If all you've got is bad programmers, and their bad code is nevertheless good enough to accomplish the tasks you need to get done, then a tool that allows bad programmers to produce more bad code may be just the thing you need. (of course some would argue that that niche is already filled by Java, but time will tell)

It would be more accurate to say it revealed a bug. The bug was almost certainly a race condition that had always been present, but it took particular entry conditions (such as an unusually fast I/O device that the transcoder developers never tested against) to provoke the bug into causing a user-detectable failure.

Many, many years ago I was a temp doing data entry for the sub-sub contractor for military night-vision goggles. the company was making the high-voltage power supplies. they had a QA spreadsheet in Lotus 123 that the results of QA test failures were supposed to be entered into, and because of bad 'programming', only the first 20 tests failures were tabulated, giving them results which showed a lower failure rate the more units they made. I pointed this out, was ignored, complained, was fired, tried to blow the whistle, got no response. But the company has since gone out of business..ha ha ha, they deserve worse.

Actually, that's only sort-of true. I started with MCC interim release, but couldn't get it to work properly. So then I spent a few days downloading SLS and it worked just fine - well, as good as you could expect with only 4MB of ram. But I didn't notice any alignment issues, and I wasn't instructed to reinforce the floor so I didn't. I had problems with overheating during compilation though, which I fixed by a powerful floor fan pointed at the air intake of the PC. I later fixed this more gracefully with a home-made triple-sized heat sink. Maybe that's what NASA should do, build a giant heat sink onto it.

There's a constant and deliberate conflation of money and speech going on in this country. They are not equivalent to each other.

He understood the concept perfectly well. He flew into the no-fly zone on purpose, with the full knowledge he would be arrested and prosecuted for doing so.

I think there will be a market niche to accommodate the previous poster -- imagine a car that works just like a traditional car, except that it refuses to run into anything. It will be analogous to a (smart) mechanical horse -- you can try to get a horse to run into a brick wall, but most horses are going to turn or stop before they break their neck. There's no reason a car couldn't do the same.

Damn right nobody dresses the gorilla in the room. Gorillas are inveterate nudists, and anyone who tries to force clothing onto a gorilla is going to regret it.

entrapment: undercover agent walks up to suspected terrorist: "here's the trigger to that bomb, it's yours to detonate." he (attempts to) detonate the bomb. he's arrested -- invalidly?

This article needs a soundtrack.

The next question to ask is, why should it bother a company so much that a companyname.sucks domain name exists that is not under their control? (i.e. why would they feel the need to spend $2500 or more to obtain it?)

It's pretty apparent that anyone who spontaneously types that domain name into their web browser probably already feels that (companyname) sucks, otherwise they wouldn't have typed in that domain name.

The other way people would find that domain name is by entering "companyname sucks" into a search engine -- in which case they will see all the "companyname sucks" pages, regardless of where they are hosted.

It's doubtful anyone is going to mistake such a domain name for a legitimate company-owned site.

And finally, paying the $2500 is definitely not going to prevent people from saying that "companyname sucks" -- they'll just say it on some other web page, and that web page's URL will be the one that comes up when you google that phrase rather than companyname.sucks. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, AFAICT.

I'd say that if companyname.sucks is getting a lot of traffic, that (company) might want to figure out why people think they suck and take corrective action, rather than simply trying to quash peoples' complaints.

That's funny, since that's exactly what I did for Pandora. AdBlock Plus makes Pandora pretty much ad-free, but when I started using it more I decided that I wanted to support companies which offer a way to pay for their service aside from advertising (which I find completely unacceptable and have no compunctions blocking). Pandora isn't the only company whose service I pay for, but it's surprisingly hard to find companies who offer a reasonably priced subscription model. Many expect you to shell out 50x as much money as they'd make off you via advertising, and even more completely ignore that for an ad-blocking user, their gain via conversion to a subscriber is 100%.

Ad blockers are simply a form a civil disobedience against the corporate marketing and advertising asshats who are trying to redefine and take over the Internet. It isn't illegal and isn't immoral. The fact that it improves the online experience (your "free lunch") is just a nice side effect.

Sorry, I know this is a really basic question, but a quick Google search didn't turn up any satisfying answers.

The question is: why is it useful to have certificates expire after a particular amount of time? Isn't that similar to writing a program that contains a bug that will cause it to automatically stop working in (so many months/years)?

The only reason I can think of is that if the certificate was compromised this would make sure that people eventually stopped using it; OTOH if the certificate is compromised you'd want people to stop using it immediately, not wait (however many) months/years before stopping; so presumably this wouldn't be a sufficient mechanism to handle that use case anyway.

race to the bottom...which series is more idiotic?

(Replying to myself before someone else does...)

This problem is technically avoidable if every code author is careful to always use tabs only for each line's initial indentation, and never use a tab after a space (or after any other non-tab character on a line), and never use spaces as the initial indent characters.

However, in practice this doesn't happen reliably, presumably because the inevitable mistakes are invisible to the code's author (since it all looks correct in *his* IDE)