I constantly wonder how they became this way.

Someday, you will get a project with physically (or at least, mathematically) impossible requirements. You will, rightly, point this out. You will end up needing to doing it anyway.

This won't happen just once. Over the course of your career, you will literally lose count of the number of such requests.

You therefore have two choices - Stop caring, or have an aneurysm from frustration and rage.

Note, however, that you don't need to lose your love of coding. You just need to learn to accept, with a calm and detached indifference, that your paycheck requires you to write defective-by-design code. If it helps, you can make little games out of it - As one of my personal favorites, I write the code to function correctly and then, as the last step before showing something to the user, I throw it all away and replace the results with the requested garbage.

Can you substantiate this? Every time somebody has said this to me and they've gone into specifics, it's been bullshit.

You know, it's good that you come to me instead of the morons you've been talking to you, because I can definitely substantiate this:

http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04...

http://arstechnica.com/busines...

See, the reason "Silicon Valley" (meaning the tech industry) is allowed to play this game is because they're willing to let the NSA upskirt your private information and communications. And since they've already got their hand up your dress, they're going to cop a little feel for themselves, you know? So the US Government is happy, the corporations get to make a shitload of money from your private information and communications, and they get to keep playing their little tax game.

If you had a government worth a damn (like during the trust-busting era), they wouldn't allow companies like Apple to perpetrate their little willful fraud.

Now, the next time somebody tells you about Apple and the government playing footsie to protect Apple's tax advantage, I hope you won't continue to say it's bullshit.

Same here. Which anti-trust laws? Be specific.

Same here. Now when somebody asks you "Which anti-trust laws is Apple violating?" you'll be able to tell them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

http://www.jstor.org/discover/...

See, the problem is "vertical integration". You can't control both the product, the store that sells the product, the insurance that covers the product, the consumables (media) that plays on the product and on and on down the distribution chain. Even making both the hardware and the software is arguably a violation of anti-trust. But when you start to also own the only store that sells software for the product and have a vested interest in every bit of software that runs on the product you've crossed so many lines that Apple should have been broken up into several companies long ago. Same with Microsoft and many others. They're not just over the line, they're WAY over the line. The technical term is an oligopoly. They are anti-competitive and they destroy entire markets. Oligopolies are what happen in fascist countries.

I hope you appreciate the time and energy I spend disabusing you of your notion that "it's bullshit". And I hope you enjoyed edification as much as I enjoyed providing it.

I've got to think that women are more likely to actually report sexual harassment than men are.

I don't think that rates of reporting substantially undermine the presence of a problem, but I do have to agree with you.

Men learn from a young age that we crave sex, think about it constantly, would bang anything with enough paper bags available, blah blah blah. And while most of us realize that doesn't actually hold true, we tend to passively accept it as part of our social identity. Thus, when some troll-woman flirts a little too shamelessly or even grabs your ass as you walk by (which in this study would have counted as an assault), we just brush it off and even take it as flattering (even while thinking "do... NOT... want!").

I would therefore agree that we very likely see a serious reporting bias here that tips the scales toward the female side. That said, where do we draw the line (for both genders) between "testing the waters" and "harassment"? Clearly it doesn't "hurt" those men who just brush it off and move on with their day; do we seriously accept, in the modern world, that females count as emotionally weaker and unable to bear similar compliments from ugly guys?

Personally, I consider this issue more complex than "just don't do it" (which will no doubt enrage the SJWs, but, fuck 'em)... We exist as a sexual species, and no amount of social conditioning can change that fact; on the flip side of that, clearly some people don't get the fact that "no" doesn't mean "try again later".

Some 3d printing services can print ceramics ;)

Services like that exist online, and they're excellent, albeit rather slow. I personally use iMaterialize because they have such a wide range of material options (everything from rubber to titanium) and finishes (for example, 4 different options for silver), but there's lots of others out there, and some are cheaper.

If you've ever played around with 3d modelling, I definitely recommend giving 3d printing a try, even if just a little test piece. :) Note that plastics are a lot cheaper than metals, although metals look the coolest.

And those nerdy kids will grow up playing around with and learning 3d modeling software to be able to make their toys.

This is a good thing.

What sort of 3d prints are you looking at?

Perhaps my expectations of 3d printers are too high because I buy from professional 3d printing services rather than using a low-end home 3d printer. They use high end products and sometimes do post-printing finishing work. But the quality of the stuff you can get is truly excellent, and out of a very wide range of materials.

Isn't that now the limiting factor?

So we have 3d printers in stores. Now we need all of the home devices that could potentially need spare parts printed to be available online, preferably in a unified database. You need manufacturer buy-in. Maybe some sort of certification mark that manufacturers can stick on their devices to show that printable replacement part models are freely available. I could use a new cheese compartment door in my fridge right now, for example. And I live in Iceland where shipping times are long and shipping costs / import duties high, so it'd make time and economic sense to print, too. But while having a 3d printer would be great, if the model isn't available, how does that help me?

Of course some companies, like iRobot, rely on profiting off of selling their spare parts.

It does seem rather weird to treat it as an intractable problem. Are we really talking about something that's AI-Complete here, like natural language understanding? Something not succeptible to a combination of chained rules, physics calculations, and statistical analysis? I seriously doubt it. So different machines can act differently due to wear, etc? Gee, people have never written programs to deal with that before, heavens no. So some things may require a decision from the operator, like whether to restart a defective piece or try to salvage it? Gee, I've never heard of a program asking the user a question during operation before! A piece of "printing" hardware experiencing a jam of some kind and needing manual intervention? Gee, nobody has ever experienced that one before!

I'm not saying that CNC machines and 3d printers are equivalent and that you can just swap a CNC machine in to the sort of role 3d printers are intended for. Of course the task of gouging out steel with power tools is a more intensive one than writing out plastic in layers with a slightly more advanced version of a hot glue gun. But we're not talking about creating superintelligent cyborgs here, we're talking about analyzing physical processes, including their various failure modes, and when a decision or action is required, presenting the user with the information needed to do that.

I'm sorry, I'm having trouble hearing you, your horse is too high.

It appears that U2 and Apple are proposing an interactive album format that combines the music of a record album with the interactivity of a video game.

Jokes aside, they did stress the "interactive" part of this as a key feature.

I can't speak for all Slashdotters, but personally, I listen to music primarily at times that I can't interact with it (beyond the mostly-passive* act of "listening to it") - In the car, at work, while mowing the lawn, etc. When I actually have the spare time and attention to interact with something, I will usually chose to interact with other humans, or actual video games, or playing with the cats, etc. I may still have music on, but I don't "interact" with it.

I would therefore have to consider this a complete non-starter. At least Neil Young's boondoggle actually did have some technical merit (while completely ignoring the reality that 99.9% of people will take "good enough" over "perfect" if it saves them a single penny). This? The "solution in need of a problem" trope gets somewhat overused, but it definitely applied here in full force.

* Yes, I do get that some music requires actively listening to it to fully appreciate it. U2 ain't that.

Don't they realize that by definition, "non-piratable" means less useful? How does Apple and Bono's new magical DRM know the difference between me putting the song I bought on my Nexus and copying it for a friend?

And you know what? Bono is becoming a little embarrassing. For that matter, Apple has become a lot embarrassing. You would think that after their recent, "You will take this album whether you want it or not" routine that they'd maybe take a deep breath before coming up with another brainstorm together.

Wake me up when Apple partners with some interesting artists, like Deerhunter or Demdike Stare or Charlie Boyer And The Voyeurs. Fuck Bono and fuck Tim Cook and fuck Apple and their jewelry.

I'm glad I got that out of my system. So, how about them Bears?

Apple does some odd things, but I can't imagine anyone could watch the Charlie Rose interview of Tim Cook and come away with the impression that he and Apple don't care about their customers. To hold that position you'd have to believe he was a pathological liar and just plain evil.

Well, there is a very high potential benefit to having a CEO who is a pathological liar. So high, in fact, that it would be incredible if someone rose to that position without being a pathological liar. And didn't Steve Jobs set the precedent?

And you do understand the reason Tim Cook goes on Charlie Rose, right? It's not because they're old friends having a nice chat. It's a very carefully planned and controlled public relations effort. They're trying to "shape the narrative" which is pretty much the definition of pathological lying. Celebrity CEOs are all about image, and image exists to fool people.

Because when it comes to security, "almost" is "not at all".

How would providing data to the USA government raise their stock prices? If anything, it would lower them.

Maybe you don't get the full picture. They cooperate with the US gov't, and the gov't looks the other way when they try to claim that 80% of their profits come from outside the US when it's tax time. Apple has so many sweetheart deals with the US gov that it's not funny, mostly in the area of non-compliance with tax code or outright tax evasion.

This increases the bottom line and that increases stock price.

Just the fact that Apple is allowed to flaunt the anti-trust laws is a good example of why Apple (and shareholders) benefit from spying.

[Full disclosure: Apple stock bought in the '80s and throughout the '90s paid for my daughter's undergraduate and graduate education. Plus a couple of new cars (though modest ones, not the Gallardo I had hoped. You know, Mazdas and like that. I cashed out around $650.)