No, BigName Company was caught with their hand in the proverbial cookie jar, and the backlash was strong enough that they were forced to backtrack a bit. You could just substitute "Lenovo" and "Superfish" with "Verizon" and "supercookie", and the story would essentially be identical.

Don't discount the importance these headlines, though. The very fact that it *makes* news is a good thing, as it's the only thing that typically forces these companies to back down.

I agree that asset forfeiture against citizens isn't warranted unless those assets are the direct gains of illegal activity. There are already punitive laws in place. This practice seemed to emerge with the "war on drugs", and continued with the war on terror.

I think a case could be made for asset seizure against foreign criminals, as there's no other way to punish them for crimes committed. I don't see why an "armed response" would be warranted if there's criminal activity involved. Of course, the big gotcha in all of this is that it's incredibly difficult to actually *prove* who's behind a cyber attack unless you can seize the person's personal computer.

Honestly, I think this is mostly saber-rattling aimed at NK and China, telling them that the US is willing to impose some financial hardships on anyone who attacks any US interests via the internet.

Yeah, you should probably check a country's laws before you electronically infiltrate their corporations, banking system, or military computers. This isn't about citizens in other countries simply minding their own business. For those that are wondering how foreigners can be charged with US law, look up "extradition treaty". For those with whom we haven't signed such a treaty, look up "financial sanctions" or "asset forfeiture".

How purposefully obtuse do you have to be not to get this?

Or you could say humans have obvious Wookiee traits. Seriously though, I'd posit that he has very *subtle* human traits that we only recognize due to our tendency to anthropomorphize. No one would accidentally mistake him for a human - that's all I was saying.

That being said, I agree with you 100% about brilliant Mayhew's performance, as he completely brought Chewbacca to life. I'd also credit Ben Burtt with his magnificent sound design as well. I loved how you could always clearly understand what he was actually saying or feeling simply through his performance and the vocalizations. Frankly, I think saying that an actor *needs* his entire face visible is selling short the best actors, like Mayhew, who have performed amazing roles with mostly body language, or through a terribly restrictive mask.

My favorite two Chewie scenes: Alone in the Cloud City detention cell / repairing C3PO, and meeting up with Han in the cell under Jabba's palace.

The actors had nothing to react to and nowhere to go. Basically the whole damn thing was shot on green screen, with a two camera setup. Lucas could just park his ass in his chair, look at the monitors, and do nothing. Makes it hard when you are not only having to imagine the entire set and everything you are supposed to be seeing and reacting to, but also are on a small stage and can't even more around much.

He had a lot of people he was answerable to. Sure he wrote the script for the first one (other screenwriters did the second and third) but it wasn't the Lucas show. The producers worked for the studio, not him, he had others who would question his decisions, make changes, etc. He was in charge only in so far as being the director, who does have a good deal of control, but still plenty of limits.

Not the case for the new three. It was an all-Lucas team. He was in charge, surrounded by yes men and did whatever the fuck he wanted. The result was really bad.

I'm not sure if I agree with your reasoning that putting people in costumes means disdain for actors. That would mean indicting Peter Jackson for his work on Lord of the Rings, which put many people in costumes as well.

I think it's rather that Lucas communicated very poorly with them, as well as probably lacking empathy or understanding about what actors do and how they go about doing it. I get the feeling that Lucas just really isn't much of a people person, which possibly leads to problems when trying to direct actors or writing meaningful human drama.

Beside which, I'd take issue with the notion that a wonderful character can't be created without a human body or face being seen on screen. Would Darth Vader have been quite so memorable if his face hadn't been hidden behind that terrifying-looking mask? And consider how incredible a performance Anthony Daniels gave as C3P0 even while wearing a restrictive costume and a face that displayed no emotion at all. Chewbacca is a sidekick, yet is a beloved character even though he's never spoken a single intelligible line of dialogue and has no obvious human traits at all.

Even the world of CGI has seen breakout characters and performances, such as Andy Serkis's portrayal of Gollum in Lord of the Rings. His work was instrumental in helping filmmakers to understand that digital performance capture and voice work can be every bit as important as animation in helping to bring a CGI character to life.

Lucas was fantastic at world building, but absolutely horrible at directing actors, and even worse at writing emotionally engaging characters. He happened to luck out with Harrison Ford, who pretty much carried the weight of the series through his own gravitas and made everyone else look good as well. There were also other places he lucked out, like with Anthony Daniels. C3PO was originally envisioned as a smooth-talking, oily (not literally), used-car-salesman type character, but Daniels had an enormous influence on the character that he fundamentally changed the role.

If you listen to some "behind the scenes" from Star Wars, you'll hear the actors talking about how Lucas never really understood how to motivate or even talk to actors. He'd give them the lines, tell them where to stand, and just expect them to "do their thing". What's painfully obvious is that he couldn't really tell good dialogue from bad, or good character writing from bad. It's really too bad he didn't collaborate with and trust someone to override some of the worst aspects of the first trilogy - mainly the awkward love affair and the questionable motivations of Anakin. Critically, he ended up breaking that fundamental maxim of movies time after time in terms of character development: "Show, don't tell."

Yep, this is at the heart of the "write boring code" rule. This also includes extending and enhancing previously created functionality as well. It also leads to another consequence in my own code: You can typically measure the complexity of the code by looking at the ratio of code to comments.

In most cases, when the code starts getting really complex (sometimes it's impossible to avoid), I start writing paragraphs instead of single line comments. When you see multiple paragraphs, you know you're dealing with some really tricky code that I undoubtedly wished I could have drastically simplified, but failed to do so.

Bullshit. You don't believe this, it's just an excuse to enable your prejudice. If you really believed it you'd be up in arms over opposite-sex married couples who don't have children and supporting same-sex couples who have children (adopted or other wise).

Oddly enough, I specifically typed "head of state / elected leader" because it was pointed out earlier that David Cameron is not the British head of state. I had intended that slash to mean OR, not AND. Anyhow, it seems to be the case that royal heads of state don't seem to use one as a rule. I suppose it would be considered undignified to show a little book with a picture that essentially says "Hi! I'm the King of Saudi Arabia". Similar to British passports, Saudi passports are (according to Wikipedia) issued in the name of the King, so naturally he wouldn't require one.

Here's another bit of trivia: As you might guess, POTUS doesn't have a normal passport like you or I probably have. He and all his immediate family have diplomatic passports, which they get to keep for life. I haven't found what having a diplomatic passport gets you (apparently it doesn't automatically confer diplomatic immunity). I suspect if nothing else, it will get you slightly better treatment at the borders - as in, "this is someone who knows someone, so I'd better treat them decently".

Sure, of course. It's why I used the qualifier "most" and "typically". And that's also why I mentioned that if the professions themselves aren't certified, then it may be the products themselves. I have no idea about the specifics of your industry, but I'd bet your company's products have to get certified by the FAA.

A personal corollary for code related to this theme is to always try to make the code I write as "boring" as possible. I've found that programmers often get themselves in trouble by trying to be "clever", which often makes for horribly unintuitive or unnecessarily complex systems. I've heard people asking about how to perform crazy language tricks and I nearly always think to myself "My God, why in the hell would you even *think* about doing something like that?" Such things nearly always point to very fundamental flaws elsewhere.

In the US, railroad engineers are required to be state certified and re-certified every two to three years. How about civil engineers? Oh yeah, them too. Mechanical engineers? To become a Professional Engineer in the US, state certification is required. As for electrical engineers, I don't think they have any state licensing requirements, but for all practical purposes, a four-year degree (a state-certified document as well) is typically required for employment.

This shouldn't be surprising to you. Any profession that could adversely affect the safety or lives of the public if mistakes are made often requires state certification. For the most part, this doesn't affect EE or CS. No one dies if MS Word crashes or your microwave stops working. And in those exceptions when that's NOT the case, certification is typically required of the products themselves (cars, airplanes, medical equipment) instead of the people who worked on them.

I tend to use "programmer" or "computer programmer" for myself, because I think it's the most accurate description.

Most professions with "engineer" in the title require state certification and licensing to practice their trade. I figure that's a reasonable benchmark for whether someone should put "engineer" in their title. Some engineers get in a snit about this, and I can sort of see their point.

I generally view "developer" as anyone who works on the software product in any capacity, although "software developer" still would likely refer to a programmer. For many products, there may be little distinction between "programmers" and "developers" simply because all the developers happen to be programmers. I happen to work in video games, where there are typically many more non-programmers than programmers working on a given project. As such, the distinction becomes more important. It's fairly common in the video game industry (and the public at large) to refer to everyone involved as developers, or "devs".