sohcahtoa

And yet... why no American names in the leaks? Funny that.

I'm sure this is an argument that can be applied for/against patent examiners, I'm just not sure how.

There's a fairly good analogy between SF and music. 70s music (and SF) was fat and bloated and slow. High concept stuff about galactic empires and gatefold sleeves and Serious Issues - Vietnam and the nature of reality.

And suddenly this fast, spiky thing appears, that's all nihilism and dystopia and edge and noir and anti-heroes and technology abuse, and instead of looking ahead a billion years it's looking ahead about 15 minutes, and instead of sounding like an orchestra it sounds like the wind over tensioned steel cables, and it wears sunglasses at night and it thinks technology is power and its just so gosh-darned cool...

Yeah, that's pretty much what it was like. Ok, it's all cliches now, but so's a modern punk band.

Radical transparency, David Brin style. Our runaway technology has made the panopticon inevitable. The best we can manage is to make sure we watch them as much as they watch us. That's what wikileaks was trying to do, on a small scale. (Anyone up for an open-source, freely-accessible ANPR network?)

Code Contracts for .NET, maybe?

Not exactly "no value", but risk-aversion is a valuable trait. Balance the small additional value the new shiny brings against the potential fail if it doesn't live up to its promises.

I take your point, and I do that with new hires myself.

I'm compressing things for comic effect, but I promise you the core of the story is true - I got suckered in by wonderful promises, and interviewing in the industry hot spot I was in is going to involve significant time and cash outlay.

This sentence sounds like an Evil Fortune Cookie.

Interviewer: We need someone with [describes soft skill set for my dream job]

Me: Great career opportunity, I'd certainly be willing to move across country for this

Interviewer, day 1: Here's your desk, now I'm going to assign you a ticket off the backlog. Let me know when you're done and I'll assign you another one. [pats me on the head and walks away]

Bait'n'switch, and I fell for it. I think it's the only way they can get people to come to this no-good podunk town, with not a sushi bar for miles, and 19th century development practices. And yes, I am preparing my awesome flameout exit. I hope to hear the lamentation of their womenfolk.

> Engineers should stick to their oath

Um... what oath?

Because they've got 5000 GitHub stickers left over from a conference and don't know what to do with them?

Personally I love it.

Seems that would be better built as a stand-alone spider than a bolt-in to a single blogging platform.

I had no idea DHCP could even do that. What do Android devices do on unmetered cellular connections? How do they know if the connection is metered or not?

Can't argue with that. Although I do think architecture is where patterns start to be useful - again, relying on pre-existing solutions rather than creating your own.

I think there are two ways to view what the job most programmers do is. IMO it isn't to write code, it's to solve business problems. Code just happens to be the tool that you use to do that, most of the time.

Anyone who tries to solve a problem by staring hard at a blank piece of paper instead of just googling the answer is not making effective use of their time.

> ARM were hardly the first people to bring a RISC CPU to market: MIPS, SPARC, and POWER are RISC architectures which pre-dated ARM.

Minor point: ARM-1-based devices were kinda, sorta, brought to market around '85-'86. That's neck-and-neck with MIPS I. Real ARM-2 based machines in '87 were three years ahead of the RS/6000.

Of course, lots of people were developing RISC architectures in the early 80s, in parallel.

The "... in Popular Culture" section is large enough to have been spun off into it's own article on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper_in_popular_cultur...

Peter Sommer's nom de plume was Hugo Cornwall - a name Brits who got their start in the 80s will recognise. I'm not sure where the hilarity is?

Gotta say, people who consider that the "organizational problems of society" can be solved have been responsible for a lot of misery over the centuries.