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."

We do our builds on a pool of linux machines, in a continuous build cycle, so that isn't really a problem.

In the case I noted, the gal turned the AV off specifically because she needed to move some files around, and was thinking it was taking too long. The real problem was the ancient hub that her machine was plugged into.

She is about 28, and is really cute, too...

The stated complaint was that she was having to copy a set of large files around, and it was taking too long. Since I spend a lot of my time copying many more and larger files in the same environment, I'm skeptical of the basis for her complaint. Our AV software isn't too onerous. Her team doesn't work -any- overtime, so I'm unsympathetic.

We maintain a development network and a QA network. The dev and QA teams have admin on the server machines in these networks. This is useful/necessary because we are constantly spinning up and tearing down virtual machines for various scenarios. Devs have local admin on their workstations. In general this has worked fine, except for one moron who used the privilege to turn off her virus scanning.

Production is subject to more structured control in theory, but in practice, I and another couple of guys have /sudo/root on the prod machines, because our corporate admins don't want to learn enough about the software to be useful. So much for PCI...

I'm pretty sure I'm not unique in having picked up such things at that age.

You're not unique, but you are unusual. I helped in my son's 5th grade class when they used NQC (not quite C) for programming lego style robots, and most of the kids struggled a bit, despite this being a class of brighter kids. One of the kids picked it up immediately, but he is certifiably genius material (5th grade at 8 years old). My son, who is just your average run of the mill 99th percentile student, was able to accomplish the robot tasks, but didn't really grok the larger 'program' thang.

On the larger topic, I think python is a pretty good choice for teaching kids. The NetBeans IDE will likely be a good choice when they get the python addons stable (don't know if they are yet, a few months ago they were rocky. If you're not scared of spending a little money, the Komodo IDE from activestate is a good IDE for Python/Perl.

I also think VB would be a good choice, again if you're not afraid of spending money, but anyone trying to teach a 12 year old programming is likely to be teaching them Linux soon as well, and VB won't be portable.

I'm talking totally impossible, acid trip inspired creatures and landscapes.

You're saying this like it's a bad thing.

Me, I'm looking forward to blowing a bowl and seeing it with the kids this weekend.