The truth about C: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/... Now seriously. Pascal was published some 2 years before Kernighan and Ritchie released their masterpiece. Having the opportunity to have a long look at Pascal and yet coming up with something like C shows a very strong character.
Pascal is pretty bad at doing anything really useful. C is better for doing embedded bit-twiddling. It's been a while, but I remember trying to do something bit-intensive and finding that Pascal required far too much typing to get results. Not as much typing as COBOL, perhaps, but C was the obvious choice. I wish they'd used C as a teaching language instead of Pascal when I was in school.
These attitudes persist today. A man used an ATM outside a bank, and the machine made noise but no money came out. His receipt indicated money had been withdrawn from his account, so he used his mobile phone to call the bank and report the problem. He was told there was nothing they could do, could not send anyone to look, etc. He then hung up and called back, reporting that the ATM had spit out too much money. A bank executive and repairman were on the scene in less than five minutes.
I actually had this happen to me at a Home Depot. The self-checkout machine had been loaded with a cassette of $10 bills where the cassette of $1 bills should have been. I got $30 change from my $20, instead of $3. Being a (usually) honest kind of guy, I walked over to the clerk monitoring the self checkout lane and smiled, handed her the money and the receipt and said "No.", and pointed to the machine I had used She and the floor manager had that machine open in less than a minute. I got to see enough to note that the cassettes were all the same size and color, with masking tape labels for the denominations ($1,$5 and $10). I guess someone had loaded that machine in the reverse order. I think they were wondering how many people had used it that morning, and neglected to report the discrepancies. The experience brightened my whole morning (especially as the self checkout machines always squawk if you don't place each object you buy on the weight scale, because they just *know* you're gonna try to sneak something through).
Yet another contractor who seems to have been doing the minimum required to get paid. Fire suppression turned off, flammable materials stored after repeated inspections required that they be removed. Outsource responsibility and this seems to be the result.
What I can't accept is the adults' repeated refusal to punish bad behavior. We have a regulatory framework. Enforce it.
I'm sure everyone in the chain of command, who isn't a political appointee, would agree with you. The problem is, "corporations are people, too", and they've paid to elect people who agree with them; that there's just nothing they could have done in this case, and it was, sadly, just an unavoidable accident.
I wouldn't say he "joined the fight" against patent trolls. He was sued by one and decided to very loudly and publicly fight it
More power to him!
If the troll holds true to form, they will dismiss the suit when it becomes clear it's going to court.
One man's constant is another man's variable. -- A.J. Perlis
