Depends on who your architecture experts are and who your developers are. If the people who actually would make the best decisions are in the architecture roles and are making the decisions, this is probably the best for the company. This is not a given, it's possible that those architect roles are for ex-developers who have made great contributions in the past but have been outclassed by younger developers to semi-retire without surrendering control of the decision making process, regardless of their current merits, or it could be that management's assessment of people's relative strengths is simply not perfect. You tend to find people who have been at the company for a long time as architects, they tend to keep making the same types of decisions, which tends to lead to stagnation and possible loss of competitiveness over the years, whereas if developers come and go more frequently, the ideas they bring and decisions they make tends to have more variety and one sees more ideas come and go and the bad ideas being replaces (and hopefully the good ones remain).

The second issue is that if the blood sweat and tears is coming from the developers, management could probably get more blood sweat and tears out of them if they were allowed to do things their way. Of course, if someone wants to do something in an extremely stupid way, they will only waste their own time and others, but 90% of decisions aren't important enough that choosing the "right" way isn't going to achieve more than some extra passion and effort.

Thirdly, whatever is best for the project/company, it is almost always better for a developer him/herself to try it their way than be told what the right way is. Whoever the architects are, if they are good, they certainly got their position and skillset from making their own decisions, rather than implementing things according to others' plans. So as a rational, self-interested actor, the environment where one can make one's own decisions, right or wrong is better.

You may be interested to know that treason is the only crime defined in the United States Constitution.

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

It is defined in Germany as a violent attempt against the order of the Federal Republic of Germany (for high treason), or betraying a state secret for the purposes of harming the state (for treason).

India is not the United States' or Germany's enemy, even serving in India's army and killing people on India's behest is not treason, as long as India is not at a state of war (declared or undeclared) with that person's own country and the acts are not against that person's own countries or its allies.

As far as German law is concerned, unless the intent is explicitly to cause harm to the German state, one cannot be convicted of treason. As far as American law is concerned, unless it is helping America's enemies or directly waging war against America, it cannot be treason.

So, that's basically why it's not treason.

Gandhi?

So, you're comparing locking a guy up for a couple of years because he organises a massive and successful revolt (then letting him out when he got sick), with killing people for picking up South Korean leaflets, entering China or making international phoneccalls.

The Raj literally kept Gandhi locked in a palace when he revolted during WWII, a palace! Try organising a revolt in peace time in North Korea and see what happens to your entire family.

The British had 77 years during which they could have easily killed Gandhi, since he lived all but the last year of his life in the British Empire (including many years in the UK) and never kept his location hidden. Instead they didn't, and he was gunned down by a fellow Hindu in newly independent India.

Seriously, some people need to understand the concept of magnitude.

Yeah, you guys should boycott. I shudder to think of how lonely and empty I would feel if none of the comment threads were about "fuck beta" and they were about the article instead. I think missing out on your company would be enough to convince me and the other complacent sheep here to join the cause.

Better yet, stop appointing non-engineers to manage engineering focused teams and companies. You don't see many lawyers willing to work at a law firm run by a non-lawyer or doctors being willing to report to non-doctors on medical issues, which is why those professions hold some professional dignity and are seen as an upwardly mobile career. Why the hell would anyone want to be an engineer when they can never join the officer class of their own company. Back when engineers were well respected and lead their own companies, they were never in short supply, I wonder why.

The legal standard for civil cases is on the "preponderance of the evidence", i.e. the proposition is more likely to be true than not. If it transpires before the court that the intent of the "no poaching" agreement might have been promoting gentlemanly conduct in HR, might have been based on the belief that employees become more productive the longer they have been in a team, but probably was to drive down wages, then the judge must rule in favour of the plaintiff.

Of course you cannot simply think of a hypothetical illegal reason for someone to have done something and sue them because it sounds likely. This is because, in this case the respondent will naturally testify that they did it for some particular reason and didn't do it to drive down wages, and sworn testimony does carry legal weight and it does take real evidence to refute it; but all it takes is a credible witness swearing that they were part of some wage collusion meeting, that they read a memo regarding the agreement's true purpose or they heard or read anything that refutes the intent given and unless their testimony can be refuted in turn, then it's really just down to who's story sounds the most credible.

This is not about the blocking the availability of contraception, it's about not having it as a mandatory part of a healthcare plan.

What I don't get here why should any contraceptive, especially one that provides no protection against STDs be on any healthcare plan at all?

I know the pill has other uses and I don't object those being covered by healthcare, but contraception is a low, predictable and avoidable cost compared to things like heart surgery and chemotherapy, which is where insurance is really needed. It's not like a woman suddenly finds herself being in a long-term monogamous relationship where she must use oral contraception and is suddenly is bankrupted by the cost of the pill. At the very least her husband/boyfriend can keep using condoms, or she could buy a diaphragm, or the couple could practice non-penatrative, oral or anal sex until they've saved up enough money for a month's worth of pills, or any of the myriad other solutions to this problem. Contrast this to traditional healthcare costs where the patient gets an unforseen issue and will regress, become disabled or die unless they are treated at great cost. Healthcare should cover those the things that a normal person could not afford or predict, stuff like contraceptives, and even worse running shoes, sports products and other "free stuff to keep you healthy" that so many plans provide can be anticipated for and are not that expensive for the type of people who can buy healthcare anyway and should be user pays.

Getting back to other contraceptives, condoms are inconvenient, uncomfortable and un-romantic and sexual deprivation is even worse, so I don't see why non-sexually active people and people who use condoms should not have to subsidise this cost for those lucky enough to have regular un-protected sex. Furthermore, if a woman's on the pill, she's less likely to demand a man wears a condom, since she does not have to worry about pregnancy. Now, the most common STDs like gonorrhoea, chlamydia and even syphilis may actually be cheaper to cure than prevent (1 course of antibiotics vs a decade's supply of condoms), but some of the more exotic STDs like Hep-C and HIV are extremely expensive to treat and could cost the insurance provider millions, paid for by other customer's premiums. Now, people are generally stupid enough to risk a 1 in 10,000 chance of catching those two nasty things for a night of passion. But give them a ~30% chance of conceiving a child and they might think enough to go and buy some rubber, which reduces Hep-C/HIV, keeps more folks healthy and makes insurance cheaper for all.

Don't get me wrong, I love the pill. I just still think 1) oral contraception is against the interest of the healthcare system 2) sex with neither condom nor pregnancy is a privilege worth paying for.

ITER is an initiative 45% funded by the EU and 9% funded by the US, that Americans repeatedly complain about sucking away all of America's money, even though it was America's idea to build it in the first place, America gets an equal share of the knowledge gained and America only has to pay one 11th of the cost, despite having the largest economy out of the participants.

Why is it that whenever I see one of you countryman's names (excluding Swedish ones), my immediate thought is "why would a F1 racing driver be speaking at a security conference anyway?"

OK, assume for a minute he is right.

Then from this, take a further leap into wild and fanciful speculation and assume that:

"Had this not been in place in 2012 and 2013, then another 9/11 would have befallen us".

What can we now infer?

If these systems were not in place in 2012 and 2013, 3,000 people would be dead and 317 million people would be free from government surveillance.

Compare this to US involvement in WWII where 418 thousand Americans died and managed to free France, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, South Korea and some of South East Asia (just over 200 million people all up), with the rest being taken by equally-oppressive Communism and it sounds like incredibly good value for human life.

A square mile, and a square mile with a permanent population of 7000 people at that, a small, third rate town.

The courts and laws are still the Queen's, so they can't simply seize you and lock you up if they feel like it. Is this a toothless dictatorship or what?

If you cannot stand their silly "city", don't move there or invest there.

So, Microsoft finally does something no geek could object to and the FSF's response is "even if this looks like a good thing, this can't be a good thing because it's proprietary". It just makes me wonder why they bother making a statement; it's proprietary, it always is and it always has been.

Oh yeah, the Liaoning right?

China buys a crappy 22 year old Soviet bucket, pretending it's a floating casino, puts a new coat of paint on it and calls it a warship.

Suddenly everyone's hangmu this and hangmu that, it's picture (any generic aircraft carrier picture they can find) is stuck on ads for anything a patriotic man might like to buy.

The whole thing is quite bemusing.

Fine, unique_ptr then. Regardless, auto_ptr was only ever 10 lines of code, if it was to be removed completely, it could still be re-added in 2 minutes. Point is, in C++ you can write pointers that free themselves. Destructors are super useful for everything, I use them to free all kinds of memory, as well as to release mutexes and stop timers when the it returns, breaks or gotos out of a block.

C++ is indispensable for 3d engine programming for the following reasons.

• You tend to use a lot of refcounting here and there to manage freeing of resources. C++ through constructors, destructors and operator overloading means it is hard to screw this up unless you try. Even when you don't need refcounting, you can use auto_ptr or something to make sure something's freed when it needs to be. I used to have memory leaks or heap corruptions regularly when using C, with C++ I run into that stuff maybe yearly.
• A lot of the most time-sensitive inner loops tend to need to work on multiple different types of buffers, like manipulating different vertex formats, different bitdepths/formats of textures, different lengths of index buffers, etc. Template functions let you write this in a way that will execute just as fast as if it was using define macros, but far easier to read and maintain, meaning one no longer has to choose between maintainability and efficiency, the easy way is also the right way.
• Mostly, the OO model fits really well. An "object" represents something that more or less actually behaves like an actual real world object with various behaviours peculiar to that type of object, that need to fit together in a heterogeneous collection of other objects in the scene graph. You can do this in C, but maintaining vtables and such gets tiresome and problematic. C++ makes this all rather easy.
• STL once again makes the easy way the right way. Using quicksort to sort a list, using red-black trees to store a dictionary, using a dynamically resizing vector to store an unknown length array is actually easier to implement things in the asymtotically efficient way and safe way than to do things in an inefficient or dangerous way. Stack/heap over/under runs are rare, since buffers can be allocated dynamically without the programmer even thinking about it. Templated functions and classes in the STL allow you to use your fastest data structures and algorithms wherever you like for less effort than it takes to write a bubble sort. You can re-arrange an array of any object you like into a heap in a single line without a single function call or malloc.