Not only illegal. J Edgar Hoover knew that all data is power. Agencies have blackmailed each other in the past with embarrassing information about senior figures.

This is why the Khmer Rouge used to train kids to torture and kill animals, graduating to killing people.

That is not intelligible.

Operator overloading can be a nightmare, it's a bad idea and it's needless: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=559976

Right, support the PM at every turn or he may not support you. He doesn't have to have deep knowledge of the technology or the code. But you do! Brief him, explain how things work, and win his trust.

If he has been put in that role, presumably he has the experience or the potential (as management see him) to get the milestones landed, which is the primary mission of any PM. He also probably has much more influence upstairs than he appears to at first glance, since management have entrusted him with delivering, so if you piss him off you might find him talking to your supervisor about fucking you to death.

To explain further: all users are idiots and we force-feed our crippled interfaces onto them for their own damn good. Really, like it or lump it.

Your Truly,

GNOME3 and Windows 8 interface design teams (for once we agree)

Thank God at least some desktop developers and interaction designers are against the crippling, dumbing down, sluggishness and configuration-hiding of the unfortunately moronic Gnome3. I tried E17 years ago and was extremely impressed with its lightness and speed, even going so far as to recommend its use in the core of a commercial project in which I was involved. (I don't know what E17 is like now). Unfortunately, a senior person with deep connections in the Gnome world poured shit all over it and Rasterman (" ... that's just gtk anyway, isn't it? ...") and convinced the CEO otherwise. I know I was right; they all were wrong. Small satisfaction.

The E17 people can only blame themselves if it has no profile and no-one knows what it is. Twelve years in getting a stable release? Give me a break. OTOH the timing might be right in that Gnome3 has alienated much of the Gnome user base and many are ready to give it the flick forever.

The solution is to get e17 into one or two major distributions as the default UI environment. One would be enough if that distro is Ubuntu or Mint.

Right, the constantly shifting sands of new requirements quickly cover up the original good code design and you end up with quickie kludge after quickie kludge after kludge. You breath a sigh of relief when the code actually runs, as much by luck as by skill, even though you can barely read it anymore, am I right? The eternal struggle between developers and product/marketing teams goes on ....!

The more I think about so-called "objective" scales that pigeon-hole people, the more I think these are there to protect the elite, whatever the ostensible function. Johnny takes a test and now he is certifiably dumb/smart/average. The rest of Johnny's future income and influence could now be determined by a self-fulfilling prophesy.

When I was very small, a shrink told my mother I was a "genius" but (a) this was not a boon because people like me had difficult lives, and (b) I would not perform until work was sufficiently challenging to engage me. While there was some truth in both a and b, what a stupid label to place on the shoulders of a 3yo! My mother did not have the education or skills to challenge him for a better label, such as something less prejudicial. A plain "he's very intelligent" without the editorializing would have done. These days they'd say "gifted" but that still carries expectations like "genius" did. Absurd. Just encourage and help kids be who they are while avoiding stupid labels as far as possible.

The first thing I did on Win 8 to make it useable was install one of the 3rd party start menus (Classic Explorer) and then move the desktop card to the top left hand corner of the sodomizing (q.v. above) and irrelevant (for non-touchscreen devices) Metro. Then you get something like the Windows 7 desktop back on boot and will never have to look at Metro again, unless it's on a tablet.

What an idiotic business decision it was to try to fuse these two very different use cases, shove it down the consumer's throat with a rolled up newspaper, and then totally omit the option to have a traditional start menu. Seniors will not cope but who cares about them, eh? MS are banking on kids just taking to Metro and then never learning what a start menu is.

Also strange that MS are duplicating the mistakes of numerous smaller companies who have worked hard to build something rather like Metro and then dismally failed in the marketplace. Stop force-feeding consumers what you think they have to have! I am dumbfounded at the stupidity of that decision.

I think the desktop metaphor is as optimum as it gets for usability on traditional boxes/laptops. Apple know that; they have had the brains to keep the desktop on OS X. MS doesn't know it or chooses not to. There is simply nothing better around for a non-touchscreen device with a keyboard. If there is, where is it? 'Coz it ain't Metro. It's all just about trying to move to the iOS walled garden model and shut down our choices and freedom as usual.

I saw that movie. Fell asleep. Boring, cliched "action" (a fight on top of a speeding train? Seriously?). Endless sequences of people walking or standing in a room. No sexual tension. Stereotypes like Judy Denche's very boring 'M' rendition. Only a little dry humor, and tackling Bond's mid-aged crisis and ageism issues, is not enough to save this movie.

Isn't the "app revolution" producing profound changes in geek culture? A democratization of app building tools and platforms so it's pretty easy to learn to build an app and a lot of motivation to hit the big time with one? So we are getting a big influx of app builders who may not come from traditional programming soil at all, are fully self-taught, and know very little about the underlying system. Compare using one of the high level easy SDKs now with first learning C/C++/Perl/Assembler to be taken seriously for a job. These are different times.

Right. Debian to me sounds like a suboptimal choice for getting any insight into the black hat subculture. Since Debian prides itself on being the most stable and dependable distribution (that's its brand, and it's a good one), I would have thought the only fondness they'd have for black hats would be as penetration/hardness testers. It's almost as if that choice was made without understanding that there is no relationship whatsoever between the press's definition of 'hacker' and the vague industry use of that term as interchangeable with 'programmer'. Black hats are supposed to be called "crackers" but that's gone right out of usage thanks to the media changing the meaning of "hacker".

I'll bet there's a huge diversity of people involved in Debian, from stereotypical Aspie-afflicted geeks that require careful handling through to smooth corporate IT types. After all you don't need to know coding to maintain a .deb package, help write documentation or do any number of other vital tasks that are the bricks and mortar of a distribution.

It's important to take the so-called anthropological method - and all qualitative research methodology - with a large grain of salt. This is not to discount it out of hand. As far as I am concerned, these methods are very useful for getting perspectives on a complex subject (by gathering so-called "rich data") and for extracting themes and developing hypotheses out of that data which might be quantitatively testable. But it's not scientific method by itself at all, these should be regarded as techniques that attempt to provide a preamble to doing scientific method. Pissed off by their exclusion from "science" and especially its funding, humanities and social sciences have inappropriately elevated qualitative methods to something mysterious and magical as part of a postmodern backlash against hard science. And of course the media has no idea what the difference is between qualitative and quantitative methods and just write things like "The study showed that ....".

Stock retort but good: so you would have no objection then to the government placing surveillance cameras in your bedroom and bathroom? After all, didn't you say that the secrets of you and your family should not be hidden from the government? Private emails to a loved one, to name one example, are every bit as personal as toilet and sexual habits as far as I am concerned.

How true. So many coding "innovations" turn out to be no more than marketing coats of a different color and that's true in many other life endeavors as well. One example is all the hype that accompanied the introduction of OoP: it was supposed to solve everything, provide world peace, provide ponies etc. Surprise! Studies suggest it has not delivered but OoP is now so entrenched in common apis (eg Gtk+) and industry coding practices that it has become quite unavoidable, loathe it or love it.

Amazing how young people buy so deeply into trends. I know I did myself at their age. I viewed it as a form of social intelligence to be up with trends. I really think human youths are biologically hard-wired to follow trends and fashions as part of 'socialization' or 'maturation' (with the political effect of processing or acculturation of the young so they become good little citizen-worker-consumers). That is the reason you love music from your youth always. There's some sort of imprinting going on.