This all seems ...so...familiar.... EBay Brick 'n Mortar

This question has been closed as not constructive by ... oh wait, wrong forum.

I would like to embrace and extend your comments, but unfortunately my conscience prevents from doing so.

Patches. On Debian it seemed that I was constantly waiting 6 months for a show stopper to get patched, because it wasn't a show stopper for enough people. The only times I have gone to source to fix a problem since switching to Ubuntu was 1 for the G#d Da323ed A4 paper size crap with inkscape (which of course was on the desktop) and for a fix to Glassfish, which has nothing to do with Ubuntu at all. If Debian released things faster, I would use them again. But then Debian wouldn't be Debian, and the deliberation serves as a useful purpose.

Though I think you have to make a distinction between a jury trial and a bench trial. In jury trial, the Judge really is only supposed to rule on matters of law (and therefore procedure). In a bench trial, the Judge is the finder of fact in addition to the finder of law. In both cases, the Judge's only bias at the start of trial should be towards justice, regardless of whether that means guilt or innocence. At the end of jury trial, this should still be the case. At the end of a bench trial, however, the Judge would be inept in his or her duties if he or she had not established a bias towards one of the defense or the prosecution. This bias would extend to the judging the credibility of the witnesses, etc., In the bench trial, the judge is not merely their to manage the adjudicative process, but is also the one and only jurist.

Of course, this only addresses the issue of criminal cases. Civil cases are fraught with bias, and when they result in justice it is just as much attributable to random chance as it is any form of jurisprudence.

That is SOOO freaking irritating. I have a password generation program I wrote to create (relatively) easy to memorize passwords that are cryptographically secure. And then find out the site won't handle * or something. Honestly, if it won't take * in a password, i am TERRIFIED of the level of SQL injection vulnerabilities that they are CERTAIN to have, and become quite convinced that the devs of the site don't know what a salted hash is, much less do they use it to store your password.

My favorite was Oracle though (pre-version 10). Passwords were quietly forced to upper case, only the first 8 characters were actually considered, and your password couldn't start with a number because Oracle uses it as an identifier. But hey, it costs $100K so you have to accept their "sophistication". [:rolleyes:]

Pfffft! You are just being paranoid. I mean what, do you think he is going to post the code somewhere public or som... er, nevermind.

Really? I didn't here anyone promise not to torture or execute Matthew Broderick!

What a complete load of horse shit. You seem to confuse pro-napster with anti-patent. I could give a shit about copying other peoples code. What bothers me is that I have to hire a legal team to verify that I haven't crossed some ridiculous patent when I publish a "Hello World" tutorial to my website! If the U.S. patent system had demonstrated even the most infinitesimal fraction of an iota of a clue as to what constitutes obviousness with respect to software patents, then I might feel differently. But it has demonstrated such a completely incompetent and disinterested level of expertise that the only reasonable solution that doesn't inhibit the advancement of the art is to get rid of them altogether. It is clear that the system is incapable of putting in place qualified personnel or reasonable measures to ensure the legitimacy of issued patents. The system is supposed to reward those who invest the time and money to build the better mousetrap. But all it is used for today is to guarantee a revenue stream to those who are too fucking lazy to compete in the market place.

And as that code should never, ever, EVER even remotely be considered patentable, you have perfectly illustrated the problem. Obvious to one reasonably skilled in the art. That particular piece of code above deserves no protection whatsoever. It is not an invention. I would posit that it doesn't even constitute a creative work.

Me three

Which is just as big a f@#$ing problem as the fracking fluids! I have always thought they lost the thread on this thing by focusing on the fracking fluids, the energy industries Wookie in this case. CLEARLY the problem is natural gas in the drinking water! I could give a shit about the fracking fluid when there is a far more clear and present danger in the natural gas itself. To think that you can crack the substrate and still have control over where the natural gas goes just shows a level of malignant idiocy that ought to disqualify all these ass hats from whatever certification they claim to have.

It isn't that Oracle can't distinguish between an empty string and null, it's that some pedantic developer along the way decided to impose the philosophy that a zero length string and null are the same thing (with some post-doctoral research paper involving Zeno's paradox, Einstein's special relativity and the Poincare conjecture to prove that this is, in fact, the only mathematically appropriate way to do things), so it stores all zero length strings as nulls. It is impossible to store a zero length string in a varchar2 or char field in oracle. This makes it a giant PITA porting applications to Oracle (at least it did for me) and leads to some really nasty bugs if you are caught unaware by it.

But hey, it's cool either having to put a not null constraint on every string column (and dealing with the application logic grief that this can cause), or wrapping every string column returned from a query with NVL or NVL2 and using some magic value and hoping for no collisions. Clearly no one would ever want to distinguish between the values of "nothing" and 'I don't know".

This is just one of many reasons that I hope Larry Ellison's yacht sinks in the middle of the Pacific with him on board sleeping off a bender. (not really, but the imagery makes me smile nonetheless)

Naw, Ahoy! was the last computer mag to matter (though I did love the old computer shopper too, lusting over crap I couldn't afford)