The Canonization of St.Bill | The Register

The Canonization of St.Bill | The Register:

If William Henry Gates the Third's philanthropic work leads to him being canonized one day as the first secular saint of our times, I won't stand in the way of the celebrations. Geeks get things very out of proportion, and the value of saving even one life should be more apparent to everyone than the cost of a poorly written Windows USB stack. When Microsoft is criticized, while the practices of arms dealers, pharmaceutical companies and extraction cartels around the world are ignored, its reminds us that some nerds place a very low value on human life itself.

40 million lines of code in windows XP. 7 billion people on a planet rated able to only feed 'most' of them. We have way too many people and way too complex systems at our disposal, and a buggy few of each of them give us faulty USB stacks or American dictator families using money from the last global menace to create a new one.

Sorry, Mr Oslowski, but you'll have to prove your point about the value of people a bit more. I know that the value of a line of code is very low, despite that there are less of them around, so you just need ot show me that people have more value than computer code, when either is taken as a mob.

Banker fighting extradition to Thailand says Canada is full of "idiots"

Banker fighting extradition to Thailand says Canada is full of "idiots":

VANCOUVER (CP) - A fugitive banker fighting extradition to Thailand for a decade because his lawyers say he fears torture says Canada is full of 'unintelligent idiots,' he doesn't want to stay here and he isn't really worried about his future.

I have an idea, since Mr Saxena "doesn't care":

1. stop posturing
2. stop fighting extradition
3. stop eating free Canadian food
4. stop drinking free Canadian water
5. stop living in free Canadian luxury apartments
6. stop insulting your guests
   
7. catch a plane home
8. save everyone money, time and your continued degradation
9. piss off.

That, sir, should please everyone. Since you're obviously tired of an overly-fair court system, you are welcome to return to your own home and be the guest of a system that may indeed take less than ten expensive years to decide your level of involvement in this massive bank scam. Then your future will be clearly determined, and you need not be concerned about it.

Bye now. Don't let my foot hit you in the ass on the way out.

`Rubbish’ in The New York Times

Mr Brian Akre writes, on a GM blog, about his struggle trying to rebut a very (intentionally) scathing opinion/editorial piece which appeared in the New York Times. To my ears, the NYT seemed very reluctant to even entertain an opinion opposing something they've bestowed upon us through their publishing might.

FYI Blog: The Ban on `Rubbish’ in The New York Times:

Part of our response was to send a letter from my boss, Steve Harris, to the editor of the Times. Now, you’d think it would be relatively easy to get a letter from a GM vice president published in the Times after GM’s reputation was so unfairly questioned.

Apparently, the word 'rubbish' is too strong a word to use in Letters, while unfounded accusations suggesting collusion with terrorists by the "most dangerous company in the world" seems okay as long as it's written by someone at the NYT -- Tom Friedman, to name the potential libeller in question. They can certainly dish out the invective, but aren't too keen on printing the replies.

Oh, but they can print the long-winded letters of agreement, never fear.

I would link to the article, but the NYT charges stooges to look over their rubbish. I wonder if the NYT thinks their rubbish is anything but, with behaviour such as this.

Your Hierarchical Database Trickery is Weak and Pointless

While searching for some recursion help in MySQL, I ran across MySQL AB :: Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL. It's a lovely read, duplicated several times all over the net by people looking to cash in on the idea by changing the names of the object, but it's got one flaw: It's weak.

Yep, it's frail. It's so specialized that it can do naught but crouch in its little niche and do one thing well but nothing else at all. Let me crush your handy model with the image at right.

Now, tough guy, show me the might of this edge model over the adjacent model.

While you're at it, show me some REAL recursion instead of this "if you think your table is X deep, do X left-joins" crap. That's not recursion, and you should know that. Recursion runs into the deepest chasm or to the end of an array without knowing where it is, how far it's come nor how far it has left to do. Recursion is, by nature, completely short-sighted; that's the beauty of recursion.

Recursion doesn't give me a migraine at all; idiots who iterate and call it recursion, or who confine truly wonderful data by crappy meta-data, all to avoid recursion, make me hulk out and want to kill everything. How come a guy like me can grok recursion and you people can't?

CGI.pm - a Perl5 CGI Library

CGI.pm - a Perl5 CGI Library:

AS OF 10 FEBRUARY 2005 (CGI.pm VERSION 3.06) THIS DOCUMENT IS NO LONGER BEING MAINTAINED. PLEASE CONSULT THE CGI POD DOCUMENTATION USING 'perldoc CGI'

Yes, okay. Instead of viewing documentation via the standard method of doing so, I'd be overjoyed in learning some pointless and redundant method which you like to use to display your help manual. Like half the gnu projects out there, the in-house projects by the foundation seemingly built to defend our freedom to choose, I'm surprised that your project can be so snobbish and demanding.

No, I'll not use perldoc, info, or any other redundant and crappy tool. I have 'man' to show me a groff representation of stuff, and when we move to HTML for documentation I'll gladly use that too. Until then, piss off.

Perl sucks anyway.

Gobsmacked

Lexington Herald-Leader | 06/03/2006 | Nightmare on Race Street:

The rat colony was next to Ann Collier's house. She said she feeds the rats so they won't bite her.

'I don't know why they congregate here,' [Ms] Collier said.

Lady, you've just advertised you're ripe for the next scam or religion you happen to wander across, and you've all but proven Barnum's Law. What part of "if you feed them, they will come" do you not understand?