Driving off with the rental car is a fine analogy if we were comparing this to not returning a DVD you rented.

But this is not that. And that is kind of the point.

Piracy is a breach of contract for sure. The point the author is trying to make is that our current licensing contracts around media are out of touch with the social contract (you pay for something, you get it).

Hence the moral hazard. So companies will flaunt the social contract (like in the case of Sony) with impunity but will get rightous as soon as people flaunt the legal contract. It’s a double standard, where all the power is in the hands of those with the biggest legal department.

You can’t define “theft” untill you first define justice. And if consumers and media holders can’t even agree to a just system, then why bother categorizing anything as theft at all?

Typing characters is maybe 1% of the job. The other 99% is understanding how the change affects everything else. Changing a single line of code in a function called by 1000 other functions each themselves called in 10 other functions can still potentially be more work and a bigger change than changing 9000 lines of code in a function called once.

Debatable whether minified JS is “open source”, in the same way that compiled machine code is technically still visible, just unfeasible to comprehend (despite, or perhaps in spite of decompilers).

Anyway, minified JS lacks comments and prompts to read from. The explanation I have accepted is just the sheer massive quantity of JS code and libraries coupled with all the documentation surrounding it.

Professional engineering is really about implementing processes and procedures that create reliable and dependable systems. Ultimately it’s about responsibility and risk management. Being an engineer has nothing to do with understanding or implementing technology or technical details and specifications (unless you are in an extremely junior level engineering position). That work already has another title: that’s called being a technologist (and there ain’t nothing wrong with that title and that work).

Very, very, very few technologists (including self-taught programmers, computer scientists, and even some engineering grads) have, or even understand the skills needed to manage technical risk, simply because those skills are not part of any of those curriculums and the licensure required to be recognized to conduct those activities. It requires knowledge, training, and certification specifically, not just a university degree or x years on the job. Of course, it’s not the sort of distinction that the general public understands by “engineering” since the public kind of just takes the act of technical risk management for granted.

Conversely, it’s perhaps also why the number of engineers with hands-on skills is shockingly lower than we expect: using technology is not on the engineering curriculum.

But yeah, just because the general public confuses technical skills with engineering doesn’t give you, lacking all three of : an accredited engineering degree, an engineering licence, and perhaps most importantly, malpractice insurance, licence to call yourself an engineer.

What does “stale code” even mean in this context?

Does that mean it falls behind stable? Just merge stable into your branch; problem solved.

Or is this just some coded language for “people aren’t adopting my ideas fast enough”. Stop bitching and get good.