The bug was hitting the nail through the pipe. Hiding it is laziness. There are some similarities, true, but if the individual fixed / replaced the pipe immediately, that would be similar to a mistake in coding during development and unit testing caught it. Hiding it blatantly is grounds for termination, that isn't a bug anymore.....that's just douchebaggery.

But I see your point.

I am an analyst and I often write requirements, test code and write user documentation. I've been in the industry for 20+ years. I have never met a single developer who doesn't have bugs in code. I've read some of the posts in this thread and many of you are comparing building contractors to software developer contractors and I honestly think you're comparing apples to oranges.

I don't know what the small business owner is making but I believe, to some degree his demands are unreasonable. When a contractor comes into your house to install an item, there are a limited number of ways in which that contractor can perform the tasks to complete the job. If that contractor must deviate from standard specs they run the possibility of having issues with the installed item. And under their contract, under normal conditions, they have limited liability to correct the issues after installation. If the house has a non-standard configuration, and the contractor must fit a square peg into a round hole, this is usually discussed before the work is performed and agreements are made. However, it happens all the time where a contractor faces a hidden issue in their goal to complete the task correctly without issue.

From that description comparing a building contractor to a software developer contractor is feasible. But code is different. With code there are several ways to skin a cat and depending on how rigid the specifications are can influence the amount of bugs that can be created. As good as I would like to think I am in writing requirements there are always hidden requirements that can't be considered until a software developer gets into the process of writing the code. The small business owner claims to have written the specifications, and I don't believe he has developer experience, and to write a chunk of code to capture data in one place may open several doors within the product on how to handle that captured data. Unless the specifications are that meticulous there will be bugs. My question would be, have you hired a tester? Just because requirement 1 says "capture data", and requirement 2 says "store data", where is the requirement on the length and type of data to store? Boom, bug. If specifications don't get down to that level of detail everywhere, there will be bugs. And if your specifications are that meticulous, then how much time is over used up front.

On top of that, you're requesting that a developer be able to write in multiple coding languages. How much would you pay an interpreter to speak five spoken languages? A lot of money, software developers who can write in multiple coding languages and are proficient in all of them don't come cheap. Specifications to interpret one to one from one language to the next.

I'd say the following:
1. raise your prices you're charging your customer
2. insist on a very small subset of development languages
3. hire a full time employee and find someone who cares about success in your company
4. perks, perks, perks
5. hire interns for testing
6. Most important, demand excellence, but be realistic.

That must explain why so much software sucks these days, as well as all the binary bloat. Now get off my lawn.

Drones don't need "a couple of days to warm up," and besides, what're you gonna do if there's a mountain or a canyon, a landfall, a sinkhole, collapsed buildings or anything similar in the way? That wouldn't be a problem at all for flying drones, but you could spend days trekking another path. In the time spent for you to "warming up" and finding another path to the destination the drones would've already sent several times the amount of stuff that you can carry.

I'm not sure why you were modded Troll. I tend to agree. Types are no good if they are not enforced. Either use a language that doesn't enforce typing or use one that does. This in between approach is indeed lazy.

Did you bother reading the rest of my post where I go into how we can balance public and private interests here without creating a cluster-f*ck of high cost litigation that ultimately winds up costing all of us? Or did you just knee-jerk your foot into your own mouth?

Just them? You'll note it also said suspected spies and terrorists. With "broader definitions" of terrorism coming out every day, and the criteria for being included on a watchlist, paired with these hotlines opening up for anonymous "tips"... pretty much anyone these days can be a suspected spy or terrorist. And being a citizen of the US is very little barrier against invasions of your privacy; They've even talked about revoking citizenship for people simply to avoid any legal hassles.

It might be more accurate to say "If you are writing anything you don't want made public, given to law enforcement, or any of the 170+ governments of the world, don't use Gmail." At least then we'd cover all the bases. :/

Wanna see an optical illusion? Hold your keyboard over your head, look up at it, and then shake it back and forth vigorously. (trollface)

Okay, I know you're trying to be funny, but let's be serious for a moment: Why shouldn't the EPA try to limit lawsuits? They cost you and me, the taxpayer, a lot of money. It slows down the entire judicial process, and increases the cost of excercising your rights in the judiciary. There's filing fees now, lawyers fees, and every motion and such you file also costs money. This is fine for corporations who can just pass the buck on to their customers, but for Joe Average, commencing or defending against a legal action can easily bankrupt him. Is that fair? Shouldn't he be able to sue people who have legitimately wronged him as well -- or should that be something reserved only for the wealthy? Conversely, if he is on the receiving end... should he be bankrupted defending against an action that ultimately failed? Any contact with the judicial process tends to be highly corrosive to the average person. It is often ruinous, irrespective of the merits of their position.

Given that, why shouldn't the government try to limit personal injury cases to those where the only evidence of harm won't surface for thirty years? Do you want a legal system that punishes people based on probability, or actuality? If so, thought crime suddenly becomes a lot more justifiable, as well as imprisoning people based on genetic markers, etc.

But I do acknowledge that statistically, we know that in a given group of say, 100 people, if exposed to X intensity of radiation over Y amount of time, Z of them will develop health problems. We can't say with any confidence which of them will develop health problems, but we can say with confidence how probable it is that at least Z of them will. In a case like this where you know harm has happened but the costs won't be known for a long time, a fine seems like a better way to deal with this than lawsuits, provided the fine is proportional to the actual harm caused, plus whatever punitive damages are justified (was it really an accident, or negligence?).

In this case, the government should be the plaintiff, not the individual. Conversely, the government should take the money gathered from these fines and put it into a general fund. If and when affected individuals develop health problems consistent with previously-documented radiation exposure, the government pays out of that fund.

I think this is the most fair method of enacting justice in such a situation -- the companies (or individuals) involved are penalized shortly after the actual accident occurs, so there is financial incentive to prevent it in the future, and no possibility of them profiting from it later, but at the same time recognizing that we may not know for a very long time who was actually harmed, or to what degree.

From the looks of it, this is more or less what the EPA is trying to do. Of course... such an elegant solution will never survive contact with Congress, but... it's the thought that counts.

No, he probably just looked up the statistics on the number of people that have been killed with their own gun. This is why police officers are trained to always keep their hand on their weapon during a traffic stop or during any other time when they're questioning someone who isn't in custody, and why once their gun has been drawn, they typically move away and don't holster it again until backup arrives and a second officer can approach and subdue. The risk is very real.

Your computer has tons of microcircuitry. Far more than this technology would require. If your life depended on being able to complete a call to the police using a VoIP product, do you think you could do it as fast as with a regular, land-line phone, assuming you had the software already installed and configured?

The fact that something isn't checked or maintained is not an indictment against its reliability. Maintenance usually happens on a schedule -- days, weeks, years, even decades. You don't just assume your car is going to run out of oil because you haven't checked the oil since the last time you started it -- you know that as long as you check it every 7,000 miles, or whatever the manual says, you do not have to worry about that. Why would a gun be different?

You know, you're working this technology all crabbed. A police officer could be issued a gun with a RF component in it that operated around 800 MHz or so. At this frequency, the signal clings to a person's skin and clothing. A low-power, short-range transmitter, perhaps embedded in the officer's radio, could complete the circuit. Thus if the officer was not in physical contact with the gun, it wouldn't fire.

Biometric identification isn't the only way of securing a weapon.

That's a social and legal problem, not a technical problem. Let's try and keep on topic here; This is a feasibility study, not an exhaustive analysis of "what if" scenarios...

Strike my last; ... not an exhaustive analysis of conspiracy theories.

Now, as has become increasingly common on Slashdot (I miss the old days), nothing in what I've said is either for or against whatever political cause or position you're advocating. It is simply, and purely, an engineering analysis. What Congress is, or isn't doing, or whatever your political beliefs are, or even mine, are irrelevant here. This about answering IF we can do this with the technology available today, not should we do it.

Hackers take aim at prison locks and other real-world targets
Vulnerability allows hackers to open prison doors, hiding activity from central command

Hacking Prisons - John Strauchs, Tiffany Rad, & Teague Newman
Researchers Say Vulnerabilities Could Let Hackers Spring Prisoners From Cells

Clearly, they're all full of shit too.

The electronic locks run on magical sky energy. There is no voltage in those wires.

Right, because there has never been a case of a system being thought of as so foolproof that it didn't need to be monitored. (Ominous look upwards) And what the hell is this "visual verification" you speak of? It sounds impressive, but it could mean "I had to look at the lock," in the same way I have to visually verify that my car's ignition and not just blindly stick the key wherever.

So slashdotters are safe then, since we only eat cheetoes... which I expect have been so thoroughly processed to remove any and all traces of this "potato" thing you speak of to render it both nutritionally and radiologically inert.

I wouldn't resort to it right away but I'm happy knowing I can, and have, live off the land. First I'd start with my vegan and vegetarian neighbors though. They are more likely to not be armed and are grass/grain fed.

Coffee/soda being free does NOT mean you have to gulp it down till you burst!

Great plan. Do you have a Plan B, too?