The interesting thing about this is that I have worked a few developers over the years who were great at those sort of complicated chunks of development but were terrible at reviewing other peoples code. Partly, they had the attitude that it "belonged" to someone else so that someone else should fix it, partly it was just that they got bored reading it and just skipped it at lightening speed missing tons of stuff and not spotting bugs.

Someone who is apt at doing code reviews can often be the most important member of a team, regardless of them actually producing large chunks of development themselves if they actually spot the sort of tricky bugs in code that often slip through unit testing as they are actually design issues.

Actually, maybe they are more suited to the Rock Star title in the way that they are going to self-destruct in their own ego fest early on in their career and never survive beyond middle age :)

My money is on 2 to be honest.

Not necessarily. The truth is that taking prisoners in that sort of OP is very dangerous. Especially the sort of prisoner where they are surrounded by other combatants who would quite happily do something suicidal to help them escape. If Osama survived it may well have been at the expense of every other person in that complex.

I am also reminded of the SAS raid on the Iranian Embassy Siege. In that case the SAS topped quite a few people who were no longer a threat. The first was the leader of the terrorists, he had been subdued by armed police officer who managed to keep his gun through the whole siege. The second and third were a couple of unarmed terrorists who had been convinced to surrender by their hostages. The SAS had orders to "make sure there was no ongoing problem after the siege" and they took this to mean long winded trials and such.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

In the end one terrorist did manage to survive, as executing him after he had been led out of the building in front of the TV cameras would have been a bit iffy.

The truth is that special forces like SEALS are often put in situations where taking prisoners is simply a luxury they cannot afford, unless they are given a strict "must be captured alive" remit. Those sort of missions are probably harder than the ones where you can just shoot anything that moves, especially if the people who you want to take alive are not hostages.

Almost never happen? That might have been true before Bush got in but as soon as he did and September 11th happened the CIA felt it had free reign to do whatever they liked, under the guise of protecting america from another attack. After that, they did not care about PR nightmares abroad as a bigger worry would be some fucker flying another plane into a US building.

This lists some of the cases where the subject survived and we know about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Even the cases we now know about make it fairly clear this was happening quite often.

One of the most important things to consider is that historically very few violent or armed revolutions and coup d'etat have resulted in a better government than the one they were overthrowing. Things that have generally brought improvement are slow drifts in line with public mood over time.

The problem with violent change, especially when instigated by people who have history of serving in a professional army is that they often have huge difficulties when it comes to coping with disagreement. People not doing what they are told in a military context often has huge repercussions (and so it often needs to) but the general public not doing what they are told is often their democratic right in a free society.

People with an army background seem to be very good at becoming dictators. The sort of flexible, politician types that have no backbone are exactly the sort of people you need when it comes to dealing with a free populace. Part of being free, is being able to believe things like "socialism is better than capitalism" even though the vast majority of the population and the government strongly disagrees.

The best sort of change the US could undergo would be driven by a mass movement of a highly educated, non-violent population who realised they were being oppressed and refused to stand for it simply by not playing along with a bullshit system designed to keep them down. Of course, that is not likely to happen any time soon.

Maybe you missed that my central point was that as a Linux user myself I can attest that actually only Safari is not available. For IE I can use a free VM provided by MS specifically for testing browser compatibility.

Using Safari as a shining example here is utterly bogus. I have had to jump though so many hoops to get a decent copy of Safari running without buying an whole computer just to test and debug web pages on a recent version of Safari or and iPad.

In the end I eventually managed to get a OSX VM running on my Linux box under VirtualBox. That finally enables me to test stuff under the virtual ipad thingy under OSX and also on the current version of Safari under OSX, this is essential for testing any HTML5 stuff. This is legally dodgy however, the only legal approach is have separate chunk of hardware made by Apple to test this stuff under. Apple are great providing you sell them your soul and move to using their hardware as your primary developer box, but then you are paying far more for the hardware then you need to.

As many other people have noted, MS are actually better than Apple in this regard in that they let you download VM's for testing browser compatibility with your site even if you choose to run Linux as your primary OS.

Anyone running Vista has bigger problems than not getting IE 10 :)

Sorry, I thought maybe you were as you seemed to have an idea of how our political system worked in a way that most Americans do not.

The proposed replacement was some shitty, over complicated, Alternative Vote ( http://www.electoral-reform.or... ) approach unfortunately, not Proportional Representation like the rest of Europe uses. It would not really have been much better as it still would have resulted in a single party ending up with all the power, unlike PR which forces the ruling party to work with losing parties if they got a sizeable share of the vote.

I was not talking about polling, I was talking about how if there was ever any sort of referendum on copyright law that most of the British public could be pushed into supporting the current status quo by our media running lots of stories about how "copyright law is needed for our digital economy" in the run up to it. This would also apply if one of the parties likely to win any votes in our electoral system changed it's stance to support copyright reform.

I was half joking.

The fact is that many techies are arrogant, selfish and exceedingly immature. These are all traits you have to rid yourself of pretty quickly once you become a parent though. It is very difficult to find out if people are like this at interview though so asking if they have kids often gives you a way of identifying those who are less likely to have these sort of unresolved personality issues.

I doubt anyone would purely use whether someone had kids as the deciding factor if you gave them a job, but if you had already come across as possibly having any of the aforementioned problems then being asked if you had kids and saying yes might be a way you could dig yourself out of a hole by showing you had a certain degree of maturity.

Also, having kids forces you to value also having stable income in a way that nothing else does, especially if you are the sole breadwinner for your family. That makes you a much more flexible employee.

I have been doing this web development thing long enough now that I feel I can untangle just about anything given enough time, I have had to work on some serious drivel created by other people over the years. That does not make writing awful code a good idea though.

I generally work on the the principle of making sure that any code I write could be understood by anyone as easily as possible, even if they are not a super duper code ninja like yourself. The only exception would be if the more readable approach caused serious efficiency issues, but in those situations I try to over do the comments.

I generally consider the ternary operator to be useful shorthand but if I had to do lots of nested stuff like that I would write it as if-then-elseif-then-else which I find much clearer. It might involve more typing initially, but if it saves someone else time later then it's worth it in my opinion.

I am not sure what that second bit of PHP sadness it really moaning about to be honest.

Ok, I understand the difference, but I also think that anyone who wrote code where the stacked ternary operators like that should be sacked. There are times when the ternary operator is useful, but it has to be used carefully if you want to keep your code easily readable by other people, stacking them like that is a quick recipe for unmaintainable junk useful for nothing else than building your own empire.

Also, wouldn't a few well placed brackets both solve the problem and make the code more readable?

Do you really choose to be childless or can you just not find anyone who will put up with you long enough to have a child together?

They could remove the links to it just like Google does.