The reason so little went wrong is because people spent ages testing and upgrading/fixing beforehand. Had we left it all to 1st Jan 2000 there would have been issues,

It annoys me to see Y2K trotted out time and time again as a non-event. It was a very big event, and by the large part it was very successfully handled.

LWN is still a thing? Damn, I stopped reading them ages ago, when I realized that all the stories I was reading were popping up on slashdot several days earlier.

Amm... anyway, most of the programmers I've known over my career have been average. They don't seem to particularly enjoy programming but they can generally make the computer do what they want it to do. Then they're quite happy to go home to their families and do other things. I've run across (and had to clean up for) five or six truly inept ones. And I mean people with no ability with computers whatsoever, who were essentially defrauding the company they were working for. Usually those people had left the company by the time I'd gotten there.

I've never met a true rockstar programmer at any company, although I have met a couple in Linux channels on IRC. I got to audit the source of the AT&T C standard library on a contract in the '90's and a lot of that stuff was brilliant. I wish I could have worked with the programmers who wrote it.

Me? I'm not going to try to appraise my own skill at it. I enjoy programming and do it at home. I've retrofitted several projects with data structures and will fix crashes that other programmers tend to ignore. I've also been told code I've worked on is easy to understand and maintain (By people in other countries who it was outsourced to.) I prefer not to subscribe to institutionalized learned helplessness that dictates that the software works that way because the software works that way and nothing can be done to fix it. I have several github repos where I work on things that interest me at the moment, mostly licensed under the Apache license. That may make me different from a lot of programmers, but I won't argue that it makes me any better or worse.

Why doesn't the industry just charge those people for the addition of chemicals to their water? Those people are getting those chemicals for free right now, and chemicals don't cost nothing! The industry should be billing everyone in that town for the chemicals they're currently getting for free!

Oh we went to a 64 bit time_t ages ago. You should just have to recompile, even if you use long instead of time_t. Assuming you ever upgraded your machine to a 64 bit platform, which won't be a problem for most people by 2038. Even the US military and NASA should be on 64 bit systems by then. So essentially we've already fixed the problem for Linux. Specific installations that don't upgrade might have some problems, but most of those systems won't last another couple of decades and will require replacement sooner. Specific in-house software that was compiled 32 bits and the the source lost might also have problems. Any remaining SCO installations might also still have problems. I actually kind of hope I can spend my last couple of years before retirement stamping out the remaining SCO installations, naturally while billing $200 an hour.

If you want to stop politically-driven science, you have to end the approach of scientific funding being controlled by politicians.

Given that she owns the entire country it's kind of a moot point. If they piss her off she'll just kick them out.

DAZ activator is cleaner and does not report you by trying to activate.

Er... presuming that the cheating is important to you, you have a 100% chance of having a cheating girlfriend if you stay with the current one but only a 37% chance if you switch to a new, randomly chosen girlfriend.

But... if you don't instinctively see that, then I have to conclude that on some level you want abuse from your girlfriend/software vendor. In fact given your track record of past choices it seems likely that your choice will perform worse than chance, although a probably bad new choice remains a better strategy than staying with the devil you know.

If you don't have the confidence in your discretion to improve upon chance, a randomly chosen girlfriend/OS is a reasonable next step. You should try *anything* that meets the obvious superficial criteria (e.g., is biologically female, has companies providing professional support services). In fact studies suggest that while attractiveness makes a huge difference in who people ask out on a date, it has no effect on their satisfaction with that date once it takes place. What we think we want and what will make us happy are often two different things.

Which does not make using a stolen key legal, any more than a broken window lock in our house makes that fair game for burglars. Nor is using a stolen key ethical (at least in most situations); the principled response to not approving of proprietary software is to use open source software with a license you can live with.

You can bet that if a theory of gravity came out and it threatened the political or economic status quo, it would provoke a political response. When Edwin Armstrong's invention of FM radio started to gain market traction, RCA used it's political influence to have the FCC take the frequency band Armstrong's radios worked on shifted, making all the radios he'd sold useless. And if that had been done today, the next thing you'd have is is an army of PR flacks and FOX selling the public on the idea that FM radio was "tainted engineering".

Climate science isn't politically tainted. That's only PR BS. If you want to see for yourself, use Google Scholar to search for climate science paper abstracts from the early 50s to the 80s -- well before anyone outside the field heard the term "global warming". You'll be able to actually see the scientific consensus shift from global cooling to warming over the course of thirty years, completely outside the public spotlight.

I would.

I've worked in a physics lab (fusion). I've worked in a geophysics lab. Here's the thing about experimental Earth science: you're not working with a idealized, simplified object under controlled laboratory conditions. You are working with something that is immense and messy and which inherently generates a lot of contradictory data. It doesn't make the big picture impossible to put together, it just means it takes a lot of hard to obtain data to shift the consensus one way or the other. It took forty years for anthropogenic global warming to become the scientific consensus; the first papers were published in the fifties and the idea that the world was warming was hotly contested for at least three decades

Contradictory data is something fundamental to empirical science. Empirical science generalizes from contradictory evidence.

When I was in college, "conservative" meant someone who was cautiously pragmatic. Now it refers to someone who adheres to certain conservative axioms -- a radical in other words (radical == "root"). Radicals by their nature prefer deduction from known truths to induction from messy evidence. This is evident in your citing mathematics as the gold standard, despite the utter inapplicability of its methods to geoscience. Mathematics doesn't deal in messy, mutually contradicting truths. Nor does political orthodoxy of any stripe.

That's why "conservatives" latch on to local phenomena -- like the snow outside their door -- that seem to confirm their preconception that the globe is not currently warming. In mathematics the number 9 disproves the assertion that all odd counting numbers are prime. In climate science the medieval warming period in Europe doesn't disprove that the globe as a whole was cooler at that time. To radicals the existence of contradictions in the supporting data is corrupt. To scientists the lack of contradictions in data is fishy.

Left-wing radicals are equally confused by apparently contradictory data points, and likewise seize on the ones that "prove" their universal truths (e.g. that vaccines cause autism).

You can't fix stupid.

"Such a group"? That is, a group that wants people to be shot to promote their prejudices?

I'm aware of only one group in this case who was seeking to shoot people to promote their prejudices... so that must not be what I meant.

I'm sorry I wasn't more clear, here, let me break it down for you a little more:

You too appear to be keen on feeing your own "hate-filled little mind" with your oh so profound "Fuck all of them."

Want more?

You are quick to label Both sides here are perfect and utter shitheads and clearly trying to demonstrate that you are in fact above the fray and superior to them... yet your very tone an attitude puts you in the same gutter as those you appear to despite.

In the old days one might say "pot, meet kettle"... however your invocation of two different groups needs something else.

Was that clear enough?

You just gave me an awesome business idea. I'm going to open up a shop in Williamsburg selling stuff like bulk coax and ethernet taps so the kids can cable their apartments retro-style.

Since we have freedom of movement within the US, local regulations don't really mean much.

Only to law abiding citizens who happen reveal they do have a firearm with them when traveling out of state:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014...
http://www.gunnews.com/new-jer...

It's not like you have to go through a checkpoint on your way into Detroit where they'll take your guns away. The only meaningful comparisons are between the nation as a whole compared to other nations - and the numbers are pretty damn clear when you do that.

*face palm*

1. Except that in a good chunk of Europe, there are no border checkpoints.

2. So just because we have this wonderful freedom of movement sans checkpoints... low crime areas (regardless of firearm ownership) also benefit from the freedom of movement of blame from higher crime areas where more often than not, legally acquiring a firearm is difficult? I think not.

The amount of gun violence in this country is nothing short of catastrophic. You're less likely to get shot in a goddamn war zone.

Care to cite your baseless & clearly emotionally driven claim?

Remember that even in a warzone, the flying lead is not equally distributed so not all in the area have an equal change of getting shot. Take a virtual warzone like Chicago (a weekend with only a dozen shootings is a rarity) where there are clearly understood lines as to where your likelihood of getting shot is significantly greater on one side of the line than the other.

I'm sorry to see/hear that you really don't care about cumulative statistics and don't try to understand what areas may be affecting the total. I'll give you one... did you know that with the exception of the 2011 Tucson shooting, every single mass shooting in this country in which 3 or more people were killed occurred in a place where the shooter was not permitted to carry a weapon? That's a rather puzzling fact, isn't it? It's unlikely that a gun free zone suddenly causes people within to go shooting, but just maybe those areas where people are not generally able to defend themselves happen to attack those looking for unarmed victims. Ever consider that?