Other related titles from the "Well no duh" category:

"Why you don't want to buy on credit" and
"Why you don't want that free cell phone" and
"Why you don't want that really cheap ink jet printer"

Yep. I thought that was funny too.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

"WHERE ARE YOUR PAPERS?"

Whats actually happening today is more scary than these infamous lines spoken in WWII era movies. And we look back at those and sigh in relief that we don't live in that time period now, while allowing the TSA to do what they do...

this must have been pretty upsetting for everybody who erroneously got the message (I have to wonder how many people actually got to the point of turning all their stuff in and walking out the door before the error was corrected..).

But the ultimate humility would be for that one person who was the intended recipient of that email. Because you know, the first thing that will happen is the news spreads around that it was all a big mistake, so that one person probably sighs in relief. And then shortly later that person finds out that they really were getting fired. Furthermore, probably everybody in the whole company will know who that person is now, where if he had been fired correctly the first time it probably would have been pretty low key and no big deal.

In fact I wouldn't be surprised if this one person could suffer from emotional damage as a result of all this.

Changing title to: "The dumb get dumberer since the 1970's"

I think it is due in large part to the easy access to vast amounts of information due to electronic distribution (faster, easier, cheaper). While this allows smart people to become more informed than ever before, it also allows dumb people to collect more dumb and incorrect "information" and become dumber while at the same time thinking they are in fact smarter. And that's a dangerous combination.

My first thought was, is it that women are potentially better managers or is it that people (and at that, maybe more for men or women?) like being managed by a woman regardless of her methods. IE, given a male and a female manager with everything else being equal, would the managed people act differently and thus be better employees?

I would be interested in testing what would happen if people were managed blindly, by someone who you dont know what sex they are. That of course would require some setup, as I dont think you could just study existing businesses...

In other news, Polaroid has purchased Smith Corona and will be merging instant film cameras with the venerable typewriter to create a new streamlined company and product, the PhotoWriter!

My first thought was: UC Berkeley outsourced the development to Russians? Really?

I've been waiting for traits in php (and thus php 5.4 when they finally decided to put traits into it) for some time now.

Think of traits not as really an extension to the object oriented features (alternative to multiple inheritance..) but as a kind of language assisted cut and paste with conflict resolution.

Because that's what it is. Traits are "flattened" at run time. Their methods become methods of the class where the trait is used, and work exactly like they were defined there to begin with. If there is a collision in the naming, you can specifically resolve that with language syntax.

oh, dont get me wrong, I didn't think you guys did claim any such thing. :) opa looks pretty interesting (though I would like OO ability as an option).

I've been anti ORM for some time now.

This is interesting.

What strikes me though is the stuff about ORM and how this isnt ORM, like its some new fangled way to use a database that nobody did before.

Here's the thing. You can do this in any language. yes this opa language has some simple syntactic sugar to make it super easy to use a database (as long as its a NoSQL one like mongo). But you can access a database without an ORM layer in any other language too.

Thing is, with OO languages, people assume you have to do everything with objects. Its there, I gotta use it! Right? I have this lovely hammer and it smashes real good, therefore I will smash screws with it! And I will smash apart wood sheet into sections! Never mind that screwdriver and saw over in the corner.. I have hammer!

So somebody makes a non-oo language that accesses a database with simple records and everybody thinks its a new and novel thing..

(don't get me wrong, the language looks interesting, I just think its funny how people look at things and run off half cocked without thinking first)

I think the idea of space battles being something like submarines is pretty close. All the claims that space battles and ships are pointless when you can just lob stuff at the target and its impossible to stop in space I think is short sighted. If we can achieve any kind of reasonably fast space travel and be able to lob objects big enough to harm a planet or fast enough to not be able to be outmaneuvered by a spaceship you're already assuming energy sources beyond anything we know currently, maybe even physics (FTL?) that we don't have yet. Assuming that, then its reasonable to assume we could also use that energy source to create powerful energy shields (magnetic, gravitational, hot plasma, who knows) to deflect dumb projectiles.

We can invade a country and kill thousands and spread mass destruction in order to find and kill one bad man...

But we can do nothing to save one good man.

This is what's wrong with America.