Trump's position is not so different from that of past presidents Clinton and Obama. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama on immigration - YouTube[^]

I love this: > "If you ask Oracle, they can show you some numbers" I'll bet they can. :-) Does anyone remember this story from last year? Oracle security chief to customers: Stop checking our code for vulnerabilities | Ars Technica[^] Or this? Oracle Agrees to Settle FTC Charges It Deceived Consumers About Java Software Updates | Federal Trade Commission[^]

I agree completely. Companies waste a staggering amount of money when they avoid making a commitment to a technology. The top definition for "agnostic" in the Urban Dictionary reads:

An agnostic is a person who believes that the existence of a greater power, such as a god, cannot be proven or disproved; therefore an agnostic wallows in the complexity of the existence of higher beings.

Wallowing in complexity... That is a perfect summary of technological agnosticism.

That's a great question. Let me think about it for a minute... ... wait, what was the question again?

Hit-and-run foiled after driver's car calls the cops [^]

Brilliant quote here.

PHP = A Fractal of Bad Design [^]:

I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there. You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes. You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways. You pull out the pliers, but they don’t have those serrated surfaces; it’s flat and smooth. That’s less useful, but it still turns bolts well enough, so whatever. And on you go. Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe not enough to make it completely worthless. And there’s no clear problem with the set as a whole; it still has all the tools. Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door. That’s what’s wrong with PHP.

It's no fun being the only expert in the room. The Expert [^]

Oracle says some pretty strange things. This is my personal favorite: Oracle Security Chief to Customers: Stop checking our code for vulnerabilities [^] >Davidson [Oracle's chief security officer] scolded customers who performed their own security analyses of code, calling it reverse engineering and a violation of Oracle's software licensing.

I agree with you. It is an enormously complicated problem without any easy solutions, and there may be too few incentives for profit-driven companies to do the right thing. Despite the fact they paint a very dark and stylized dystopian future, classic films like The Terminator and The Matrix (and to some extent, more recent films like Ex Machina) contain stories that advise great caution when it comes to robotics, automation, and AI. Frankly, I'm not sure we take stories like those seriously enough. Many years ago, Bill Joy (the co-founder of Sun Microsystems) wrote an article for Wired Magazine that was titled "Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us [^]. Here is one excerpt: > The average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite – just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race.

How to welcome the robots that will steal all our jobs [^] An interesting article here... :) Does anyone know if the following quote is actually true?

Quote:

Today, you can have a company like Instagram, which is valued at $35 billion, and it's only employing like 20 people.

I have always followed an agile methodology, long before the term was coined and capitalized upon. Scrum was a formulation and a formalization that I never bought into, personally. I mean "pair programming", for example... Who has ever had that kind of money to burn!? The article is excellent. Thanks for posting a link to it here.

This quote from the article is especially interesting: "We have a situation where taking an entirely ad hoc approach to software arguably leads to more successful outcomes than traditional approaches." Does this mean no management is better than poor management? Could you argue that no development is better than poor development? Perhaps...

I agree completely. In fact, sometimes I think the term "sanitation engineer" would be a more accurate job title. :)

Hopefully you aren't working for SunTrust. :) Bank’s severance deal requires IT workers to be on call for two years[^]

> Source code is worthless[^] This is the reason so much of it is free and open.

"How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot" in every language. http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=3917012#xx3917012xx[^] We love - and hate - them all.

A friend watching Fox News last night sent me this photo of his television screen. Open Season on the Cracker [^] This is either terrifying or hilarious... I'm not sure which.

Great article - thanks for posting the link here. This is a great line: "Today, software is more like an extreme sport." Just imagine if everyone who took up programming also took up wingsuit flying. Wait a second... That could actually solve a lot of problems.

I agree completely. I'd say 5 years to achieve proficiency, and 10 years to reach anything that resembles mastery. I have been coding for a lot longer than that, and I'm still learning something new every day.

I understand your reluctance to use third-party tools, because I encountered a very similar problem (with very similar requirements) working on a project for one of my customers. Email verification is a complex process, and it requires several validation levels: 1. The email address itself must have the correct syntax, so a regular expression check is needed. 2. The email address must reference a valid domain name, so a DNS query is needed. 3. The email address must reference a domain name that accepts mail server connections, so an SMTP connection is needed. 4. The email address must reference a valid inbox on the receiving mail server, so a send (or send attempt) is needed. You don't have to use the components from this particular developer, but you might his descriptions of the above levels sufficiently detailed to implement your own solution using your own code. Refer to the section titled "Understanding Validation Levels" on this page: http://www.afterlogic.com/mailbee-net/docs/getting_started_with_address_validator.html[^] Speaking from my own experience, it is certainly possible to write the code to implement all four validation levels, but it turned out to be too expensive and too time-consuming for my customer, and so I was able to convince them to license software components from that developer.