If i'm paying for support, I get support. If someone thinks I'm an asshole, fine. I don't care about them. If I don't get the support I think i'm entitled to I'm going to complain. It's important to always make sure you get the name of whoever you're dealing with, and make a note of the time/date of the call. That way when you complain about them there's some chance of their managers knowing who it was calling their paying customers assholes or whatever and they get fired.

Harsh and really unrealistic.

I enjoy the series- not a fanboy. It's a big book series. I doubt that anything you do in your life will approach this size of work.

It's comments like this that drive creators to away.

But creators should be aware that there are probably a thousand patient fans enjoying the work for every bitter unrealistic comment. And there's always at least one person who will spit in your face even when you try to give them a 20 dollar bill.

I hope he finishes the series. He owes us nothing.

It sounds like your problem is with the quality of the new equilibrium, not with the principle.

The best kind of correct is technically correct!

It's such a big company it's in plural.

Kind of fits. Alibaba needs 40 thieves.

That's a good point. I also mentioned arbitrarily factoring and refactoring subroutines and I did not state clearly enough that i was suggesting using the tool mentioned in the article to confirm your code was giving a false result.

aye!

If everyone used it then we'd all be spartacus.

What I was implying also in my parent post was using the tool the article is about to confirm your code had reached the ambiguous level.

Nice one, Centurion. Like it. Like it.

What if you live, say, 20 miles from the capital? If that happened in London it would stop about *15% of the UK population from being able to use one! Perhaps that malware will be useful in re-enabling the damned things!

*I guessed that, but I think it's close.

Absolutely- if you were the only one using the tool.

Those are interesting points.

I read 'Darwins Black Box' by Behe many years ago, and thought he made good rational arguments about irreducible complexity.

When a genetic mutation occurs, there will be a continuum of effect, from new feature to no effect to death.
Natural selection will only have a certain forcing effect that is weighted to the 'death' end of the scale.

The problem I have with evolution, is the vast majority of any random mutation will be non beneficial and that this process will happen faster than natural selection can remove these defects from the population.

Isn't this a problem for Evolution proponents.
Evolution requires that beneficial DNA mutations win out over non-beneficial.

Lets say DNA is like a self replicating VM. The VM has built in error correction but occasionally a copy error occurs. The premise of evolution, is this copy error is occasionally beneficial and the non beneficial errors eventually die out, but the spectrum of copy errors can cause vastly different outcomes. Sometimes a copy error may change an eye color, or cause a miscarriage.
The question is, does the rate of beneficial mutations outweigh the rate of non-beneficial so the NEW functionality is created and functional entropy is halted?
My pragmatic side says, If I changed random bytes in a VM, I wouldn't eventually get a facial recognition system, I'd get slowly decaying VM.
 

Write a version of pretty-printer that rerenders your code into a different style.

Have a lexicon of mipelled words for each "personality".

Another lexicon of variable names.
a vs inta vs int_a vs x.

Refactoring and unfactoring for subroutines.

Run the comments through google translate and back to english.
ukrainian
japanese
chinese

Synonym and antonym substitution in the comments.

The mind dances at the possibilities to mess with this algorithm.

That's pretty trivial and already occurs.

The convention center effectively gets no signal due to the way it was constructed anyway and so the major brands have repeaters inside the hotel while the minor brand phone's don't work.

DFW Hyatt is a good example of this. If you are not on Verizon- good luck using your phone inside the convention center downstairs.