Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of pork

The last company I worked for gave us all T-Shirts left over from the "Better Days" swag bin. Then HR told us all not to wear them. "You'll make yourself a target for kidnapping," they said. So on behalf of that company, which if you're the Chinese hacker who compromised my information, you'll know who it is, please don't kidnap their employees! With their culture of ineptitude and recent public stock offering, anyone who knew how to build a thing that we were working on had long since left the company! Literally the worst thing you could do for your country's program is kidnap one of their employees! You will set your program back by a least a decade! You'd be much better off targetting Google's employees for kidnapping! Thanks for your understanding!

Do you really need an explanation, considering you just shot down their drone?

Get a screwdriver and just pry the damn thing off the keyboard.

Same with the windows and menu keys. You can still press them by poking something in there (often a pinky works).

If a stranger wanders onto your property carried along on the back of a foot long drone, then I think any reasonable person would assume an alien invasion by really tiny people (or ants) is in progress and do their patriotic duty and start shooting.

In the words of the wise: "How can you be expected to teach children to read if they can't fit inside the building?"

And that was one of the charges. I think the facts of the particular case are important rather than the principles at stake. Of course he had an expectation of privacy and below a certain height (I think it is 500 feet or so) the other person was trespassing with the drone. Did shooting it out of the sky reasonably endanger anyone... How far from the property line was it? What direction did he shoot? This was a shotgun, so pellets generally have a shorter range than a rifle or hand gun. The fact that only the drone was damaged and no one was actually hurt should count for a lot.

So Comcast isn't incompetent after all, just bribed up the wazoo.

It's not practical any more than everyone learning to be lawyers or plumbers or electricians. Get experience and master your art rather than try to be a jack of all trades. Newbie programmers usually do poor work for a while (or are slow), just like newbie plumbers.

We're using .net on our production server, and since we implemented the new optimizer our system's been running super-fast! There's almost no load on the CPU anymore, leaving plenty for our Team Fortress server! That seems pretty optimum to me!

How about over ISIS

mongodb? Use something that's been tried and true for at least 10 years. Go with MySql or PostGresql and screw the noSql toys until they mature and have decent docs.

Let pioneers take the arrows, the rest of us stay in proverbial Boston, which has infrastructure and seasoned specialists, and get shit done. And we have nice lawns to kick fanboys off of.

The problem with most software isn't that it can't be modelling and rely on basic physical principles, it's that many projects fail to take specs and testing seriously

Most requesters (users) don't really know what they want UNTIL they actually see something concrete, and then realize it didn't fit what they had in mind. We don't need engineering, we need mind-readers. If users had enough time to sit and be thoroughly interviewed about needs and preferences, they wouldn't need automation to begin with.

And further, how to make software maintainable in the longer run is highly disputed largely because it depends on "wetware" and unknowns, such as developer perception of code, and unknowable future domain changes.

It's more akin to writing technical documentation than to building a bridge: how do you write documentation that's clear to the audience, but flexible enough that it doesn't have to be largely reworked for every change.

There is no magic modularity formula: domain issues inherently intertwine (or can intertwine in the future even if not at original launch.) You can't hide intertwining, you have to find a way to manage it well.

Software development seems to be riddled with arrogant know nothings who think they can cut corners or reinvent the wheel...

That's a problem with human nature, not just devs. We are not Vulcans. Humans are impatient, egotistical, fixate on the wrong factors, and often just plain random; and most don't know it or care.

I know some well-educated people who are complete idiots outside of their narrow specialty. I'm probably an idiot also in ways I don't even realize (please don't educate me in replies). My head-model of the world is perfectly logical and consistent to me, but it's probably highly lossy against the real world.

Gee, it's almost as if we are merely upright apes who happen to be able to talk and write. (I would have said "hairless", but I'm hairier than the orangutans I see in the zoo.) They fling poo, we fling nukes.

I like the cut of your jib, anon. We should hang out.

/but not as friends... because of reasons.

Why not The Register? Sarcasm is their biz such that they may be able to tolerate being trashed by nerds....and enjoy shooting back.