shithead

The truly rich have no pesky income - that's for the servants. They just have property and expenses, which their accountants, lawyers and politicians keep safe.

Hints: tax-free foundations are great, intellectual property is tax-free.

(There's a reason putative class-betrayer Gore Vidal spoke of "our owners", referring to the U.S. aristocracy.)

They really hate to be called out as creeps and liars.

Slightly insane, eh, what?

I can think of a few people roaming around foot-loose and fancy-free, and even pocketing scores of millions of dollars, who should be doing that.

But an engineer should have the chops one gets from doing the academic obstacle course.

Good luck.

I did not expect better of that company. Crooked is as crooked does, and that sorry bag was born crooked.

What I'm really sad about is Google going down the drain chasing after them.

"A method is described for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain." – Facebook Patent application dated September 22, 2011

Creeps and liars.

Google must be shooting for just sincerely creepy. Competitive advantage there.

Hey, Larry Page, read my lips:

    DO NOT WANT!

Asses may well just have signed the Google death warrant.

The one titled "Too many developers" may be right: [...] My John Harvey-Jones fix: bin 90% of the programmers (pay them a million each), keep a small team to maintain and slowly extend the core, and leave it at that. After all, once your house is finished you don't keep the builders and architects on retainer, but you might hire in a decorator once in a while. [...]

Also, three slots down: I easily manage my facebook content by never reading it.

Thus came B1FF@PSUVM to roam the land of newsgroups, whence comp.sources circulated programs, rec.sf-lovers hosted epic flame-wars apropos nothing much, and alt.sex (ably assisted by alt.sex.anal) told tales titillating the prurient interest of the readership.

Since then we have learned nothing much, which is why Google is climbing up its own ass chasing the social butterfly, and there are pundits like Shirky milking this tired teat over and over.

A no-prize to whoever brings back the kill-file that was feature #1 in Usenet readers. Not to mention decent threading with color-coding of postings read, but I suppose that's too much to ask in today's morass of PHP BBs with twitching avatars and stupefying 'emoji'. Ah well.

A. His lips are moving.

That's an interesting question. I'd bet the other way - for example, a 500 kLOC program having more total bugs than the sum of ten 50 kLOC programs.

But even if the sub-linear hypothesis were true, there's the yield problem that semiconductor manufacturers know well. Suppose you have, statistically, one fatal defect per 500 kLOC. That means it's hard to get a functional 500 kLOC program done. But you could get right eight or nine out of ten 50 kLOC programs ...

If not that, a grain of sand down the shaft will probably jam it good.

And, to be a complete spoilsport, "how it will look in fifty years" must be minus the nicks and dents on the sharp edges.

Effective sarcasm demands flawless execution, and they're losing that. Nowadays one can often find misspellings and sundry grammatical errors in their texts.

Once bitten, twice shy.

Scapegoat, in the vernacular. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating : a she-goat with a silver bracelet hung from her neck was driven forth into the wasteland ...

They'll make it gold, and probably spare the sex change ...

He's been watching the show for a couple dozen seasons now. The scripts aren't quite Coyote and Road Runner class, but it is possible to make good guesses about what the characters will do.

Besides, inside information would probably be wrong anyway, possibly deliberately.

The 'intellectual fight' for 'enlightenment' is the thin veneer the anticlerical Jacobins lay on their murderous ideology. Loot the Church, rape the nuns, kill the christians - started here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Vend%C3%A9e, repeated too many times in many places over the last couple of centuries.

And when their legitimate heirs Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot murder a few score million people, these Jacobins start talking about the "crimes of the Inquisition".

Good going.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3013314

> not a fair apples-to-apples comparison

Speaking of apples, will the next up be "Apple papers", linking to http://daringfireball.net/ ?

(You too, Peter Norvig.)

Good question. I'd say it depends where one draws the line. Some people draw it at horse-drawn buggies (and they may be right), others don't balk at electricity but reject some body-invading medical practices, others have very hard lines on human dignity.

I guess we'll find out, sooner or later, where the real line is by the collective "Oh, SHIT!" expletive when the tripwire is stepped on ...

Greg Bear, 26 years ago (Blood Music): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo