Cost reduction, maybe. It really involves management that is afraid to trust the very people it hired, and wants to keep them under constant surveillance. It's the modern way: trust no-one, watch everyone. It never seems to occur to such types that if you hire good people, pay them well, treat them well, and give them reasonable goals, you don't need to be so paranoid.

As a long-time software developer, I know that such an environment would severely impact my ability to focus and do what I'm being paid to do. Furthermore, any employer that would trust me so little is one for whom I would not choose too work.

I suspect that China does. They just haven't had a Snowden happen to them.

Awesome Captain Kirk impression.

99% of people who depend on Node.js don't give a flying fart about what pronouns are used in COMMENTS in the library

Apparently Ben Noordhuis does.

... is to be disbanded.

I really hope you are trying to be funny.

One can always hope, but it seems we've managed to go from "climate change isn't real" to "it causes everything bad that happens."

Of course, a big enough eruption would actually trigger a global cooling trend for a while. Think Krakatoa and Mount Pinatubo.

I read that as "A Woman's Mind in a Leggy Body."

I'm going to bed now.

Sure, I know. Few things are truly novel and one has to be able to do all of it, including the grunt work. It's just that there's no point doing something original when its faster to copy, so one copies up to the point where either nobody has done it before or its just easier to reinvent it oneself than find and incorporate somebody else's solution I just took that attitude a little earlier than I was supposed to. I wasn't trying to be clever, I just wasn't ready to start working hard at the time.

Do you mean, the repeated code, or the cool professor is as likely as winning the lottery ? Either way, its more common than that.

Same thing happened to me in college, except I didnt even discuss the assignment with him. It was a lisp project and we both decided to do it as purely as possible (which at the time meant no assignments - what today would be called functional style). The end result was about 150 lines of lisp (equivalent to maybe 2k lines of C). Our code was identical except for some identifier names.

The last program I had to write in first year CS was a plagarism detector. Surprisingly easy.. just do a frequency analysis on keywords and that will get you 90% of the way there. So, I actually did this assignment unlike all the others that I had cheated on...

When I did a CS degree I cheated hard through first year.

1. I was young and lazy, my main goal was to maximize time I could spend in the pub.
2. There's no point doing something if someone else has already done it

No, not all companies do it. Most companies in fact don't do it. Only those who are big enough to afford to do it get to do it. The rest of them are stuck paying more (comparative to their earnings) than all of the successful companies.

I'd prefer a world where we as a society demanded that everyone follow the spirit of the law and publicly punished those who refused to. I realise we don't live in such a world, but I'm not going to say "I don't see the problem" for people doing the legal thing rather than the moral thing.

What do you mean by "legally obligated to pay"?

Do you mean that you declare all of the tax deductions that you can without having to provide evidence? For example in Australia you can declare traveling expenses up to X dollars without having to provide any proof whatsoever (expenses over X dollars require that you keep receipts in the event that your audited). would be paying the exact same amount even if I didn't use it for work purposes.

Now legally your not allowed to declare those traveling expenses without actually incurring them. However there is 0 chance you'll get caught because the tax man doesn't require you to provide proof as long as you remain below a certain threshold. So do you consider lying about those tax deductions to be "legal"? Is refusing to lie about them "paying more than your legally obligated to pay"?

What about expenses that you claim are for work? For example I'm required to have a working internet connection so that I can provide remote assistance in the event an emergency happens. Now I could try to claim that my internet connection is therefore a work expense, except the truth is that I would have that internet connection no matter what and I could just walk 10 minutes down the road and actually enter the building physically to deal with any issues. Morally my wage is not impacted by using my internet connection for work. Legally, I might be able to get away with claiming a percentage for tax purposes.

"Mickey Mouse" search engine.

Heh.