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Comment Re:What is life? What is a virus? (Score 5, Insightful) 158

Then, in that case, what separates pithovius from the prokaryotes?

Structure, from the sound of it, although mostly this is people committing various fallacies of reification and making false claims of "natural kinds".

Everything is a continuum. Humans divide the continuum up using acts of selective attention. The only infinitely sharp edge is the edge of our attention (because we scale the edge to match the scale we are attending to, so whatever scale we are attending to seems to have a sharp division between the things we are selecting out.)

"Species" do not have particularly crisp boundaries in the general case: they fade into each other, and we draw edges around them in more-or-less arbitrary ways. When we find new varieties we can either create new categories (by drawing new edges) or lump them into old categories (by moving old edges). Which move is to be preferred depends on the purposes of the knowing subject.

Comment Of course not (Score 1) 310

It's just more COP-RULES where everything everyone does everywhere at all times is HyperMegaSuperFelony where you run the risk of exterminating all life on earth if you're not arrested and given a trillion dollar bail. Jeez don't you follow the news? Can't even FILM cops w/o the Antarctic Ice Sheet falling the fuck off and drowning 1 million babies.

Comment This is like the Belgian army (Score 1) 364

The tiny Belgian armed forces is horribly bloated and inefficient because it's based on awarding political contracts across a broad spectrum of Flemish and Walloon constituencies. This results in badly mismatched and concocted schemes to build systems no one wants and no one can use. For example one model of APC uses a one-off 90mm gun where the ammo is made by a single small company. But the other FOUR incompatible models of APC all made by different companies are all secure in their permanent contracts as well. This is the F-35 in a nutshell.

BTW the Australians and the Brits discovered the F-35 "B" version VTOL runs so hot it melts the decks on their ships taking off.

Comment Re:Cry Me A River (Score 1) 608

What I think a lot of the utopian visions miss, as well as a lot of the posters here, is that the problems with programming are not problems with the tools, but with the code that these amateurs produce. Writing clean, clear, correct, modular, maintainable, tested, and reusable code is still a skill that takes time to learn.

Generally, most people understand following a sequence of steps to achieve a goal. They can follow a recipe's steps to bake a cake. Some can even write down the steps they took to accomplish a task, which is the beginning of automating it; but recording and playing back steps is certainly not all there is to programming. Almost anyone who can write steps down can then learn enough of a language to string together a dozen or even a hundred individual steps to then achieve a goal: StepA(foo); bar = StepB(foo); StepC(foo,bar); ... another 97 steps here...; return(). The problem is that because writing down all those steps is possible, people who manage to do it once think they're programming. But all they're really doing is scripting.

Once someone tries to add logic to their scripts, the resultant code is generally buggy, slow, difficult to maintain, impossible to test, and probably should not be put into production, let alone reused. What a professional software developer does is recognizes the difference. He or she uses his or her experience, skills, and knowledge to organize those instructions into small groups of functionality, and wraps them into readable, testable, reusable, methods. He or she recognizes dependencies in the code, follows design principles to ensure they are properly organized, groups related methods into classes or modules, knows when to follow design patterns and when to break from them, groups related areas of modules into architectural layers, and wraps the layers with clean, testable, usable interfaces. He or she knows how to secure the code against various types of attack or misuse, and to properly protect the data it's been entrusted with. He or she understands validation, authorization, authentication, roles, sanitization, whitelisting, and blacklisting. And he or she understands the many forms of testing needed, including unit testing, system testing, integration testing, fuzz testing, pen testing, performance testing, as well as tools to evaluate the code, such as static code analysis and metrics.

On the other end of the developer's life are the inputs to the processes: requirements, stories, use cases, usability, scalability, performance. They know that following certain development methodologies can make a great deal of difference to the software's quality. And then there are the realities of all the non software development issues: equipment, firewall rules, IDPs, networking, vendor contracts, software licensing, hosting, distribution, installation, support, bug tracking, and even sales.

Tools can help with all of these steps, but as you pointed out, having a word processor does not make one a poet.

Comment Re:seems like snowden did the exact same thing. (Score 1) 95

Really? Because I don't seem to remember the purges that took place when Reagan took office, or Bush, or Clinton, or Obama. I don't remember when they arrested the political dissenters from the opposition parties, hauled them out of Washington and trucked them up to camps in North Dakota where the majority froze to death, or shot them in the basement of the Lubyanka after pronouncing them guilty in a secret "trial". Perhaps that all took place when the Ministry for Information took razor blades and cut out the encyclopedia pages for Jimmy Carter, and extended the entry for the Bering Sea to compensate, because we can't really trust our history books.

Go read Mitrokhin's books. Read the KGB's own history, stolen from their own archives. Compare it to what the USA claimed actually happened, and to what the USA claimed was Soviet propaganda. Mitrokhin's papers serve as independent corroboration that essentially everything the USA said about the Soviet Union's "active measures" was true.

Comment Re:seems like snowden did the exact same thing. (Score 1) 95

Wow, such hate and bile. The country Mitrokhin "betrayed" no longer existed. He turned over documents from the Soviet Union, not from "Russia". Yes, there is a distinction.

You completely failed to read what was written, which was a comparison of Mitrokhin to Snowden.

Apparently, that's what the fuck I don't get.

Comment Re:Python for learning? Good choice. (Score 1) 415

I'll disagree on that. We use white space to communicate our programs' block structure to other humans. Why should we use a different syntax to tell the compiler the same information?

IMHO it's far easier to logically get it right with braces and pretty-print it for proper indentation than fiddling around with whitespace.

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