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Inequality and Risk
Mind the Gap

As a software engineer you should be able to think of a productivity increase. Otherwise you lack imagination.

Go and read Paul Graham's essay on Great Hackers as an inspiration
and then revise your statement.

Amazing Grace invented the compiler because she saw a limit of productivity imposed by machine language programming. Ever since, programming
languages and new programming doctrines have extended productivity probably hundreds of times and you say you can not think how to go on?

A recent example: some say Ruby on Rails cuts development times in Java by 90%.

I can not tell, wether this is true or not. But it makes clear, that in principle it could be true. Tenfold productivity may be just around the
corner.

I really like Paul Graham's view about great hackers and their aversion towards cubicles. Google may be a great company to work in with all their star hackers and what not, but it has not got its offices done right. For instance look at the Google's Australia office with the long rows of tables for their programmers.

Compare with the plush private offices that Microsoft provides to its developers developers developers.

As a side note, I had posted the links on this same topic some time ago, but can't seem to find it on slashdot now.

Playing devil's advocate here: And the problem with this is? Isn't it in man's nature to attempt to improve themselves?

I'd say that the problem is that it's all too artificial. It's no longer a question of a better, smarter, stronger individual surviving long enough to breed, it's a question of how often that individual can be conned into buying some product. You too can look cooler, smarter, more interesting, if you just buy this car/watch/jacket/hat/etc. Get a face lift, get bigger boobs, fix that bald spot, bleach your teeth. Make your grass greener, your house warmer/cooler, get a fast-looking car, get an 8-person SUV for a family of 3 and never mind the low milage. That's what's driving "evolution" now.

Did you know suits are making a comeback?? Mmm, gotta go out and buy a couple of suits for work. Why?? Well, the nice man a Men's Wearhouse said so... Will I work better/longer/smarter/harder?? Nope. Will anyone care if I wear a suit?? Nope. I work nights and often don't see more than about 5 people in the building all night. Daytime there's a slight possibility of seeing client in the building, but business casual is usually fine.

Follow the money. That's what's driving evolution these days.

Well, I'm probably the exception, but I can tell you why I decided to drop out of high school.

I absolutely hated every minute of it (except hanging out with my friends). The things we were being taught were almost completely irrelevant to anything happening in the real world, the pace of actual learning was tediously boring, yet we were saddled with ridiculous homework assignments that were obviously designed to keep us busy first and possibly teach us something second. Most kids just cheated off of each other or did a divide and conquer strategy (you do the fill in the blanks problems, I'll do the multiple choice, etc). I'm sure I could have "applied myself" more and all of that. However, I did not (and still don't) see the point. If someone assigns you a fool's errand, are you smarter to complete it successfully, or to avoid it in the first place?

When I dropped out (toward the beginning of Junior year, or 11th grade), I spent the next year reading about 50 books, mostly non-fiction (my parents were pretty tolerant, and they sensed that I was actually learning something).

I have since taught myself Linux, Perl, PHP, C, SQL, music theory, piano, etc. I have a full time senior level programming / sysadmin job as a result (of the computer learning anyway :). I read Wikipedia almost every day for fun. I chose for the longest time not to have a TV, preferring books instead (my fiancee likes TV though, so we have one now). Clearly, I like learning stuff.

So what happened? Shouldn't high school have been really easy for me? What was my problem? I was pretty popular, had a good group of friends, did well on standardized tests. Why couldn't I get good grades?

Because high school was slowly but surely rotting my brain. While I liked my teachers all right as people, the whole enterprise seemed to just be based around giving us some reading material, which we were supposed to parse and look for the relevant keywords so that we could parrot them back, as directed, on multiple choice or fill in the blanks tests. Yeah, there were some essay questions too, but it was the same basic idea. The amount of drudgery involved was just overwhelming.

Some people warned me that dropping out was a mistake. For many people it might be. I would be extremely cautious to recommend dropping out of high school to anyone. However, for me it was one of the best things I ever did. I got out of teenage jail almost two years before my other cell mates, and actually learned a lot more in the same amount of time. Eventually, in a roundabout sort of way with several false starts, my self directed reading and technology learning landed me a job in the dot com days. I have not been unemployed for more than two weeks since I joined the workforce of the real world in 1999.

Each job I've had (mostly) involves doing real work that is actually used by real people. Ostensibly, most of the things I did made the company a better place to work. Success brings rewards, and failure has consequences, neither of which are arbitrarily decided by someone developing a curriculum to keep you busy so you don't bother your parents or light off firecrackers or smoke pot or whatever else teenagers would do if we let them do what they wanted. I guess you could say the biggest thing that was missing in high school for me was the feeling that any of these stupid assignments I was doing served any greater purpose than allowing the teacher to compare my paper to their answer key.

Paul Graham put all of this far more eloquently than I did here, in his essay Why Nerds Are Unpopular.

Paul Graham, if you're by chance reading this, I want to thank you for writing that essay. My only complaint is that you didn't write it when I was a teenager :)

I shall quote Paul Graham here. [Source]

"Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric."

The abc news article is useless so I can't address anything specific in it, but to answer the general question of what's wrong with high school -- I want to say it is the culture.

I hated every day of it. I both took abuse myself and watched it heaped on others for being black, supposedly gay, poor, or simply there. The teachers consistently did nothing. They saw people psychologically and physically harassed and did not say a word. I did not go to a school in the city or a ghetto. It was a bucolic, predominantly white area with a school of about ~1200 students.

And yet for everything that happened to the people I know, we ended up as functioning adults. Functioning adults with anorexia and whatnot, but we didn't drop out, went to college, got jobs, etc.

The people who were the ones dealing out the unpleasantness, however, did not. The people who should have walked away psychologically unscathed are the ones who dropped out high school or college and led uninspiring, financially challenged lives.

What would an exit poll on how much people liked high school reveal? What kind of person enjoys it? How do the scores correlate to success [in its many shades] and contentment later in life?

Does any of this even matter if high school is just a holding pen for still-immature, dangerous people who can't fully contribute to society yet?

I've heard that theory before. Frankly, I don't give it much credence. If the US educational system was designed with some overarching motive in mind, we would expect it to be highly uniform across the country and tightly controlled by the federal government. This prediction does not agree with observation, which shows a loosely organized system in which states and local school boards have a great deal of leeway. Obviously school board members don't want to see their kids turned into mindless automatons. No, they're definitely trying to set up a good educational system. They're just failing.

Paul Graham's essay Why Nerds are Unpopular posits that part of the problem is that there's very little competitive pressure for schools to be good at their stated purpose of educating. If schools competed academically as fiercely as their football teams do, we might get a better overall system out of the deal. Sounds good to me.

There are a lot of things wrong with the school system and high school is just the first time that you can effectively and easily do something about it. Paul Graham describes several of the problems with school in this essay, but it boils down to: schools are full of disrespect for students and busy work and forced curriculum, rather than open to interesting learning opportunities. School feels like jail and freedom...well...looks pretty good.

Theres a book about unschooling that I've been reading and would probably encourage my kids to try it, if only I were the type to have kids:

The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education.

The preface and a couple of chapters are online at that site. It speaks volumes to me about what my high school wasn't: interesting, a collection of information that is still catalogued in my head lo these many years later, and self-directed. Oh, and being a dork in high shcool didn't help the comfort level. At least I had a few good teachers.

After reading all the scathing criticism lately about Mono and OOo being tainted by MS patents, it leaves me to wonder why WINE never had so many skeptics (though it did have a few). With the same line of reasoning, WINE should be at a greater risk.

Anyway not that I think any of these will face any problems,
1. Anti-Trust - It will be difficult for MS to pull of anything close to killing a small competitor out of business using patents.
2. Massive attrition at Microsoft - All things being equal, people tend to work for saner, lesser-evil companies. There is a certain pride in it, and I don't fancy a lot of people saying - Yeah I work for SCO! (I just dug this interesting article from Paul Graham about MS Patents)
3. MS has benefited from interoperability, and cross-technology support for years (Remember how Word had Word perfect emulation modes and shortcuts). I don't think patents cover those APIs too.
4. And piss off the large clients??
5. Total loss of good-will and PR disaster.
6. Can OIN (Open Innovation Network) patents be used against Microsoft?
7. Only a tiny fraction of Mono and OOo will ever fall under the patenttotine, and those will no doubt be re-written and re-implemented the same weekend.

What's the problem with journalists these days?

For anyone who hasn't yet read it, I highly recommend that you read Paul Graham's blog post entitled "The Submarine". It's a very interesting insight into how PR firms craft the fake news that you describe.

Maybe not poverty, but differential income. Paul Graham does his essay-about-something-with-overly-sweeping-general izations somewhat better than normal on just this topic:

http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html

However 'Beyond' is also butt ugly, the first week's worth of posts are a bit boring and the blogroll is narcissistic.

I recommend you the following essay (or any by Paul Graham for that matter):

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

If you have a boring programming job such as coding Java web apps (as I do) it is particularly important you turn away your attention from the mainstream (e.g. the framework of the week) or else you too may become yet another boring corporate drone.

It is also very important to avoid fads (such as PHP) as well as stuff that gets a lot of attention but only because of the huge publicity behind it and the swarm of clueless people who fall for it (.NET, Windows whatever)

Finally, it is essential that what you work on is interesting in itself (to you, of course), otherwise no matter how effective a way you find to make it, it will fail to inspire you and without inspiration your mind will deteriorate.

• Shitty long tables and cubicles at Google
• Or the neat offices at M$.

Particularly in a decade or so when all of those now-empowered youths learn enough English to take in http://www.paulgraham.com/
Suddenly, Western civilization is flattened by a limitless swarm of Lisp-powered shopping carts.
Not even OPEC will survive OLPC.
Fear.

I did a brief survey on "I hate [X]", and got the following:

perl 9
java 20
c 8000
c++ 11
c# 1
lisp 0
scheme 0
elisp 0
fortran 3

Looks like John McCarthy wins.

Personally I wouldn't be shocked if a scandal broke that various journalists were part of a clandestine "psyops" operation to influence US public opinion with relation to Bush's policies.

Hackers like to work for people with high standards. But it's not enough just to be exacting. You have to insist on the right things. Which usually means that you have to be a hacker yourself. I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up.,/i>

Hackers like to work for people with high standards. But it's not enough just to be exacting. You have to insist on the right things. Which usually means that you have to be a hacker yourself. I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up.,/i>

Lately there's been a few incidents of Plagiarism in the news, not to mention some wholesale ethical breaches of faked stories (e.g. Blair at the NY times and "a million Little pieces"). But the thing is the reason those are news is that they are both exceptional and something that is specifically drummed in to any professional journalist not to do.

I disagree. "Traditional journalism" is rife with "press release reporting" where someone reads a press release, rewrites it, maybe calls a few sources starting with the company's (or government's) own PR department and then publishes it as news. That kind of reporting is so common that it basically gets a free pass nowadays.

I'll traditional plagiarism where at least the original author put in the legwork to come up with his own perspective over the parroting of a PR campaign.

The tests are not the goal posts, though. The tests are, well, tests.

Suppose you were writing a calculator program. If you knew it had to do rational numbers, you'd have tests to make sure rational arithmetic worked, and an implementation of rational numbers that passed that test.

Sure, the customer would come change things 10 times next week, but if you have a solid test for the core functionality, it's easier to shift high-level things around to meet those goals. (If the customer changed what data and functions your program operates on the day before release, you're screwed no matter what. But that rarely happens; once you have a library that makes the expected functionality easy, shuffling it around to do something else is also easy.)

In a sense, by requiring passing unit tests first, you force the design to be bottom-up, which (as many others have found) gives you more flexibility later on. It lets you meet high-level requirements ("goal posts") much more easily.

It's hard for me to imagine a program whose entire purpose was so poorly specified that you couldn't write unit tests first. It'd essentially have to be "OK, we want you to write a program, and we don't know what data it'll operate on, or how it will manipulate that data -- start now!"

http://www.paulgraham.com/iflisp.html

"Python copies even features [from Lisp] that many Lisp hackers consider to be mistakes." -- Paul Graham

Mainstream TV and newspapers are hardly immune to this effect.

I can't provide full scientific proof, because there is no scientific proof in this domain, which I regret.

The best actual "proof" is the following: There was a study a while ago that established productivity for a given programmer appeared to be constant across lines of code, regardless of the language. This study was, IIRC, done a while ago, against C, assembly, and a couple of other suspects, but it was a pretty good spread. Programmers can turn out a couple hundred lines of non-trivial code a day. The idea is that since this is true, you want the language where you need the fewest lines of code, all else being equal, to accomplish your task.

The details of this have been debated endlessly. My personal call is that it is "mostly true", with some important caveats (programmers not gaming the LOC count, and the real important metric is "lines of code the programmer has to think about"; frameworks can churn out thousands of lines of templates (MFC was horrible about this) and they don't count), but experience does bear this general idea out.

The general LOC multiplier for Python vs. Java on the small scale is usually thought to be 5-10x. It's hard to know exactly how accurate this is because Java makes doing small things enormously complicated; "Hello World" is at least three lines of real code (class definition, static main method declaration, and the print call which itself involves a method chain of the form X.Y.Z("Hello World"), not just a simple statement). However, it is also a reasonable to believe that Java continues to make things hard as you scale up, and there are some simply Python patterns that are effectively impossible in Java or require jumping through very complicated hoops. I also believe there are a few cases of Java programs ported to Python that bear this out, or possibly even more. (Sometimes you can end up with some multiplicative gains, where the 5-10x improvements actually start layering on top of each other; in real terms this usually translates to the ability to create a superior design in Python than what you can do in Java. There's a reason Java's got all of these code generation tools and bytecode hacking tools, whereas Python mostly doesn't.)

The productivity multiplier does seem to be similar.

I cut down my estimate for C# because while I'll cop to never using C#, it does seem to me to be somewhat better. As I alluded to, adding in closures in 2.0 will also be a significant step forward. (Closures are a feature I recommend learning about, as for a long time I saw programmers talking about them and I had no clue what they meant, but once I got over the learning curve I understood why they were so important. Some of the worst problems with the worst workarounds in Java come from the lack of closures or any equivalent functionality, require fully separate large complicated classes with new interfaces to achieve the same functionality, all with no gain in safety or functionality. This is one of the places you tend to get the layered benefits I alluded to...) So I don't know if the gain is as large.

On the other hand, C# does seem to make heavy weather of certain very easy constructs in Python.

So that's the general evidence. If you want to learn more and get a lot of opinions, you can search "Python productivity" on the web.

But I know in your shoes I'd be downloading IronPython and putting it through its paces. :) It is proper to be skeptical about productivity gains in a world where we have no concrete measure of productivity, but since I don't have concrete standards, all I can tell you is that my own experince matches the Blub Paradox to a T; whenever I do have to code in Java or C++ or anything else like that, I will see simple solutions to my problem in Python that require the equivalent of tens or hundreds of lines of code in those languages. (Heck, even in Perl I've wished for generators on more than one occasion, and unrolling a generator is no fun.)

Wouldn't it make more sense for Microsoft to work to change the current totally broken patent system?

Yes. But until and unless there is actual change in the system, they have to play the game the way the rules are written.

Amen to that.

Geeks are successful precisely because they reject convention, so get used to it if you aren't already. No cow is sacred, no thought is verboten, and this can be hard to adjust to sometimes, especially if you tend to have delicate sensibilities.

A woman in an IT department full of geeks is going to be thought of as the odd one out, simply because IT is so male-dominated. As a minority (especially with socially-inept people like geeks), you have to prove you're "one of the lads" - this might mean inviting them all down the pub one night, not being afraid to fart in front of them, or responding to a risque joke with a downright rude one (basically, match their behaviour, at least a bit).

Grow a thick skin, and whatever you do don't get sniffy or go running to management when a problem arises - nothing marks you out as different more than demanding special consideration. There are already several geeks in the department with their own little microculture - if you want to fit into it you'll be fine, but if you start demanding they change to suit you, you'll only ostracise yourself.

Sure, if someone makes a blatantly misogynist comment by all means defend your gender, but do it by good-humouredly responding in kind, not by getting uptight or offendedly asking them to stop.

Guys like all-guy groups because they can relax and let it all hang out. Women tend to demand higher standards of behaviour, which prevents many guys from relaxing fully.

If you want to get on comfortably what you're aiming for is to be "one of the lads" who just happens to have ovaries, not a girly-girl they have to watch themselves around.

If you do this right they're highly unlikely to ask you out on a date - women are mysterious magical creatures who smell nice and have almost no body-hair. Mates who burp in front of you, tell dirtier jokes than you and aren't afraid to scratch themselves in public and just happen to posess ovaries don't get a look-in.

I think this article is a PR hit. Anyway, Google is far from the only company to develop a lot of their code in-house. My current employer is one, and it greatly increases the quality of life. I used to strongly advocate this approach, but now I understand that it's right for some companies and not others.

It all depends whether the company is a tech producer or consumer. Tech consumers buy or outsource everything but their core competency. This eliminates the risk of in-house development. Tech producers usually roll their own, accepting the occasional late and over-budget project in exchange for many cheap and quick projects.

So if you work for a Tech Consumer, and you hate the crappy Enterprise Software they inflict on you, don't evangelize them - go work for a Tech Producer.

Does Paul Graham count as "anyone"?

Hype up the site by posting related article on Slashdot, in which you compare the site with another, of lesser value, cite a figure for the lesser-worth site, estimate that site-you-want-to-pump is worth 10 times that much. This is a classic public relations recepie to hype up an industry. Paul Graham, anyone?

In this way I also seperate the real nerds from the 'wannabes'. A real nerd uses crack, cracking and cracker and hacking means slapping something together instead of really thinking and engineering a solution.

I have another quote, admittedly from someone with somewhat less intellectual stature than Albert Einstein.

I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.

From here. I offer, as an example, the baker, George Green. He did not enter college until the age of 40, and yet we owe to him Green's functions. This man spent the majority of his life baking, and yet he discovered mathematical tools that probably upwards of 99% of the population have never even heard of (despite being extremely useful). I am sure that there are hordes upon hordes of people that have spent far more time and effort to become the next "Einstein" (hopefully, they don't cherish that dream), and yet have contributed far less than Mr. Green here did in his spare time.

Paul was arguably the creator of ecommerce. This is a great read http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html/.

Love The Blub Paradox.

Mod parent up.

The patent FUD concerning Mono is now dead, and Mono is included in Fedora are Suse distributions. I am sure Novell would have invested considerable effort in analyzing potential issues. Mono is a from scratch implementation. And no surprise, Miguel appeared in the Microsoft Technet Video explaining Mono last week and it was on slashdot.

Here is a nice article by Paul Graham on SW Patents, which was Slashdotted earlier. What he says makes a lot of sense: But I doubt Microsoft would ever be so stupid. They'd face the mother of all boycotts. And not just from the technical community in general; a lot of their own people would rebel.

Last time it was big in the news, I read a lot of opinion-peces about European softwarepatents.
There is one part of patents that I miss in your explanation of them. And that is part of the history behind them.

Or, as Paul Graham writes:
You don't get a patent for nothing. In return for the exclusive right to use an idea, you have to publish it, and it was largely to encourage such openness that patents were established.
Before patents, people protected ideas by keeping them secret. With patents, central governments said, in effect, if you tell everyone your idea, we'll protect it for you., http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html

The publishing is why they work for better mouse-traps and so on. After a reasonable period for getting back the money invested in designing a better mousetrap (the period the patent is protected), everyone can improve again on said mousetrap. The reason CocaCola didn't patent the recepe for it's product is that the protection is time-limited. Having a secret formula is better (for them) then sharing it and have a temporary monopoly.

One of the problems with swpat is the length of the monopoly. During the protection-period innovation is not improved or promoted. Only after this period is innovation by other people possible. It was, long ago, usual for innovation to go slow (think windmills and waterpumps). These days it goes very fast. The patentsystem does not and can not take that into account.
I remember reading a piece on this, just can't remember where.

Hope this helps a bit, cause these patents have to be stopped.

Greets,
David

Everybody have different non-spammy word. How are they going to find out that MY innocent words are Python and Linux related ? If they knew, they might spam ME but it wouldn't affect anyone else. Beside, there's headers that are also full of infos. Read A Plan for Spam by Paul Graham, it explains why such a scheme would not work.

How many spam do you get a day? I get hundreds. Half of them are not in my native language (much like half the mail in my inbox), which means it takes more than a split-second glance to figure out what is going on. I'd guess my accuracy in split-second decisions is probably on the order of 95%, which if I were a spam filter would earn me a D-. Paul Graham, who probably has more typical email habits when compared with the average Slashdotter, says he misses about 3 per 2,000. http://www.paulgraham.com/wsy.html There are systems which are better than that.

In Soviet Spam Filter, the computer doesn't trust YOU to filter the email.

... the ones which have worked best (for me) are Bayesian Spam Filters (A Plan for Spam, SpamBayes - a free filter) and CRM114 The Controllable Regex Mutilator (Paul Graham mentions it here). I've always had a very high success rate with these.

... the ones which have worked best (for me) are Bayesian Spam Filters (A Plan for Spam, SpamBayes - a free filter) and CRM114 The Controllable Regex Mutilator (Paul Graham mentions it here). I've always had a very high success rate with these.

In the same boat as you, actually I was a CS major and was about to shift to a EE major - but unlike High School, all the math is finally clicking (in my head) with me. Perhaps I'm a late bloomer, but now I find the math much more enjoyable than hacking code*, as hacking code seems to be just that so far, usually a bunch of hacks that barely stay together to make a program (in my experience so far). Math, otoh, seems much more elegant and solid. Anyway, enough philosophizing, I just wanted to say I am returning to school to become an EE major with a math minor, or the other way around. Anybody think one or the other is any better?

BTW, according to my Math professors who teach parttime (and work at "real" jobs the other part), they are pretty much in demand. Because pharmaceuticals are in my area and all three are hired by them, my perspective may be skewed. But they also say it is hard right now for schools (at all levels) to get and retain math teachers/professors (people with math degrees).

*The language I find programming elegant is a lisp. But that may be because it was designed by a mathematician. I never looked at a C/Algol derive as particulary elegant even if C is my first language.

The advantages of OOP have been very well researched and understood for nearly 30 years.

Well, the so-called "advantages" of OOP have at least been well propagandised for at least some of the last 30 years. :)

It is unquestionably a major advance in software development, with relevance to all areas, including websites, allowing re-use, encapsulation, isolation and testing of code [...]

None of those concepts you mention have anything in particular to do with OOP. And you shouldn't really be terribly surprised that more than a few programmers find OOP evangelism more than a little extreme. See Andrei Stepanov and Paul Graham for a couple of good examples.

Maybe he decided to quit because he finally learned Lisp? That would make a pretty serious personal conflict.

Of course it doesn't specify what the data means. Nor it should, because that's not the point of it. How the hell can any markup format do that, anyway? It's simply an unsolvable problem in this respect.

What if you came up with an XML DTD that could represent a Java program structurally? What if you then wrote a Java program to manipulate those XML data files? Then what if you wrote that program in your new XML-Java language?

The program is the code. The code is the program.

Now generalize the concept. For any XML data file, what if you could enhance your language so that the XML elements actually corresponded to calls (subroutine, methods, jumps, whatever)?

I've seen your link, but it's completely useless. It's completely devoid of any technical information.

The technical information is elsewhere. The movie trailer shouldn't tell you how a movie ends....it should encourage you to go see the movie.

For more trailers, I'd recommend many of the essays at http://www.paulgraham.com/

What's wrong with Ruby, as a replacement for a very ugly language called Perl?

What's wrong with Perl, as a very powerful and flexible replacement for C?

Seriously, Perl can be ugly, but that's mostly the language revealing the real programmer inside, and being flexible enough to be ugly or pretty. I think it's also informative to try and compare languages another way: what do they fix?

Seriously, the spammers will adapt no matter when anti-spam tactics you use.

They 'cannot' beat the filtering I use now...

Not long ago, I added a form of rbl support to a personal copy of My homebrew Windows email client freebie and the results were 'amazing'....

Essentially NO spam gets through now!

Recently, one got through so I spent a few minutes to take care of it.

The only drawback to using a rbl is that it can be inaccurate if an innocent party starts using a blacklisted IP. But in the real world due to laziness, inertia, and corporate indifference, that is quite unlikely.... :P

The 2nd half of my approach uses a few rules that simply take away the ASCII characters a spammer is likely to use in their message. I patently refuse such email at iamcf13@hotpop.com so they get deleted immediately.

All the spammers are doing is wasting the small amount of time and computing resources it takes me to get my email with this 'updated' program. But usually I am doing something else of importance at the time so presumably no time is wasted at all...

My approach is 'transparent' with the current email system and could be useful -- nowadays there is talk of replacing the current, spammed out system for something else -- a likely far remote possibility....

Food for thought.... :)

P.S. Shout/mod me down if you want but you have to admit, Baysean spam filtering is just not working anymore. Challenge/response is cumbersome, considered 'bad manners' by some, and can generate more unwanted email messages. How about giving a different approach such as mine a try?....

When the filter analyzes the content based on the statistic frequency of certain words and phrases, it can be contaminated by training it on junk mail containing large lists of words meant to throw it off. Sometimes they are random, sometimes they contain collections of terms specific to industry. There's also the issue of random insertion of garbage characters into words. There are probably a hundred-thousand different variants of 'Viagra' that the filter couldn't possibly recognize. I couldn't even think of a regular expression to get them all. We've got v1agra, Via.jGra, Vi,aGra0, etc.

> That's the defense that capitalists always turn to, yes.

I hold that it's a fine defence, and I hope that my case below convinces you of this.

> and they certainly won't rise now with Work Choices ( Business Choices )

The point of work choices isn't to deliver higher wages, it's to use the good times to deliver reforms that will benefit us in the bad times.

Keating has recently been in the media taking credit for 'the recession we had to have' and pointing out that though he was criticised for it, the economists who have been directing the US reserve bank have been praised for delivering the same outcome - keeping wages under control. Although I'm overall a critic of Keating's economics during his period as Prime Minister, the reforms that he and the Howard opposition pushed to deliver in the 80s (and which the opposition backed) set the country up for the success it enjoyed in the 80s. Unfortunately the reforms didn't go far enough, particularly in the area of labour regulation.

Work choices is the sort of reform that Howard, Hewson and economic soulmates have wanted to deliver throughout this period and is designed to benefit two distinct groups:
1) People who are looking to hire labour but currently can't due the risk of picking the wrong person or picking a bad time and being stuck with someone they can't afford to support. Ie: Small business owners.
2) The very bottom of the economy who are not in employment and who previously had no prospects of empoyment. It is not a feasible option to hire someone with no work experience in the confidence that you can retrench them if it doesn't work out. Previously these people wouldn't have been hired.

This is a crucial reform needed to fight the patterns of long-term unemployment which accumulated between the end of the Macmahon and beginning of the Howard administrations. Only recently has this group started to be reduced, and only through constant deregulation will we be able to bring these people back into society.

If Beazley wins the next election and delivers on re-regulating the labor market and re-instating the power of unions all that will happen is that we'll have an immediate benefit of wage rises for low-income earners but then the next time we go through a down in the economic cycle we'll crash seriously and need our own equivalent of margaret thatcher to brutally de-stall the economy and get things moving again.

It's all too rare that politicians sacrifice political capital during the good times to bring in inevitable reform. That's what Howard's doing on this matter, and I support it wholeheartedly. Make hay while the sun shines.

> The most telling of statistics is the distibution of wealth. 1% of the population own 99% of the wealth.

That statistic is wrong, and the correct one is irrelevent. If I go out tomorrow and start a successful manufacturing and export business that hires lots of people and brings lots of money into the economy then that is a fantastic thing, and the fact I should get rich from it is nothing to be ashamed of. In doing so I have increased the wealth gap but everyone is better off - my customers, my employees and myself. Using the distribution of wealth as a measure of the success of a society is based on the mistaken notion that there is a fixed amount of wealth in an economy that has to be divided up between the members of that economy. This is absolutely not true.

As you take away the incentive for successful people to be successful you destroy the economy. I strongly recommend you read this article by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html
Graham is hardly a pin up for the right wing - he supported Kerry in the last US election.

Please read that article, and if you'd like to continue the discussion further post here or email me, craig att ahdore do com.

If you get into this sort of thing I'd also strongly recommend F A Hayek's _The Fatal Conceit: The Err

1. How does the RIAA control the media so well? Are the big papers and news channels really lazy enough to only report things that have press releases?

To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it means a good programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To programmers, "hacker" connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who can make a computer do what he wants-- whether the computer wants to or not.

(And, also, whether the previous users/programmers of the computer want him to or not)

- http://paulgraham.com/gba.html