Oh, and as others have mentioned:

Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - maybe hold off on this one for a while, but do read it
https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/...

Software development can be a grind. Perspective is valuable.

Geoffrey James, The Tao of Programming
http://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.h...

Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line
http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/...

Vernor Vinge, True Names

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Your codependency has gotten completely out of hand.

I've been a little worried about the Unicode Consortium ever since 'PILE OF POO' (U+1F4A9) received its own codepoint. Don't know what's going on with those folks, but it doesn't seem healthy. Given that Unicode is an important and widely used standard, it seems like perhaps they should take their work a little more seriously. Or have they already 'JUMP THE SHARK'ed?

Slashdot posts have had their ups and downs over the years, but this kind of information-free, foaming-at-the-mouth crap is really beyond the pale. The article submissions should include at least some informative content - if any dead strawmen need further beatings, why, that's what the readers are here for.

As to the topic at hand. Love the SLS or hate it, whoever thought NASA should have used off-the-shelf software for SLS launch control should be punished by 5 years working SAP ERP's support desk. Well, maybe that's a bit harsh. But at that level of scale, complexity, and criticality, off-the-shelf should not be your go-to option.

Sure, it's perfectly legal. As you said, the researchers aren't slaves. But it's still a huge fuck job. As a result of the "partnership", CMU is now down 40 top staff members, which was probably not mentioned in the original CMU / Uber partnership discussions, and affects them materially. For instance, in their ability continue providing quality education to current students, and their ability to recruit new students who aren't interested in doing research for Uber. I'd doubt that $5 million even begins to cover the damage.

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.
-- Jean Giraudoux

This is where I get off the bus. I've used Firefox for years, Netscape before that - gladly so. But the Firefox people have gone from great developers making a useful product, to pretty good but a little squirrelly, to UX weenies and marketing assholes, to evil sellouts actively trying to screw me over. Fuck 'em.

On a completely unrelated note, if you use Linux, chattr +i is your friend. Works on directories as well as files too. Just sayin'.

I've often had that same thought. The trolls would be first (the really nasty ones, I don't mean the app appers dude - that would be silly :-). Then crackers, spammers, and crapware purveyors. "And while I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony..."

That's just beautiful. Naturally, every country in the world has their own version of this :-)

Ahhhhh, thanks for reminding me about this one. Beautiful song. And the lyrics are, amazingly, even more relevant now than when it was released.

Thanks for posting this, Anon. Did not know about this little thought experiment. Googled it and was not disappointed.

Seriously, I had to double check that this wasn't from Forbes.

...so are the Firefox releases of our lives."