Yet she still had time to write the Realm-Jumper Chronicles, 5 volumes and counting. Colour me impressed.

Let's wait until next week then.

Sure, it could be that. But it could also be:

• A cleaning person plugging a vacuum cleaner into the power strip on the rack instead of into the wall outlet that's on an external circuit (combined with improper power filtering in the equipment).
• Electrical noise caused by some other crappy piece of equipment in the rack (combined with improper power filtering in the equipment).
• Errors caused by higher operating temperature.
• Errors caused by emissions from natural Uranium or other radioactive elements in the soil.
• A software bug.
• A hardware bug.

And if it happens disproportionately on one class of equipment, unless there are material differences in the amount of shielding, any one of those five is probably much more likely than cosmic rays, IMO. :-)

So... After I rob your house, if I can make it to the Canadian border without getting caught, I'm home free, and this is entirely ethical, right?

Kuala Lumpur. I thought the context should have made it clear. Sorry if it wasn't so obvious.

After they mismanaged the company for a few years, trashing our corporate culture and making all the employees miserable I found another job and resigned.

If you were an ethical person, you would have bailed as soon as the acquisition was announced.

miserable, judgemental jerk

Why would I be miserable? I don't have the taint of working for a criminal organization on my conscience.

-jcr

Perhaps you lack the basic information that oxygen is the most abundant element on earth. It makes up close to half of the mass of the planet. We're not going to run out of it.

-jcr

an insurance company that uses Accenture policy administration software

Would you mind telling us what company that is? I want to make sure I never do business with them.

-jcr

I was a Senior Consultant at Andersen Consulting

Hey, thanks for the heads-up. Now everybody knows that you're not someone to trust.

Have you also worked at the NSA or any other criminal organization?

-jcr

Andersen Consulting split off from Arthur Andersen before the SHTF.

Not before crimes were committed, just before they were discovered.

Andersen remains a pack of crooks, and hiring shills like you to spin the story doesn't change that.

-jcr

"Accenture" is Andersen Consulting under a stupid-sounding name to try to avoid the stench of the Enron scandal. As an organization, they have always been devoid of any ethical qualms, and they should be ignored.

-jcr

You should not argue with analogies if you don't understand their limitations.

Well, technically it is illegal for a private citizen to tamper with US foreign relations, and about the only way to do that effectively is to be a presidential candidate and open side negotiations with a foreign power in anticipation of your possible election (e.g. to continue doing something or taking a position against American interests until you are in power and will give them a better deal).

In that case this is both an issue for the FBI (for the criminal aspect) and the CIA (for the working against US interests aspect).

Over the years there have been charges of presidential candidates tampering with US foreign policy: Nixon in Vietnam; Reagan with Iran. In both cases the candidate succeeded. The evidence for Reagan's involvement with Iraq is circumstantial at best, which is what you'd expect because if Reagan had violated the Logan Act it would have been William Casey who orchestrated it. But there IS solid evidence that Nixon did try to ensure that the North Vietnamese didn't agree to any ceasefires with Johnson -- not only a violation of the Logan Act, but since we were at war with the North Vietnamese quite possibly a rare actual case of treason.

Pol Pot was Cambodian. Now go get Grandpa his bourbon, I'm a gettin' testy with you youg 'uns.

Agreed. And more importantly, if you have braces, it is possible for the IDE to programmatically fix the indentation so that it is easy to read. There's absolutely no sane reason to require a programmer to use whitespace for any reason other than between tokens that would otherwise be a single token if shoved together. All other use should be superfluous, and the IDE should make it readable for you without the need for a person to do it.

And the reason braces should be in every programming language, IMO, is that it makes it easier to jump to the end of a block. When I have nested blocks in a properly braced language, I can hit percent in vi, and I'm at the end of that block. I don't have to move the cursor to the beginning of the line and laboriously hit the down arrow key a line at a time until I find a line that isn't indented as far. Therein lies the path to madness.

Want to dramatically improve the programming world in a single project? Design a meta-language for code formatting so that a set of text-based rules can enforce everybody's own quirky code formatting standards. Make it handle at least the twenty or so most popular programming languages. Then open source it under a BSD license so that the interpreter can be readily built into every IDE on the planet. Then, we can finally dispense with all of these silly programming languages that use whitespace syntactically once and for all.