My first paid programming job was a point of sale system I wrote for my boss, who had just bought a gym. It had basic functionality; a cash register function, inventory function and a Z tape-style dump that they could run at the end of the day. It was good enough to be used to catch one of the employee's stealing protein drinks. I was paid a whopping $250. QBasic was a bit slow and the startup parameters a bit hoakey so I convinced my boss to pick up a copy of QuickBASIC 4.5 and compiled the beast into exe.

I remember having to do that with MFM drives on our Tandy 6000 mini-computer. That's the beast that I gained my *nix chops on.

First experience with programming was my uncle teaching me a few commands in C64 BASIC. Where I really learned to program was on a Radio Shack MC-10 with 4k onboard and a 16k cartridge for a whopping 20k! Say what you will about the quality of the Radio Shack/Tandy computers, but they had some of the best manuals going, and I must have read my MC-10 BASIC manual from cover to cover a hundred times.

Where I think I really crossed the line and became an actual programmer was when I was loaned a VIC-20 with a bunch of RAM expansion modules and I decided one day, for no real reason that I can remember, to develop my own BASIC interpreter written in Commodore BASIC. I never got it much more complex than being able to do user input, store variables and do some basic branching, but it taught me much of what I know about array handling, string tokenization and even some low level stuff like a pretty primitive stack and program counter.

Because that's what humans do... over and over and over again.

They have medications for your condition.

Yes but... look Malvinas!

Yes, but they don't have a ground plug, so jacking off in the can while plugged in greatly increases the risks of severe electric shock.

And maybe that's part of intelligence. Catching yourself being stupid is infinitely smarter than not catching yourself being stupid.

If he has no money to fight his legal battles, he has no money to sue Google or anyone else. So I think the appropriate response should "Fuck off."

Indeed. Would somebody please put this worthless piece of crap in jail.

No, it's like how convicted pedophiles are not allowed to live or hang out near schools.

Obviously one has to draw a line somewhere, but comparing a computer to food is obviously not a rational comparison.

(And FYI, the analogy would be "People accused of lock picking are not allowed to have lockpicks". Which should be obvious.)

First off, £350 is probably not particularly out of line for the cost to process the records. If we were talking £350000 pounds, yeah, that would look like an attempt at censorship. But there's nothing pecular about £350. Secondly, if anyone in the media had felt it was even remotely newsworthy, they would have paid it. The media pays processing costs for records all the time. All that this means is that most news agencies consider Warg a non-story.

Warg's restrictions are special specifically because the crime his charged with is hacking. Banning a graphing calculator is probably overreach, but it's understandable why they'd want to keep him away from computers.

Sort of like the last leak, the "Kissinger Cables", that were publicly accessible data that journalists and historians have been making use of for years, which he downloaded, reformatted, and set on the Wikileaks site.

New slogan suggestion: Wikileaks: We Open Governments (by taking the data they've already released, running it through a couple python scripts, putting it on our site, and calling it something new)

Prior to the Classical Greek era there was no philosophy that really even vaguely resembled modern science. Not even the Greeks possessed actual science, but at least they tried out different methodologies.