Having fun isn't necessarily stupid. Having fun with flamboyantly dangerous things isn't necessarily stupid. It's endangering unwilling bystanders that's stupid.

Some people like to build and shoot powerful crossbows, or even replicas of medieval siege weapons. These are extremely dangerous and useless things. The dangerous power of a trebuchet to throw an upright piano 150 yards is part of the charm.

But a trebuchet is something that takes certain amount of thought and sacrifice to obtain and use. This flamethrower thing is more like a powerful handgun. There's been a recent fad for ridiculously overpowered handguns, which pack superfluously fatal power into a convenient, affordable form factor. The recent brouhaha over "armor piercing" ammunition was a side effect of a manufacturer selling a cut-down semi-automatic carbine as a "handgun", even though if you look at videos of people using them they're obviously terrible as handguns. This raised the question of whether 5.56 NATO ammunition should be regulated as "handgun ammunition", and in the end I think the decision not to was reasonablee. These aren't cop-killing or military handguns. They're extremely dangerous toys designed to get your rocks off.

There are some who'd say that because these guns are dangerous and impractical they should be banned. But I don't agree. "Impractical" isn't the same as "useless" because getting your rocks off is a legitimate use for a thing. I think people should be able to enjoy their ridiculous firearms as long as they do it at some kind of appropriate range. I also think there's a real danger though from stupid people who will go plinking in the woods with the things like they were BB guns.

That's really the only problem I have with this flamethrower, whether it's gold, chrome, or gunmetal gray. Any idiot can buy one, but it'd take someone reasonably intelligent and determined to find a place where it can be used safely. I'm not against people buying them, but I am for coming down hard on people who use them where they're a danger or public nuisance.

Well, in the end you have to ask "did he get away with it?". Or, given that he turned himself in later, "did he have some purpose in escaping that he fulfilled?"

Intelligence is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. It includes things like thinking through unintended consequences before acting that quite clever people are sometimes bad at.

Well, no, I don't. That's why I asked. It sounds like the answer to my question is yes?

Right. Don't buy them. They specifically moved the Golf back to Wolfsberg. Be careful, though, because I think they moved it back to Mexico more recently. You can get e.g. a "VAG VIN Decoder" app for Android, or just memorize which place in the VIN to look at and a handful of plant codes. Then you'll know precisely where the vehicle was produced.

If that's all the variable is used for, won't the compiler optimize it out of existence anyway? Or is that too fancy yet?

Welcome to the party, it began several years ago.

Please tell me you already feel this way about Gawker.

Not because you were the most qualified applicant? That means the company you work for hired you not because they should have, but because they were strong-armed into it. In fact, they should not have had to have hired you, they should have been able to hire the best-qualified applicant.

The reality is that you are asking employers to pay for that, but making children isn't their business. If society needs children, then society should pay for children, through income redistribution. Oh wait, guess what? We already give people a tax break for having children. I've known people who made more than me but paid no taxes because of their children. Now you want employers to pay again?

Or you could argue that people who do have kids don't deserve to get paid for their time off. A person who doesn't have kids is worth more to their employer. If people can't afford to survive while they have kids (they can) and we need more people (we don't) then it would be worth it to pay people to have kids. Big problem with that is there are too many humans on this planet already, at least while we operate in our current mode. You want more people made, but that's the opposite of what we need.

No, completely unlike those VWs built in Mexico, which are built like shit. The only thing more embarrassing to my heritage than how shit UAW puts together cars is how shit Mexico puts together cars. It's interesting that you mention Volkswagen because Mexicans are known to be particularly bad at that. When VW brought USDM Golf production to Mexico, reliability plummeted. When they took production back to Wolfsberg, it came right back up to the German standards that we know and love.

Anyone who buys a VW built in Mexico is a moron. All of my imports to date have been built in their designing nation, and came over here on a boat fully assembled. Started with imports with a 240SX, then I had an Impreza GC5, couple of 300SDs (still have one) and an A8. That last has electrical problems but the mechanicals are good, anyway. And there's the rub with VW; their electrical is a bit garbage, even out of Germany.

In any case, you would need Amazon to actually enforce it.
While they do have more money for legal fees, they would risk a big PR issue if they tried to prevent some guy from working at Walmart after quitting Amazon. Also, the first guy with such a problem wouldn't have a lot of trouble finding someone to help them with legal fees, if only for the publicity.

This is probably just a scare tactic, to discourage people from leaving them, it is unethical, but not really enforceable.

Does that manual encourage bad code ?

The second one should also include "immutable". If it's hard to understand it will evolve easily to non working, and time spent on improvements can start to creep up very fast.

I have worked in very clever, solid code, but not easy to read. It was then maintained and extended by average, but competent programmers down the road, and turned into a big mess, only because it was so hard to understand.

In my experience, good code is easy to read, above all. That will make it easy to extend it coherently, find bugs and stuff. Also, if it doesn't work OK, it's easy to find out why. The single metric that saves time, money, and improves quality down the road is readability. Eveything else should be suject to that.

And, about the last point in the "article", "efficient", it's nonsense. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. You should _always_ follow the second rule of optimization (see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RulesOfOptimization ).

PHP can be good or bad, like any other code. Lately it's getting better.
As an example, do you think this looks bad? Looks pretty good to me.

  https://github.com/symfony/sym...

I have some awful, unreadable examples I could share in Java, PHP, Javascript and even C, but chosen language no longer forces you to write bad code. Maybe Perl, but I haven't seen it lately.

The default is to charge you the fee whether you have a tuner in your household or not. This may be less ridiculous now that they provide a lot of other services, but it was also true back when they didn't.

Why, indeed?