digital audio systems that minimize background noise.

I was squeaking by in undergrad, working various part time jobs to pay the bills. I took longer than most to finish my BS but made it through without having to take out any student loans.

For grad school I was a married man, which helped. I was also given a tuition waiver and a $20k stipend which also helped. I knew plenty of people who did OK on the stipend living alone as well; not great but a tolerable existence. After all, the stipend is intentionally kept on the meager side to encourage you to get out of grad school.

Yeah. What if you want catadioptric bokeh?

IIRC, Gravity had 3d lens flare.

uh, sure, except these aren't independent trials. to clarify, the event of being in a storm now, and the event of being in a storm one minute from now are almost perfectly correlated. this means you can't use the product rule.

by contrast, the event of a storm happening this year vs. a storm happening next year are closer to independent exactly because the blocks are bigger (a storm on Dec. 31 will make a storm on Jan. 1 more likely, but apart from that...).

your 'improvement' rests on assumptions which are not only unwarranted, but obviously untrue.

Consider this picture of a spider dining on its prey--possibly a cricket.

What's important? the spider, the web, the meal.
What's not important? the storm drain, the foliage

It's not completely successful, but both the foliage and the storm drain are out of focus, while the spider, the meal, and the web are in focus. The aperture control on a large sensor camera lets the photographer select where the blurriness ends, and where it begins. Generally, the longer the focal length of the lens, the more dramatic the effects of opening up the aperture. Since camera phones use short focal length lenses, the blurring effect is quite subtle, and is often insufficient to draw in the viewers eye.
In this particular case, it's a macro shot, so even a very narrow aperture (f/16) involves some blurriness. Quite often, macro-photographers use very narrow apertures-- f/16-f32, in an attempt to resolve all of the interesting aspects of their subjects.

If you care about good beer you should be making your own. Thanks to Jimmy Carter you can do that since 1978.

OK I will give you that. Still a damn fine keyboard though.

what? where the hell did you pull that from? why 1/e?

if a storm hit every two years, your method would give a probability of 0.393. what sense does that make?

> Yeah, those CPAs auditing Enron did a bang-up job of it, didn't they?

The 100-year old firm that audited Enron was worth over nine BILLION dollars at the time. It's now worth a few thousand, because nobody will ever hire them. The market executed them.

Compare Sony and their root kit.

Arthur Anderson was a 100-year old brand worth $9.3 billion. Because they violated the public trust, they are now worth about $0. The company still exists, but noone will buy from them.

Sony, on the other hand, is still selling electronics after rooting their customers' computers wholesale. Electronics company does something unethical - they have a PR problem for a few months. CPA does something unethical - the market executed them.

Many states in the US now license software engineers because the national organization now has criteria. A problem is that you need sign-off from an existing PE who knows your work, so there is a bootstrapping problem. A new software PE has to be approved by an existing PE, but there are virtually no existing software PEs to approve the first generation.

Of course, it's always been possible to work under the same ethical guidelines voluntarily. More than once I've told a client I won't do something because it would be akin to malpractice.

We knew they had poison gas because we kept the receipts. We knew they didn't have poison gas any more because they had already used it, and it was very old.

And the rest of us deserve some of whatever it is you're smoking. Or drinking.

In a large organization where its not possible to talk to everyone informally. And if some dev sitting in a corner downloads his/her favorite framework, nobody will know. Until the dependency lists are compared and someone finds out that this person went off on their own.

Don't get me wrong. I have no problems with the informal processes if you work in a tiny shop (maybe a dozen developers). But you aren't likely to have a 'devops' position. It will be a part time task of one of the devs. Or the admin person who does the job for all systems (devel, test, production).

But if you are installing stuff, even on your own workstation, you are doing an admin's task. And that means understanding the impacts of your actions upon your and your group's work product. At some point, your company might be asked by a customer to adopt some sort of process standards (think SEI-CMM, ISO 9000, etc.). That will either mean a manual process you must follow to make changes to the development/test/deployment environment. Or turning that responsibility over to a person assigned to to so (that means turning your workstation admin over to them). And I imagine that if the response to this is, "I don't wanna!", the boss will quietly show you to the door.