I wish I had known how mundane and utterly banal most software development is.

I spend 99% of my time on bug fixes, documentation, configuration management, and writing new code that quite frankly, aside from exact implementation, isn't that much different than code I wrote 10 years ago.

"I need to shuffle data from point A to point B."
"I need to hit an API and stuff the result somewhere."
"I need to make sure the user doesn't enter something retarded into this form."

Maybe 1% of the work I do is even remotely interesting. Why? Because of the flood of software frameworks and libraries that take care of all that interesting stuff for you. A vast majority of us don't have to care about the best algorithm for X, for example - that work has already been done. Software is more like legos these days. You take the pieces you want and put them together.

That is good in that making software is easier and faster than ever before, but it is murder for people who did this stuff because it was interesting. There's very little mystique these days.

You assume he changed his stance. I think his stance hasn't changed - he just said what he needed to say to get elected. In other words, he lied. This is nothing new for him, by the way.

It seemed that the company did, in fact, have growth on track: The article mentioned that in 2014 sales were up 40%. That's huge, and it shows that whatever they were doing was working. The company was actually doing well and had broke even for the first time.

Investors were likely unwilling to dump more money into the company because they saw these lawsuits and said, "Damn man, there's no way I'm going to make my money back in a reasonable amount of time. Sorry dude."

So... Thanks, France.

Isn't socialism wonderful? Workers of the world unite and all that? I mean, obviously, the business is rich with unlimited funds because it's a business, right?

For now. In a few years I fully expect additional funds to be appropriated so that people can have both services subsidized.

Yeah, not sure why the poll is so prominent. Stick it back into the sidebar, please. Also, that orange color is really awful.

And the numbers don't seem particularly significant either. 1,100 people out of 1.2 billion, when 2/3 of those people don't have access to electricity and therefore air conditioning?

If anything, the news story should be, "Holy crap, there's a serious heat wave and only this many people died. That's amazing, how does this population manage to deal with this kind of weather so well?"

Me, anything over 70F is too hot. 117F? That's insanity. I'm glad I'm here and not there.

I have Time Warner here in Ohio and I don't have any complaints. Service interruptions are very rare, speed is great for a semi-rural area (I have neighbors with goats, alpaca, chickens, geese, and horses - I'm not in a metro area at all), and on the occasion that I've had problems I've had a truck out, with a technician that knew what he was doing, the same day.

It's a little pricey, but then again, I'm in a semi-rural area. I'd be surprised if TWC breaks even doing business here.

What exactly is it that I'm supposed to do?

Sure, I use SSL when it is available, I use AdBlock et al., I stay off of the social networking sites, but c'mon: What exactly is it that I'm supposed to do? If the government wants to snoop on me then it will. There's really nothing I can do about it.

"Encrypt all your email!" Mmhmm. Yeah, okay, sure. That will work out great when I want to send a message to my technologically normal friends and family. Web-based encrypted mail is a farce anyway - you're still relying on a Java applet, or some JavaScript, and you're trusting that it isn't leaking your keystrokes.

"Use SSL!" Great idea. Let's all use SSL. Except the NSA has the resources, reportedly, to break TLS / SSL. So... Back to zero once more.

"Use Tor!" Sure. Okay. Aside from the fact that it is slow, there have been plenty of articles here about how it's possible to track individual users on Tor - using the resources of a university computer lab. What do you think the government can do?

Basically, we're boned. These technologies are great against your neighbor next door or the 1337x0r h4x0r in the next country, but when it comes to the resources at the government's disposal, there's really very little you can do on the Internet, if anything at all, that can be kept private.

You say that the IMF and ECB gave loans to Greece at rates that are not sustainable.

I say that Greece accepted loans offered to them at rates that are not sustainable - and they should have known better.

I'm not rooting for the whip master. I'm rooting for being responsible and reaping the consequences of failing to be responsible.

I'm also rooting for this example of extreme, heavy handed socialism to fail in a spectacular fashion so that it can be used as a warning to my country, which is also surviving on massive deficit spending. It's bad. It shouldn't be done. Do you want to collapse like Greece? No? Okay, then stop, set up a real budget (not the "we balanced the budget because we borrowed money" bullshit), and be responsible.