This is getting ridiculous! I want Adobe Acrobat to just take a PDF and DISPLAY IT. I didn't sign up for all this bullshit with javascript, adding a service into my already crowded memory space that checks constantly for updates, etc. It's fucking ridiculous!

All it's supposed to be is a way to format a document. Anything more than that, adding all this fucking unnecessary infrastructure/bloatware onto desktop just makes me crazy! The additional fact that it causes viruses makes me really, really close to saying fuck off to acrobat completely.

It's as if the reading light switch on your car all of a sudden tried to get fancy, by adding motion detection, but then it needed additional layers to prevent it from draining your batteries it turns on because it detects motion on your car, so you're forced to buy tinted windows, etc, and oh yeah, it can somehow unlock the doors and start your car. It's a fucking utility that has taken on a life of it's own and I've really had to at this point.

Actually, after this rant I've decided I'm going to uninstall Acrobat immediately.

It sounds instructive, but you will probably get fired for lacking good judgement.

There are plenty of stories where teachers do similar things that end up getting them fired. Teaching students how to write viruses, faking a classroom kidnapping, how to plan a terrorist attack, etc.

Teaching your students how to write a virus is a classic case of bad judgement. Your superiors will tell you "What were you thinking?" and you will get let go.

Teach them verbally how viruses are created, but don't assign anything as homework.

If everyone is called John Smith from New York City, then they won't be able to find anyone. That's likely the best solution, because a cursory search won't come up with your name, or will find duplicate information, and they won't be able to tell one from the other.

I sincerely hope you guys don't believe they are shutting down 2000 factories because of energy.

They are shutting down the factories because they don't have any orders for them to build things. This is just another example of the Chinese government hiding their data, and making them look better than what they are.

They have a patent on this technology. They deserve the right to not have compete against their own technology. End of story. You can bitch and moan over whether or not patents are fair, but that's not the issue. The issue is that as of this moment, they have a legal patent and they spent years investing and developing their snapshot technology.

Netapp for what it's worth is a decent company, I don't think they would just go out and start a patent war for no reason. I fully support them over Sun and ZFS on this one.

I really hope someone's head rolls for this mistake. I'm so tired of companies like Blizzard thinking they can do something stupid like force people to post with their real names.

The executive in Blizzard that tried to force this really doesn't "get it", and needs to be removed from a position of power where they can cause even more harm to the company.

It's exactly like when Intuit enforced DRM and then instantly lost hundreds of millions of dollars and had to kowtow to their users. That was obviously a decision done by a group of people that aren't good enough to make decisions on behalf of a multi-billion dollar company and need to be removed immediately.

I use news.google.com a lot, I switched over from my.yahoo.com about a year ago, and I found news.google.com to be a really dense source of news that I could quickly scan. Now, I have to scroll far too much and it's not nearly as useful anymore. In addition, the fucking page keeps moving, because when you mouse over an article, it adds some more text which causes it to jump a little. It's really fucking annoying.

I'm not sure what's going on with Google but they are definitely not in tune with what their users want. People want simple and useful, not all this bullshit. Yeah, yeah, I know it's free. But they really are moving away from what made them great, and I think they are forgetting their core users for some reason.

The best way is to give him a real-world project that will force him to program. Have him make a web site, or set up a web server from home so that his friends can log on over the internet directly to a computer that he controls.

Be aware, though, that it really takes a special mindset to not only enjoy programming but be good at it.

They need to really have a strong sense of order. Attention to detail is required. They need the ability to concentrate very hard and be able to flow chart behavior in their heads.

If they don't possess these skills, they'll find programming intolerable.

I love programming. But when I first started, I thought computers were only good for games. I thought programming was retarded. But by my senior year of college, I took on a project that required assembly level programming of a dsp chip, and that hooked me. I enjoyed the zen-like state I went into when I started programming, and I enjoyed putting code in order. I used to spend lots of time as a kid building snow forts and arranging the best location for my snowballs for a snow fight. It's the same sort of mental pattern I use when I program as well. Now I program at work and in my spare time. I love it.

A project that starts October 2006 with a deadline of Dec 2006 doesn't sound like a big project. In fact, even including the slippage of 3 months to March 2007, that's not a lot of code complexity we're talking about. I've had a single feature that took more time than 3 months!

From the sounds of it, it doesn't seem like this project really counts. Completely rewriting an app that take 3-6 months is not what I think could be considered a high risk project. The rewrites that I've seen were for much much larger projects and they took years. One ended in success, and the rest were failures.

You need to be someone that the other people on your team want to work with. So, what does that mean?

For me, the #1 thing I try to do is: ask how you can help the team. This is something that not a lot of people do. If you have some extra bandwidth, ask your manager or your coworkers if there is any tasks you can take up that will help your team out. This instantly sets you apart as being not only pro-active, but a great team player as well.

Don't be the team's bitch, but if you're finished your bugs early, go through the buglists of your coworkers, and see if you can pick off any low hanging fruit. Of course, ask them first because they might have already started working on them. But how nice would it be if someone on your team said "Hey I finished a bit early, I think I can fix bug 2431533 for your if you want."

You've got to be kidding. Do you honestly think you can go back to prior cases and use that to show how something is or isn't a crime?

What matters is how good your lawyer is and what sort of strings they can pull. Obviously, this guy's lawyer wasn't as good as the other guy's lawyer.

The rules that apply to us DO NOT apply to rich people. Stop believing for one second that they do. Look at some black dude that goes to jail for 3 years for stealing bread vs. the Wall Street banksters that steal billions and get multi-million dollar bonuses.

Marc Rich was convicted of tax evasion, and fled to Switzerland. It took $250,000 in donations to Bill Clinton for him to pardon him on his last day in office.

There is no justice, all there is is how much money you have to spend to grease the wheels of the system.

Sure you can get more threads and CPUs for your SQL Server, but eventually it's going to be a cloud like environment where there will be massively partitions, very small databases, each using up 1 virtual CPU. Massive monolithic databases are how things are right now, but in the future, things like CPUs or cores will be foreign concepts.

Come on, are we really being that stupid? Of course it was a hacker attack. The chances of an IP address "accidentally" being pointed to a Chinese one is remote.

These Chinese hackers (and hackers in general) are getting more and more dangerous. If they hack the DNS servers, we're talking about a massive ability to steal passwords, since https is based on domain name and not IP address. If the DNS is configured to give incorrect DNS information, then we really could get hosed here.

for example, if someone is typing quick.

and then all of a sudden
the typing speed
drecrease
anmd the typos
rate
increases as
if theyre
typing
with one handsssggggaaaaahhhhhhh

We are not all fucking lawyers. You can't expecting regular citizens to be able to parse a legal document that signs away our rights to privacy. The expectations for photos is that you should be able to share them with your friends, and then when you want to remove them, if ever, you can. This is analogous to the expectations in the real world.

However, in the digital world, things are encapsulated in legalese making it very hard for the average citizen with an IQ of 100 to understand fully the repercussions of what they are signing up for. This is especially the case for children and teenagers, that don't give a fuck that their photos will be on the Internet forever.

So yes, privacy is dead.