Pretending (against all evidence) that climate change is mostly due to "larger natural forces" that we're helpless against, is not going to make those changes go away. We can already see them beginning, it's very clear they will get worse, and we will have to deal with them one way or another.

Only by accepting responsibility, then tackling the effects we are ourselves causing, can we minimise the upcoming costs. Thankfully, independent studies have repeatedly shown this IS possible and effective, particularly if we act sooner rather than later, and in fact is significantly cheaper than allowing the worst of the changes to occur then trying to adapt.

Inventing a tsunami as an excuse for doing nothing when the plumber is telling you your bathroom is flooding because your pipes are leaking, is just foolish. When that flooding will spread to apartments below you as well, inaction verges on criminal.

I am of the opinion, and have been for a while, that casual coding (i.e. coding something in your free time, not backed by hint of monetary gain) is at the heart of the problem. People code casually because it is fun to do. They don't like writing comments, documentation, or clean code. This is not to mention that these project need good people that can write this complex code and putting massive amounts of rules and coding practices is not going to attract people to code in their free time. When you have code that is backed by money and/or a company, the motivation exists to do the not fun stuff, but the required stuff to make code more secure, more easy to audit, and easier to understand. Without that type of backing, you have people hacking away writing code as quick and dirty as possible. That is the reputation that FOSS is trying to get rid of. That is the reputation that hurts its adoption rate, especially in critical and important systems. That is the reputation that the OpenSSL vulnerability drags kicking and screaming into the limelight. Unfortunately, it is a reputation that has a significant basis in reality and, in my opinion, the Heartbleed vulnerability will have lasting effects for years to come.

Developers too often seem to think they know everything, when (esp on large teams) often they have zero idea what it takes to bring their ideas to the real world. It takes serious designers to develop a scalable app, even if lots of people think they know how. I work in production support of multiple websites, meaning I have to clean up after the mistakes developers make on a daily basis. The support folks who have to write patches for our products often grieve over the situations the original developer placed them in. It often takes a major rewrite to fix many performance issues, because the original programmer never imagined all the different situations their code would be used. Prod support is where the real issues are discovered and solved. Accept it and move on.

Reminds me of an email I got from a recruiter today:

Because the beauty of startups is having a massive legacy code base that requires talking to several teams in order to change.

> This sysadmin/scripter/system architect/DBA

And then they stop doing _any_ of the tasks well. They don't show up for planning. they don't document their code, because "it's self documenting" or "documentation is unrelable". They say "Just Google It" when most of what is on Google about the task is _wrong_ and written by people who aren't aware of the subtleties. They refuse to mentor, because it keeps them away from the meetings where they can soak up and interfere in _every single groups's projects_ by citing standards that are only in their head, or worse, are only in the mental image of what other people remember they said once about something else.

One of the great pleasures of my professional life is finding these people and educating them in how _not_ to be a micro-managing block to everyone's work: it involves actually documenting the _working procedures_ for daily tasks so other people can do them. Many of them are afraid of the loss of control or possible errors, but the improvement in speed of daily procedures is enormously satisfying.

3rd party GPS is gimped due to a lack of wheel rotation data from the car which OEM GPS get's "for free".

Phones have accelerometers, gyros and in some cases barometers that can adequately make up for the lack of wheel rotation data to cover gaps in GPS coverage. A bigger problem is the size and position of the GPS antenna, especially when the windows have metallic coatings.

After two years in the wild. And apparently *not* by eyeballs on source code. Proprietary or open seems irrelevant to this discovery.

"“We developed a product called Safeguard, which automatically tests things like encryption and authentication,” Chartier said. “We started testing the product on our own infrastructure, which uses Open SSL. And that’s how we found the bug.”"
http://readwrite.com/2014/04/1...

No they can't.

FTFA:

do you even read, brah?

Paul Kersey?

Anyone else remember a day when this function was split? Back in the early days, we had Systems Analysts, kept in a separate room to the programmers.

DevOps,,. we've seen this sort of thing before. End result is that we get less specialists, and things become harder to fix when they break. But, multi-skilled people are the way things are going. And have been since ... well, Michaelangelo was a sculptor who was asked to paint. And I have some of his sonnets, somewhere.

From TFS:

I've worked at a Fortune 100 company, who was looking to add a DevOps team, because our development and our deployment teams weren't working together as smoothly as we'd have liked. The development teams didn't know anything about the hardware their (very hardware-specific) software ran on, and the hardware teams didn't know what parts of the software needed testing on new hardware.

Of course, it's ridiculous to ask the hardware guys to be present at all of the software meetings, and vice versa. DevOps fills a role bridging the gap. Outside of IT and platform-agnostic software development, the "ops" part can be a customer-facing role. In the shelter of software development, any incompatibilities can be blamed on hardware, rather than the real underlying cause of "poor testing across platforms"

Perhaps it is not being stated clearly but the point that you are missing is the fact that this bug in some of the most critical network software in use had been around for 2 years. This fact demonstrates the hyperbole of the quote. Its a well crafted quote, illustrates a concept well, but people read way too much into it. Few FOSS users are developers, few developers are qualified readers. Eyeballs are a plus, but not a panacea. The gap between proprietary and open exists but it is exaggerated.

A second and more important fact is that the bug was not discovered by eyeballs on source code. The techniques used seem to be the same applied to proprietary closed source code.
"“We developed a product called Safeguard, which automatically tests things like encryption and authentication,” Chartier said. “We started testing the product on our own infrastructure, which uses Open SSL. And that’s how we found the bug.”"
http://readwrite.com/2014/04/1...

Straw man.

I think you just summed up 90% of my job!

C++, properly written, is much more secure than C. It includes memory management, type-safe I/O, and well-behaved library containers.

My mistake, I thought you were an Australian.

I agree, this is how I pay. I am self employed, and have to save up for "tax day", where at the end of the year, I have to write lump sums to both Fed and State. Sucks every time, and you see how much friggin' money is going out to them. I could practically buy a car every year (outright!) with the money that goes to the IRS, that is SAD and depressing and enough to make anyone angry.

For those who say you're supposed to file quarterly, yes I know, and don't, I'd rather keep the money all year and have at my disposal if business dies down for cash, not to mention I don't want to do my taxes 4 times a year...and you only pay a $200 penalty for not paying quarterly, which is peanuts to what what the actual bill is.

I think everyone should have to pay like this, and the tax system would end up getting overhauled, and taxes cut very fast if everyone did this as they would be more aware.

The thing that drives me most nuts (and I used to do this too when I worked for an employer), is hearing people actually get happy about a "refund". I think the "refund" is just a way for the IRS to make you get excited about all the money they are taking from you...and it works in most cases. While most people don't like taxes and the IRS, those same people get uber excited about their tax refund of $2-$5K, and forget about the other $15-$30K that the IRS is keeping of their money. (actual numbers used just estimated ranges for decent wage earners obviously).

A decade or so ago, I knew a number of graduate students living in Boston (mostly Cambridge) who were paying well over $1000/month for one-bedroom apartments -- while living on graduate stipends of something like $20k per year. Definitely a few paying $1200 or $1250. (Maybe they made $25k.) A decade later, I assume rents may have risen by a couple hundred dollars in places, so it gets to your range.

Anyhow, these people were NOT "very rich" or even "rich." They were often struggling. BUT - If you were going to school in Boston or Cambridge, your choice was often to rent a place way out of the way and spend hundreds of dollars per month on commuting passes and/or parking, and perhaps spend an hour or more each way getting to school... or you could basically pay just a little more (or even the same) and live in a convenient place with an insane rent. Either way, between housing and commuting expenses, you'd be spending well over 50% of your income.

Of course, the alternative would be to live in some sort of 4-person roommate situation and have more beer money and be able to eat more than rice and beans. Some people did that; others found having their own place to be worth it for various reasons.

I'm not speaking of the San Francisco situation, and I don't know the dynamics there. But there are plenty of people I know who have lived in places like Boston and New York and were shelling out loads of money on rent because on-balance it made sense in their years as a starving artist or graduate student or whatever. Not all people who pay high rents are "very rich" or even "mildly rich." You can call these people "insane" for paying so much for housing compared to the rest of the country -- and perhaps they are -- but that insanity is simply a fact of life in some places.

Modern C++ is a lot more coherent than you suggest. Its main problem is the initial compatibility with C, and attempting to be compatible with bad decisions made along the way (long has to be 32-bit, so we need "long long"?). I have no idea why you think binary literals are all that much more useful than octal or hex. Macros aren't type-safe, but C++ templates are. Name mangling is an implementation detail, and there's lots of variation between compiler output that isn't name mangling. Standardizing it would accomplish very little, and there's no need for the runtime to know the mangled name.

Giving away Nexus 7's seems hard to explain away. I mean, I tried to think of any reason why they might have wanted to give them all 7" Android tablets, like maybe an interesting way of distributing a multimedia press kit or something, but that could have just as easily been handled by $75 Chinese-made Android tablets.

That did make me think that that'd be pretty cool though; imagine buying a bunch of modestly-spec'd 7" Android tablets from China wholesale, and using them as giveaway items to distribute really dynamite multimedia presentations.

I actually picked up FOUR 7" Android 4.x tablets from DealExtreme for ~$35 each last year, during a half-price sale...and I doubt they'd let even such a sale as that rob them entirely of profits... So I imagine if you're a company buying tablets like that wholesale, you can get some pretty sweet deals, AND get them all custom-branded.

Deveops types aren't the kind of people to be crawling around under desks or helping directly to push for a release milestone.

They're the go-betweeners, sort of a cross between senior sysadmin and development project management assistant. They are the internal toolsmiths, depending on the blacksmiths to produce effective metal so they can hone the tools for the carpenters' needs. They are broadly skilled and know how to at least muddle along in both a developer and a sysadmin job, but prefer the big picture of orchestration. They're the ones who figure out where the shortcomings are, and are broadly skilled enough to jump in and provide possible avenues and solutions, seeing where one side can't fix a problem, and the other may have a solution.

Oh and on top of all of that: if you somehow make absolutely nothing whatsoever, you automatically get about $20 a day to work with, which should at least keep you from either starving or being homeless (pick one, cause it won't cover both).

And American residents and businesses are spending something like US$432 BILLION per year (according to some economists) for tax compliance. We need a drastically simpler tax system, if only to cut this spending by 60% or more.

I thought about that a bit. It's easy to remove all but the functions intended to be used parameterized, but that doesn't prevent you from doing something stupid, it just doesn't invite you to be stupid. There is certainly something to be said for that.

The solution for the second part would be a bit heavy weight and never really satisfactory. For example:

"SELECT info from STUFF where id=$uid;"

Pretty much anyone would agree that uid should be parameterized. However, what about:

"SELECT $field from $table where $other_field = $value;"

Which of those do we want to force into parameters for all cases? Surely we don't want to force the first query to be re-written as:

"SELECT $1 from $2 where $3=$4;", array('info','STUFF','id',$uid)

But short of that, we can't stop someone from being stupid.

I read your posts, and other people's posts. How else would I have been able to point out your repeated poor reasoning skills and ignorance regarding the English language? How else would I have known you were fabricating information contained in those posts to back your position? You on the other hand failed to comprehend or read (I am not sure which) 98% of my first post, and complain about the content. Then failed to read, or simply lied about, the contents of other responses to my post.

I'm socially retarded because I correctly used an expletive? Seriously, you still never bothered to read anything about written language after me pointing out your ignorance? No, I'm not surprised really because the first paragraph explains exactly where you are wrong in every conceivable way. You never demonstrated how "Wholly fuck" as a statement could possibly be a personal attack, or why a different expletive would not be attack. Obviously you see me as socially retarded, because you refuse to admit that you are factually wrong!

To the other piece of that sentence: Show me a single text book that claims ignoring facts and basing your opinion opposite of facts is not delusional, irrational, and illogical. I have at least 6 college text books on my book shelf and every one of them defines your position almost exactly as I have. You ignore the definitions of words, but if you bothered to look for those definitions you would see they also match my statements. Like this these.

delusion
A delusion is a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary. As a pathology, it is distinct from a belief based on false or incomplete information, confabulation, dogma, illusion, or other effects of perception.

exclamation: a sudden cry or remark, esp. expressing surprise, anger, or pain.

explative
a : a syllable, word, or phrase inserted to fill a vacancy (as in a sentence or a metrical line) without adding to the sense; especially : a word (as it in “make it clear which you prefer”) that occupies the position of the subject or object of a verb in normal English word order and anticipates a subsequent word or phrase that supplies the needed meaningful content
b : an exclamatory word or phrase; especially : one that is obscene or profane

Personal attack: see 'ad hominem'
An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument.[2] Fallacious Ad hominem reasoning is normally categorized as an informal fallacy,[3][4][5] more precisely as a genetic fallacy,[6] a subcategory of fallacies of irrelevance.[7] Ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, for example, when it relates to the credibility of statements of fact.
Ad hominem arguments are the converse of appeals to authority, and may be used in response to such appeals.
Ad hominem as it is discussed in this article refers to the logical fallacy argumentum ad hominem, and not to the literal Latin phrase ad hominem.

Now, show me one single fact that backs your opinion that my statements "Wholly fuck!" and "Absolutely wrong!" are personal attacks without changing either statement or combining them. Don't come back without proof, your opinion thus far has been based on dishonesty and ignorance (feigned or otherwise). You won't be able to do so, but I'll look for a fact based reply.

In a car, the number one thing you can do to improve the sound is to close the windows. Given so many people that turn it up with the windows down, I presume "good speakers" are not required.

Thus they'll have the pictures from drivers license photos. They'll make it mandatory for exercising your constitutionally guaranteed rights(* exclusions apply, complaints accepted in 'free speech' zones only) - so press passes, licenses of all types (esp. for guns) will require it.

FWIW, Linux started way back when C++ was nonstandard (1990?) and didn't have many advantages over C for kernel development. At that time, C was definitely the right choice, and making it a mixture of C and C++ isn't real attractive. Nowadays, I'd recommend C++, as it can do pretty much everything C can and more besides, and standards-conforming compilers can be found everywhere (pity about Visual C++).

See my other post in this thread.

Agreed, I'm not worrying about it, but I will in a couple years.

If you owe more than $1,000, you owe a penalty. Unless you got a refund last year, or you owe less than you did the previous year. The wording is awkward there. Basically the first underpayment is free, and you get a pass while you're trying to fix the problem. I'm pretty sure TurboTax told me this.

It is legal, and the IRS has a calculator for you. Intuit has one online somewhere. TurboTax will generate a W4 for you after you do your taxes. However, I hate all of them. They all try to take into account what's been withheld year-to-date, and figure out the magic number to get a $0 refund at the end of the year. And every single one gives me a wildly different number, without showing their work. Which means they're all wrong, and I'll have to try again next year. I finally sat down and figured it out, because fixing it was a couple hundred bucks a paycheck. I hate myself, but I made the largest spreadsheet of my life using the IRS Employer's Withholding publication. I started coding it, but the publication tables mentally mapped better to a spreadsheet. My HR department wasn't willing to help me, and I can't blame them once I finished. Now I just tweak the W4 number up or down by 1, based on if my refund was larger or smaller than last year.

And if they were using a FIPS certified version of OpenSSL, they would still be compromised. FIPS means....nothing in this context.

OpenSSL is not FIPS certified. Most banks are using NSS, which is.

About 5 years ago, a snake took out my substation for 5+ days. I think you greatly over-estimate the level of monitoring and response times.

What Netflix should do is recoup the cost by charging it back to Comcast customers. Seems perfectly fair to me.