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.

Programmers are smart enough not to unionise, which allows newcomers into the field without these insane artificial barriers of entry.

Unions are barriers to entry into the field to any newcomers, unions are also horrific from point of view of price setting and prevent people who actually excel in the job from making significantly more than those who only coast by. Your complaint is a complaint of somebody who shouldn't have become a programmer in the first place, but also it is a complaint of a horrible person, who wants to prevent others from entering the field freely.

People shouldn't be licensed just to try and make a living, all professional government dictated licenses and participation in various organizations are a huge economic mistake but more importantly they are a huge impediment to individual freedoms.

My point is that an employee is an instrument in the hands of the people that own the company, like a screedriver but a more complex one, and the best 'respect' that an instrument can expect is his compensation for doing the job. An intelligent person would recognise this and turn it to his advantage by working as a contractor making the highest hourly wage he can master given his relative worth in the market. A person less intelligent would complain that in his role as a sophisticated screw driver he is not getting respect he believes he deserves.

An employer that is paying top dollar for his workforce can afford to treat his sophisticated tools with as much contempt as the law allows. If you are treated with more than simple master/tool interaction, you are exchanging top dollar for 'warmer' treatment, trust me on this, I worked as a permanent employee, as a contractor and I run my company now, I know all of this very intimately.

I don't know what exactly the point of this story is, however many people think they are not getting respect or their worth of whatever, not just engineers, and many people are of-course wrong.

An employee is part of a company, a company is a machine that makes the investor/owner money, and the way it makes investor/owner money is by implementing idea/solving a problem that the investor/owner is solving. The company makes work of the investor/owner more productive by allowing the investor/owner to execute the solution to the problem in a faster/more reliable/cheaper manner and thus providing the market with the best value for money solution to the problem that is being solved.

The employees are part of the system that is set up by the investor/owner to be productive. To talk about respect in this sense is meaningless, does the watchmaker have special respect for a spring loader or for a chisel or for a hammer or for a cutting tool? Is the cutting tool more important than a welding tool? Is a welding tool deserving of more respect than a screwdriver?

Employees are screwdrivers, cutting tools, welding tools, spring loaders, etc.etc., they are part of the machine that the owner/investor has created to make himself more productive in the market, to offer his solution to the market.

Your worth to the employer can be fairly easily measured by comparing you to any other employee. A developer's worth can be measured comparing him to another developer. An employer that cannot measure relative value of his employees is probably running a suboptimal machine (company), but at the end it doesn't really matter that much, whether the solution is fully optimal or is somewhat less than optimal, the employee will only see the market discovered salary (part of the salary discovery includes the government rules and regulations, nonsensical stuff like mandatory vacation pay or wage controls or insurance controls or whatever).

I do not have a more special respect for a keyboard than a monitor for example, for a harddrive or a DVD drive, etc.etc. I know they are there to perform specific functions. I have employees, they are respected in a very specific way: they are paid what they are due and the treatment is normal, they are people and that is all there is to it.

Eh, which stuff? The head in the sand tactic only gets you so far even ostriches do not actually do that but some humans apparently rely on that not to lose footing in their narrow perception of reality.

- first of all what is 'special' is that for the first time more companies shut down in a year than were started.

Secondly, you are right, existing companies are 'filling voids', as in they consolidate because the unproductive American workers can no longer earn enough by producing something to trade with. You are saying that consumption is the bottleneck, it's never the bottleneck, the problem is lack of productivity on behalf of the American worker. All these so called 'productivity gains' in the last 40 years in America are actually inflation and not gains of productivity. Productivity in USA has been completely annihilated with the laws, taxes, inflation. If American worker was productive, American worker would be able to earn to consume. American worker cannot earn to consume because he is not productive enough to pay for productivity of others with his own productivity, thus USA has been running 500Billion USD/year trade deficits, for this exact reason.

Capital is completely dried out in the USA, you don't have capital, you have inflation - printing of the money by the Fed and borrowing by all levels of government and by the private sector, but there are no savings, which is why there are no net new companies that replace the old companies that shut down and too many old companies shut down, and all of it is because there are no savings. There is no capital, printing money does not provide capital it only steals savings from the savers, savings are punished in the USA. The low interest rates artificially forced by the Fed are not true cost of capital. The pensioners in USA can no longer afford to live on savings, so they are coming back into the work force, while the younger who should be working are getting laid off and shift from permanent jobs to one or two or more than two part time jobs, all thanks to the government unauthorised nonsense, including Obamacare. As to ideas, ideas without capital behind them are nothing at all.