Actually a BB gun can seriously injure someone. I was hit with a BB once (accidental) mind you, hitting me on my knuckle. That dig itself in bad. I do not want to think what it could do to an eye.

== the following below are generalizations of what the law says, counting variations across different jurisdictions within and outside the US ==

By law, a "deadly weapon" is not just a weapon that can kill for certain, but that has the potential to cause a serious injury that can lead to death. A BB to the eyeball at short range can do that. So can a rock being thrown to someone's face. In some jurisdictions around the world, a professional boxer's hands can be considered deadly weapons given that, unlike other people within their respective weight classes, professional boxes can kill someone with a punch to the temple.

The fact that using a BB gun has the potential to seriously injure someone makes its use a 3rd degree assault (potential to injury + recklessness). Use it to commit a crime and that shit by default ups it up to 2nd or even 1st degree depending of the circumstance.

Moreover, the law (as it should be) takes into consideration the state of mind of a potential victim. If the victim seriously thinks he is in physical danger, that is enough to bring a 3rd degree assault charge, even if the assault never takes place. This is more so if the person is put into a state of being scared of his well being or life while being subjected of a crime (then it goes to 2nd or 1st degree).

The person would have to know pretty well that the weapon is a BB gun and not a real gun. It is unreasonable to expect a person in a state of fright to recognize the two. If this were the case, one could argue I could attempt robbery with a fake gun (or a gun without rounds in it) and then claim in my defense that I did not use a deadly weapon. I hope I don't think I have to explain this one any further.

I disagree with you that 6 months probation was enough. This wasn't a harmless crime, and this person is a criminal.

I agree that we put petty criminals to jail too often. But armed robbery is not petty crime.

Breaking into a house when no one is there, and stealing a TV is. Cutting a bicycle chain to steal it, that is petty crime. Shoplifting is a petty crime. Selling bootlegged DVDs or dope is.

Armed robbery, subjecting a victim to a state of being afraid of his physical well being, that is not a petty crime.

What I'm really curious, and what I'm really afraid, and the real question of importance is: what the hell were the authorities so afraid to disclosed that they opted to drop charges and offer a plea. There is something absolutely wrong going on here if they have to cover that shit like that. That is the stuff we should we worried about.

Anyone who says 'regular software writers' doesn't know shit about the subject he/she opines about. Seriously, what is a 'software writer', and what does 'regular' mean in this context? Define 'regular'.

I've always liked the 'science guy', but seriously, his use of language to describe whatever the hell he tried to describe leaves a lot to be desired and betrays a certain level of ignorance on a science/educational topic. Considering that software development, engineering and IT are some of the most important fields in the modern industry, that is ignorance of science and knowledge applicable to the current times.

Not even Bill knows everything, and he, just like everyone else, should STFU every once in a while on subjects not too familiar with.

I would challenge anyone to show me a CS degree that doesn't have any of what you mentioned. This meme/fad/bullshit has been running for a long time among hardware degrees, that we CS grads never see such things (and I love their faces when I show them otherwise.)

The thing is, and this is what I've personally observed, that CS detractors claim we do not know those things listed above because we do not know the basics of electrical engineering. For example, knowing the exact working of a capacitor by reciting the laws of physics (and interactions) that make its work possible. Or reciting what a Thevenin's equivalent is.

Of course we do not fucking know (nor should we need to). And then we spend most of our careers working at higher levels of abstractions, so we won't recite out of heads how to construct a digital adder with a carry bit, nor remember how we built a basic ALU in our undergrad studies 10, 15, 20+ years ago.

But that does not constitute any evidence that we never see anything regarding computer organization and architecture (a fundamental subject that all CS students must pass to graduate.) And making assumptions like that can only to "conclusions" that are not only stupid, but malevolent.

There is a degree of truth that many CS degrees have lowered the requirements and put too much emphasis on higher-level programming languages to the detriment of lower level ones. But that is not the state of the field in general, nor a characterization of all who work in the profession with that degree.

YMMV, but people who make that kind of ridiculous assumptions are just carrying a big chip on their shoulders and need to make shit out to feel good about their career choices. It is not just ignorance, but arrogance.

And most other engineers (even EEs who write software) don't know how software works (I had an EE old timer challenging me that he could write a compiler by just using look up tables to replace high level syntax artifacts into machine instructions.) Same with Physics majors writing code in, say, Python or Fortran.

See what I just did there? Every motherfucker out there is blatantly (and sometimes inexcusably) ignorant of some other thing.

And what do we mean by "understanding". Most CS grads (myself included) do not understand how computers works down to the nitty gritty levels, where copper meets the solder, where the laws of physics dictate how transistors and shit like that do their magic.

Nor should we need to. That's what EEs and CEs are for. But we do know, in general, the architecture of things, digital logic, the basic composition of computer architecture and so on and so on. That there are CSs out there who do not know that is not an indictment of the general population.

The same applies to, say EE majors that write software in C/C++/MatLab/HDLs more often than designing stuff at the physical level. Most have no clue how a compiler works, nor how a OS works. Seriously, most might now about hardware level protection, but not many can explain how the OS mediates a user-level process' request to a kernel-level call.

And that person shouldn't know. That's what CS grads are for.

That is what specialization means. To make blatant generalizations about who knows what is just an exercise seeing who has the largest wiener. That is all.

And somehow this translates to property tax exemptions how? There are other businesses that went through the same construction costs, that created more permanent jobs and that end up (or ended up) paying more taxes during the same tax period these tax breaks occurred. From a sensible, logical point of view, how to we justify that?

Notice that I'm saying "justify", not "explain" because I can explain anything away with a barrage of cynicism. Justification, the rationale behind something, however, that is what I'm asking.

And where are the arrows coming into the rest of the country from Mexico, China and Russia, among other countries? Yes, the map is incomplete.

But there are property taxes, business related purchase taxes and so on. You are just being deliberately obtuse for the sake of having an ideological argument.

But since you do not know for sure, you might as well STFU and learn about it before trying to conjoin this issue with federal taxation issues (or more to the point, stop trying to shoehorn your pet-peeve issues into every single issue you come across unless you factually know the two are related.)

What the hell is a rock start CEO? Like Leo Apotheker of HP sad fame? Eddie Lampert who ran Sears to the ground? The list of crappy CEO's can go on and on. And the list of average CEO's is even greater.

The list of rockstar CEOs is very minuscule, so your argument about needing high parachutes to attract rockstart CEOs is flawed.

The entire compensation system is flawed and it has more to do with using golden parachutes as 'hush money' to get rid of a bad CEO quickly and without issue (thus minimizing damage) than to attract rockstar talent. Thomas Sowell explains this in details in his "Basic Economics" (a deep look into the subject, a worth read.)

This type of argument only makes sense when we can objectively correlate the quality of golden parachutes to quality of performance. People can argue as much as they want that this correlation (or actual causal relation) exists. But real world (and actual managerial intention) evidence says otherwise.

Just some background to qualify my opinion (subjective and anecdotal to a degree, obviously). From 1994 till 1999, I worked in a variety of languages, VB, FoxPro, Delphi, and then C++. Then I switched to Java in 1999 and worked with it till 2010. Then , then went back to C/C++/Asm till recently. Some C#. Now I'm doing Java/EE and Python again.

I've seen a lot of people in different roles, and indeed, at least my experience matches what the OP is saying. A background predominantly Java (or C# or VB or PHP) does not typically translate to a good understanding of how things work.

And such people work in a fallacy that such knowledge is not essential. And that's why we have Java/EE systems that trash the GC, or that leak connections up to the wazoo. When you have never seen a segfault with nothing but a core dump, and when all you know are these high-level stack trace constructs, it creates a false sense of security where the basics of cleaning your own shit are nowhere to be seen. Algorithm basics go out of the door (with hilarious consequences), and always operating under the assumption that latency is always 0.

So I find the OP's premise to hold consistently, regardless of whether we are developing an e-commerce site or a networking tool, or an Eclipse plug-in. In my experience, it simply holds. YMMV.

This is actually a valid question. God knows how many people I've seen constantly asking me how to use GNU sed or whether deleting keys off a java.util.HashMap is ok while iterating on it. A simple trip to google, a set of javadocs or stackoverflow would answer that shit very quickly. And that is a function of a learning style (or lack thereof.)

So there is a validity to the question. If you ask that question, and the answer doesn't contain a single reference to visiting google or stack overflow, be very afraid.

... with a golden parachute so fucking big, the only punishment they get is some headlines in the news.

Failing like that == making it rich no matter what. If that is punishment, I'm going to get me into S&M!

Goddammit, we have a lot illiterate people in this country.

This is the thing. Lots of state owned enterprise =/= socialism. That is barely a requirement for it, and it is in no way contradictory of capitalism.

Socialism, in its most general term, pushes a preference for public (social) ownership of production over private ownership. I challenge anyone to show me that this is the general trend in Germany (or even the Scandinavian countries.)

... and no, I'm not a proponent of socialism. I'm free market/private ownership all the way. I lived under socialism and it sucks, but I also know what is and what it is not. It is not what the pseudo-conservative idiot masses of this country say it is.

This is a place that tens of thousands were killed in purges, and where being homosexual can get you to the firing squad, even today. This is no bullshit or lies, but actual history (and contemporary news for those found "guilty" of homosexuality.)

Not to mention the well known fallacy of its health care system (education is good, though). You might want to revisit your notions of what a "relatively successful" society is, though (if you give a shit about being intellectually honest, that is.)

ZOMG WTF? Either you are joking, this is a typo, or you simply don't know WTF you are talking about? Name one jet, or airplane, or anything that goes up with propulsion containing something with 11 inches of steel. I seriously doubt even something like an Atlas rocket would have something like that.

We are talking about something almost a full feet thick of relatively heavy metal, not aluminum or titanium or high-strength ceramics or polymers, but steel. Other than an engine block or thrusters (which are not solid pieces of metal), what the hell in a jet is made out of a piece of steel 11 inches thick?

Not that different from the Java FOSS cornucopia. And in many ways, it is better than the design-by-committee-slow-as-molasses thing we have with JEE and the JCP.

A lot of it is ego and developers OCD/fixation with trying new technical things (as opposed to solving business problems with economical, yet maintainable solutions.)

OTH, a lot of the churn is due to external pressures of competition. You put something on the web, someone is already competing with you.

Then you have catch up at worst, or out-innovate them at best, which leads to technical changes and challenges that inevitable lead to revisiting and reinventing (sometimes brilliantly, many times horrendously) the plumbing, the scaffolding and struts that puts all of it together, where it gets deployed, etc.

Non-disposable technical software is not a quality you want to seek unless you are developing critical systems.

If your web stuff is not disposable, it means it cannot be replaced when the need arises (which it will.)

Disposable code is trivial if we know what the fuck we are doing. What we do not want are Enterprise-level business logic and dependencies and fundamental architectural decisions that are trivially disposable.

You want those things to be clear and malleable, but not so easily disposable. Because then you have a clear blue print with which to create systems with disposable (ergo, loosely coupled) design/implementation-level artifacts.