I guess I'm playing with cheat codes. All I have to do is check out and compile one of our solutions and I've automatically got all the "Power Coder" achievements. Until today, I'd never considered any of those attributes to be things anyone would want to consider as goals - not that they are inherently bad. That's nothing special either. I think there are hoardes of programmers out there working on software for which this is true.

Where's the points for things like consistant formatting and naming conventions? How about a low ratio of intermodule dependencies comparied to complexity (ie. orthogonality)? How about points for checking error conditions? How about points for adding a unit test or updating the comments around the code you're working on? Is "Equal Opportunist (10 points) Write a class with public, private, protected and internal members. It's all about scope." really the best they could come up with for a Top 6 list? It's sad to see how far they've fallen since the days of Steve McConnell and Code Complete.

Indeed. I often hear the accusation that scientists are afraid to challenge the consensus for fear of losing grant money. Actually, it seems that all the incentives are rather to challenge the mainstream. After all, in science you get famous by discovering something new not by blindly reenforcing old beliefs.

It seems SOPA is trending higher than "Wikipedia alternative" at least according to the information available at the moment. It will be interesting to see which really spikes today (if any).

This smells a little bit like Y2K in that the real problem was that noone wanted to pay to find and fix the remaining incompatible code. From my vantage point it appears that it is still cheaper for MIT to do nothing. I wonder if there's a reasonable price point at which it would be worth their while to free up some address space to sell. Of course, that might involve asking cantankerous professors to change some static ip's that they've cherished for years. I suppose I'll be ice skating on an imaginary frozen lake of fire before that happens. By contrast, the only revenue stream I can think of that would help offset the cost of going to IPv6 is grant money *rolls eyes*.

Disclaimer: my only experience with IPv6 was on a Linux client machine. For me, it meant horribly slow web browsing as many requests involved waiting for IPv6 to timeout before if would fall back and try IPv4. I opted for lazy and just disabled IPv6 rather than go looking for a solution.

Funny you should mention. Some researchers recently published experimental results which, in spite of their best efforts to check and rerun the tests, still contradicts Einstein's theory. Instead of being "ignored" or "told they are wrong" this has sparkd a healthy debate in the community where people either need to determine why the experimental results are not as expected, perform their own experiments to provide meaningful and relevant data for comparison, or they need to accept that the current consensus is wrong (at least to a certain extent) and reflect on this new information we've just learned about the world. That's how science works.

Note that those researchers have received plenty of criticism for their findings but they have chosen to participate in the scientific process instead of doing something childish such as forming groups to lobby the government to prevent Einstein's theories from being taught in public schools. If someone has credible data to the contrary of the current findings and concensus they will get much further by presenting their own data than they will by trying to censor the data and conclusions of others.

BTW. The US Congress isn't exactly a credible authority on matters of science and technology. You would do a bit better to find sources from people who actually have some knowledge about the subject.

checksum != digital signature

Arch already provides checksums for source to be downloaded for AUR packages. I'm not sure about binary packages. In any case, that's not the same as digital signing which is what is being implemented here. I highly recommend Applied Cryptography (ISBN 0-471-59756-2) if it's is not clear to you.

I'll second that. All my experiences with home telescopes and observatories I've visited have been underwhelming to say the least. I'd rather look at Hubble images any day. The only exception is when I've been fortunate enough be in the mountains (or just away from urban areas and other sources of light) on a few clear nights. A telescope would have been nice, but it's amazing enough just to see the full night sky and everything I usually miss living in large cities. For shear breadth of view the naked / lensed eye works quite well.

I suppose now Murdoch will accuse Wikipedia of being a "piracy leader" along with Google. After all, Wikipedia just serves up other people's content and takes money (what they call "donations") for it.

Ok, fair enough. Language alone can't be used to establish cultural identify and the continuity of civilization. But the point remains. Roman civilization has not carried forward to the present day the same way that, for example, the Chinese and Indian civilizations have.

I was responding to the assertion that the use of a particular policy by the Romans could be used as an argument for the US to implement the same (or similar) policies today. I submit that the decline of Roman civilization and even culture is reason enough to not blindly adopt arbitrary policies and tactics that they employed. You could certainly assert that the Romans achieved X by doing Y and we can learn from that, but I refuse to accept the OP's argument: "We should do X because the Roman Empire and Soviet Union did X."

Our strategy after 9/11 was a totally disproportionate response and it essentially was a losing game... for us.

For each of the "enemies" you're thinking of, you should go back to history and take a look at they reasons they have to hate us. I'll give you a hint: they have better reasons than just religious, economic and cultural differences.

We should of course point out that the Soviet Union lasted less than a century. Not only did Rome overextend itself militarily and eventually fall, but there's no one left that even speaks their language as a mother tongue. These are not exactly shining examples of thriving cultures and effective governmental policies.

For my part, war is simply a more violent period of a larger geopolitical conflict - be it struggle for resources, religion, misunderstandings, oppression (the attempt to impose or be free from), or simply bruised egos. Going forward we should be thinking about these underlying conflicts and better ways to address them. I think we will find that violence of all sorts is the decreasingly pragmatic choice much as it is already a poor humanitarian choice.

Nice. Right after Hostess files for bankruptcy TFA cites "hacker machismo" with a link to a list of "real programmer" attributes which includes 'surviving on Twinkies'. Seems like there's not much demand for that "food" after all.

That's only relevant if you screw up your own ballot. If the monkeys at the booth smudge your marks or if the voting device malfunctions behind the scenes, you won't know you need to ask for a new ballot. If we didn't consider voter intent it would be awfully easy to selectively mishandle ballots when determining which ones should be discarded for not having clear marks.

It's an ironic criticism considering how ugly the font is that they used for the article.

That's an odd generalization for programmers. If you hire people who don't pay attention to detail, you'll get sloppy resuls whether they're programmers or designers.

Is he actually reading the books or just looking at the pictures?