I'd mod this up, but then couldn't comment in this thread. The information about this past history indeeds supports the suicidal tendency he was burdened with. I too have long had a will, and have planned many possible exits from this sometimes pain filled world. I have no doubt that this case pushed him over the edge, given the overzealous apporach taken by this felon of a prosecuting attorney. The real criminal in this case, if you ask me.

You sir, are cluesless. Only an idiot tries to commit suicide and fails. Most of the ones who try to commit suicide and fail are in desperate need of help and don't really wish to die. The ones who try and succeed actually want to die. Further, it's easy to say that faced with financial ruin, an order from a judge not to seek public financial support and facing 50+ years in prison, you wouldn't also commit suicide. Yes, many guilty and bad people face 30 years, 50 years, life or even execution for crimes fitting those terms and don't commit suicide. But how anyone can consider downloading the JSTOR Acedemic article archive as a serious felony worth 50 years in a Federal Prison, is revolting. How you got modded insightful is a mystery to me. As you clearly have no grasp of psychology or the what drives suicide.

You misunderstand my comment. I mean only, if you look closely, you'll see that Linux would far more expensive to "write" and "sell commercially", than any other program. So more expensive in "development cost", only.

As for Windows, it's actually been fairly stable for a long time.

I much prefer the Linux kernel. Although, I've had to abadon both KDE and Gnome, due to the dystopic mindset of the developers. Which has been a bit of a step backwards in the use of Linux, making things harder for me on a regular basis. The same exact type of behavior that drove me away from Windows in the first place (that and the entire concept and mindset of Linux and FOSS).

Windows is still too annoying, so it's still not an option for me [except that I need to use it for my clients who depend on it.]. On top of the licensing BS.

I know at least one person who loves Windows 8. [sends shivers down my spine, and that feeling you get when you are completely grossed out.]

Well seomtimes the right way is more expensive than an almost as good way, and the cost-benefit ratio doesn't justify the right way. Perhaps, a b-tree algorithm is the best thing to do at a point in the code, but an already written sorted list will be nearly as good. Do you take the time to write a custom b-tree function, or link to the existing sorted-list, when you need to ship in two days? The sorted list is known to be bug free and working.

Take that choice and multiply it by 500 and you get an idea of why code might look like crap, but be very stable and easy to maintain, and faster to implement.

Consider the man-hours involved in building the Linux kernel, and then figure out what you'd have to charge per copy to pay all those people a decent wage.

That is the difference between commercial software developed by for-profit companies, and open-source. I'd give odds the Linus kernel is incontrovertibly the most expensive working application ever written.

Actually the Space Shuttle Challenger was a design choice to save on the cost of shipping the tanks to Florida. The alternate one piece design didn't fit through one specific tunnel along the railroad from the plant to Florida, and would have required overland transit. It was well known within the industry. The other tank design was nearly identical to the design used by Russia. I was in an aerospace engineering class when this happened, and we studied the problem. I'm positive my professor already knew the answer, he was part of NASA's team.

This is so very true. I remember when a company I worked for hired another company to come in and upgrade our code to make it y2k compliant.

First they analysed the code and found the places it needed fixing. We spent time teaching them about parts of the code and they would frequently come and ask us about certain pieces of code. They then made the changes to the code. We knew we had a y2k issue, and where most of it was. A lot of the code they changed was very old, and not actively maintained, because of code maturity.

Five years later we were still fixing bugs they introduced to the code in the process of updating it.

Messing with stable and ugly or pretty code is a hornets nest. You might make it look better, and introduce new or even old bugs. I am guilty of that myself. I've even come back to my own code years later and said, "WTF? This is crap code". I would then "fix it", only to figure out, it was needed. Sometimes, you just need to add a hack in code to make it work. Sometimes you forget to comment that hack.

You ignore the group of people who actually enjoy coding, over the other tasks you mention. I've known excellent and poor coders, coders who've moved up the corporate ladder and coders that were utter failures. Certificate boys and lazy old-timers and lazy young slackers.

As for me, I've been doiing this for over 20 years. I still write a ton of code. I also own the company and am the majority stockholder.

I prefer to do coding over management tasks, but manage to squeeze some of that in too. I set the designs, along with others.

Perhaps you've just been unfortunate in your choices of companies. It's big world, full of many variations. I try not to make generalizations on entire categories of people. I've worked in maybe a dozen fields on multiple continents over more than 4 decades, with thousands and thousands of people. The IT field is no different than any other field, people come in every flavor imaginable, and some you'd never imagine. I've run five successful and profitable companies and done pretty much every task involved. I hold multiple degrees in various technical fields. To tell a little more about my case. You won't hurt my feelings. I'm comfortable with what I am and what I do, and don't need anyone patting me on the back. I make my own way and always have.

I disagree, while I was being rather grandiose on the submarine bit, my point was we routinely do long mission type activities. Rather than do an artificial study, there is a wealth of real world data to draw from and analyze. But apparently that leap of logic was too much for your amazing brain, and you took too literal an interpretation.

Secondly, we are still the same people. Doing a considerable amount of historical searching, one thing is clear we have not changed much in 500 years. We've gotten more advanced, and mostly better educated, most do less physically demanding work, are relatively better off financially, etc. But for the most part we've not changed much physiologically, and arestill capable of doing the things we did 100, 200, 500 or even a 1000 years ago.

Thirdly, I never said the editor was an idiot, merely that he/she didn't bother to look deep enough before posting this unworthy of /. study news.

Lastly, I'm impressed at your extreme powers of intelligence detention being able to determine an idiot from a single paragraph of a written opinion, while simultaneously ignoring higher intellect functions.

Catal Hyuck was city that had a population of around 10,000 people, approximartely 10,000 years ago. There is also evidence of ancient American cities like Cahokia, which likely had a population of around 40,000 at it's height. Long before European settlement, and a population greater than any North American city until Philadelphia exceeded 40,000 around 1780. But you didn't see state issued ids in Cahokia, nor in the Colonies. In fact, it's possible the Native Americans in Cahokia didn't even have a writing system.

I call Bullshit, that you need to keep track of everyone, and have to give out ids for that. I could do everything I need to do except drive a car or travel to a foreign country without id. And if we got rid of the idea of this planet is divdeed into countries with imaginary lines telling us the boundaries I would need id to travel. the id requirement for driving is solely so you know who to blame in the event I damage someone or something.

There are actually a number of people who do object to SSNs on this basis and do not have them. I believe the Amish fall into this category. Not everyone has an SSN, but it makes life a lot harder to live, except in an Amish or Mennonite community.

However, this is a BS case, as the school offered to remove the battery and chip and issue a trackless card, but it would look just like all the other ones on the John Jay campus. But she and her Dad refused that. She wanted to use the same picture ID she had from her old school. Which looks different, as each school has it's own style of badge for rapid identification of student who do not belong on a particular campus.

So, from the get go, they really had no case, because the school accomodated the Religious objection, which likely would have passed muster.

Let the child whack the RFID a few times with a hammer. Tracking problem fixed.
Or 5 seconds in the microwave, although the burn marks might clue in the school as to why the RFID no longer works.

Stupid studies. Why not look at history? A trip to Mars is about five months (150 days) with current technology, although, most of our trips these days are in the nine month category (260 days, less fuel). The American Colonists spent up to 3 months sailing across the Atlantic. A trip from England to it's colony China, back in the day was a very dangerous and lengthy journey, well over nine months in length. A circumnavigation of the planet took three years to do. US subs, regularly stay submerged for 9 months at a time. No sunlight. When's the last time you've heard of a nuclear sub being lost because the crew got lazy? Right. Never.

Idiots and their surveys. Whatever editor allowed this post needs to have his/her Geek and Nerd credentials yanked.

Igorance is bliss. I have to wonder about the depth of your experience. Having been around long enough to know a number of guys who worked on some of the first computers ever made, and seeing them "retire", and others come along and retire, I call bullshit.

I'm not yet at a retirement age. I could retire. My brother retired at about this age, as did my father. Rather than retire, I started my own company, and I do well enough. Old people don't lose the ability to adapt. That's just FUDspeech. Some people find adapting harder, than others. But not all old people do, and there are plenty of young people who can't adapt either.

You make a lot of unfounded and unbalanced claims, which simply don't hold up to the light of day and the rigors of time. Sometimes great coders lie hiddne in obscurity, bacause they have personality issues that make people shun them, and their skills go unnoticed.

Why the "C" disclaimer? There is more than one language used in the world, and I still support some code where gotos are necessary, as well as labels. There was a time not many years ago, where I would have 10, 20 or even 40 gotos in a single program I'd write on a daily basis. And it ran faster than probably anything you've ever written. Much of that code still runs today on a billing system billing 100s of millions of dollars annually. All rock solid and untouched for nearly a decade. It just works. I was the lead on the team that converted the system from a mainframe, and the billing programs that once took literally all weekend to run, now run in less than an hour. Context is everything. Granted this is not the goto used to taunt kids with. It's an almost necessary part of the obscure and aging language.

Speak for youself. Being even older than you, and being an experienced programmer, I can say for certain that I'm not willing to say that kids can do things I cannot. They merely have had a different learnig experience and may have learned things I didn't, because they were hacking things that I don't have the time to hack.

Nor would I "read" a book given me by some wiz kid fresh out of school. I would probably look at the book as I do all books, and make a judgemnet call on whether it was worth a read, or to be given to the nearest charity to be recycled.

The advantage the younger kids have is having had time to play with the latest technology, while in school and not needing to spend 8 hours a day working, and many hours after in raising a family. I work about 14-15 hours a day between my company, and family responsibilities. Leaving much less time to play. flexibility isn't the issue, "available time" is. Still I wouldn't discount the opinions of younger coders, and often seek it out. But I have serious doubts about random "kids" offering to teach me how to code better.