Wow, I feel for you. If QA is not testing against the same build the developers are using, they're doing it horribly wrong. Or did you mean QA is doing their own build for their testing tools? That I can understand.

You're a better programmer for assuming it's not a compiler bug and trying harder to figure out what you did wrong.

I've been programming professionally for over 20 years, mostly in C/C++ (MSVC, GCC, and recently CLang (and others back in the olden days)). I've seen maybe two serious compiler bugs in the past 10 years. They used to be common.

On the other hand, I can't count how many times I've seen coders insist there must be a compiler bug when after investigation, the compiler had done exactly what it should according to the standard (or according to the compiler vendor's documentation when the compiler intentionally deviated from the standard).

By "serious", I mean the compiler itself doesn't crash, issues no warnings or errors, but generates incorrect code. Maybe I've just been lucky. (Or maybe QA just never found them ;-)

Oh, and btw, yes I realize you were joking (and I found it funny.)

There are a handful of case-sensitive words in English. "Open Source" isn't one of them.

This kind of defeatist moral nihilism wouldn't be so annoying if it was expressed with a little intellectual humility.

Maybe. You seem to think (with no uncertainty) that it's a foregone conclusion that such evidence is impossible. It isn't.
Mathematical proofs are for math. Science is about weight of evidence, not proof.

You seem to think the only two logical possibilities are moral nihilism or morality from religion. They aren't.

Again, so arrogant, and yet so ignorant.

This stuff has been debated for thousands of years, right up to the present day, in philosophy and science (yes, science.) But never mind that -- AC on Slashdot has it all figured out.

Educate yourself, or STFU. Here's a good place to start:

Science of Morality
Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions?

Moral relativism, spoken with such conviction! Of course this is a popular point of view, especially among geeks, but rarely do you see anyone willing to go so far as to state that "there is no such thing as an immoral act" out loud (even if they believe that.)

I congratulate you for that, even though you did it anonymously.

Normally I would state something like the following as an opinion, but your matter-of-fact confidence inspired me, so I'll do the same:

Moral relativism is utterly false. Moral questions do have objectively right or wrong answers, founded on empirical evidence. (Or to be a little more precise, the answers to these questions are no less objectively right or wrong than are the answers to 'ordinary science' questions.) The answers don't depend on culture or upbringing any more than answers to physics questions do.

The reason why we codify law is because we don't agree on the answers to moral questions. But we don't agree on the answers to scientific questions either. That doesn't mean the answers don't exist.

I couldn't agree more -- well said. Of course, the problem is in deciding which laws would have the intended effect. I personally believe we could get by with a little less free speech in a situation like this, but I wouldn't want to be the one to decide where exactly to draw that line.

Agreed.

No, phishing is also a design problem, here's why:

Web authentication is fundamentally broken. We've known this since forever. The whole idea of typing your credentials into a web page is a poorly thought out idea. Authentication/authorization should be done out-of-band, in a way that cannot be plausibly emulated by the content of a web page.

There's a reason why phishing attacks don't work against your local computer account password. You get an email saying "your computer has been compromised, please go to this website and enter your user name and password" and you immediately know something is wrong, even if you have no idea how any of this works. Why? Because you're never asked to go to a website to do anything related to administering your local computer.

Actually, even without phishing attacks (which took a surprisingly (in retrospect) long time to become common) web authentication would still be horrible design, just from a usability standpoint.

Off topic. We're talking about common decency here, what does the law have to do with it?

You make it sound like it's some display problem in the email client. It's not. The entire email protocol is broken by design and always has been. The technical solution is easy, but it breaks compatibility with an enormous amount of deployed software. Things have to get pretty bad before people are willing to break that compatibility. Actually, "pretty bad" happened a long time ago, I should have said "horrendously fucked". Err, wait, never mind, It'll never happen.

If you are a programmer, you are part of the problem. The user isn't dumb, s/he just has better things to do than become a Software Engineer just to use what has become an everyday appliance. The problem here is bad design, period. Accept that and maybe we can move on.

I want a set of sails made from this. Neatly solves a problem with solar panels on a sailboat: half the time they are in the shadow of a sail.

I don't know much about modern computer engineering but hell, if you can wake from sleep that fast, you might as well sleep every time there is no schedulable thread.

...Weird to think about your computer sleeping between each key press, or between each network packet. You'd probably want to keep the display powered a little longer though ;)

They already thought of that. They're building another army or robots to handle maintenance of these ones.

If you're interested, I did the OCR and posted some numbers later in this thread.

This looks like a good place to post this. I took the data from this economist article and broke it down by red vs. blue state according to this map. This is what I found:

* There were 20 surplus states and 30 deficit states.
* Of the 24 states that voted for Romney, 4 of them had a surplus.
* Of the 26 states that voted for Obama, 16 of them had a surplus.
* Together, the blue states had a net surplus of 2.57 trillion, the red states had a net deficit of 1.50 trillion.
* The average blue state had a surplus of 98.8 billion; the average red state had a deficit of 63.0 billion.
* Four blue states (New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Minnesota) each had a surplus greater than all the red states with a surplus combined.