because after all, it's not like they can be taken utilized without a legal key

Who you trying to convince, there?

Win7 had such a flawed, easily circumvented activation system that many suspected MS did it deliberately just to get market share on a new OS post-Vista.

You can literally keep using Win7, fully functional, forever without a crack (note that the tool mentioned in my subject line doesn't "crack" or install anything, it just automates a few steps you can run, from the command line purely by hand, on a stock Win7 box).

We need to address the real underlying problem you are describing right there - code written by different people that does not conform to any standards is hard to manage over its lifecycle - and this goes double for limited frameworks that may get some things right, at the expense of not allowing you to get all things right.

This is one thing that open source has gotten right on occasion - think of the Linux kernel for example, and how many people contribute to that and keep it going.

So really the answer I think is twofold - on the one hand people need better tools that make it easier to integrate their efforts, on the other hand entities engaged in this activity need to develop standards that ensure when people develop things - they document and build interfaces that are consistent, if not globally, at least between members of the groups expected to work on the code. If you do both of these things - and by extension some other things that those recommendations imply (e.g. code reviews, agile development methods etc).

Now, if you are only building software for yourself, then this isn't so important. However, if you expect other people to extend and manage your code over the long term, then I would still opt for leaning towards either creating and documenting standards, or selecting and learning existing well known standards - and sticking to that in your own code. Keep it consistent between all the things you build that you want to share, and you just might get people to help - if that's what you are looking for.

I would not consider being overly risk averse as being rational behavior.

There are many rational reasons to take risks:

1. Gives you, and by extension your company the opportunity to learn and grow. If you never take risks you stagnate and learn nothing.

2. Real invention occurs through taking risks. If you never take risks you don't innovate.

3. Taking responsibility, and therefore risk is what men and women do. Being overly risk averse is immature slug-like, weasel word behavior.

If your company does not reward risk-taking - then you are in the wrong company.

I've told this story elsewhere, but it applies directly to this issue, so I'll recap in short:

Vender is contracted to create an integrated support application for large sums of money ($millions) over a 6 month period; contractor chooses an obscure commercial java framework to build the system on. The application is delivered and appears to work fine for several months, then starts getting sluggish, then a month later the application locks up - and has to be restarted. This progressively gets worse, and is asymptotic with the growth of the underlying customer base - and soon becomes completely useless - shutting down within minutes of being started with a memory exhaustion error.

The main problem we found was the equivalent of a memory leak in Java. The code would instantiate objects based upon the framework in the main loop, and they would never go out of scope. Furthermore the code imported hundreds of libraries that were never used - further impacting clarity and understanding of what the thing was doing.

To make a long story short, since this was already in production and now there was even more pressure to get a solution in place fast (and all the lawyers threats in the world can't replace a knowledgeable developer) - we rebuilt the whole system using perl in a little over 1 week. That solution is still running today - even as we've scaled orders of magnitude since then.

So - to your point - this stuff really does happen, and wastes godawful amounts of time and money, when a more simpler home grown solution would do just as well, if not better.

Minimize the amount of work necessary to complete your work. (emphasis mine).

Some of us aspire to a bit more than shuffling tasks from our in-box to our out-box. Some of us want to produce functional, resilient, maintainable code. Some of us want to actually understand how it works, not just trust that it works. Some of us want to write code, not the compiled equivalent of shell scripts that do nothing themselves but pass inputs and outputs between different external blobs.


I'm paid to build. I don't get paid to pat myself on the back.

I get paid to meet an SLA, not just to say "well it compiled, didn't it?" and throw my hands in the air with vague complaints about bugs in library X. If I build some fragile piece of shit out of a dozen other fragile pieces of shit all held together by spit and string, I haven't done my job, no matter how quickly I did it.

Yes, "not invented here" counts as its own problem; it surprises me to hear that its opposite can count as a problem, though, because why does any organization with that culture employ programmers in the first place?

Programmers have to take more responsibility and think holistically about what they are building - and integrate testing to validate their assumptions against the hard light of the real world. To be a great programmer, you should know how to test and build tests and test rigs as needed. To be a great tester, you should know how to code - so you can automate what you're testing. I think the lines have to blur - a firewall between the two only leads to silos, and limits what can be done if they were to work seamlessly (the quote attributed to Aristotle applies here, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts").

Of course, in many development shops the 'just a programmer' mentality is baked into the whole process - so as a developer you might feel that you are stuck. That being said, if you know better, then it is in the interests of your business if not yourself to champion the issue and effect change.

It's a machine before the TCP/IP and Internet times.

And?

I remember the joy of using machines back then, and that convinced me of the awesomeness of Linux... Flat memory? Every device (with suitable physical capabilities) can act as storage, or network or an input method? Awesome!


The "right" answer here, pull the drive. The second choice, install Linux to a FAT partition and tell it to use either SLIP or PLIP to talk to the outside world, then just transfer the files via RSync. Simple as that.

Truly rich, tossing out personal attacks about "moral bankruptcy" in a discussion about privacy rights as they relate to celebrity scandals and porn.

You win. I just can't compete at that level of rhetorical rigor.

Funny, all three of your examples are consensual activities. Posting nudes without permission of the model? Isn't.

Biiig difference between banning links to "revenge porn" and banning all links to porn without the explicit permission of the model.

Sure, it sounds nice and progressive and kum-ba-ya-bullshitty to say that even "real" porn models have a right to control the distribution of their images. In practice, you need a bigger stick than Reddit has to force that genie back in the lamp. Hell, you need a bigger stick than world governments have - See how long it takes you to find all the dirt on Max Mosley despite France ordering the internet to forget about him.

As a result, we end up with "fake havens", echo-chambers where everyone can pat themselves on the back about how much of a difference they've made, essentially by doing nothing more than ignoring the rest of the world. "Good job, guys! We sure showed them! Hey, where'd everybody go?"

Reddit doesn't host images. People post links offsite (usually Imgur).

This has nothing to do with copyright.

If you think that I as a host should not have the right to throw abusive visitors out of a gathering at my place, you're a fucking idiot.

When you've advertised your party as a "come one, come all, visit the tea room for the lace doilies, or the BDSM dungeon, or jump into the political mosh pit!", then yeah, it takes a lot of damned gall to draw lines around one particular niche puritanical issue after everyone shows up to the party. "Whoah now! Sure, we said we'd have beer for everyone, but we didn't mean beer beer, we meant O'Doul's!"

That said, you technically have it right - The owners of Reddit have every right to decide what content to allow on their site. Decisions like this have consequences, however, and we've seen it on site after site after site - Get too popular, start banning "offensive" content to appease the advertisers, and watch your userbase move on to the next "Wild West" site.

If they really want to ban something to promote harmony among the users, they could just get rid of TwoX - But of course, that would look bad, so instead, they will slowly ban everything incompatible with that sub (ie, everything else).

A better approach is to simply ask - and listen - to the employees about things they consider wasted time. They know more about it than any tracking system.

1) People don't typically give honest responses when the CEO asks if they consider his meetings a waste of time.
2) You assume the people wasting others' time actually want to know the truth, rather than using the data they can collect as an excuse to implement whatever new policies they want.

"The data shows that you all become drastically less productive for two hours after our weekly meeting. Clearly, the amount of content I present at those meetings simply overwhelms you all; so to break it up a bit, we will start having slightly shorter daily meetings."

...While no one has ever said "hold my beer and watch this!"

FWIW, TFA talks about the therapeutic index (LD50 vs effective dose) of these drugs, not their long-term effects.

So no, this doesn't add more information to the "alcohol is good for you this week / alcohol is bad for you next week" debate. Just saying that we typically drink a significant fraction of the amount it would take to kill us.

I have some ukrainian hryvnia to sell you, and some russian rubles too! I will give you a great price.

You realize, of course, that Rubles count as a pretty damned good deal right now? First, the Ruble usually varies pretty much directly with oil, which has pushed it waaay down on the short term; then Pooty's pissing around has given it another good hard kick down. Eventually, both of those factors will go away, and the Ruble will return to its former level.

"Buy low, sell high" doesn't mean "sell in a panic at the bottom of a dip".