Even 10 times would far too often. And nobody was whining.

Who was ignoring this? Certainly not me, and I don't think anyone else.

Again, nobody did this. Not me, and not GP.

GP mentioned losing a house. There was an actual case like this in California. An innocent elderly couple lost their home and large plot of land to civil forfeiture because somebody had planted a few pot plants OUTSIDE their property line.

Ignoring the outrageous cases that do occasionally happen is no less erroneous than what you accused us of. Nobody should be treated like that.

---
"It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own." -- Thomas Jefferson

That was way up the thread. I was replying to a general comment to the effect of "running a program isn't work". There was nothing suggesting that comment was in the context of playing a game or watching a movie.

Strictly speaking, that's not true either. There are an uncountable number of cases where judges were convinced to sign a warrant based on false statements or false evidence, for example.

So the warrant was not a legal warrant, and the search was therefore not legal, either.

Of course not. However, we do know of quite a few cases of abuse occurring. And for every one we know about, there are probably at least several we don't.

I don't think GP was referring to the basic concept of any civil forfeiture, though I could be wrong. I think it was a reference to the many cases of abuse.

Uh... if that's what you think, GP might actually be more informed about the issue than you are.

I am reminded back when I first started reading electronic bulletin boards, and I found EFFector Online from EFF, and the pubication from EPIC, whatever that was called.

At the time, civil forfeiture was a big deal as it related to online crimes, and the publications were chock full of examples of abuse. Like the greenhouse operator who liked to order his annual shrubs at market using cash... stopped at the airport, and was deemed to be a drug dealer because of his old jeans and excessive cash.

He was never charged with a crime. He never had a forfeiture hearing. But he never got his $30,000 back, either.

There are LOTS of such stories, from very reliable sources. I would consider EFF to be one such.

They've made a decent start for 2015, though. Among other things, I am holding onto hope for a ruling on King v. Burwell that reflects the actual law and Constitution, rather than ideology.

Not only is this just wrong, but where the heck do you get the idea that Ruby is a "hippie" language?

I mean seriously. WTF?

Yes, it is. Or at least it can be.

As a programmer, often running a program IS work, and what I'm getting paid for.

And if I write a script to update the database this way, and it runs all night, then that's my work that's being done. Of course, I'm not charging by the hour. But still. If I wrote it, and it's running, that's my work. That's what computers are for, and why people are paid to program them.

And if, for any reason, I have to sit there and watch it run (which does occur, for various reasons not necessarily related to the code) then it most definitely is work. For example: sometimes it's not possible or practical to do THIS until THAT finishes running.

So, wait - who exactly in the First World does not know what Microsoft is and does by now?

This one I can sort of agree with, though most of their efforts in this space have flopped spectacularly: MSNTV, Kin, PocketPC, Zune... I think the XBox was the only Microsoft product to date that hadn't crashed and burned insofar as consumer electronics are concerned.

More than that... in 2012, I had once estimated that they blew $7bn on the enterprise, and though they're raking in something like $200m/yr (IIRC) in profits now
(mostly from dev house licensing), they have yet to fill that titanic money hole they dug with the thing.

Agreed. if it weren't for Halo and the subsequent lock-in to that console, I suspect the XBox wouldn't have really gotten anywhere.

Consider that the XBox was still a massive money-sink for years on end, and I daresay that it has still not yet reached its overall ROI, let alone a profit. If it were built/sold by any company other than Microsoft (or similar behemoth-sized), the company would have gone broke years ago from it. They may eventually reach ROI and turn a profit, but I think that's still a couple of years off at best, and after that, I have no idea what kind of profit margin it would have.

My best guess is that Microsoft wanted to (and is still desperately trying to) make the XBox into a home media center, to the exclusion of everything else (DVRs, dedicated DVD/Blu-Ray players, etc). They may still latch on a cablecard/sat receiver, and maybe some tie-in to "The Internet of Things" (or whatever buzzphrase is being used nowadays), so that it becomes the brain of the "smart home"(ditto), so as to lock-in a potential market. But then, people being what they are, they stubbornly go out and buy tablets, 3rd-party home alarm/HVAC controllers, decide to use Dish instead of DirecTV or Comcast, run out and buy a Sling/AppleTV/Roku box, etc. I think it's that diversity (and the entrenchment of the players in it) which has kept them from making that final drive. This in the end may well turn the whole XBox thing into a permanent anchor on Microsoft's profit margins unless costs are cut somewhere... which makes me wonder why the shareholders haven't demanded that the console be made profitable or else.

This problem isn't just in pure developer-land.

As an example, meander on down to the PuppetForge and look at the common modules used to do boring stuff.

For example, installing and maintaining PHP on a box via Puppet should be drop-simple, with little-to-no work... I designed and wrote a simple module for it in like 30 minutes, spending 15 minutes of that having a cigarette, no sweat. But one look at some of these, and you'd think they were writing Turing-capable climate modeling software. Okay, I exaggerate (a little), but the point is, these guys spend untold hours trying to turn a set of car tires into jet engines.

Here's where it gets ugly: Most DevOps folks liberally download these beasts and implement them, never realizing (until it's way too late) that the vast majority of these modules are written either to be cute, to be clever-by-too-far, or to bolster someone's resume ('look, I'm a coding deity!' type crap***). They then spend hours on end busting their ass trying to get these damned things to work in their environment, and end up with something that quite frankly eats more CPU cycles and disk space then it really should... by orders of magnitude.

TL;DR? The greatest wasting of time I've seen in development and beyond is when people try to get too cute or too clever with code.

*** if someone showed me some of these ugly-assed bloat-factories as part of the interview process, they would face some damned hard questions from me about design before I'd even think of recommending them to be hired.

Who knows? Maybe they mean "spartan" in the sense of the opposite of "bloat".

One can only hope.

SQA jobs hence why I got laid off over a couple months ago. :(