Unfortunately, Windows is just a little bit more than a VMS clone.

Man you say this like it is a bad thing. If Windows were a VMS clone, it would be bulletproof, stable, usable, but really expensive.

Wait...

I'm dating myself, but I used to love VMS.

Oh, please. Go back to your garage already. UAC, for better or worse, implemented a permissions scheme. Your statement is equivalent to saying that the user security subsystem was created to fix a design problem in the Unix kernel. Both functions exist because of human issues outside the machine.

So why is this a problem?

Generally it's a problem because the sysadmins are busy and can't get to it for a week, and something needs to be installed on this machine today or a team can't get work done.

You seem to be infected with the sysadmin disease that causes the patient to think that no-one else can run yum safely. Generally, the less experienced/capable the admin, the more susceptible they seem to be to this disease. Nobody should be working on the mail server, but they shouldn't need to be doing anything on the mail server, anyway - it should be a protected box. For general development boxes, it shouldn't be an issue. For production boxes, you NEED a sudo account so someone who knows what they are doing can perform production support. Trusting a system admin to do this who doesn't know the application is as risky as letting a secretary administer the mail server.

Less sarcastically, sudo exists for a reason. It's trivial to let someone perform a subset of admin tasks without giving away the keys to the store.

As an admin, it's also smart to learn to delegate these tasks when possible. It reduces your response time to tickets, improves user productivity, and creates skill redundancy. These are all good things for you and the business.

Must be a windows box.

Hmm-m-m. I think you're making what is known as a Bare Assertion Fallacy . With a touch of red herring thrown in for seasoning. I said nothing about illusion.

What I said was that I suspect that free will is a perception that we have. I think an omniscient objective observer would think we have free will like an amoeba, for example, has free will. The amoeba has physical constituents which are determined completely by the laws of physics, it reacts according to environmental factors which are determined completely by the laws of physics, according to it's biomechanical reactions, which, again, are determined completely by the laws of physics. And yet it wanders apparently sometimes randomly, sometimes purposefully. Is that free will?

Now, for a human, maybe we have some magic thing, let's call it a soul, which makes our reactions somehow not governed by our makeup, our environment, and our history. But nobody has observed or measured one of those yet. Yet, many people say it is obvious that we have one of these. I don't think that is a scientific or thoughtful conclusion. And so it is for the notion of free will, for me. I realize that many will disagree.

There is no imaginable mechanism by which that could have happened, so the claim is (of course) arbitrary, and should simply be disregarded.

Show me a mechanism by which free will can exist, and I will readily concede the point. It's reasonably well accepted in the scientific community that everything we do is governed by the neurons in our brain (mediated by the rest of the body, no doubt). If that is true, and absent an observable soul, it seems simply that there is no imaginable mechanism by which free will can exist. Therefore, as someone recently said this notion should just be disregarded. ;-)

which is easily falsified in this instance by the simple fact that not everyone acts in this way.

If everyone had the same background, geneology, wealth, intelligence, etc, and still acted in different manners, you might have an argument for non-determinism. But that too is an impossible scenario, so we don't really know, do we? Simple birth order has been shown to change behavior between siblings. The brownian motion of society will cause us to have different histories, and thus to be determined differently.

Those of us who do believe in determinism don't automatically rule out the phenomenon of apparent free will. We simply think it's likely a perception, rather than any true capriciousness of man's mind. If you argue this, it's because your history and makeup force you to do so. If you don't, it's because they allow you not to.

It's really hard to -prove- that free will exists. I spent 2 years in philosophy classes listening to people try. It's no more settled than whether some guy 2000 years ago really died for our sins. It's also usually argued with the same level of non-fact based vehemence, too.

You know, it's easy to poke fun at the Microsofty, but is it possible that he was just trying to find out what was being hit so that he could figure out who in his organization he should contact? Maybe there is some uber technical way he could have figured this out, or maybe he should have RTFB, but his response sounded well intentioned and responsive. What would you prefer? The microsoft of old?

While I agree with your prescription, I think it's too late for that alone to be sufficient. Even if we fixed the current deficit, the current interest payments alone are some 20% of our spending. Somehow we have to pay back the principal.

he reason we will likely get it is that it is the politically easier of the only two options available for addressing the massive debt, including off-book future liabilities, of the U.S. government.

Oh, for mod points. This person gets it. Historically, one of the major drivers for government laxity towards inflation (Argentina, Mexico, Pre WWII germany, etc) is that the government owes more in nominal terms than it can fund through taxes. Allow a few years of 10% inflation, and that burden is eased significantly, as tax revenues rise with inflation, while the size of the debt remains the same. We will see 6-10% inflation for 3 to 8 years sometime in the next 15 years, because that is the ONLY way the US government can get out of the financial hole we are in. This will in turn hurt the Chinese, who are holding vast amounts of dollar demoninated debt.

Well, in a "sterile" security zone, one unapproved person can ruin everything. Even if you find him/her, they may have given an weapon to somebody else who was screened earlier and passed.

Oh, fuck, is there anyone who really believes that airport security prevents weapons from getting through? I personally have forgotten pocket knives in my carryon luggage twice in the past year, and neither time were they detected. The airports are nowhere close to being a sterile zone. Never have been, never will be.

As Steve McConnell noted a long time ago, one of the major reasons you supply free coffee and free pop is to keep your employees close to their desks. If people walk across the street to starbucks twice a day, or even to the cafeteria, , that's 30 minutes of productivity per day you lost. Assuming $70k a year for a developer, those walks across the street cost you $4300/year. It's a lot cheaper to buy a coffee machine.

The phrase "false economy" comes to mind.

I disagree. The special effects/CGI was relevant to the plot. The 3-D was icing on the cake, and I found it uncomfortable to watch. This may have been in part due to the poor seats we had (close and to the side). The plot itself of course was fairly mundane, but it was a fun movie.

Agreed. I found the 3-d distracting more than additive to the movie. It was neat, but not relevent to the plot.

Software engineering is a new discipline

How new is a discipline which can now claim that at least three biological generations of man have been involved in it? Consider Hoare and Turing, Kernighan and Ritchie, and the current class of students. Heck, there have been three generations involved simply since I first laid hands to keyboard in the 70's.

As a Greybeard myself, I have repeatedly run into these types of dismissals of the value of my experience and that of my aged peers. These dismissals usually come from the youngest in the room. While it's good to challenge assumptions, it's also good to consider the possibility that you may not have been the first to do so, and that many folks before you may have done so and come to the conclusion that the assumption is still valid. I think it's logically risky to conclude that everyone before you was a freaking idiot, and that you are now the first person to see the light.

And please, if you work on my team, comment the big pieces of code.

Her boss said, "keep it on, and deal with it."