If you want to run applications completely controlled and filtered by Apple, yea go with that. Apple doesnâ(TM)t like something about some app you want to run then you do without that functionality. Apple wants you to use their crappy version of some app so they kill the competing apps, which one are you gonna be using?

I am fine with the prospect of using mobile devices to do everything assuming they have peripherals and expansion, but the prospect of Apple and Google controlling all software, not so much.

For a more reliable product, the door's interlock would first signal the microprocessor to shut things down normally, but then manually cut power if the processor doesn't respond. For similar behavior on high voltage products (for example), the hardware has like 60 ms or so to become safe after the interlock opens. For a product I worked on recently, we budgeted around 1/3rd of that for the standard digital system to operate and bring things down cleanly, and only if it didn't would the analog circuit kick in and pull the rail down hard. (The analog circuit could damage the board by discharging capacitors too fast, but if digital is dead that's what we had to do to protect the users.)

We had something similar happen. The lead surgeon for a scheduled surgery never told us that he would need to bring in a second doctor, and of course his partner wasn't on our network. With no negotiated discount on service rates, his partner was paid more by insurance company (at 70% "out of network" payment on the full charge) than he was (at my 90% in network rate, after the massive "negotiated" discount). This was for a multi-hour invasive procedure where the book rates for the primary and secondary doctors were in the $40-50k range each.

Supposedly we owed the 30% coinsurance for the partner ... but it's been five years now and he never sent a bill. I only know about this at all because of the insurance statements. I think they aren't going after us as I have a better fraud claim against them. (We confirmed in writing that the primary doctor was on our insurance prior to the surgery. I could argue that he should have mentioned that his partner wasn't. We never once met or even saw the partner though maybe he did show up during the surgery itself when no one was awake to notice.)

No, I can't. I started out and I sucked. I got better eventually through experience. In order for it to be truly bimodal, people have to start in either camp A or camp B and end in the same camp they started in. Because if you transition from one to another over time, any point in time will capture a group of people in between the modes. Now, you can argue that people don't spend much time in between those modes but you haven't presented any evidence for that. What's more likely is you have geocities coders on one tail and John Carmack/Linus Torvolds on the other tail. And in between are people like the presenter and I. And since I'm not instantaneously going from bad to good, the reality of the situation is most likely some degree of a normal curve filled with people trying to get better at programming or even just getting better though spending lots of time doing it and learning a little along the way.

For all your attacks on the presenter, your argument of a bi-modal distribution sounds more flawed to me. I would love to see your study and hear your argument.

To be fair, you can spend a great deal of time talking about something and make progress on the issue without solving it.

For example the current metrics are abysmal so it's worth explaining why they're abysmal. I just was able to delete several thousand lines of JavaScript from one of my projects after a data model change (through code reuse and generalization) -- yet I increased functionality. My manager was confused and thought it was a bad thing to get rid of code like that ... it was absolute dopamine bliss to me while he felt like our production was being put in reverse. KLOC is a terrible metric. But yet we still need to waste a lot of breath explaining why it's a terrible metric.

Another reason to waste a lot of time talking about a problem without reaching an answer is to elaborate on what the known unknowns are and speculate about the unknown unknowns. Indeed, the point of this article seemed to be to advertise the existence of unknown unknowns to "recruiters, venture capitalists, and others who are actually determining who gets brought into the community."

Perhaps ... but that would imply that one does not transition over time from one hump to the next or if they do, it's like flipping a light switch. When I read this I assumed that he was talking only about people who know how to program and not "the average person mixed in with programmers."

But you just said there's no way to measure this ... how could he have collected data? What data set could have satiated us? The answer is quite obvious and such collection would have been a larger fool's errand than the original article's content.

The definition of stealing does not require tangible property, it just involves depriving the owner of that property.

If you take a trade secret from someone and share it with the world, you have stolen the trade secret, because, while the owner might still have the information, they have been deprived of a secret that was not yours to share. Plagiarism too is a form of stealing, for you are depriving the author of a work from their name rights. (And yes, while not honored in the U.S. outside the bounds of copyright, I agree with the moral rights of authorship.)

Copying a song does not deprive the owner of the source copy nor the author of the original work of anything, hence it is not stealing. It's not even a crime morally. In the U.S., Congress has decided to sometimes make this a civil crime called copyright infringement, because the Constitution allows them to do so if they think it will encourage more work from those authors. Something it's not a crime at all, like for older works or government publications.

In other words, I agree with your sentiment, but don't wrap the definitions of theft and copyright infringement up in the terms of tangible property. Intangible things can be stolen, too. Focus on how it deprives the author of something they previously possessed.

And if you go way way back to get a car with no code, you end up with one of these:
http://themetapicture.com/cras...

Most of us are willing to create civil unrest about something, at least in theory. That's why you have all those guns, right? It just has to be bad enough that you see civil unrest as the only available option.

For emotional teenager minds, police in riot gear surrounding you and presumably yelling at you to disperse while simultaneously preventing you from leaving might be that trigger. Sure the first guy who threw a rock was probably an asshole who should have been expelled for something else months ago, but others might join in who would have also been perfectly happy to just get on a bus and go home if they had been allowed to two hours earlier when school let out.

That's where the police failed - by creating a situation where immature people feel rioting is their only option, when they just as easily could have tackled the rumors of a riot by trying to disperse the kids into the city and away from trouble instead.

In other words, police showing up in full riot gear and marching in unison down the street at you is an incentive to start a riot. Honestly I'm surprised the libertarian gun-loving wing of Slashdot isn't rising up to support people "resisting the police state".

Err, under the Massachusetts constitution, any citizen (governor or not) may file a proposed piece of legislation. If you're going to rail on about the government, maybe try a different state?

Wait, when did we start talking about Sony?

Not that it matters any more, but if you work for Google and wonder why ignored all those invites, it's because you, Google, insisted I change how I share my use of your products as a condition of joining Google+.

Before Google+, I used a variety of your products - blogspot, youtube, search. You know that the same person was using all these services - but the world in general doesn't, and most importantly, none of them were tied to my real name.

Then, to join Google+, you wanted me to "convert" my account, and attach my name to everything.* I was not interested in that, so I diligently stayed away. For Facebook, on the other hand, I knew going in that it would use my real name. (I still waited as long as possible and only signed up to avoid becoming a hermit.) Since I knew my name would be attached from the start, the way in which I share has always been somewhat sanitized.

Because you, Google, are so many things, you can't be a real-name social network, at least if you insist that I retroactively claim ownership over everything else. Sorry.

* Even if this isn't true, this is what I got from all of the media coverage, discussion, and your own promotion. If I understood this all wrong and could have keep using the other services separately and anonymously, then it's your fault for advertising Google+ so badly. That's sort of sad, given that advertising is your business.**

** IIRC they did change this eventually, but by then Google+ was already an obvious failure and it wasn't worth creating an account.

And create a new way to exploit the poor and desperate!