It's an odd assertion that Roman's wanted arms control. I would like to see the evidence on this as I am tired of reading it every time some gun nut asserts that gun control doesn't work.

Please present your evidence when making this assertion.

Naw, just for being a dick about it

Now you are just being stupid.

How does this particular eloquent insulting flame bait get Scored all the way up to Insightful? What a dipshit.

I've never worked at a job where I would not have been fired for that lazy crap example you just coded.

Logically, if you place an else or if you return from the function early you avoid having the need for the goto. Its lazy and it goes against every coding standard I've ever seen and unless you are Larry Wall (Perl designer and coder and goto apologist) you don't get to use them.

Out of the slppery depths of Hell the Leviathan rises once more. DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION has returned. Say it with me Brothers and sisters: all hail the PDP- 16894. Hoozaah. Hoozaaah. Is that a tear of joy or despair. We will never know.

If you only program on Windows then you are write. Welcome, however to the real world where windows is but a very small fraction of the hardware devices in existence and the very vast majority of them do in fact require memory management to function. Bad Advice is in the end Bad Advice.

Funny thing about games even, it turns out that if you were writing games even on Xbox you would find that your employer would fire you with that advice. You should keep it to yourself.

If you go to college and all you learn is Java when you got your CS then your an idiot. I got my degree in Math, taught myself C, avoided Fortran like it was Ebola (it is in Software terms, not wait, that's Forth). Anyway, Software is Art. It isn't science, it isn't Engineering. It is Art. It should be taught like Painting, only with Math and to Nerds, and Geeks, and people with severe social problems who are way too smart.

The thing is, that the people who are good at this, really good, are so good that you will never, no matter how much you work at it, be as good as they are. They are gods. I've been doing this for twenty five years and I'm good, I'm slow but I am good. But I have seen really good, I have seen artists who are like Rembrandt, these guys like Linus Torvulds (never met him but you know his work) these guys come along and they just kiss the canvas and they change our lives. They pretend that they are writing software but they are creating art.

The rest of us do that to, and most of us are pretty good, we invent languages, and rules, and say stupid things like, "if you don't get close to the machine for a semester then you aren't a real Computer Scientist". And then we expect that other people will just follow along.

In the end the things that makes you a computer scientist, a software engineer, a computer programmer, an engineer, a mad scientist, a developer, they are all pretty much the same things. You know what tools you need to do your job. You work to get those tools. You don't bitch about it if you can't get them, or you leave, and in the end. You write software that works. That is it. You write software that works. You want to be a Computer Scientist? Can you write software?

You have odd ideas ocean CEO's. I won't argue that there are a few idiots who some how smoozed their way to the top. However, if you stop to look at
The the bios of startups and take a look at the CEOs of most of those companies you will find that for the most part these positions are filled by scary smart people who are smart technically as well as emotionally. These people are often the single point of success or failure of any company.

Being a genius, you probably already new that and you were saying something stupid just for the argument.

Athiesm is very much a faith, and one of the more annoying ones at that. I put it on the same pedestal as Vegans and Mormons which is my Verse is slightly lowers than Krishnas but higher than Muslims in the order of who annoys me more. Athiests are those group of people who go around loudly proclaiming that they don't believe in God because there isn't one, but they can't be happy enough with that. They won't rest until every one else is as unhappy as they are. In the world of annoying gits who are going no where when they die Athiests are the top of the list. Every one else at least has a comfortable fiction of what happens when you die, but Athiests live in the ultimately depressing reality that this is it. There is no afterlife that in a thousand years not anything we do as a civilization will mean anything at all. Maybe five people from this century will be memorable, the rest of us will be sediment. Athiests are not happy unless the rest of us succumb to their dogma that this is it.

So, in the great shit hole of religious dogmas, Athiests have absolute worst, the least imaginative, the least useful, and ultimately the most self defeating. Every other religion has a place, an afterlife: HOPE. Athiests are religious and what they preach is despair. So, I now officially reorder my list of annoying religions and place Athiests at the top, displacing Satanists, who, while voting for the wrong team, at least admit there is a team.

It seems that what you are good at is bitching. I don't see what Slashdot gets out of it. You don't add anything substantive. You have offered nothing except the always helpful "it all sucks" which we all know in the end is not helpful and is not even true. It does even not "all" suck. It is not 'all" a steaming pile of "dog shit."

Slashdot is going to change. This much is true, but you want input into the change. Instead of offering what is in essence the big "F*ck Off" to change why don't you step up to the plate and offer a list of things you would like to see different. I always find it amusing to say the least that tech people who pride themselves on embracing change when it hits them in the chest like a train always are the first to rail against anything that seems like change. Try this exercise: Instead of envisioning that you have the power to put Slashdot out of business (you don't). Try to imagine that you have the power to make them better, something you want to read.

Come to think of it. That's what this page is for.

So, stop bitching and planning for the end of days and for overthrowing web sites and try to be a little constructive. If you can't do that then just shut the fuck up because truthfully your just a noisy prick who needs to take his dick out of his mouth and zip up his pants and get back to work.

Funny thought on how you get to be the guy who decides what is "good" or not. I would say "ill informed." It doesn't matter what your opinion is at all, or mine for that matter. The people who the government pays to make decisions are generally the people I would trust to be the best informed people in the room. You either trust them or you don't. In this politics is irrelevant. If you don't trust the people making the decision for the country then then you should leave the country. You could tie up the agency, make it less efficient, make it worse, but in the end who are you hurting? Certainly not the Chinese and Indians, and Russians who would very much thank you.

In any case, "personal contact with guys from NSA" doesn't count much with me as I once ran into a guy who new Bjorne Stourstroup. So what. If you had worked for the NSA you could maybe say, I used to work for the NSA but probably wouldn't and you couldn't certainly ever tell anybody what you did. Snowden is almost certainly unique in being able to talk about it.

Your argument is pointless. You don't really know what the NSA does so you assume that almost everything it does is evil. Then as example, you concoct and example and show that by using your example of evil some good could come from it. Stupid.

The NSA doesn't exist because it does evil. The NSA exists because what it does actually does work, and is good. The problem is that most of what it does, the very vast majority of it will never be public. This probably is research into capabilities but also serious work into what our major International Competitors are doing, people like the Chinese, Indians, and even Brazilians might be doing.

I prefer a bullet to the brainpan. It's more correct for the crime of treason and it doesn't make a mockery as you would do of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

You are an idiot.

Militarily speaking, the reason why you think that the military does nothing to protect the citizens is because it does it better than any other military in the world. 2.5 Million men and women, many of whom spent way too much time away from their families in the past twelve years because their country asked them to in countries they hate, not fighting for the most part but building infrastructure such as roads and sewage systems (I have friends who spent time there). You do this so that people there feel hope and maybe don't hate us quite so much.

Our military has a command structure designed over fifty years that spans the globe which watches for threats to Americans so that you can go almost anywhere in the globe and when you try to get a Visa to some country in the middle of nowhere the Embassy can say "Hm, no that's not a good idea, denied." and maybe they just saved your life.

You can go anywhere in the world almost and walk almost any street in the world and you don't even know that the reason why you can do it safely is because just maybe the people there like you as an American but maybe they hate you because you're a snot nosed American with a self important attitude that thinks you know better than everybody else and maybe you just walked into a really big drug deal but nobody is going to kill you because just maybe that might spark a drone attack.

When Genghis Khan ruled China it was said that you could walk from one end to another without fear of Bandits. This is what the US Military brings you outside of the United States. Safety. This is the reason why