as a backing link the case of a man who, for all the good that he did, actually was cheating on his wife left, right and center, and who famously died of something that was most definitely not suicide, doesn't it kind of undermine your point?
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
"Assembly" isn't a language as such; it's a one-to-one mnemonic mapping of the machine code for a given processor architecture. There's no such thing as "the ASM programming language;" rather, there's x86 assembler, x64 assembler, ARM assembler, and so on.
And even if we granted that it's a real programming language, it still doesn't fit my criteria. When's the last time you heard of a program being written in assembly?
And I'd bet that most of your dealing with it consists of fixing architectural problems, (such as refactoring bad algorithms to better ones with lower big-O complexity, and replacing inefficient data structures with better ones), and not micro-optimization. As a developer with extensive experience in both low-level and high-level work, I've observed that around 90% of the time that's where the big gains are found.
I'm sure a job might hypothetically exist somewhere, for which C is the right choice. I have yet to actually see it.
For C++, on the other hand, I don't believe any such job exists or ever could exist. It may not be the worst programming language ever created, but it is without a doubt the worst ever to be taken seriously.
But you don't have to take my word for it; check out what one of the most accomplished computer scientists of all time had to say on the subject, when he was honored with the Turing Award. The excuse about language-level safety being a necessary trade-off to be given away due to constrained resources was well-known to be bogus way back in the 60s, many years (and Moore cycles) before C, and I would suspect, though I don't have any documents to show as evidence, that it was invented by the folks at Bell Labs to hand-wave away the horrendous flaws in the language they inflicted upon the world.
If by "excels" you mean "does a terrible job," then sure. As a former coworker of mine used to say, "Dennis Ritchie's true legacy is the buffer overflow." I have yet to see an OS written in C/C++ that did not require regular patching to deal with an unending stream of security vulnerabilities, the vast majority of which were directly the result of language flaws.
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Such as? In order to ensure a fair, apples-to-apples comparison, please restrict yourself to serious languages with a non-trivial market share. Anyone can create a crap language, but actually getting it accepted by the community takes some real doing. (Such as corporate sponsorship by AT&T!)
Not at all. It's a manifestation of the whole point of building computers in the first place: to automate tasks that are repetitive and boring, easily automated, and make sure they're done right every time.
It's a sign of humility, which, Larry Wall notwithstanding, is one of the highest virtues a programmer can manifest: demonstrating that they know when something is beyond their abilities and not trying to reinvent the wheel when an existing well-proven system can do it for them?
That argument made sense back in the 80s. In the age of Raspberry Pis and Arduinos, it's a much less valid excuse.
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