By 8th grade only the kids in the advanced classes won't know how to do that...

This is a little story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.
There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.
Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.
Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody's job.
Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it.
It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

I love this, I worked for a multibillion dollar gorilla that used this as a management principle. In that management thought that Anybody could do the work, but Nobody they hired could, and Everybody else wouldn't help. Eventually, to fix the dysfunction, they fired Somebody. Somebody told his friends what happened, and Anybody that heard quit. Nobody that was left could do the work, so Everybody was miserable.

The Ballad of Offshoring. It has a happy ending though, the CEO got fired (he's a Somebody that Everybody hated, which Anybody could replace) and things are slowly recovering. The funniest part is 6 months before he got fired he sent out a strange email to the company reminding them he's still the boss. We suspect that HR realized they forgot to tell him, and got around to fixing it shortly thereafter.

Wrong, completely wrong. For instance, if the majority of the collective wanted to force every single female US citizen to have at least one abortion in her life time if she should get pregnant and for all men to purchase, practice with, and keep ready at all time, military style riffles and handguns, the US government would be beyond their abilities in making these laws.

Wrong, I'm holding in my hands an amendment mandating every single female US citizen to have an abortion immediately. As soon as its passes it is the law. I also have one about reducing gravity, which I suspect will be more popular.

there was no "intent" beyond creating a stable, balanced government that could self-modify.

  don't know why you brought up intent, I certainly didn't. But the only way to self modify is to amend the constitution granting the government more powers or taking them away.

because clueless people think it is supposed to do crap it was never intended to do.

Clearly this was a comment by someotherdumbass then.

Glad you have heard about amendments though, amazing power they have, assuming it is the will of the people. We can also amend ourselves hte ability to not be able to amend our constitution further, also we can amend ourselves into a communist dictatorship.

You can walk into a sport bar and hear how some team could have won a game or what will make them winners (usually something stupid like catch the ball or something). But that doesn't make them authoritative of correct.

True, but this is a particualrly loud, if inconvenient voice. Osama won in 2001, it may have been a pyrrhic victory for him personally, but if you didn't notice the insane increase in police power, TSA power, FBI power before and after you must have been under a rock. Osama scared people.

You are taking people that people do not know or understand the purpose of the federal government.

I'm talking about the citizens of the United States, who are the only thing that actually matters. Right or wrong, we define the government. You can get hung up on the lawyering of the process, and we can debate what specific things you think the government does that it is forbidden to do, but I suspect all you'll end up doing is having the government changed to the will of those same people.

Very clearly the constitution says the US government is supposed to do what the collective we want it to do, there was no "intent" beyond creating a stable, balanced government that could self-modify. Honestly intent doesn't matter for shit, the guys that wrote it are dead. I would argue in most cases that it is working as designed, and that the people bitching and moaning are simply not in the majority and delivering a clear enough message on priorities. When I leave my young urban mecca and visit more traditional venues, all I hear is how the Obama isn't doing enough to stop crime, terrorists, drugs, etc.; how he's weakened the government and pussified the United States, that we need a republican back in there to kick out the muslims and put some order in.

These people aren't bothered by spying, torture, or big government interventions. They want safety and they do vote. Their message is no doubt inconsistent, they also complain about "big government" and "regulation" and "wasting money". But listening carefully they don't consider the military, a well stocked police force or an elaborate spy network to be 'wasting" and they consider it a priority. The young urbans, by contrast, largely don't care about this at all, and instead want the government focusing its efforts on other things, mostly economy & socially oriented; listening carefully to them speak they merely have contempt for the police state, they don't vote strongly against it.

There's a potential terrorist under every cell in minesweeper, hell that's why they call them cells!

I'd put it a different way. From TFS, they try to create an analogy between coding and composition, that just isn't remotely appropriate. If coding is the new literacy, software engineering is the new composition. Yet reading and writing, basic literacy, help billions of people who are neither authors, nor poets in doing their everyday job. Literacy enabled a huge revolution in the workforce, and life in general.

Coding is a tool, like a hammer. Anyone can wield a hammer, some people do so far more proficiently than others to great effect, while others merely pound the nail in that holds a house together. Similarly, anyone could describe the required actions to go from their front door, to backing their car down their driveway, and given the appropriate language could instruct a robot to do so.

If enough people understood properly how to command their computer, productivity would would increase by orders of magnitude and our lives would change again. Most of the produced code would be very utilitarian, poorly structured, utterly mundane but incredibly useful.

Windows is unfortunately relevant. The question is whether the built in browser is relevant. I'm going to install firefox and/or chrome and use those exclusively anyway because i've been burnt too many times with MS's attempts to "add value" with IE to ever trust their browsers again.

give all the money to the state

Donate it all to charity (that isn't the fraternal order of police, or some self-serving operation), mail it all to the north pole, but not the state. In some places the states or local governments have "arrangements' with the police to share this money. Further amongst themselves the police divide up roads for state, county and local coverage. You can tell because you can blow by a local cop on the interstate and he won't twitch, even if you're in his city limits. If it was about public safety he'd pull you over just to stop you, even if he was powerless to ticket you. The cat and mouse game around stop signs and traffic lights in some areas has reached epic proportions. There should not be a debate about whether you fully stopped, or almost stopped... only that you followed the intent of the intersection control.

Take away the money motive and I think police would start enforcing traffic laws based on actual danger, rather than what they think they can stick you with.

It's funny because I learned to program in Pascal, that's what high school AP CS was taught in at the time. Then I learned C 6 months later and wondered why anyone would ever use Pascal. Then I saw this thread, and I wonder ....

The issue is that most of the time people doing this work are on the hardware teams, rather than the software teams. It's a hard world to live in, to be sure, the silicon & pcb guys think you're software (i.e. you write code that executes ON a processor, not code that creates the processor). The software guys don't speak the same language: they're hung up on methodologies, APIs, code style & the business of software, or else are more heavy in to the software research side of pure algoritms. It can be tough to fit in, but the job has to be done, it isn't any less essential, just a bit more niche.

So did STTNG.

No you misread. FiOS isn't AS profitable, it's profitable. Someone without a conflict of interest, willing to compete with wireless, could set up a business and make money, give good service, employ people and return value to an investor. Verizon won't, they see it as a cannibalizing their wireless market.

This is an example of all that is wrong with telecom.

Statements like that one unfortunately lives to regret. Lucas dropped the ball on the prequels, but I'm pretty sure JJ got hit in the head once with the ball and suffered long term damage.

Well, if the user has to wear the helmet shown in the picture, then perhaps the punishment will be more severe!

Seriously, what is the point of that picture?

Or is it the other way around...