So it looks like revenue at King will be going down a wee bit...

>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.

Why does this lead in with "Stephen King has sold more than 300 million books of horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy" -- sure, he's been a popular author, but the relevant info would be how many books he has *written*, no? How many *words* would be interesting to learn.

But if he wrote one book and sold 300 million copies, I doubt he'd need a continuity adviser.

A friend of mine went to Cuba on vacation and noted that pretty much every cabbie, hotel maid, and bus driver had at least a Master's degree. Largely courtesy of two things: free higher education and a lack of jobs to keep people out of school.

On the plus side, I hear that Cuban doctors are pretty good.

You forgot the part where the other half of the working population gets offshored to China.

:shudder

I've never worked for a megacorp, so I've never even seen this, and hope I never do.

Though I suppose it'd be nice to have down-time to catch up on my reading now & again.

Here's what my current dev team has settled on -- we ran into many of those issues early on, and modified our approach.

We have brief meetings MWF (calls w/ screen sharing, technically, since we're distributed).

We make up meeting notes in advance (on the wiki), each person adding in briefly what they've done, what's next, and what they'd like to discuss (if anything).

In the meeting, we only actually discuss the points listed for discussion, unless someone brings up what someone else is working on (like, "if it's useful, last year I did something quite similar to X that may be helpful to you").

Imagine a manager who asks you about what helps you be productive, and what is slowing you down, then works to change your working environment, schedule, hours, etc. to maximize your quality of life & productivity....

Naturally, it's not common, because instead managers assume their developers won't know the first thing about their own work habits (and what improves/degrades them), and instead blindly tries to establish top-down processes that will make "the team" more productive.

Sometimes it'll work out; but to be sure, people are individuals, the best developers are *already* thinking about these things (and how to hack their own lives), and the ones that aren't will become better if they're encouraged to think about how they actually work.

One thing that applies to everyone, at a general level -- getting the level (and kind) of communication right.

Some people can't get difficult tasks done unless they can retreat into a silent bubble for days on end, free from distractions and completely focused. Most people, however, need at least some level of communication along the way, to intercept them (and help) if they're getting bogged down, getting lost and attacking the problem via brute force, or getting tangled up in their own perfectionism and spending way too much time polishing the first step when they have 19 steps of the solution still to go.

So they need regular (but short and very focused) communication where they're comfortable honestly discussing where they are and where they're going. (Hint: it's hard to avoid triggering ego traps in these kinds of discussions, but if you do, you'll quickly make the whole relationship completely dysfunctional, and useless).

Other people thing best in conversation, and will work best when more-or-less permanently paired with someone else (with similar needs, of course... don't pair them with the solo deep thinker!) -- together they can be far more clever and productive than they could possibly be separate.

And even that is fairly non-binding and has a proviso of "when their financial circumstances permit" apparently. I believe the first confidence pledged some serious amounts of assistance most of which never eventuated.

It doesn't really commit anyone to anything. It's mostly so they could get something out and not look like they'd just had a junket.

It's a by product of the UN requiring consensus from every nation to pass anything. The smaller nations know we're not going to stop increasing global carbon emissions (and maybe believe they can continue on mostly as usual) so hope they can get some money out of the process. And it's pretty convenient for the US as they can justify doing nothing on the basis of the UN being ineffectual. Meanwhile China says it doesn't apply to them (despite being the biggest global emitter) because they didn't get to poison the planet in the first place so they deserve their turn (In UN terms that's referred to as "equity"). I recommend http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RInrvSjW90U/ for the current numbers. Basically if we want a planet that looks remotely like the comfortable one we occupy now we'd need to peak carbon emissions soon (before 2020) and start reducing at unheard of rates. Instead most of the planet has no intention of stopping, some of the nations just want to get some money out of it, and a small group (15% of global emissions) are trying to cut their emissions by numbers that are a small fraction of what would be needed globally. We're pretty much guaranteed to blow through any manageable carbon trajectory in the next decade. Probably sooner because most of the news out of the climate scientists is bad and that they may have badly underestimated how sensitive the system is. Be thankful though, we'll basically get to watch mankind fumble their first highly probable global crisis (barring miracle discoveries or climate science being wrong in a good way) which should be entertaining. Given the current prediction is 4c by by 2050 (twice the "acceptably dangerous" level of 2c, 6c by 2100) we'll even get to see many of the effects start to kick in.

When I did my CS degree computer science was part of the science stream, was expected to be primarily a tool for the advancement of science and to have lots of scope for development in its application.

It was only later people realised the scope of computer use is a whole lot wider and that the main problem is dealing with the complexity of the systems. So it became less about the micro of clever algorithms and code and more about the macro of trying to get the product of large numbers of people to work cheaply and reliably.

In practice I suspect there's little difference beyond the name and self image. I'd expect CS people to understand the issues of large scale software development (as much as you can in a Uni). I'd expect SE people to understand the materials they work with and why software isn't reliably reproducible like stuff made from bolts and girders.

Fairly inevitable and if done well a good move, though a comeback is going to be really hard. Motorola believed it could compete on hardware differentiation and sweetheart deals (backed by exclusive features) with the networks. Thus completely missing the move towards the phone becoming a platform to run smart software and how that needs to tie into a rich eco-system of software services. And that pretty much needs a focus on software, third party software developers and a unified platform they didn't have.

Maybe if they can come up with something really innovative in terms of software they might survive. But it's so weird to remember it wasn't that long ago they saw their only competition as Nokia and believes they were on track to be number 1. Woops.

I also remember Padmasree Warrior (Motorola's cheap technology officer) explaining that the iPhone would never catch on because it's too hard to dial while driving. With technical leadership like that...