No, and get a load of that poor fucker's middle name. If my parents gave me a name like that, I'd set shit on fire, too.

No, more like that.

We hate ACs because AC is mostly used for trolling.

All you need to get a slashdot account is a throwaway email address.

If you have an account, then you become accountable: we can tell whether what you say today matches what you said yesterday. Absent that, we have every reason to believe that you are just some malicious asshole.

...and it's lucky I didn't expect it from you, or I might be upset now.

Your argument would carry more weight if the government who'd be trying Snowden weren't the same one he outed for violating its own laws, with the active collaboration of its judicial branch. Not to mention all of the recent fully-public sidestepping of due process for hundreds of other enemy combatants. Oh, and the torture, including of US citizens. And... do I really need to go on?

Snowden has extremely good reason to be skeptical of the fairness of a trial... or if he'd even get a real trial.

Sorry, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the real world. They're giving twenty people - ten in experiment group and ten in the control group 30 minutes to do a bit of analysis. And they measure minutes to apply a few changes, without any qualitative measure on how the code is growing. There's very little proof that the refactoring they did made any sense, the sample size is so low you'd never get reliable results and pretty much what you can conclude is that refactoring doesn't make hackjobs easier. Never thought so, that just involves finding the place something's happening and hack it. If it's a good idea, well... it works there and then.

I see no evidence that Snowden didn't hand everything over to the Guardian et al, all at once, as he said he did. On what do you base your claim that he's still got something left?

In most cases these days it's a distinction without a difference.

I see this differently. Obj-C has the objects I need to interact with the framework. C++ has the speed, compatibility and expressive power I want. C has speed and compatibility, but lacks expressive power, which creates a lot of tedium and loses a lot of safety.

We agree on something :-)

I haven't really done much on Macs, but I did a lot of work on NeXTstep back in the day, and C++ was quite common in scientific computing there. Actually, what I saw a lot of was "Objective-C++"... they may have grown further apart, to the degree that this no longer works, but in the early 90s gcc allowed you to mix Objective-C and C++ constructs freely in the same code. So a common approach was to build everything in an OO fashion, but to choose between Objective-C and C++-style classes based on performance and flexibility tradeoffs. The result required you to be fluent in both, but that really just means being fluent in C++ because a C++ programmer can learn Objective-C in a day (which is something I respect about the language).

Well somebody has to be the first at discovering something before somebody else can confirm it. And yes, in human years it might take a while to build another billion dollar project to do that. Science works on incomplete information, otherwise there wouldn't be anything to do science on. Has anybody independently verified the Higgs boson yet? All the exoplanets discovered recently? Probably not. That's always how it will be at the leading edge of science.

I misread the the article's title as "Douche Telecom Call for Google and Facebook to be Regulated like Tacos." I'd misplaced my computer glasses.

Well, this is the thing about civil disobedience. The classic formula is to keep up awareness of your issue by forcing the government to go through the embarrassing and drawn-out process of prosecuting and punishing you. I'll bet they had to drag Thoreau kicking and screaming out of that Concord jail cell when some joker finally came along and paid his poll tax for him. Holding court for his admirers in the town pokey no doubt suited his purposes nicely.

In that spirit, this announcement is very effective. When was the last headline you read about Edward Snowden? If he comes back for a long and drawn out trial that'll show he's pretty hard core about this civil disobedience thing -- if leaving a cushy, high paying job in Hawaii with his pole-dancing girlfriend to go to fricken' Russia wasn't enough.

It occurs to me, though, that this situation is a lot like what I always say about data management systems: the good ones are easier to replace than the bad ones. Likewise the better governments, the ones with at least some commitment to things like due process, are much easier to face down with civil disobedience than ones where being a political threat gets you a bullet in the head, like Ninoy Aquino or Boris Nemtzov. If Snowden *does* come back, and if he ends up "detained" in limbo somewhere, then it'll be time for everyone to go into the streets and bring the government down.

Everyone likes getting paid. And all things being equal, everyone likes getting paid *more*.

But one thing I've noticed is that the people who are most dissatisfied with their current pay also happen to be the most dissatisfied with their working conditions overall, particularly how they feel treated. The feeling seems to be that if they ought to get more pay to put up with this shit.

Now I wouldn't suggest to any employer, particularly in tech, to economize by offering low salaries. You want to attract and retain the best people you can. But this suggests to me that many employers would do themselves a favor by paying a little more attention to worker happiness. If you're paying people approaching (or even more than) $100,000, there's bound to be a lot more cost effective ways to goose worker morale than handing out raises they'll perceive as significant.

But oddly many employers seem to think paying someone's salary is a license for handing out indignities. This doesn't even qualify as penny wise pound foolish.

Probably DirectX and C++. And in fact, Microsoft would most likely buy some other game which is close to what they want, then task the studio with making it into Minecraft 2. There are loads of Minecraft clones out there, the trick is finding one which is both technically competent and developed by someone willing to work for Microsoft and sell them their baby.

The existing mods wouldn't work with the new game, obviously. But many Microsoft games have been modded fairly extensively, and Microsoft has even released the sources to one of their games when they were done with it (Allegiance.)

So I place a USB wifi stick at the focal point of a baby satellite dish and point it at your camera, cheap and easy

What is gasoline if not a liquid? And what is liquid but a fluid? Therefore I should be able to run my car on hot air. So not all fair use is parody, nor is everything an author has to put up with fair use.

Fan fiction falls into that last category. Some authors encourage it, which is gracious; others are paranoid about it, which is understandable. But ultimately no matter how they feel about fan fiction they're going to have to put up with it. A successful work of fiction fires peoples' imaginations, and in the Internet era that means they're going to share their imaginings with like-minded people. Trying to police fan-fiction in a world where anyone can set up a blog or social media account to share it is like spitting into a hurricane force wind.

But even though a successful author pretty much has to put up with fan fiction whether he likes it or not, it's ridiculous to think that any author is somehow obligated to promote it. That just a fan-fiction author's fantasy. Authors have lives too, and there is not enough hours in the day for an author to police the stuff, much less to negotiate business deals for the people who write it. It's considered bad manners to even ask an author for the name of his literary agent, because an agent is supposed to work for an author, which he won't be able to do if he's swamped with requests from wannabes.

He's not shilling, he's just also not thinking. A lot of people want to believe that they live in a great country, because they think that makes them great. So they shout up their country every chance they get because they think it improves their credibility. Heh heh heh

I didn't say killing. I said murder. There's a difference.

Publishing documents may or may not be legal. Espionage is always illegal. See the difference?