But you do need competent ones. Does your HR know the first thing about what makes a programmer "good", much less a "rock star"?

You guys ever think of scouring github for programmers? You can see their code in advance and contacting someone directly vs having some headhunter google their resume off the internet and shotgun it at you might save you a few grand. You might even find a guy or two who knows something about oo.

A while back I jokingly told a fellow skydiver I refused to fall slower than the top speed in my car. Average terminal velocity is 120 mph. Falling at 200mph would be kind of a bitch. I might be able to fall faster than the Ferrari if you pushed it out the back of the plane, though (Actually, that'd make an awesome Red Bull commercial...)

Like that scene from Airplane, they should just give you a gun if you don't have one when you check in at the gate. That'd make the whole process a lot easier...

That's what God wants. It says it in the Bible that Jews are His Chosen People. We can believe the Bible because Jews wrote it and who can doubt God's Chosen People but those who are working for Satan or Nazis?

Everyone's jumping on the lambda train! Choo Choo! You know what that means! Two years from now all code will be written with nothing but lambdas. All those programmers out there with a new hammer, looking for a nail and all. Don't get me wrong, I just posted up a bit of nitfy sorcery with the new C++11 ones that would have been a lot harder without them. I'm just not looking forward to maintaining any code written in the next couple years. If we actually did design reviews here, I'd have to demand that any usage of them be justified (Kind of like singletons a couple of years ago blah.)

Hah! My process thingy uses fork and network socket I/O, monitors the state of its child process and tells you how it died! It does everything you ever wanted a process thingy to do on windows! Good luck getting it to compile there! Heh heh heh.

Oh, hmm. I don't think I've actually written the process thingy up as a library yet. I probably should. It's a bit nicer than system(). Then all those bad programmers out there could do process_thingy("rm /tmp/some_file").wait() instead of system("rm /tmp/some_file"). That's a HUGE improvement. I'll add that to my to-do list for the weekend. Funnily enough I wanted exactly such a library a couple of jobs ago, but they were using Java for their application, and it's impossible to do this in Java without JNI. And my position is if you're using JNI in your java program, you've already defeated the reason you used java in the first place (Write once, run anywhere.) So you may as well use C for the entire project.

I DID write my socket thingy as a library though, and posted it as a repo on github. You just implement a class that takes its owner, a file descriptor and a sockaddr_in pointer as constructor parameters and overload operator() to do work against the the file descriptor. Mostly it's an academic exercise, but I'll be leveraging it to do some neat things in the coming weeks. It uses pthreads and network socket I/O. Good luck getting that to compile on windows (Maybe you can with cygwin *shrug*.) I don't actually compile any code up there though. It's mostly just up there to illustrate how to do something. Maybe one of these days when I've done enough libraries like that, I'll write a book.

Oh, yeah, and I don't do windows. I think that's what I was going to say right out the gate. Sorry about that. My bad.

I got it before the turn of the millenium, big ol' bulky SONY CRT. Doesn't even have digital connectors, that's how old it is. I just have a couple of sets of composite plugs.

That could very easily be the last TV that I ever buy. It's been more and more irrelevant as time goes on -- neither next generation of console interests me, cable's a vast wasteland of uninteresting programming and anything that IS interesting can be found on the Internet with more convenience and less expense. If I need something to look at when I'm in the living room, maybe I could take its guts out and turn it into a fish tank.

The staff of the Consulate should construct giant satellite dishes out of tin foil and hang them out of every window in the place.

That's not really the point. Gmail is one of the larger mail services and if they were encrypt-by-default, a lot more mail would be encrypted. A large campaign to subvert that would be more likely to be spotted. I'm not saying that would be the be-all and end-all to security. There IS NO be-all and end-all to security. I'm just saying I would find that to be an impressive move on their part and it would go a long way toward restoring the confidence I've lost in the company.

I'll trust my 4096 bit GPG key over some ietf-approved 256-bit encryption standard. At least I'm not asking them to support a one-time pad sent on a DVD via personal courier :-/

If Google wanted to impress me, they'd include a spot to paste a GPG public key in gmail and auto-encrypt all mails with it on the client side for gmail users or at the entry point of their network for all other mail users. As it stands Google is very much part of the problem, not very much part of the solution.

No! It seemed like an ENTIRELY reasonable position, at the time, that there was NO CONCEIVABLE WAY that "they" would be listening to EVERYONE! That would be a COMPLETELY USELESS waste of resources to catch then probably-less-than-a-thousand people who were ACTUAL THREATS to security! People, I might add, who already knew NOT TO USE THE INTERNET for communication! "Mom," I told mom, in a reassuring tone of voice, "go ahead and use the internet. 'They' already know you're not a threat. Their file on you says 'mostly harmless.'" She's gone dark since this story broke. Now I'm going to have to find a motherfucking CAVE somewhere in Florida and send a motherfucking CARRIER PIGEON there with a note that says "Fine, you were right." AND I'm going to have to give tinfoil-hat-guy $20 next time I see him, because if he was right about THAT, then ALL BETS ARE OFF! Now I'm having to rethink my position on ALIEN MIND CONTROL rays! Thank you VERY GODDAMN MUCH, NSA!

Hey baby! How's about you and I get together and... kill all humans?

Yeah yeah and I'm having to go through the last couple years of E-mails and tell the various paranoid whackos, slightly demented old relatives and that one guy with the tinfoil that they were right and I was wrong. How do you think that makes ME feel?