The job is tricky.

I'll give a simple example - if I give you two date/time stamps, how long between them? Say Monday 8am to Friday noon

It depends what the dates represent. If they're start/stop dates when a customer had no service on something they were paying for, this is 4 days 4 hours, 100 hours total. If it's time a staff member spent working on a project, it's *still* 4 days 4 hours, but those are likely only working days, 40 hours. If it was longer than a week, does the weekend count? Are some people contracted to work specific hours? If the working day doesn't start until 9am, does the hour before that count? Are there legally enforced break times? What if the person involved is only part time?

With surnames, it's complicated. Surname restrictions can get hung up on actual. Someone who lived near me had a two letter surname (Ng). There are some names in my extended family tree (outside the security question ones) that cause problems. My grandmother's sister's *married name* was "de la Haye". Two spaces, and the capital on the noun, but not the first letter.

These are simple, trivial examples, but they're done wrong all the time. The work involves holding a lot of details in your head, including the problem, the language, the libraries you're using, the user's request (which might not be possible), it's effect on system performance, all the while under time pressure from management to work fast.

If you want 100% bug free software, we can try exhaustive testing, but it will take much longer, involve much more people who cost much more themselves - and inevitable result in less powerful code that was less features. Feature requests will stall. Think internal systems for things that cannot fail. I was going to put examples here like aeroplance, cars, spacecraft systems - but they pressure to release a lot has caused failures here too.

Can we get this in a passenger aircraft?

It'd cut other-side-of-the-world trip journey times from 24 hours (approx) down substantially.
My quick calculation suggests approx time to orbit at the equator is about 2 hours at M17, but you couldn't run that as an average speed, plus getting airborne, into airspace where sonic booms won't disrupt third parties but should be able to come down to 5-6 hours, say London -> Sydney over the North Pole and down the dateline.

So if you're working in New Zealand, the night shift is 9am - 5pm ? Yeah, that's going to work.

I mean, today I altered a recipe in IfThisThenThat to change the behaviour of my Philips Hue lights slightly. Am I now a IoT developer?

Okay, I'm already a developer, but I work for a telco building our internal platform, but how low a bar is being a developer for this journalist?

Me also. But I'm suspecting that having en-NZ in my http headers bumps my uniqueness up quite a lot.

Just tried switching that off. I'm still unique, but that brings my uniqueness on the "one in x browsers have this" down from ~15M to well inside 100k

This is useful, but

I've backed a project that's currently been running late. Like 18 months late. Updates are random, and while follow-ups are promised, they don't happen in timing promised ( https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.kickstarter.com%2Fpr... )

Big question is how do we deal with a zombie (dead, but not admitting it) project? According to the previous project, all backers seem to be entitled to refunds, but there's no mention in this post as to even how to flag this for KS staff.

I took an elective course in beginners COBOL back in the day (1992). It was an elective, but it was picked blind, before the course had started. I quickly realised that I didn't want to work in this language, and that C was much more interesting.

These days, I write perl. Which is closer to C than it is to Cobol. Cobol, if anything, is closer to banging your head against a brick wall - it feels *so good* when you stop.

Or you could *not* bulldoze them and bury all the jars whole.

Okay, maybe this is more in the "confuse future archaeologists" category....

I work for a large multinational (well, for a subsidiary. Parent company is massive. Global subsidiary is quite large. We're a regional offshoot).

We get a fair amount of our deadlines set by head office, with a "We've put out a press release saying it'll be out on this date". You can't say no, it won't work. This sort of thing isn't restricted to big companies. In smaller companies I've had bosses tell me (and this pre-dates Agile as IT design tool) that I have to have the code finished before the end of the week, as they've got an advert in Saturday's paper.

Like in Mythbusters, failure is always an option.

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth ? We'll all end up blind and toothless

If your attacker was spoofing your IP, you've just attacked an innocent party.

Punishment without trial, and vigilante justice is not the way forward.

As April Fool plots go, this is one of the stupidest, asking your users to jump through hoops to read your content (and when you lose that, you lose advert revenue as well).

To add insult to injury, you haven't unscrambled them again, and it's April 2 here (and well inside it, too)

Does anyone want to buy a 4 digit Slashdot user ID? I don't want to be associated with this once great website any more.

Looking into it, the US varies (as do other places), but many offer at least the illusion of a secret ballot.

So we need an option for the party of Mind your own Business...

I'm just saying

According to Google at least, a pint = 568ml.

Perhaps the reason that they're so cheap is that the US is serving short measure?

Person-to-person: not so much.

If you're writing for a professional purpose, having good grammar shows attention to detail. If you can't show you have paid attention to detail on this small thing, I'll assume you didn't pay attention on the things that mattered.

If you're writing fiction, if I notice patterns in the writing (like poor grammar), I'll start paying attention to them instead of the narrative flow. This is a bad thing.

If you're writing to a person, consider what impression you want them to have on you. Good grammar / complicated words may not be necessary. Or they might be very necessary. See http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-849/ .