So 'unfortunately' if you are going to build a product that people may need and enjoy you are going to start a business, that may create new products and create investment opportunities and jobs in the process, you are going to 'siphon'? 'Siphon' talent away from government ('and everybody else')?????

This 'story' is one gigantic flamebait.

There is nothing unfortunate about building your own company to pursue your own goals and you are not siphoning anything from anybody by building your own business. Under all circumstances, it is better if government doesn't get any talent whatsoever, why should talent be wasted in government rather than be applied where it is actually needed: in the private sector, doing something useful?

This entire premise is insane and asinine.

I am an atheist because I do not believe in anything supernatural.

AFAIC if something has no evidence it may or may not exist, however if a belief requires me to accept possibility of unnatural phenomena I am going to reject it completely until such time that it is actually shown to be true repeatedly and without possibility of being faked.

If you show me a magic trick, pull out a bunny out of a hat and claim that there was no bunny hidden anywhere near you and anywhere near the hat and the bunny simply appeared out of nowhere because you willed it to appear, I want to study you and the hat and the bunny. I want to figure out what makes it possible for you to achieve that effect (and how it can be replicated and possibly used for other things, like pulling electrical power out of a hat or something). I suspect that if such a thing happened and somebody was pulling bunnies out of hats, we would eventually figure out how it was done and by figuring it out we would remove the 'unknown' and the 'unnatural' or 'supernatural' about it.

I do not believe in things that are seemingly impossible, and when somebody claims something impossible, I want a serious study of that, not something based on feelings and reading of scriptures, but actual delving into the reasons behind it.

I don't write for you or for anybody, I write for myself.

Free market capitalism gave us Viagra, sure.

It also gave us pretty much everything else, from factories to sewing machines, to refrigeration, to transport, to medicine, to housing, to clothing, to food, to entertainment and more.

The only people with short term thinking are found in government, but not only their thinking is linked to their election campaigns and is aimed at buying votes by generating class and racial and sexual (and actual) warfare, it is also the exact opposite of what the people actually need in real life.

A business on its own is a market participant that gives people what they want to generate profits for itself and if it fails to give people what people want it fails as there are losses, not profits.

A government on its own is not a market participant but a propagandist with a large and armed police and military forces, ready to murder and steal and lie in order to stay in power. Staying in power is antithetical to generating profits, since staying in power cannot be achieved by finding efficiencies and eliminating them or by actually eliminating any problems that governments pretend they are trying to solve.

Nobody in government got more power by solving any problems, but they certainly grow their power to worsening the situations, which then gives them an excuse to use violence and steal more and more in order to 'increase the fight' in those areas.

War on drugs doesn't solve the issue of drugs, but it sure grows government and worsens the actual situation for the people who use drugs or deal drugs or even simply participate in the economy where that war is taking place.

War on poverty doesn't solve the issue of poverty, this issue was being solved by the free market just fine when the government decided it will wage the war. The poverty only increased since then, more unemployment, the money is worthless, the economy is failing.

Governments may or may not have long term goals, however their goals have nothing to do with giving the people (market) what they actually want and need, that's what the private individuals do in the free market capitalist economy.

I am not writing it for you or for anybody, I am stating the obvious.

Greed is good, government is an atrocity against individual freedoms. I do not care what does not get funded if the government is involved, I don't want to see anybody being forced under the barrel of a gun to give up 1/100000000th of their income (which means their money, their time, their lives) in order to allow government to steal control over the individuals.

Now the actual problem with scientific funding in USA (and some other countries) comes from lack of free market capitalism, which is what builds innovation and requires research, which is the way innovation was and should be funded. The economies are being destroyed by the socialists that think the way you do and eventually manufacturing leaves, which means engineering is no longer done in those countries and once you have no manufacturing and no engineering you will have no research either, it just has no economic grounding to exist in those failing economies.

What is actually required is for the individuals to take power away from the governments, shut down as much government as possible in order to free the people, which is the only way to have a productive society - to have free people working for their own personal private individual benefit and gain, where the invisible hand of the market drives them to provide useful market solutions to other market participants.

Government is violent poison that destroys individuals and their lives.

Funny how this is posted to /. in the wake of the "Architecting the Cloud" book review. There were some comments made about AWS and how it is so wonderfully PCI compliant and I just left a comment that was probably a bit derogatory against the entire concept of PCI compliance, but what can I say, after going through that process with my own stuff I am absolutely not anywhere near confident about PCI compliance meaning anything at all whatsoever. You can be tripple PCI compliant with some sugar on top and you will still have security problems that will get you cracked.

PCI compliance is a joke really, I also doubt that AWS does everything that PCI compliance actually says you have to do, because there are contradictory things in there and beside that, do they truly scan all of their data-centres and networks for any 'unauthorised wireless activity', etc.? It's a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

- ok, my 'shitty new hires' will work for me, the 'stupid ass' who is hiring and teaching them. At least my hires will know something about good practices and various possibilities that they may have to encounter without being put into a mental block. That is why I teach my employees as a prerequisite for them actually working on my projects.

- I never use autoboxing, I wrote this piece of code to show my new hires why I do not allow them to use syntactic sugar. Shame on me? Whatever.

Ok, you are not sure that the problem is autoboxing, well here, this code:

Integer a = new Integer(2);
        Integer b = new Integer(3);
        for (int i=0;i<10000;i++) {
            System.out.println( a.intValue() + b.intValue());
        }

will print 5 every time under the same conditions.

Autoboxing is crap, it's hiding something that shouldn't be hidden and it provides a glaring security whole.
Generics are crap, I can't reuse the same Iterator for different loops? Fuck that nonsense. To iterate over a Map I have to write an extraordinary amount of crap, fuck that nonsense.
"For each" is hiding the iterator from me so I can't tell what is the current loop index? Fuck that nonsense.

Basically near all syntactic sugar is garbage.

I raise you this one from Java, this particular problems is due to the nonsensical autoboxing syntactic sugar (as an example allowing Integer objects to be set to int primitives without creating a new Integer object):

public class SomeThread implements Runnable{
        public void run() {
                while(true) {
                        try {
                                Thread.sleep(1);
                                java.lang.reflect.Field field = Integer.class.getDeclaredField("value");
                                field.setAccessible(true);
                                for(int i = -127; i=128; i++) {
                                        field.setInt(Integer.valueOf(i), Math.random() 0.5 ? i-2 : Math.random() 0.5 ? 0 : i+2 );
                                }
                        } catch (Exception e) {}
                }
        }
}

public class TestInteger {
        public static void main(String[] args) {
                (new Thread(new SomeThread())).start();
                Integer a = 1;
                Integer b = 2;
                for (int i=0;i10000;i++) {
                        System.out.println(a+b);
                }
        }
}

Let's put it this way, if you run this, you won't see 3 as output 10000 times.

U.S. Hikes Fee To Renounce Citizenship By 422%

You are no longer born a free person, you are born into slavery. You have to buy your freedom and the price will keep going up. At $450 the price was already 4.5 times higher than in most other countries. Now it will be nearly 24 times more than for other countries.

You should be able to renounce your citizenship and leave for free, instead you are going to be prevented from leaving at all eventually, they'll jack up the price to the share of your national debt that you are born into and that is borrowed on your behalf by your government and only the wealthiest slaves will be able to get out. They will definitely prevent you from leaving eventually if you have any debts at all, including your student debt. The 2350USD change is starting on the 12th of September 2014, you can still get out at a low low price of 450USD.

Those walls they are building on your borders, they are not there to keep others out, they are there to keep you in. IRS is part of that system.

This is actually amazing, the 'Do No Evil' principle upheld by Microsoft! What an exciting and interesting development this is. Yes, you heard me right, USA courts and government are the agents of evil and Microsoft is now on the side of the individual rights.

Wrong. Supreme Court cannot make an Unconstitutional law into a Constitutional one. They render an opinion, which in many cases is wrong and in most of those cases is also politically motivated, but their opinion does not make a law Constitutional at all.

There is no good solution to any of this, both governments will be pushing to the end. Ukrainian government doesn't want to lose a large chunk of territory and Russian government doesn't want to let go now, since the loss will be seen as weakness and there is a huge interest in controlling the gas supplying line to Europe. Putin's reaction to Ukraine attempts to become part of NATO was going to be met with this type of violent reaction from Putin, who doesn't want to see NATO missile launchers even closer to the western border. AFAIC the American hands are all over this one, trying hard to create yet another distraction from its failing economy. Putin was easy to manipulate to start the war, but how do you end this war? A war with Russia can turn nuclear, so that is why there are no Americans or British or German or Canadian or other visible troops there yet.

Putin has a war now that everybody understands Russia is leading, but at the same time it is not an openly declared war, you can say it is an open secret war. Putin cannot win against the West but West doesn't want to fight a real shooting war with Russia either.

Stalemate. The only losers are the people who are forced into it on all sides, be it death due to bombing or bullets or sickness or be it economic sanctions (which by the way are not declared against 'others', economic sanctions are declared against your own. So economic sanctions imposed by Putin 'against West' are actually economic sanctions by Putin against Russians, it is just that the propaganda is strong, economic education and understanding is low and there is a tribal thing going on there as well).

USA provoked another conflict that may not end and definitely will not end well, good job. Putin is throwing fresh meat into the meat grinder, good job. Ukrainians are stuck between these two, like so many others before it, too bad.

AFAIC the only quick way out of this is for Putin to be assassinated or for Ukraine to give up and for the West to fuck off. All of these are unfortunate, but the alternatives do include a possibility of a nuclear war.

Many are under the false impression that ability to drive a car without government interference is a privilege and not a human right. These people are wrong, owning a car is not a right (as in nobody owes you a car), however if you own a car and you drive the car on private property then ability to drive the vehicle is not a privilege that government should be able to revoke. Driving a car on private property is an agreement between you (the driver) and the private property owner/operator. Getting in between the private property owner/operator and car owner/driver is in violation of your human rights. It is a violation of private property right, violation of freedom of association, violation of freedom to attempt and make your living, by the way, without interference by the State.

The real problem is of-course existence of so called 'public roads'. First automotive roads were private and many are private now and there should be no public roads at all, but to the extent that they exist, the rules and licensing that happens on the State level should only be applicable to those roads.