Ireland's gradual transformation to a police state

Well, here we are. The Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform have made it so that all migrants to Ireland from outside the EU must be fingerprinted (and their details shared with who knows how many foreign agencies). And of course, the costs for this are passed on to the migrants themselves - they will pay another €50 on top of the old €100 "registration" fee to lose their privacy. I have to wonder what practical use there will really be for the fingerprinting.

The "Land of the 100000 welcomes" is long dead and buried by this point. What disturbs me is all the people who feel that all foreigners should be fingerprinted and they're lucky they're not just sent home immediately anyway. What if all Irish citizens had to be fingerprinted? Would that be okay? No? So why the double-standard, and where does it stop?

Refactoring threats

Entertaining quote of the week (a comment on an article about a newbie employee running a "NEVER RUN THIS" database recreation script after being told not to) from a user on thedailywtf.com:

Re: Do not run this script, ever!
2008-01-25 15:45 • by morry (unregistered) 173406
I've always thought it's better to put these things into the positive, i.e. don't use "don't". For example:

RUN THIS SCRIPT WHEN YOU WANT TO BE FIRED

EXECUTE THIS PROGRAM WHEN LIFE NO LONGER HAS MEANING FOR YOU

IF YOU LIKE EVERYONE HATING YOU, THEN START THIS JOB

MAKING TOO MUCH MONEY? DO THIS TO REDUCE YOUR PAYCHECK TO 0!

GET ESCORTED OUT BY MERELY PUSHING THIS SHINY RED BUTTON

Stupid thing of the day

Eclipse (the popular Java IDE) has an update manager which allows it to automatically fetch and install or upgrade new versions of various components and plugins.
However, it can't upgrade itself from version 3.3.2 to 3.3.4.

WTF.