I once took over 30,000 lines of code that had been written by a subcontractor and trimmed it to around 4000 LOC. And you better believe it ran faster! Not because refactoring is magic, but because once all the mind-numbing almost-repetition was mucked out you could actually see what the code was doing and notice that a lot of it wasn't really necessary. Ever since then I have always maintained that coders should never ever copy and paste code. I've had people disagree, saying that a little bit of copying and pasting won't hurt, but I say if it's really such a little bit then you shouldn't mind re-typing it. Of course if you do that very soon you start putting more effort into devising ways to stop repeating yourself, which is exactly the point. Repeating yourself should be painful.

That's I think a reliable litmus test for whether you should refactor a piece of software. If it's an area of code that's been receiving a lot of maintenance, and you think you can reduce the size significantly (say by 1/3 or more) without loss of features or generality you should do it. If it's an area of code that's not taking up any maintenance time, or if you're adding speculative features nobody is asked for and the code will get larger or remain the same size, then you should leave it alone. It's almost common sense.

I don't see why anyone would think that refactoring for its own sake would necessarily improve anything. If an automotive engineer on a lark decided to redesign a transmission you wouldn't expect it to get magically better just because he fiddled with it. But if he had a specific and reasonable objective in the redesign that's a different situation. If you have a specific and sensible objective for reorganizing a piece of code, then it's reasonable to consider doing it.

>I don't know about rioting, but I can tell you that if he returns home, and doesn't receive a fair trial, I will be one of the ones out there protesting.

Depends on what the definition of "Fair" is, he gets a lawyer and a jury, so thats fair right? The judge will either approve or deny his plea argument. Think about that, he cant use a whistleblower plea because there is no whistleblower argument under the law. The judge wont allow it. This is the same thing that happens with state crimes in federal court. You could have a state permit to grow marijuana, but its federally illegal. So having a license by the state, is not allowed as a plea argument, and its excluded from the jury.

And then the judge will instruct the Jury how to weigh the evidence. If the jury follows his instructions, he will be found guilty.

If the courts ban your testimony and evidence for commiting an action, how can you defend your action?

And appeals courts, they only rule if you had fair trial, not new evidence. DNA can set you free, tough, its new evidence.

The legal sytem is the lie to pacify the masses.

I misread the the article's title as "Douche Telecom Call for Google and Facebook to be Regulated like Tacos." I'd misplaced my computer glasses.

Well, this is the thing about civil disobedience. The classic formula is to keep up awareness of your issue by forcing the government to go through the embarrassing and drawn-out process of prosecuting and punishing you. I'll bet they had to drag Thoreau kicking and screaming out of that Concord jail cell when some joker finally came along and paid his poll tax for him. Holding court for his admirers in the town pokey no doubt suited his purposes nicely.

In that spirit, this announcement is very effective. When was the last headline you read about Edward Snowden? If he comes back for a long and drawn out trial that'll show he's pretty hard core about this civil disobedience thing -- if leaving a cushy, high paying job in Hawaii with his pole-dancing girlfriend to go to fricken' Russia wasn't enough.

It occurs to me, though, that this situation is a lot like what I always say about data management systems: the good ones are easier to replace than the bad ones. Likewise the better governments, the ones with at least some commitment to things like due process, are much easier to face down with civil disobedience than ones where being a political threat gets you a bullet in the head, like Ninoy Aquino or Boris Nemtzov. If Snowden *does* come back, and if he ends up "detained" in limbo somewhere, then it'll be time for everyone to go into the streets and bring the government down.

Everyone likes getting paid. And all things being equal, everyone likes getting paid *more*.

But one thing I've noticed is that the people who are most dissatisfied with their current pay also happen to be the most dissatisfied with their working conditions overall, particularly how they feel treated. The feeling seems to be that if they ought to get more pay to put up with this shit.

Now I wouldn't suggest to any employer, particularly in tech, to economize by offering low salaries. You want to attract and retain the best people you can. But this suggests to me that many employers would do themselves a favor by paying a little more attention to worker happiness. If you're paying people approaching (or even more than) $100,000, there's bound to be a lot more cost effective ways to goose worker morale than handing out raises they'll perceive as significant.

But oddly many employers seem to think paying someone's salary is a license for handing out indignities. This doesn't even qualify as penny wise pound foolish.

What is gasoline if not a liquid? And what is liquid but a fluid? Therefore I should be able to run my car on hot air. So not all fair use is parody, nor is everything an author has to put up with fair use.

Fan fiction falls into that last category. Some authors encourage it, which is gracious; others are paranoid about it, which is understandable. But ultimately no matter how they feel about fan fiction they're going to have to put up with it. A successful work of fiction fires peoples' imaginations, and in the Internet era that means they're going to share their imaginings with like-minded people. Trying to police fan-fiction in a world where anyone can set up a blog or social media account to share it is like spitting into a hurricane force wind.

But even though a successful author pretty much has to put up with fan fiction whether he likes it or not, it's ridiculous to think that any author is somehow obligated to promote it. That just a fan-fiction author's fantasy. Authors have lives too, and there is not enough hours in the day for an author to police the stuff, much less to negotiate business deals for the people who write it. It's considered bad manners to even ask an author for the name of his literary agent, because an agent is supposed to work for an author, which he won't be able to do if he's swamped with requests from wannabes.

Well, it's an open question of who's living in a fantasy world. I'm actually old enough to remember these people. Show me a Republican today who'd be as aggressive as Nixon on regulation. Who would sign the Clean Water Act, or the Fair Credit Reporting Act, or appoint someone like Elliot Richardson the head of HEW. Nixon also took the single most intrusive act of economic intervention ever by an American president (including FDR): the wage-price freeze. It's fair to say that there's nobody in national politics anywhere on the spectrum that would undertake a step like that. For one thing it was hopeless; there is no way to stop incipient runaway inflation without restricting the money supply and reducing government deficit spending so as to induce a temporary contraction of the economy.

A generation ago, Paul Wolfowitz was on the left fringe of the Democratic party. People change.

Nelson Rockefeller was to the left of Hillary. So was Richard Nixon.

That may surprise people here. The Republicans have done a good job painting her as the quintessential ultra-liberal Democrat, but really she is no such thing. She is, in fact, from the right wing of the party and could have been an establishment Republican a generation ago. She is widely reviled by the left over her vote on the Iraq War Authorization of Military Force (although to be fair, Joe Biden voted for it too and he's seen as generally reliable on liberal issues, as long as he doesn't open his mouth).

On the other hand she's the first really plausible female presidential candidate for a major party, and I think a lot of people who want to see that milestone project a great deal of their hopes on her. But what makes her plausible in the first place is her acceptability to the establishment.

And what makes her acceptable to the establishment is her competence and personal accomplishments; being married to Bill helps. But the Ivy League education, experience in high profile NGOs and partnership in a major law firm mean she's seen as serious by "serious people". But in this case that should be held against her here. She's not like old Uncle Joe (Biden), whose heart is in the right place but who the hell can tell where his mind might go a-wandering; Hillary is someone you expect to have her head in the game. She knew damn well that conducting official business on non-government servers is exactly what people do when they're breaking the law.

I'm neither a Hillary partisan nor a Hillary hater. On the political spectrum I tend to fall a little to the right of the most vocal Democratic base and to the left of the establishment "DLC" wing that dominates the party at the national level. When the Secretary of State does something this fishy, that's a big deal. I think there should be something like a special prosecutor appointed, even though when the words "Clinton" and "special prosecutor" are uttered in the sentence the word "circus" can't be far behind. But then if the special prosecutor finds no indictable offense I'd be happy with that result.

There once was a senator from mass.
Who went out in search for a piece of asd
Lucked up and found it
But fucked up and drowned it
Even that didn't end his ass.

How do you know? Its not like you cannot go through her backup store and see if it happened and it would be her discretion if anything was covrred or not.

Not really. The really one remaining significant difference between the parties is that public shaming is still a career-ender in the Democratic party. There's no post-scandal career phase as an evangelical preacher, Fox news commentator, or both waiting for guys like Anthony Wiener or William J. Jefferson (the freezer cash guy).

It could be likely that one or more of the employees where account holders. But i agree, the DC has about as much right to snoop through your data as your landlord has to wiretap your phone or rummage through you closets and sock drawer just becsuse it is on his property.

That doesn't make a hill of brans anyways. The answer is US law does not matter in canada unless a treaty makes it matter or a US citizen in US jurisdiction is involved in violating a US law. And the later is only to the extent the US can convince Canada to enforce a warrant or extradite someone to the US or otherwise lawfully brkng the people or companies into US jurisdiction (nab them at the airport or something).

The reason it was brought up is because organized democrate trolls were marshalled to trash the republicans online in an attemp to manipulate sentiment against them in the event of a shutdown of DHS over defunding Obama's executive action on immigration. We see it rise up here every time the republicans seem to be getting into a standoff with Obama. I suspect they haven't quite called the dogs off because of israel's priminister speaking to congress without asking Obama first.

They will try to use anything even if it is absurd because it advances the narritive that X is evil. Soundbytes sell ideas even if they cannot sell products. This can be seen in the recent Oracle story where they insisted the corupt governor involved was a DINO and really a republican.

That was somewhat my thought. Some gravitational anomally that has bent light representing of as being in an area other than its real location giving the appearance of old-young.

Or perhaps there are more than one way for the heavier metals to form or our understanding is flawed. Its not like we can easily recreate the process we think is behind this.