10,000 line functions are shockingly common in industry. Shit grows over time, and is so poorly written that you can't safely refactor it, and management lacks the balls to let you clean it up, so it just festers and festers.

I hear PayPal had 90% of their processing business logic in a single, multi-million-line class! Thankfully, I don't know that one first hand.

Government will fuck you sideways for a laugh, then shoot your dog and seize your house. I'll take Google's arbitrary of government's malice any day.

Whatever your perspective on that, someone, somewhere has to rank search results. If Google becomes capricious, people will stop using them (I haven't used them to search in 5+ years). If some government controls search results, it will get worse every year, and never ever get fixed.

when you're going to shoot someone, you can see them and know what you're aiming at. I guess you didn't think of that.

I didn't think of that because I dismiss inherently ridiculous thoughts. All that happens is that a persons OWN WORDS are pointed out to others.

It's far more like I have a magic shield that reflects anything shot at me back at the attacker. Guess then who is responsible for the amount of damage received back...

You totally should be able to do something about it, and that something should not require you to become a private investigator, politician, lawyer, judge, and security guard.

Too bad that is the reality is that in fact that is the case. It is utterly unrealistic to expect ANY kind of public service like a police force to scale to handle the amount of trolling that actually exists - every other person on earth would have to be employed to handle this.

You claim it's a hardship to have to be " a private investigator, politician, lawyer, judge, and security guard". Well guess what, the internet solves that issue by training you how to be all of those things online, if it matters to you.

This behavior pattern - acting before thinking it through

And YOUR behavior, of failing to act until it is far too late, is what leads to things like gangrene and amputation in real life. It is FAR batter to take informed action quickly than action that comes far too late, or to become lost in analysis paralysis.

YOU were the one to claim that self-defense means you must be "a private investigator, politician, lawyer, judge, and security guard." How can you go through those stages WITHOUT thinking it through? The very act of doxxing or shaming is inherently not done without thought, because it requires thought to complete.

Nothing about what I've just said demands "having inherent trust in the system to do everything for you".

Except that you are advising in waiting for action that will, by the natures of scale of the problem, never come. It's hard to imagine what good that will do anyone, except for serving trolls very well indeed.

The Salem witch trial methods would still have killed many innocents even if witches did exist

But all that we are seeing in THIS case is someone pointing out what people are saying to others. So the harm done is directly proportional ONLY to the persons own actions.

Someone moderately clever will post horrifically offensive content under someone else's name, then "catch" the designated offender and post their info and purported crimes to social media.

So since that might happen one in 500 million times of ACTUAL trolling - so we should do nothing at all about real trolls that we can actually combat. Even though it can be disproved...

The good of the many and all that. We should not back down from preventing common crime because of a hypothetical.

The Salem Witch Trials were good thing. After all, there might have been some real witches there.

In this case you have people literally flying around on metaphorical brooms on Twitter.

If there had been actual witches eating children, are you saying they should have done nothing? Because that's what you are saying should be done in the case of people talking on Twitter about how they want to rape his daughter.

We aren't talking about witch-hunts here against people who have done nothing. We are talking about bringing consequences to people who in fact HAVE done something and expect nothing to happen as a result.

This is why we have police departments.

Come on, you realistically expect the police to handle every case like this?

This is no different from having a reasonable right to self defense to protect your life. If you are being harassed online you should be able to do something about it, because chances are the police will not are at least not nearly as expediently as you can. The earlier you take action, the more you cut off the really bad stuff.

that's a reason to fix what's broken about our system

What if what is broken is having inherent trust in the system to do everything for you?

Sounds like it is being fixed.

The number of grammatical cases is irrelevant. Question: What's the difference between a grammatical case without stem changes and a postposition (opposite of a preposition? Answer: A space.

  That which is challenging, apart from stem changes, is the same thing that is challenging with helper words in general: when to use what with what. Picture a person learning English and trying to remember what to use with what. "I was scolding her.... over it? for it? about it? to it? around it?" "We were unhappy.... over it? for it? about it? to it? around it?" "She was dedicated.... over it? for it? about it? to it? around it?" And so forth. It's the same for people trying to learn which declension case to use in which context. But if the declensions are just suffixes without stem changes, then they're no different from postpositions. And often stem changes where they occur follow pretty predictable rules, often for pronunciation reasons.

OK, and digging loose change out of your couch cushions is you making use of a banking platform.

Everybody involved here knows that "investment" means something very specific when you're handing money to a company to use in the formation and growth of their business. What happens when you funnel money towards a favored project through Kickstarter is no more an investment than losing some change in your couch is you making a bank deposit.

There's nothing wrong with Kickstarter or with people on both ends of the gift-giving making use of it. But it's not an investment. If you're one of these people that thinks you've just "invested" money when you go to see a movie, then the term - to you - is so absurdly broad as to have no meaning, especially not in the context of an actual discussion about business finance and project funding.

If you never trust you never lose - but you never win either.

That is one thing that it absolutely is NOT. It's a donation platform, and some people asking for donations offer some incentives in exchange for your generosity. That's it. There is no investment. People who've given money are not vested in any way, except perhaps emotionally.

We're skeptics because we see right through marketing drivel. Some technology makes sense. Some, like mobile payments, serves no practical purpose for the average consumer.

I can see why you posted AC, you were wouldn't want anyone to think you were really that stupid, right? Just trolling with an over the top utterly absurd statement, right?

I mean, replacing credit card numbers that have literally affected millions of average consumers through POS breeches, with a system just as easy to use as a CC only now the merchant never gets your card number to leak... or your name if you don't want to share it, or your drivers license number to stalk you with later (since many places rightfully ask for ID with a credit card).

I mean, there's no way anyone who can even log into Slashdot could possibly see all those things as having no benefit to everyone, much less the average consumer... right? Right?

Morale: gloomy

But!

That doesn't mean you should never contribute to hardware kick starters. It's a good idea to carefully examine what they have done before to see if they can handle making the new thing...

But!

Sometimes, it's just plain good to kickstart something even if it looks unlikely they will reach the goal. I would argue that is what happened in this case, because they found out a LOT about making this thing a lot of people want, and are sharing what they found. Eventually the thing people really wanted may well get made. If I had contributed to this Kickstarter (I did not) I wouldn't be mad, just a bit sad it didn't go through.

9% of people don't care. I set up my mother's computer with the OS on C and everything else

She sure will care if there's every a problem (and there will be a problem) with one of those drives.

As a rule of thumb it's way better not to double someones possible failure rates if they don't know themselves how to recover from it...

I've spent my life helping people get set up technically so they never need to talk to me again - at least not about their systems. It creates a lot less work for yourself, unscheduled works that generally comes at very bad times.

SSD for boot/OS/swap, and slow spinner for data gives 99% of the performance for 99% of people.

That would be great except 99% of people don't want more than one disk.

Hell, *I* don't want more than one disk, and I can ably manage them. But there's no way I can afford the SSD it would require to store everything I have (never mind the backups).