What a wonderful surprise. I'd forgotten about the judicial branch, and now they appear like the cavalry to sort out this mess.

Wouldn't it be great if they went after the patent trolls next?

I always hated that advice "Do what you Love". It's a fucking terrible advice. I know people mean well when they give that advice, but its a downright terrible advice for the vast majority of people.

Let me point out that this is an article written by a guy that ended up "loving" programming. I know that there is a lot of programmers here, (myself included) but let's face the reality here: only weirdos love programming. I say this because I'm a weirdo and I love programming, and every friend I know that loves programming is more or less the.. eccentric type. We just happen to be very fortunate in that we happen to love something that guarantees a middle class income and plenty of opportunities.

Most people are normal and love normal things. They like food, they like music, they like art, they like sex, they like sports, they like adventure. If you tell normal people to do what they love, you are practically dooming them to shit careers. It's all about supply and demand. Most people love the same things that other people love (except programmers, who are weirdos), and there just isn't enough jobs that normal people will love. Maybe 1% of normal people will end up in their dream job, and the other 99% end up on the hamster wheel chasing what they love.

Nice quote from a different judge: "The court is well aware that it is being played as a pawn in a global industry-wide business negotiation."

Here's the video of the developer walktrough: http://www.gametrailers.com/video/exclusive-development-unre...

It's stunning that this runs on a single Nvidia GeForce 680GTX in an editor without any visible lag at all. I wonder why tesselation wasn't enabled though, it may have been because of performance issues.

Without a package manager, I really can't see myself using this. Cygwin + apt-cyg is just easy.

Ah, the constructive devil's advocate.

Judge Posner is indeed a brilliant and highly-respected jurist and his views on our problematic patent system will undoubtedly resonate and help the cause of reform. In his courtroom role as such, though, he can have only limited impact on the broader patent debate.

The judge entered a tentative ruling saying that he was inclined to dismiss the entire case on the merits with prejudice (meaning, to kill all the claims in the case definitively so they could not be brought again by either party) on grounds that (a) neither party could prove actual damages on their claims, and (b) no good ground existed for the grant of an injunction.

These conclusions are well supported on technical grounds by existing law. A damage case can be tossed, once and for all, if a party is conclusively shown not to be able to prove damages, as happened here. And a judge can decline to impose an injunction where the costs of doing so would be far out of proportion to the benefit it gives to the harmed party, where the wrongdoing party is not gaining great benefit from the wrong committed, and where the public would be more damaged than helped by such a remedy.

What this really amounts to is a victory for common sense. Where patents involve essentially trivial rights (as often is the case with software patents especially), judges do not like to be used as tools to be manipulated in a broader commercial fight between litigants. In essence, this judge, looking at these facts, said "OK, kids, time to stop squabbling in the sandbox and go home." The lesson: pick your fights carefully and don't push claims that are essentially trivial.

Judges, good as they are, can only do so much in a system that is defined by constitutional authorization, congressional implementation, and a specialized court set up by Congress that has become cozy with the patent bar. That said, Judge Posner can hardly be accused of being a judge who doesn't respect property rights or IP rights generally and his voice will carry far more impact than most. It will be necessary to have respected voices in the legal community say, "enough is enough" many times over before Congress will listen. This act may not be enough but it is a great push in the right direction.

I've identified several technical problems with this domain, and this isn't an example of how to properly operate DNS. 37signals is setting an absurdly low TTL on these records (10 minutes; the answers never change, I absolutely do not understand the logic behind this TTL), which means every 10 minutes you're re-resolving a local address, through a CNAME (so two DNS round trips, and in my case this resolution took between 115ms and 230ms, not small change):

    [~]$ dig foo.169.254.84.1.xip.io
    foo.169.254.84.1.xip.io.	600	IN	CNAME	foo.daze1.xip.io.
    foo.daze1.xip.io.		600	IN	A	169.254.84.1

Concerningly, ns-1.xip.io is also broken; it does not serve NS records for its own zone, instead relying upon the SOA record and the upstream glue, which I'm shocked works:

    [~]$ dig +short NS xip.io
    [~]$ 

The nameserver delegation from nic.io is also broken:

    xip.io.			86400	IN	NS	ns-1.xip.io.
    xip.io.			86400	IN	NS	ns6.gandi.net.
    ;; Received 86 bytes from 2001:678:5::1#53(b.nic.io) in 60 ms

Oh, well that's interesting, Gandi is a backup for their custom daemon, eh? So did they implement AXFR, IXFR, and notify and such to Gandi? Well, let's ask Gandi:

    [~]$ dig @ns6.gandi.net. SOA xip.io
    ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: REFUSED, id: 3222

Oh, guess not. The long and short of this is for DNS purposes, a custom daemon is almost never the answer. This could have been accomplished with BIND fairly easily, and the zone would be functional as well.

Summary: Cover your ass.

Here are the author's ideas, rewritten without the pollyannaish nonsense:

Step 1: Have a gigantic book of employee guidelines. At any point in time, you should be able to pick an employee and find something you can write them up for. Have the employee sign a piece of paper on day 1 that they are aware of the book.

Step 2: Before you fire the employee, make sure you've written him up more than once. Lay your groundwork a week or two in advance. Find something else, and do the paperwork from step one. You don't fire an employee for walking in on the VP banging a secretary, it's because he wasn't filing his TPS reports properly.

Step 3: When actually firing somebody, have a witness + a recording device in the room. This protects you from sexual harassment lawsuits.

Step 4: Explanations: Blame the economy. If that doesn't work, blame the phases of the moon. Anything you want, but not something that is grounds for a wrongful termination suit.

In the realm of "productivity", there are many different personality types:

- People with vision, who can recognize potential in a concept or idea

- People who, given an idea, can conceptualize all the use cases and rare exceptions

- People who can initiate projects and provide good momentum for all those involved

- People who take a task, buckle, down and get their part done

- People who carefully examine other folks' work to check for mistakes

- People who can take a languishing project and bring it through to completion

- People who play constructive devil's advocate, helping you consider all the possible risks

- People with all sorts of other skills that I didn't think of right now

- People who slack

When building a team, you'll need almost all of these personality types (you could probably leave out the slacker, though). Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater by only looking for the "manager" types or the "coder" types.

content aggregator spam, go directly to http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa_jsc_photo/sets/72157629726... for the full set and info

An excellent quote from Posner:

"The institutional structure of the United States is under stress. We might be in dangerous economic straits if the dollar were not the principal international reserve currency and the eurozone in deep fiscal trouble. We have a huge public debt, dangerously neglected infrastructure, a greatly overextended system of criminal punishment, a seeming inability to come to grips with grave environmental problems such as global warming, a very costly but inadequate educational system, unsound immigration policies, an embarrassing obesity epidemic, an excessively costly health care system, a possible rise in structural unemployment, fiscal crises in state and local governments, a screwed-up tax system, a dysfunctional patent system, and growing economic inequality that may soon create serious social tensions. Our capitalist system needs a lot of work to achieve proper capitalist goals." [1]

[1] http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/06/capitalismposner.h...

Studying individuals is the wrong experiment. Static typing benefits tooling most when you have larger groups of programmers who much collaborate, often asynchronously. It's easy to hold a mental model of the code you write in your head and minimize mistakes, it's harder to hold a mental model of a larger program consisting of code written by many programmers.

I'd like to see them hand a pre-written codebase of say, 10,000 lines to a bunch of students, and ask them to make large changes/new features to the codebase.

"A young man contemplating his decreasing significance on the world stage" ...hilarious.

There's some truth in this. And it's what often concerns me about the tech world- that it's a big echo chamber of young, tech savvy people that actually represents a tiny demographic. It's one of the reasons I like living in New York- it gives me perspective. I see hundreds of people that are using 'dumbphones' and are quite happy with them. I know I've been reading too much TechCrunch when my friends who work in fashion, media, finance- anything but tech- tell me to shut the hell up.

"Path? What's that? A social network that limits how many friends I can have? Why the hell would I use that?". Sometimes it's good to be exposed to a little cynicism in life.