Yeah, yeah, I know... Don't feed the trolls... but...

Were 35 years in jail an even-remotely-appropriate penalty for what essentially amounts to trespassing and/or mischief, I'd be with you. Him being "held responsible" should have amounted to something like 30 days in jail and a small fine, not a good chunk of his life in prison.

No. Fuck that.

I'm tired of the sentiment that the system is to blame, or "don't hate the player, hate the game". At some point, an individual made the decision to do this. They checked their morals at the door, and decided to abuse their authority for their own personal gain.

While the system is set up to reward that behaviour, it doesn't change the fact that Carmen M Ortiz chose to do this. At some point, we need to hold people who make decisions like this, whether or not the system encourages them to, responsible, and hold them up as the immoral SOBs that they are.

If we don't, the system will never change.

Yes, it would be. Silently failing is one of PHP's most common and egregious sins. I'd rather it fail and fail loudly, so bugs like this can get fixed during development.

Yes, they do.

I was contacted by Google solely through my website (which I hadn't updated in about 3 years). Still, they'd found it, using a pretty funky search, and then they emailed me asking if I would like to be interviewed.

As a further indictment of HR drones :-), I aced the technical interviews (including several by phone and about 4 or 5 back-to-back technical interviews onsite), but then they mysteriously "had no projects that matched my skill set" once everything got to HR.

Yep, you can go as old-skool as you like.

I build Flash apps regularly using ant from the command line and VIM for editing.