This is the same asshole who buys a pretty little property out in the countryside, and then after a year or two launches a farm practices complaint to shut down the neighbouring farms (which have only been there for two hundred years) because they smell like farms.

Then he shows up in town council explaining that only sociopaths raise farm animals.

What an incredible self-interest bullshit configurator this man possesses.

Get the fuck off my moral lawn.

The only assumption you should be making is that nothing is secure.

I'll file that right beside "In the beginning, God created the universe, and it was good."

In tech today if you dont speak english your dead in the water.

Emphasis on the word "speak".

It's a statement of fact, and everyone - including you and me - is terrible at programming.

Simply not true, unless you believe that non-terrible code requires God himself to reach down and personally touch type.

I heard a bit of CBC episode recently, where a breathing consultant by the name of James Chambers argues that humans are terrible at breathing, and that with proper training (this takes about a year), we're almost competent (and then flowers bloom everywhere in an orchestral swell).

Breathe In, Breathe Out

One thing I will say is that a programmer is only as good as the API he or she programs against. In the spirit of Bill Maher, I hereby announce a New Rule: Garbage under, garbage above.

Most of the programmers with legendary reputations for writing correct systems have worked at (or fairly close to) the bare metal (or some POSIX-ratified virtual bare metal with extra starch).

Humans actually suck at just about everything. Programming is not especially special (modulo rampant innumeracy). All the greats in any discipline recognize and work within their personal limitations.

It's not constructive to become so bitter that you give up, or delegate the hard work to a tool that can only take you so far (perhaps less far than you wish to go).

Just the other day I listened to this Econtalk episode from six months back: Joshua Angrist on Econometrics and Causation

For the entire episode, Russ Roberts is trying to play the same pessimism card, effectively implying that humans suck at everything.

Joshua Angrist is having none of it. He directly refutes the posture of excessive pessimism time and again. It's a joy to hear Russ taking one on the chin for a change.

Now we just need an enterprising academic to self-subscribe to a personal mission to save us all from ourselves to come along and wrap up the whole of econometrics into a protective cocoon inside of which many of the basic errors simply can not be made.

Brave new world? Or cult of pessimism?

In my corner of the world, hard-baked optimists don't write unthinking rants anchored on assertions prefaced with "statement of fact". Wits on dial tone predicts no good thing.

If no-one could see it because it was too dim to see everywhere on earth, then we probably should describe the source object as "luminous" rather than "bright".

I don't know why this is moderated down, it is absolutely correct. Ubuntu provides and supports both upstart and systemd:

Mint is just following their lead, which makes sense given that Mint is based on Ubuntu. This is a non-story, fabricated because editors know systemd flamebait generates traffic.

I actually waste less coffee, coffee filters, etc.. now that I own a keurig and I like that I can make a single cup of coffee in the morning without any waste.

I had the same feeling when I switched to single cup pour-over, without the blasted machine or the blasted machine politics.

Somehow, I always manage to find three minutes of work to be done in the kitchen while I pace three or four slugs of hot water. Must be some weird corollary to Murphy's law. Or maybe my cookware is telepathic.

The whole point of this is that they are planning to mandate that per-country licensing is illegal in the EU. The same way that the EU is a single market when it comes to physical goods, it will be a single market for copyright as well.

That is the killer feature, IMHO. I was scrolling through expecting to just ignore this like I did the downloader, but that actually provides something of value above what you can do with the website.

In 17 years the number of complaints went up by 30%. However according to the Census Bureau, the number of "Mathematical and Computer Science" workers increased by 150% between 1997 and 2012 (from 1.3 Million to 3.3 Million). The number of job postings likely scaled similarly, so the complaints per posting actually went down.

Source:
http://www.census.gov/prod/3/9...
http://www.census.gov/compendi...

Except the whole part about inviting speakers who are actively trying to suppress free speech by banning the Quran.

So, there was no billing error here. The guy actually had his modem making long-distance calls for inordinate amounts of time. Doesn't seem like an AT&T error. Though it definitely sucks for the old man/woman!

No billing error? The entire billing system sucks balls at the largest possible frame.

There should be a legislative directive that all such usage-based billing plans provide an option for the end user to set hard spending caps, which are automatically enforced by the service provider.

Show me a corporation that doesn't—at least attempt—to enact hard spending caps enforced by automatic systems wherever and whenever possible. Heads roll in the gutters when a corporation loses $100 million because some trading desk manages to go rogue with respect to set trading limits. (By the Finnish system of traffic fines, a $100 million loss for AT&T is about on par with some old geezer tabbed for $25,000.)

End users are, of course, purposefully disadvantaged to have to police their own usage by manual vigilance, because everyone knows this is a lucrative fail mode for AT&T's revenue piracy service.

That this whole thing sucks balls right down to the bag root is the least possible diagnosis.

Canonical earned their black eye in spades by giving no advance guidance to their dual-head power users while knowingly ruining the dual head experience in the service of a reconceived user interface which might or might not be all for the best in the long run.

It was their blasted refusal to honestly inform their dual head power users that the dual head power user experience would be unavailable in Ubuntu for several releases so that we could plan accordingly that caused me to set the Canonical bit in my bozo register.

Now, George was a good straight boy to begin with,
but there was bad blood in him someway
he got into the magic bullets and
that leads straight to Devil's work
just like marywanna leads to heroin
You think you can take them bullets and leave 'em, do you?
Just save a few for your bad days.
well...

Well, now we all have those bad days when we can't hit for shit.

The more of them magics you use,
the more bad days you have without them
So it comes down to finally
all your days being bad without the bullets
It's magics or nothing.
Time to stop chippying around and kidding yourself,
kid, you're hooked, heavy as lead

And that's where old George found himself.
Out there at the crossroads.
molding the Devil's bullets.
Now a man figures it's his bullets,
so it'll hit what he wants to hit.
But it don't always work out that way

You see, some bullets is special for a single aim.
A certain stag, or a certain person
And no matter where you aim, that's where the bullet will end up.
And in the moment of aiming, the gun turns into a dowser's wand,
and point where the bullet wants to go

I guess old George didn't rightly know what he was getting himself into,
the fit was on him and it carried him right to the crossroads.

- Tom Waits, The Black Rider