On top of that, if anything, forcing the government to fix it's bad code (insert snarky ambiguity between software code and legal code) can't be a bad thing. I'd buy the guy a beer.
I'm pretty sure the government will continue to just waste money processing his appeals instead of making an effort to fix the system.
So in reality, this guy is indirectly wasting taxpayer money. Sure, the government is wrong in not fixing it, but knowing that the government won't fix it, but continuing to behave this way, is his fault.
The problem is it's a "a privately operated citation processing center" that's causing the problem. They might even be instructed to hand-enter a NULL for these cases.
I'm don't really see an incentive for the govt agency to do anything about it. It's no skin off their nose. They'll just keep sending the tickets.
> "a privately operated citation processing center"
In a way, this is the real bug - one that affects more areas of local government than most people know or understand.
Our local governments are constantly seeking - and usually getting - private companies to do what should be public. The potential (and actual) repercussions to the system are serious.
For instance, how do such arrangement affect FOIA requests? What about other forms of transparency? Are we really getting our money's worth as taxpayers? Is the money actually being used properly or are costs being inflated?
It's a form of government privatization "by a thousand cuts" - we already know of the problems inherent in the system of privatizing out and contracting of private prisons; plus the loop they cause because of recidivism rates, because a repeat "customer" is better for the bottom line than one reformed for society. Which may be better for the private company, but has huge costs to society itself.
I wouldn't doubt that similar issues are happening with the privatization of other parts of our local government. It is sickening to me, personally.
Well, to be fair, that romantic image plays pretty strongly on a desire to see my work as something of a legacy--something that outlives my own mortality. I might be unique in that romantic desire, but somehow I doubt it.
Your engineering manager is on to something. I feel like that romantic desire, ironically, gets in the way of making real progress 99% of the time; even the code I'm really proud of, given enough time, will probably end up irrelevant, if only because I'll have learned so much more in all that time. It's easy to think of the act of writing as the hardest part of "writing code." But, really, it's all the learning in all the years prior that's most difficult. So, really, "throwing away" code and starting over isn't actually all that costly. Throwing away engineers, their experience, or skills is what gets expensive.
With that said, one of these days I'll start writing my "The Art of Computer Programming" ...
This is actually a huge problem for the US honey industry right now. As bee kills become more of an issue, re-queening becomes more necessary, which puts even more pressure on breeding programs, which likely only exacerbates the genetic diversity problem.
> Also remember that the honeybee is not native to North America and is technically an invasive species here.
Yes, but they are also the only species (so far) that is commercially managed, and therefore easily counted and tracked. If Apis Mellifera is suffering, we can pretty safely assume that other, native species are also suffering.
I think the take-away is that the Web (with a capital W), even though it's what all the cool kids are doing these days, is really just a collection of real actual standards established by real actual standards bodies, run by real actual Engineers. There are plenty of folks out there who don't give the Web much credence, and would rather shout at those kids to just get off their lawn.
Maybe I'm over-stating the value, but it's good to remember that, as software and automation becomes more ubiquitous, good standards and good engineering are going to get more and more important.
Depends upon what bee specific species and where. "Honey bees" (genus Apis) alone comprise several species which may or may not be considered invasive. In the particular case of the linked UMich paper, Apis mellifera (note: species mellifera, the Western/European Honey Bee) is definitely an invasive species to North America.
This says nothing of the, arguably more important, wild bee population, e.g. bumble bees (genus Bombus) ...
