Obviously the defence didn't work in your story, but it may not be as flawed as you might think.

Depending on the jurisdiction (at least applicable to UK-based common law jurisdictions), there is a requirement to prove an intention to permanently deprive the rightful owner of the item, and as such an intention to return the item can allow you to wriggle out of the definition of the crime.

I'm not familiar with criminal law in the US, but I suppose the precise definition of theft various from states to states, so not sure how well this would stand in the exact scenario you described. Even if the jurisdiction adopted a similar legal definition of theft, the jury could still call BS.

If you read TFA @ https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpediatrics.aappublicat...

From TFA ( https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpediatrics.aappublicat... ):

Perhaps you can write a sonnet without a million dollars of training, but I'd like you try flying to the moon without a million bucks...

âLook, I'm not judging, but when an illegal immigrant janitor who shouldn't be interested in stocks talks about stocks, I'm disgusted."

I can't believe such shitty rhetoric got modded to +5. I bet it's OK for the OP if rich, white bankers in Wall Street do the same thing.

These days I'm mostly comfortable in reading reactions from people of the opposite sex, but back when I was in my late teens and early twenties, it would be really difficult to avoid misinterpreting the situation occasionally.

It's a sad fact of life where there's always some tension between people of the opposite sex, but you make it sound as if it were so easy to navigate the situation. It really isn't, especially for those who generally have much less successful experience (you really need to have two control groups before you can tell the difference between them).

[offtopic]
That being said, I wonder whether it's really a good idea to blame it all on the "sex" part of "sexual harassment". I mean, as a straight male I'd probably feel uncomfortable around creepy people badgering me for whatever reason even if they probably don't have any sexual interest in me..... It's the "harassment" part that needs to be dealt with, IMHO.
[/offtopic]

I agree with your statement generally, but the commonly accepted solution against unintended assignments in the if conditional is to add an extra set of parenthesis -- which is literally bending code style so that compiler (at least the static analysis tool) will catch violations.

Perhaps you'll also learn not to take comments on Slashdot seriously.

Seriously though, it's hard to believe *anything* taught in schools at all would be helpful (without proper interpretation). Different problems require different solutions and different processes, and not every solution / process fits the problem. So far, all the crap floating around claims it's the best thing since sliced bread, but they don't really tell you the context in which their solution works (and they probably don't have sufficient perspective to tell you anyway). Your professor in school is probably clueless as to their differences anyways, anyone who is intimately involved in real-world software projects don't have time to teach.

That being said, before you dismiss the stuff in your textbook and lecture notes, be aware that a lot of the software processes are for *long term*, *medium-to-large scale* projects. Your weekend project doesn't have to follow those processes, and probably shouldn't. There is a difference between code monkeys writing "code" and somebody who understands the "software engineering stuff" as well. I wouldn't attempt to make serious distinctions between "programmers" and "software engineers" and what not. They're merely stupid labels. Most people fall between the extremes -- although these days, with everything becoming a software/data problem, people from non-software disciplines occasionally have to write programs, especially in the scientific/engineering fields. They might be able to cobble together something that works, but I wouldn't trust them to run a 10-man software project.

If you read what the GP said, it never said it was "all right". In fact, I think it's pretty clear that GP was implying that violating IP rights isn't something to be proud of.

Two wrongs make two wrongs, and it's just fair that both are mentioned.

It seems you're complaining that somebody is presenting the full picture. It might be irrelevant, but hey, you're not complaining about it being offtopic.

This.

Catalyst was there before Ruby on Rails was even a thing.

I've had my own intensive "eat sleep code repeat" cycles back in high school, which is more than a decade ago. That's probably when I went from being a shitty programmer (by adult standards) to an OK programmer. These days I mostly fool around random things when I'm not working, instead of being a beta tester for some bleeding edge software development stack (that's what I secretly think of developers who use RoR and node...)

The "eat sleep code repeat" cycle is probably quite effective initiallly, I just think there are diminishing returns to this approach. If you've done this thing for (say) 10 years already, you probably don't need another twenty years doing the same thing -- it either gets repetitive (which, especially in this field, isn't exactly a good thing), or you've managed to continue to innovate, but by then you've probably holed yourself into a tiny niche or something.

Not that I disagree with you though, the *intentional* breaks from actually programming, i.e. those that you force on people just because doing something other than coding "makes you a better coder" probably don't really work. I guess you just need to do coding a lot, and also somehow manage to squeeze other stuff into your life as well.

Hate to break it to you, but if you even had to look up syntax regularly, you're not a professional programmer.

Seriously, you need practice.

If you can train a monkey to do your job and a monkey is willing to do it..... well, then maybe your years of experience and collected knowledge isn't that worthwhile anyways...

210k salary and you can't feed a family of 3.

Software engineering jobs are in ever more demand today, and you're talking about bleak prospects in a job which you say isn't going to fire you any time soon.

You talk about stability and jumping ship from a safe job in the same sentence.

Hmm.

Actually, what do you want? Or maybe you just hate software engineering as a job or career?

it depends on whether you take into account relativity...