I voted for Clodos...

On the other hand, when you see them express themselves in writing, that's when you can get really worried...

Soldiers suffer from shell shock and go crazy doing what they do with or without drugs. It seems more convenient to blame "fuck ups" like these on a drug than on the simple fact that war causes horrible suffering and stress on both sides of a conflict and is expecially difficult to handle for soldiers who consciously or subconsciously feel they are occupying a country for dubious reasons. Blaming this one incident on a drug instead of on American foreign policy in general is easier for the party who is actually responsible for these atrosities.

If Macciavelli had known about drugs that "may" cause such behaviour, I'm sure he would have recommended the Prince give them to all soldiers, in case the shit hit the fan and you had to put the blame on something. Smart man - Macchiavelli.

When I drive I place my hands on the wheel immediately! It's simply too dangerous to drive without using your hands until 2 o'clock or 10 o'clock...

Except that connecting your computer to a printer is not installing hardware. Root privileges are only there to protect the integrity of the file system and operating system. If you have physical access to the computer, you already have the possibility of smashing it to smithereens, or compromising the security.

There is no reason why a properly implemented printing system should be potentially harmful to the OS. The most dangerous action of installing a printer is connecting the USB cable, which could potentially fry your computer if the hardware is malicious. Requiring root privileges will not protect you against that. After that, a properly implemented printing system is a greater risk to the printer than the OS. Requiring root privileges actually makes the printing system more potentially harmful than it needs to be. Period.

When commenting the opinions of one of The Giants, always think twice before clicking submit. There's the remote chance that they actually *are* smarter than you, no matter what you think.

Hang on there! Your misunderstanding the portion you quote! Hed said "or ripping off its fans". Not at all the same thing as copying an idea or plagiarizing.

A fin is a limb on a fish.

Get yourself a copy of "Perl Best Practices" and read it. It will show you the errors of your ways and make you write better and more readable code.

No, but perhaps a "my ($a,$b,$c) = @_;" would have been. Since I'm a long-time Perl programmer, I can't really speak for the newbie. But the use of the numerous $_[n]-lines is probably unclear. In any case, it is considered bad code, since it is both hard to read and error prone.

Using a foreach, instead of the C-style for loop, is certainly easier and MUCH closer to the implementation used in Quorum and Randomo. So that, at least, was very poorly thought-out. And Randomo? Is it really random? Or is it really Quorum with a bunch of substitutions made? Just look at the code samples.

When I had a look at the paper, the first thing I noticed was the use of the ampersand sigil in a function call. This has been considered bad code in Perl since time immemmorial and really goes to show to things:
* The researchers didn't know the first thing about contemporary Perl and didn't bother to find out, ie. do research.
* The researchers did nothing to make the Perl code readable, which is paramount for newbies to any language.

And worst of all, and this is really appalling, they are cherry-picking their methods. Just look at the table and the numbers, then read their analysis. And don't even get me started on the sample-size...

It is sad indeed that the death of this man, who contributed a whole lot more to IT, will be overshadowed by the death of a CEO whose main achievement was dishing out cool gadgets. Without Dennis Ritchie, these gadgets would never have seen the light of day.

No Ritchie, no UNIX, no FreeBSD, no OSX. (And, of course, no Windows or Linux either.)

Without the C programming language, the IT world would be completely different today.
May he rest in peace.