I knew Chicago politicians had a reputation, but that is deeply disturbing, although it furthers my point that gun control is probably not what is causing the high crime rate.

Er, no. That's what HR is for. If you think you have a valid complaint and you're afraid of speaking to someone in a way that is supposed to be confidential, your workplace is very unhealthy.

Hit a nerve? Seems like you're one of the senior programmers who can't take criticisms very well. It's quite obvious that OP never painted senior programmres as a waste of space, but rather complains that this one programmer is screwing up the entire workflow and it's because he won't consider the input of someone more junior than himself.

Seems like you have the same problem with listening before taking offense youself.

People are not robots. Even you, who purports not to care, will be affected negatively by a shitty work environment where you spend your time dealing with the tolerated incompetence of a senior programmer, and it will affect your attitude and skills when a poorly run business folds and you have to find a job at another company and suddenly find that you spent 5-10 years of your life getting practice fixing problems that shouldn't have existed in the first place rather than getting actual, marketable experience.

I feel like if you're junior to someone who won't take criticism well, and you can't get the manager to do something about it, then you have a management problem. You should be doing what you should always do in this situation: move to a different position where you are not under this manager or leave your job for a one with a decent boss.

This is not an issue just about his ability to program at this point.

To throw lead downrange, you need ammunition, which is not easy to get either.

Pretty sure "terrorists" in TFA are not going to be stopped or "get away scott-free" because they weren't able to print some damn plastic guns. Apparently, it's more likely these days that they would buy a pressure cooker.

Senator Yee is dumb and doesn't know what he's talking about.

But, you are dumber, and don't understand the basic concept of laws and enforcement. There are plenty of place with stricter bans on guns than the US that are not Mexico. The difference is obviously an effective enforcement system and corrupt government and enforment officials OWNED BY THE DRUG CARTELS .

Stop trying to fit reality into your world view. You don't know jack shit about gang-related crimes. The people living in Chicago that have to deal with shootings are hardly living in a "criminal paradise," and arming the non-violent citizens of the city would not help the crime situation. There are all kinds of exisiting issues including poverty, segregation due to social-economic status, and existing problems of gun violence that each new generation of young, poor men is dragged into. I assure you that Chicago is not a "criminal paradise," and that relaxing gun laws there or in any other city would make the situation worse, not better.

Somehow, you got it into your dumb head that not only is more violence the solution to the current violence problem, but that everyone else thinks the same way you do and would go and arm themselves with guns to shoot other human beings to "protect themselves" if only the government would get out of their way and let them own guns. And that if the government had laws against buying guns, that they would go out and print their own guns, if only there were those damn laws against 3-D printers.

I think this is the key.

Get your friends' computers infected instead!

There's an evolutionary reason for racism too, but we've made much better progress on that front.

I will make three points here:
1. Brute-force attacks are not the main vulnerability of passwords at this point, so debating entropy is a little pointless
2. Your calculation of 4 sextillion combinations of words is overly optimistic
3. And 4 sextillion doesn't even compare that favorably to current password schemes

1. It's almost trivially easy to defeat brute-force attacks compared to securing passwords from being lost through social engineering, trojans, and general poor password practice.

2. There may be a quarter of a million words, but the average user will choose a passphrase that has:
(a) an adjective-noun pair,
(b) words all 4 characters or more
(c) from a vocabulary of about 2000-4000 commonly used words,
(d) and include a lot of nouns that are animals, places, sports, or objects found around the office (rather than more abstract nouns like "conciousness" or "ambiguity")
The entropy in that is much lower than 4 sextillion.

3. Even if we went with your 4 sextillion (4 * 10^21) value of entropy, that is 1/5th the entropy of a 12-character password that can be any combination of upper/lower-case characters, digits, or one of 10 punctuation characters (72^12 = 2 * 10^22). At best, your scheme is better than an 11-digit password. A slight improvement, but not revolutionary.

Also, I can't think of any 2-factor authentication that doesn't involve a central authority of some sort, which poses incredible scaling and logistics issues. Since the internet is international, you'd need an international authority. Good luck getting people to agree on one. Cell phones might be the closest thing we have to a consensus, but that obviously leaves out huge populations of the world where that can't be relied on.

For better or worse, passwords are probably going to remain the same as they have been for the past decade.

I feel like everyone is so focused on the "inequality" part of the article that no one is paying attention to "holy crap, 8 weeks is a lot of time off." Seriously? 8 weeks of paid leave to spend with your kid? I don't think that constitutes a policy that "discourages dads from participating in their kids lives." At most, there's a bit of grumbling about how it's unfair that your coworker in the next office got 8 more weeks paid off than you did, but then your wife will smack you in the head, remind you that you didn't have to carry a baby around for 9 months including many weeks where a lot of basic movements we take for granted become very difficult, and then force a small person through our genitals. And it's not like you can't take additional unpaid time off, no questions asked.

I've seen people who've worked with a company for years still have to take vacation time to make up for a very meager paternity leave, so even if you have a point to make about sexism, which I may or may not agree with, you are simply moaning and groaning about a completely unrelated topic if you're complaining that 8 weeks of paid paternity leave somehow is inhibiting the fathers from being parents or that this somehow reduces fathers to only a source of income.

And please, even when making a valid point that we should start treating dads as equal parents as moms, don't ignore the huge difference in physical changes that happens to a woman giving birth that do not happen her husband.

Which is the cause and which is the effect though? I think there are a lot of valid arguments that standardized testing is hurting the ability of schools provide their kids an education.

With all the reprecussions schools face these days for not testing well, it could well be that schools that have smart kids (read: higher social-economic status) can teach Algebra and have kids do well in testing, while school where the students are already struggling in the testing cannot focus on teaching Algebra over teaching testing because if they don't improve their test scores, everyone assumes the school isn't doing a good job.

I'm not saying that teachers are saints or anything, but most people who decide to go into the US's public school system with its terrible pay and long hours already have the desire to give kids a real eduation and also realize that teaching to the test is not doing so.

Yes, but the school is supposed to be the a source of wisdom and knowledge for developing adults. Instead of being the voice of reason that acknowledges and points out the heightened sensitivity to the child (and yes, a 16-year-old is still very much a child when it comes to making non-malicious mistakes like this), and teaches her to exercise better judgement, the school system is teaching her that if her curiosity leads her to accidentally crossing the line on what will freak out parents, the who system will come down on her and try to throw the book at her.

Although, after reading what I just wrote, that's probably a pretty accurate and depressing lesson of our current paranoid state. Still, I don't think kids should be subjected to such treatment.

I agree completely.
Polk County School's justification for expullsion was (from TFA)

Yes, Polk County School, I think the 16-year-old understands what the general concept of punishment is and that actions have consequences. I don't see how they're going to be able to explain why a small explosion that produced as much force as any other gas reaction in a sealed bottle deserves expulsion, a felony charge, and being tried as an adult.

This one comment on TFA also seems appropriate:

What if the unarmed assault was unprovoked? There's no reason to believe that the stranger you've never met before who is randomly hitting you in the face is suddenly going to stop.