I can appreciate the difference between "I don't like this code because it looks different than how I would have written it", and "I don't like this code because the author clearly has no clue how to accomplish the required task and only barely managed to cobble together enough crap to get the desired outputs on a handful of test cases".

The former, I can work with (and sometimes learn from). The latter, I know that I will eventually need to waste more time "helping" the author repair it when it breaks, than I would have just doing it correctly the first time myself.

The real problem here comes not from professional programmers, for the most part (though yes, truly awful "professionals" do exist). The problem comes from having most of the people "programming" in a modern office environment not actually programmers. You have accountants writing god-awful VBA, you have help deskers writing crappy web forms to automate part of their work, you have business analysts who know juuust enough SQL to get an answer, albeit a completely wrong answer, from the data.

This has nothing to do with style, and everything to do with "programming" as an increasingly required bullet point on the average office worker's resume. Yeah, you know some VBA, good for you - Now learn when you can accomplish the same thing with normal Excel formulas, and quit turning every spreadsheet you touch into a smouldering heap of unmaintainable side effects.

Battery life of an existing device won't go up over time.

If a brand new one has only 30% at the end of the day, a year from now (or an OS update, whichever happens first) you'd better get used to charging your watch at lunch.

Ah, so "right" and "wrong" can be determined by popular vote now?

Not so much "popular" as "fiscally responsible".

Society has a compelling interest in keeping people employed as long as possible - Ideally until they drop dead on the job, but as long as possible in any case. The longer someone can't work, the longer society will bear the financial burden to keep them alive. A decade of SSI, we can readily bear when offset by a 40 year career of paying in to that system. 30+ years of welfare because companies "don't want" to hire competent experienced professionals, however? The numbers just don't work out when we allow that to happen on any large scale.

So yes, we as a society have determined, for our own good, that companies (you remember "companies", right? Legal fictions allowed to exist as a boon society grants them in exchange for the small possibility they will benefit us overall?) cannot turn away otherwise-qualified people because of a few protected categories.
It doesn't matter if you don't want to work with blacks - Too fucking bad.
It doesn't matter if you don't want to work with women - Too fucking bad.
It doesn't matter if you don't want to work with fogeys - Too fucking bad.
It doesn't matter if you don't want to work with Jews - Too fucking bad.

If someone can do the job and you don't "want" to work with them, rejecting them for only that reason breaks the law. They have a "right" to consideration for employment regardless of the age, gender, race, or religion; you don't have a "right" to run a company however you want, simple as that.

McDonald's in town has a help wanted sign out front saying "hiring 15 year olds". Discriminatory?

Possibly by the letter of the law, but probably not under any reasonable interpretation - 15 year olds fit into a special "pain in the ass" category as far as labor laws go, so McD's intends that sign to mean they will hire 15YOs, not that they'll only hire 15YOs.

Whoah whoah whoah there!

We use standard units around here, none of that "furlongs per fortnight" crap.

You'll need to rephrase that in multiples of Rhode Island, please.

The right to face your accusers in court is irrelevant here. They don't present Stingray-obtained evidence in court, just the old-fashioned stuff it led them to.

"Your accuser" doesn't just mean the testimony and evidence against you - How and Why they collected evidence can matter more than that evidence itself.

Just think how much easier it would make police work if they could randomly barge into your house and search for criminal activity without a warrant... Or if they could "find" your DNA at a crime scene by bringing you there after-the-fact to "ask some questions" and you "just happen" to trip and bleed on the scene (but don't worry, an anonymous phonecall assured them you did it).

We have rules in place for a reason. We either always follow them, or they mean nothing.

Law-enforcement officials also don't want to reveal information that would give new ammunition to defense lawyers in prosecutions where warrants weren't used, according to officials involved in the discussions.

Un-fucking-believable - Or rather, sadly all too believable.

That one statement right there almost completely expresses everything wrong with modern American legal system.

Mr. Prosecutor, I would point out that if you would so willingly abandon the core principles of our legal system - The ideas of innocent until proven guilty and having the right to face your accuser in court - Why shouldn't we go back to vigilante mob justice and tar-and-feather your worthless ass for breach of public trust?

A small percentage of the population is using it as a black market currency exchange. That is all.

That also doesn't really fit the definition of "disruptive".

Would you use that word to describe US drug dealers using Tide (the detergent) as a medium of exchange?

The Argentine economy has hyperinflation and unreasonably burdensome government controls. Bitcoin hasn't "disrupted" the Argentine economy, it has made daily life possible for the average Argentinian.

Yes, from the perspective of the government, Bitcoin has made their self-destructive policies moot. It has given the populace an alternative to their collapsing fiat currency. Fortunately, however, the government doesn't get to define "the economy" - The participants in the economy do, and Argentinians have said "no thanks!" to the local Peso.

Argentina doesn't highlight the problems with Bitcoin, it exemplifies the entire raison d'etre for it!

You assume this counts as a bug rather than a feature - As others have pointed out, Apple knew about this "problem", and decided to officially make lemons out of lemonade.

Suffice it to say, the Walled Garden has no room for dirty tattooed heathens. No emulators, no system tools, no duplication of Apple functionality, and no colors.

it sounds like it is his first time with undergrads.

A&M lists this as a 400 level course - As in, targeted at graduating seniors (and actually has that as a requirement to take it without an override). Technically still undergrad, but if those students haven't mastered the concept of "pay attention and don't screw around", they won't, and deserve to fail.


1. These students are taking more than just His class.
2. Chances are the class is required.

The BBA curriculum at A&M lists that as the only required class for 8th semester students (with three other electives) - It counts as the goddamned capstone course for the degree. Any student who has too hefty of a workload that semester aside from that one class has only themselves to blame.


3. The students are filled with other concerns then just that class. Finding a girl/boy friend, trying to keep on on what he should socially be.

Sooo Not His Problem that you have me at a loss for words on how to phrase this more strongly. When paying $22,470 per year for a piece of magical job-paper - Sit down, shut up, and pay attention, or GTFO.


4. Because he specialized in that topic for so long, there isn't any empathy on the fact that people just don't get it, the first time.

I have taken strategic management (though not at A&M). Really not much to not "get" - You learn about Michael Porter and SWOTs and Jack Welch. Even if the professor completely sucks, you just watch powerpoint slides and memorize facts for the test. If he doesn't suck, you have fluffy group case study discussions where you basically have no wrong answers. If you don't "get" it at that point in a business degree... Well, to reiterate my opening paragraph, you shouldn't pass.


You want to know what really happened here? In every class, you have a handful of waste-of-flesh whiners who will bitch about every lecture as too boring (or alternatively, that the professor actually expects them to participate instead of letting them read Facebook on their phones in the back of the room); every assignment as too hard (even the ones where the professor all but gives the answers right in class); every paper too long. This poor bastard just managed to get an entire class packed full of them.

So if you need a framework so you can pretend to have a native version of the application

No, you need a framework so you don't need to reinvent the wheel for every project you work on. With Sencha's frameworks, I can write a pretty slick-looking responsive site in a few hours (or days, for something larger) that would take literally months to roll on my own (and for the record, yes, I can and have rolled my own, back in the dark ages).


why not just focus on having a webpage instead of a shitty application which is just a web page?

Two reasons. First, it increasingly doesn't make sense to force your end users to download and install potentially untrusted code - never mind needing to maintain separate versions for every major platform you target (oh, you want this on iOS and Android and Windows and Linux and OS X, etc?), when you can accomplish the same result in one nice tidy webapp. Second (and you can fairly call this a matter of personal preference), IMO just about everything looks like crap in a browser on a phone, and even that assumes the browser handles it correctly (yeah, like I want to support Chrome and FireFox and *shudder* MSIE and Dolphin and Safari and Opera, etc - Going right back to all the joys of supporting multiple OSs, woo hoo!).

The concept of a "webpage" hasn't limited itself to some statically published version of a document-with-markup in over 20 years; that model lost so thoroughly that pining for it doesn't even count as beating a dead horse anymore, more like trying to clone a mammoth from frozen DNA.


This sounds like lazy people who want to claim they have an app, when all they're doing is pointing to a web page.

It really doesn't matter to me what you want to call it, whether an app or a webpage or a widget or a three-handled family gredunza, if it accomplishes the intended goal... All just a matter of using the right tool in your box for each task - Sure, you can hammer in a screw, but sometimes a plain ol' nail will do the job just as well.

IOS 8 has had 9 updates since its release...

They're just trying to shoot the messenger but they created the problem by circumventing or ignoring the law.

The real problem here - And finish reading this post before you start shooting at me - Rowley has it absolutely correct. Tech companies do behave in ways friendly to terrorists.

Except, he has committed a fundamental attribution error by assuming they do in support of actual terrorism. Tech companies don't support terrorism - They support fairness, they support security, they support usability, for everyone. Unfortunately, "safe" and "secure" includes "from government tampering", and "fair" and "everyone" includes terrorists.

If the encryption software I use doesn't block all attempts to intercept my data, whether by flaw or by design, I will use something that does. Simple as that. Tech companies behave in ways friendly to terrorists because tech companies can't readily discriminate between the actions of crackers and governments, between privacy advocates and terrorists, between a legal court-ordered wiretap and an NSA hijacking - Nor should they.

What exactly do you want me to notice in the mirror?

I made no claims about my own intelligence or angst; only a throwaway joking comment about the self-assessed intelligence of the average Slashdotter.