Bull. There's a term for "engineers" who spend half their time on "teamwork": worthless. Math follows below.
One person gets X hours of coding done in X hours. Two people get X hours of coding done in X/2 + Y hours, where Y is the time they need to spend interacting. If Y is more than 50% of X (half their working time), then one engineer alone will get the job finished faster than any larger number of engineers - therefore, if a given engineer needs more than 50% interaction time, their presence is merely slowing down the project, regardless of size. The value of X/Y determines the maximum number of engineers that you can put on a project before it starts slowing down (this can be mitigated by splitting the project up, if it's possible to do so in such a way that the two teams don't have to talk to each other very much).
Furthermore, if the people who create the actual products are spending 50% or more of their time neither debugging nor documenting code (neither of which should involve much interaction with other people), then your project is over budget and behind schedule before you've even started - those two things together will consume more than half of the total effort in the project (Brooks). If a significant percentage of their time is being wasted on interaction overheads, either your engineers are inept or your project structure is wrong (Brooks again) - because that's what this stuff is: overheads. It's not productive work, it's a penalty for having more than one person working on the same project.
A competent engineer is one who can complete the job properly with a minimum amount of interaction with their peers. The efficiency of any project is dominated by this factor (still Brooks - people need to read that book and learn from it).
Teamwork is important, sure - but what's important is that you don't spend much time on it. Open-plan offices are things built by people who fail to grasp this. It doesn't matter much about "context switching", or being "in the zone" - if your engineers are spending a significant amount of time talking to each other, something is badly wrong with your project. Usually, either some of the engineers don't know how to do their own jobs right and are trying to get others to do it for them (fire them, they're dragging you down), or the whole project is lacking a coherent plan and they're having to work it out between themselves (fire the team leader, it's his job to have the answers on people's desks before they ask the question - he doesn't have to plan the whole project out in advance, he just needs to stay at least 24 hours ahead of everybody else, so the answers are ready when they need them). If the project is running smoothly and people are keeping their interaction level to a respectable minimum (say, 10% of their time - 4-5 hours out of a 40-50 hours working week), making them spend the rest of their time in the same space is just a distraction that they'd be better off without.
Anyway, not all sofware engineers are hermits! Some of us are sociable!
Socialising on company time is just another form of skiving. If you're on a flexible time contract, those hours just don't count towards your working week; otherwise, save it until after work. Either way it's irrelevant.
It will be a while before FM disappears entirely, their first priority is getting analogue TV off the air. Why is it the government is forcing this? I don't know, it should be up to the market to decide.
Under British law, there can be no changes in the use of the radio spectrum except those forced by the government. This is the only way that any change is possible. The "market" is not allowed to do anything.
Yes, the law is pretty retarded and about 30 years out of date, but it's easier to do it this way than it would be to rewrite the laws again.
Finally, someone who actually understands the purpose of patents. The whole deal, here, is that, in the past, people just kept their inventions secret if they could. The end result? Techniques could die with their inventor (read about Damascus steel for a great example of this). And, as you say, meanwhile people have to duplicate the effort.
How exactly are these companies not keeping their inventions secret? Where is the source code?
The patent system is failing to solve this problem. Companies have realised that they can simply patent some parts of their invention, and keep other parts secret, so they get the 'best' of both worlds - nobody can legally copy their invention, and nobody can technically copy it either because they don't know enough about it - and reverse engineering is now outlawed thanks to the DMCA, so nobody can legally find out how the invention works in that way either. Furthermore, the extra layer of copyright means that the patents never expire (because copyright on the patented code never expires, so even after the patent runs out, you still can't use it unless you're willing to spend large amounts of money in court, proving that your implementation doesn't infringe).
Read any software patent. It describes part of a system but doesn't say enough for a person "skilled in the art" to be able to recreate the system. By intentionally patenting only some of the system, the 'tradeoff' is completely destroyed. Patents are monopoly abuse, period.
Now, out of the blue, something *utterly* unexpected, inexplicable and major happens - the rate of methane emission levels out; and no one has a *CLUE* why.
And yet all the pro-global-warming mob will still be screaming about how we know everything about the climate already, and only kooks think it's still uncertain.
Re:Sounds like a pretty accurate book to me....
on
In Search of Stupidity
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· Score: 2, Insightful
They barely even tried to sell their last version of Warp, v4.0 "Merlin" - despite it having numerous innovative features that could have easily been marketed to the public as good reasons to buy it.
The irony here is that the last version of Warp was "Aurora", the should-have-been-v5.0 version that was finally released, in a blaze of no publicity at all, as "OS/2 Warp Server for e-Business". They tried so hard not to sell it that you haven't even heard of it - the policy was to tell nobody but the large enterprise customers about its existence. They'd sell it to you if you asked, but you had to know about it first. It also contained numerous new features over Merlin, that could have been marketed to the public (like the JFS filesystem, AIX-style LVM, a full NFS implementation, etc). Nothing that we're not used to now, but this was in 1999.
The caliber of people that hold an opinion are testimony as to it's potential worth. When a bunch of religious nutbars, tin foil hat conspiracy theorists, and oil industry executives hold one side of the opinion, and a wide collection of highly educated, fairly disinterested parties hold the other, I'm inclined to give the nod to the group that actually studies the issue and knows how to work numbers.
But why do you think that they hold that opinion?
Have you talked to climate scientists yourself, questioned them, and established their position?
Or have you just been reading studies posted on slashdot?
The trouble is, a lot of these studies work like this: "Hi, you're a climate scientist, right?" "Sure" "Is global warming real?" "I don't know, we need more data" "Do you think it's real?" "I think it's the most convincing of the available options" "Okay, mark down another one in favour"
It's not really an opinion that this theory is right. It's just an opinion that nobody's come up with a better idea yet.
I've talked to a fair few scientists in the field, and most of them have been unwilling to commit to a firm answer. The thing is that if you start with a mandate of getting a "yes" or "no" answer, then what they tell you will be more like "yes" than "no" - but not very much like it. Any study which *doesn't* attempt to force them into a yes/no answer will usually come back as inconclusive (or "we need more money"), so nobody pays any attention to it.
This paper reads like a refined exploit for the same vulnerability.
Virtually every academic paper ever published will match some statement of the form "a refined X for a known Y". That's what academic papers do. Papers which break new ground come around about once every few decades; most significant developments are actually a sequence of very small steps that the press ignores because it doesn't sound very impressive that way.
Academic papers are almost never newsworthy. They are for academics to read. If you aren't working in the field (of *research*, or closely related engineering), you aren't interested in them. This one is no exception.
The normal process, for those editors who have been living in a swamp for the past 500 years, is: discovery, press release (-> news), peer review, paper. Occasionally the second and third are swapped, but not often; researchers rarely feel a desire to keep their work secret after it's finished. For security issues like this one, the press release is called an "advisory", but that's just another name for the same thing.
There's a good chance that this paper contains nothing new, and is merely the peer-reviewed version of an advisory that was published months ago (I don't remember the advisory, so I can't check). That would be normal. It would mean this article is a dupe, which is also normal.
This wouldn't really stop anyone from getting the card information, but without the PIN, theoretically that information would be useless.
I have been making online purchases with my cards for years, and at no point have I been asked for a PIN. This one falls under "security through weakly hoping that nobody wants to steal any money".
Standard technique is to capture the card numbers and use them to make online purchases of goods which are highly liquid on the grey market - jewelry, DVDs, consumer electronics. People don't make millions this way, but they do make thousands (selling the goods at way below the market price). Also you can extract cash with paypal, although that requires laundering so few people bother.
SuSE was born in the Linux Leper Colony. This is the company who, until recently, produced only proprietary software - specifically, every one of the tools they created for their distribution, most notably yast, were closed-source.
They appear to be merely returning to their roots.
Getting a fusion reaction to occur is damn hard; getting a self sufficient reaction to occur is still beyond our reach.
Actually, you can get a self-sufficient reaction to work quite easily in a small lab rig. The hard part is combining "self-sufficient" with "multiple megawatts of power" and "cheaper than oil". You need all three at the same time before you've got a viable fusion power plant. JET was aimed at the second one. ITER's an attempt to get the first two to work at once. We still have to crack the third one - it's not enough to produce more power than you put in, you also have to produce more money than you put in. Converting expensive materials into cheap power is not practical in a capitalist economy, which is why the lab rigs are no use in the real world.
If anyone thought this was viable, he would be buried in funding.
You are obviously not a researcher and have never attempted to get research funding.
If you have something that you can prove will work, to a layman, you'll still have to fight for funding. If you can't prove ahead of time that your experiment will be a success, buy a lottery ticket instead. Better odds.
So you use SiS chipsets then? They're the only manufacturer I can think of who still provide specs for their video chips (or do Intel still do that too?).
Unfortunately we're currently stuck with a range of equally sucky choices. I tend to buy (older) ATI cards because at least they get reverse-engineered drivers, eventually.
I would like to be able to walk into Target and purchase the same things that I could purchase at Walmart, or purchase it online, and know it was the actual same thing.
But you don't need to. You can simply buy one from each store and compare them for yourself - or, if they are expensive, you can read a review by a person you trust, who has bought one from each store and compared them. There is no requirement for trademarks here.
Under your system, you've make the manufacturers anonymous, and have to trust distributors, which means we're basically stuck with purchasing from one store
Troll. Obviously this is not true. Nothing stops you from trying multiple distributors.
But when they spend their money on what THEY want it's "squandering"?
Comparing research to buying you some more luxuries? Yes, that's a good definition of the word.
Because that's what we're talking about here. All these people live above the poverty line, so increasing their salary is all about improving their "quality of life" by buying them more luxuries.
If Cuban is successful in getting a judge to rule that takedown is no longer good enough to prevent a site being sued for copyright infringement, how long do you think it'll be before no site allows anything to be uploaded, as they can no longer afford the resources to work out if it's copyright or not, and can't afford the legal fees for even a few infringements?
Never. But they'll all move out of the US in under a month, to countries where copyright isn't quite so back-arsewards.
Without enforced trademarks, all products are the lowest possible quality, because there's no point in making something better than that, because no one can say 'Hey, that worked well, I'll buy another one of those.' or 'Well, that fell apart immediately, i won't buy that kind anymore.'.
This is true only in a completely anonymous market. If you can identify that the person you're currently looking at is the same person who sold you good (or bad) stuff the previous week, that's all the information you need to make an informed decision. Trademarks are not required, they're just a way to boost the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
If your business' products are entirely reproducible and then sold for cheap, you cannot sustain a living in such a place.
Yeah, because everybody knows that companies whose products are entirely reproducible cannot sustain a living and don't exist. Oh, wait...
You cannot reduce everything to trivial economics just because it is convinient for your business model. If you cannot find a way to do business in an environment where copying of data is easy and free, you do not deserve to do business at all and should be driven out of the market, as quickly as possible, to make room for people who do know how to operate in this environment.
Why shouldn't we make money off of something we spent years of our lives working on?
Simple economics. You have a choice: make money for yourself to squander, or do something productive with it.
Private industry prefers the former. Universities prefer the latter. That's not a coincidence, it's their fundamental objective - private industry exists to make people money, while universities exist to make research happen.
Whenever you are faced with a task that involves research, there is always an approach that generates more profit (less costs) while limiting or removing the value of that part as research. Private industry always chooses this approach so they get paid more.
In such a scenario, what incentive does the research institute have to develop the drugs and medical devices other than government grants?
The same that they have now - none. Drugs and medical devices are largely developed on government money, because there's no reason to spend your own money when the governments are willing to pay (both through grants, and through the welfare state).
But hey, of course this company is entitled to kill millions in third world countries in order to maximise their return on your investment. Hence the patent-monopoly market.
They should be trying to pursuade drug manufacturers to ship more reduced/free products to these third world countries.
This will never happen, because the third world country would just ship them back again, undercutting the manufacturer's prices in richer countries. So long as these people have an unrestrained monopoly, the status quo will not change.
Or maybe it was just off-putting that this writer thought that a socially superior hominid would be even MORE cliquey and xenophobic than us humans.
Those are excellent survival traits. He didn't call it "Darwin's Children" just for laughs. Evolution does not care about your notions of morality. If you don't like having your preconceptions challenged, SF is not for you.
I think Bear falls into the trap that other "hard" sci-fi writers fall into, which is that the characters end up just being mouthpieces for "cool ideas" that the author wanted to put into a novel.
Yes, heaven forbid that hard SF authors might fall into the trap of writing hard SF.
The whole point of hard SF is the ideas. The rest is accidental. That's what the term means. If you want character-driven fiction, that's soft SF.
Can Novell legally assume Power of Attorney for their customers without a written grant? Do Novell customers have the ability to "opt-out" of this agreement? Is this agreement binding on customers?
To be fair, these are all stupid questions. The answers are obviously no, irrelevant, and no. A contract is not binding on you if any of the following are true:
you do not receive any benefits ("consideration") from it
Yeah, I really mean that. Builders do not select materials and construction methods for run-of-the-mill buildings based on what is best, or even what is cheapest. They select whatever the building codes say they have to select. It's easier than spending time trying to convince a planning bureaucrat that your alternative approach is acceptable. Only "creative" architecture (skyscrapers, company HQs, etc) is ever done differently; office blocks are all built according to whatever the book currently says.
This stuff will get used if and only if the building codes are changed to say it is what builders should use. The people who write the building codes do not care what effect this has on the cost of the building; pretty much every change to the building codes makes buildings more expensive anyway.
It's just that each generation seems to insist on learning everything the hard way.
"Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other"
Each generation has far more fools than the previous one. Population expansion and all that. You can spot these people because they never learn from anything other than their own mistakes. Ironically, many of them think that this is a virtue.
Believe it or not, the mainframe folks in the 1970s really did know a lot about IT Operations.
In the 1970s, mainframes were hard to work with. You had to be good to get anywhere at all. Nowadays, it is far easier for an idiot to use a computer.
Oh, and in recorded history, there are no significant instances of people learning from history. That's why it always repeats.
Seems kinda redundant, since most new houses are being run with cat6 cable.
Where, and for how many millions do they sell?
Cat6 is no joke. This is not something your average building contractor can handle. It is harder to work with than fibre. Explaning the physical behaviour of the cable requires quantum physics (most of the energy travels outside the copper conductor, as an electromagnetic field). Everything has to be done precisely correctly. The way you handle the cable while pulling it. The order in which you punch down the wires into the patch panels. The spacing of the cable ties (I am not kidding, this is essential - the field is passing through that space and the ties can cause harmful interference if misplaced). Get any of it wrong and it won't work. Pulling cat6 cable and installing it to cat5e specs is a waste of money, because cat5e is all you'll ever get out of it.
You are almost always better off with a mixture of fibre and cat5e.
Slashdot Mirror
Bull. There's a term for "engineers" who spend half their time on "teamwork": worthless. Math follows below.
One person gets X hours of coding done in X hours. Two people get X hours of coding done in X/2 + Y hours, where Y is the time they need to spend interacting. If Y is more than 50% of X (half their working time), then one engineer alone will get the job finished faster than any larger number of engineers - therefore, if a given engineer needs more than 50% interaction time, their presence is merely slowing down the project, regardless of size. The value of X/Y determines the maximum number of engineers that you can put on a project before it starts slowing down (this can be mitigated by splitting the project up, if it's possible to do so in such a way that the two teams don't have to talk to each other very much).
Furthermore, if the people who create the actual products are spending 50% or more of their time neither debugging nor documenting code (neither of which should involve much interaction with other people), then your project is over budget and behind schedule before you've even started - those two things together will consume more than half of the total effort in the project (Brooks). If a significant percentage of their time is being wasted on interaction overheads, either your engineers are inept or your project structure is wrong (Brooks again) - because that's what this stuff is: overheads. It's not productive work, it's a penalty for having more than one person working on the same project.
A competent engineer is one who can complete the job properly with a minimum amount of interaction with their peers. The efficiency of any project is dominated by this factor (still Brooks - people need to read that book and learn from it).
Teamwork is important, sure - but what's important is that you don't spend much time on it. Open-plan offices are things built by people who fail to grasp this. It doesn't matter much about "context switching", or being "in the zone" - if your engineers are spending a significant amount of time talking to each other, something is badly wrong with your project. Usually, either some of the engineers don't know how to do their own jobs right and are trying to get others to do it for them (fire them, they're dragging you down), or the whole project is lacking a coherent plan and they're having to work it out between themselves (fire the team leader, it's his job to have the answers on people's desks before they ask the question - he doesn't have to plan the whole project out in advance, he just needs to stay at least 24 hours ahead of everybody else, so the answers are ready when they need them). If the project is running smoothly and people are keeping their interaction level to a respectable minimum (say, 10% of their time - 4-5 hours out of a 40-50 hours working week), making them spend the rest of their time in the same space is just a distraction that they'd be better off without.
Socialising on company time is just another form of skiving. If you're on a flexible time contract, those hours just don't count towards your working week; otherwise, save it until after work. Either way it's irrelevant.
Under British law, there can be no changes in the use of the radio spectrum except those forced by the government. This is the only way that any change is possible. The "market" is not allowed to do anything.
Yes, the law is pretty retarded and about 30 years out of date, but it's easier to do it this way than it would be to rewrite the laws again.
How exactly are these companies not keeping their inventions secret? Where is the source code?
The patent system is failing to solve this problem. Companies have realised that they can simply patent some parts of their invention, and keep other parts secret, so they get the 'best' of both worlds - nobody can legally copy their invention, and nobody can technically copy it either because they don't know enough about it - and reverse engineering is now outlawed thanks to the DMCA, so nobody can legally find out how the invention works in that way either. Furthermore, the extra layer of copyright means that the patents never expire (because copyright on the patented code never expires, so even after the patent runs out, you still can't use it unless you're willing to spend large amounts of money in court, proving that your implementation doesn't infringe).
Read any software patent. It describes part of a system but doesn't say enough for a person "skilled in the art" to be able to recreate the system. By intentionally patenting only some of the system, the 'tradeoff' is completely destroyed. Patents are monopoly abuse, period.
And yet all the pro-global-warming mob will still be screaming about how we know everything about the climate already, and only kooks think it's still uncertain.
The irony here is that the last version of Warp was "Aurora", the should-have-been-v5.0 version that was finally released, in a blaze of no publicity at all, as "OS/2 Warp Server for e-Business". They tried so hard not to sell it that you haven't even heard of it - the policy was to tell nobody but the large enterprise customers about its existence. They'd sell it to you if you asked, but you had to know about it first. It also contained numerous new features over Merlin, that could have been marketed to the public (like the JFS filesystem, AIX-style LVM, a full NFS implementation, etc). Nothing that we're not used to now, but this was in 1999.
But why do you think that they hold that opinion?
Have you talked to climate scientists yourself, questioned them, and established their position?
Or have you just been reading studies posted on slashdot?
The trouble is, a lot of these studies work like this: "Hi, you're a climate scientist, right?" "Sure" "Is global warming real?" "I don't know, we need more data" "Do you think it's real?" "I think it's the most convincing of the available options" "Okay, mark down another one in favour"
It's not really an opinion that this theory is right. It's just an opinion that nobody's come up with a better idea yet.
I've talked to a fair few scientists in the field, and most of them have been unwilling to commit to a firm answer. The thing is that if you start with a mandate of getting a "yes" or "no" answer, then what they tell you will be more like "yes" than "no" - but not very much like it. Any study which *doesn't* attempt to force them into a yes/no answer will usually come back as inconclusive (or "we need more money"), so nobody pays any attention to it.
Virtually every academic paper ever published will match some statement of the form "a refined X for a known Y". That's what academic papers do. Papers which break new ground come around about once every few decades; most significant developments are actually a sequence of very small steps that the press ignores because it doesn't sound very impressive that way.
Academic papers are almost never newsworthy. They are for academics to read. If you aren't working in the field (of *research*, or closely related engineering), you aren't interested in them. This one is no exception.
The normal process, for those editors who have been living in a swamp for the past 500 years, is: discovery, press release (-> news), peer review, paper. Occasionally the second and third are swapped, but not often; researchers rarely feel a desire to keep their work secret after it's finished. For security issues like this one, the press release is called an "advisory", but that's just another name for the same thing.
There's a good chance that this paper contains nothing new, and is merely the peer-reviewed version of an advisory that was published months ago (I don't remember the advisory, so I can't check). That would be normal. It would mean this article is a dupe, which is also normal.
I have been making online purchases with my cards for years, and at no point have I been asked for a PIN. This one falls under "security through weakly hoping that nobody wants to steal any money".
Standard technique is to capture the card numbers and use them to make online purchases of goods which are highly liquid on the grey market - jewelry, DVDs, consumer electronics. People don't make millions this way, but they do make thousands (selling the goods at way below the market price). Also you can extract cash with paypal, although that requires laundering so few people bother.
SuSE was born in the Linux Leper Colony. This is the company who, until recently, produced only proprietary software - specifically, every one of the tools they created for their distribution, most notably yast, were closed-source.
They appear to be merely returning to their roots.
Actually, you can get a self-sufficient reaction to work quite easily in a small lab rig. The hard part is combining "self-sufficient" with "multiple megawatts of power" and "cheaper than oil". You need all three at the same time before you've got a viable fusion power plant. JET was aimed at the second one. ITER's an attempt to get the first two to work at once. We still have to crack the third one - it's not enough to produce more power than you put in, you also have to produce more money than you put in. Converting expensive materials into cheap power is not practical in a capitalist economy, which is why the lab rigs are no use in the real world.
You are obviously not a researcher and have never attempted to get research funding.
If you have something that you can prove will work, to a layman, you'll still have to fight for funding. If you can't prove ahead of time that your experiment will be a success, buy a lottery ticket instead. Better odds.
So you use SiS chipsets then? They're the only manufacturer I can think of who still provide specs for their video chips (or do Intel still do that too?).
Unfortunately we're currently stuck with a range of equally sucky choices. I tend to buy (older) ATI cards because at least they get reverse-engineered drivers, eventually.
But you don't need to. You can simply buy one from each store and compare them for yourself - or, if they are expensive, you can read a review by a person you trust, who has bought one from each store and compared them. There is no requirement for trademarks here.
Troll. Obviously this is not true. Nothing stops you from trying multiple distributors.
Comparing research to buying you some more luxuries? Yes, that's a good definition of the word.
Because that's what we're talking about here. All these people live above the poverty line, so increasing their salary is all about improving their "quality of life" by buying them more luxuries.
Never. But they'll all move out of the US in under a month, to countries where copyright isn't quite so back-arsewards.
This is true only in a completely anonymous market. If you can identify that the person you're currently looking at is the same person who sold you good (or bad) stuff the previous week, that's all the information you need to make an informed decision. Trademarks are not required, they're just a way to boost the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
Yeah, because everybody knows that companies whose products are entirely reproducible cannot sustain a living and don't exist. Oh, wait...
You cannot reduce everything to trivial economics just because it is convinient for your business model. If you cannot find a way to do business in an environment where copying of data is easy and free, you do not deserve to do business at all and should be driven out of the market, as quickly as possible, to make room for people who do know how to operate in this environment.
Simple economics. You have a choice: make money for yourself to squander, or do something productive with it.
Private industry prefers the former. Universities prefer the latter. That's not a coincidence, it's their fundamental objective - private industry exists to make people money, while universities exist to make research happen.
Whenever you are faced with a task that involves research, there is always an approach that generates more profit (less costs) while limiting or removing the value of that part as research. Private industry always chooses this approach so they get paid more.
The same that they have now - none. Drugs and medical devices are largely developed on government money, because there's no reason to spend your own money when the governments are willing to pay (both through grants, and through the welfare state).
But hey, of course this company is entitled to kill millions in third world countries in order to maximise their return on your investment. Hence the patent-monopoly market.
This will never happen, because the third world country would just ship them back again, undercutting the manufacturer's prices in richer countries. So long as these people have an unrestrained monopoly, the status quo will not change.
Those are excellent survival traits. He didn't call it "Darwin's Children" just for laughs. Evolution does not care about your notions of morality. If you don't like having your preconceptions challenged, SF is not for you.
Yes, heaven forbid that hard SF authors might fall into the trap of writing hard SF.
The whole point of hard SF is the ideas. The rest is accidental. That's what the term means. If you want character-driven fiction, that's soft SF.
To be fair, these are all stupid questions. The answers are obviously no, irrelevant, and no. A contract is not binding on you if any of the following are true:
Expense is an irrelevant concern anyway.
Yeah, I really mean that. Builders do not select materials and construction methods for run-of-the-mill buildings based on what is best, or even what is cheapest. They select whatever the building codes say they have to select. It's easier than spending time trying to convince a planning bureaucrat that your alternative approach is acceptable. Only "creative" architecture (skyscrapers, company HQs, etc) is ever done differently; office blocks are all built according to whatever the book currently says.
This stuff will get used if and only if the building codes are changed to say it is what builders should use. The people who write the building codes do not care what effect this has on the cost of the building; pretty much every change to the building codes makes buildings more expensive anyway.
"Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other"
Each generation has far more fools than the previous one. Population expansion and all that. You can spot these people because they never learn from anything other than their own mistakes. Ironically, many of them think that this is a virtue.
In the 1970s, mainframes were hard to work with. You had to be good to get anywhere at all. Nowadays, it is far easier for an idiot to use a computer.
Oh, and in recorded history, there are no significant instances of people learning from history. That's why it always repeats.
Where, and for how many millions do they sell?
Cat6 is no joke. This is not something your average building contractor can handle. It is harder to work with than fibre. Explaning the physical behaviour of the cable requires quantum physics (most of the energy travels outside the copper conductor, as an electromagnetic field). Everything has to be done precisely correctly. The way you handle the cable while pulling it. The order in which you punch down the wires into the patch panels. The spacing of the cable ties (I am not kidding, this is essential - the field is passing through that space and the ties can cause harmful interference if misplaced). Get any of it wrong and it won't work. Pulling cat6 cable and installing it to cat5e specs is a waste of money, because cat5e is all you'll ever get out of it.
You are almost always better off with a mixture of fibre and cat5e.