Open source code contributed by "mere hobbyists" is actually some of the better stuff I've seen. The hobbyists seem to make up fewer excuses to do things in the most moronic manner possible. They don't have endless policies and procedures that they then eagerly toss aside at the earliest opportunity.
The ethical problems have nothing to do with coding. The ethical problems are purely a function of the people you work for. Either they are engaged in socially positive activities or they aren't. Google despite all of the hate it gets is really the tip of the iceberg here.
There are plenty of companies where their employees should lose sleep over what colossal anti-social leeches those companies are. It doesn't matter in what capacity you're employed by one of them. You could just be the janitor and you're contributing to the evil.
I was bothered by the "surgery is fun" and "engineering is easy" parts. I would expect the more competent surgeons and engineers to think exactly like that. You really don't want your life in the hands of people that aren't into their jobs.
This is much more true for surgeons and real engineers.
Competent people in any technical field should be much like the people that populated Brave New World minus the genetic and psychological engineering.
We already have a market as large as the EU. Chances are that they don't have the excess capacity to handle a shortage on our end and vice versa.
Besides, this stuff is already made all over the world to begin with. This shortage may be due to a factory in India that failed it's FDA inspections and got taken offline.
That's retarded. You don't prescribe an drug because it's cheap. You prescribe it because it's effective. Drug A & B are not in any way the same. Even if they are targeted therapies for the same defective gene, they are going to have wildly different results and side effects.
This kind of bullshit is what leads to stupid insurance companies forcing crap on you that doesn't work at all and might even make your condition worse.
Forget about the ambulance chasers you want to vilify.
The local prosecutor will nail your ass to the wall for this kind of nonsense. Even without tort reform, serious medical malpractice can rise to the level of a crime even in the US.
Forget Perry Mason. At this level you have to worry about Judge Dredd.
Doctors have found that when they get rid of medical malpractice that they still have to worry about going to prison for gross negligence. Apparently that doesn't just magically go away because you've managed to avoid one aspect of personal responsibility.
Oddly enough, a lot of women have told the corporations to fuck off and strike out on their own. This is true even among the women that want to be part of the Cx0 class.
This makes a certain amount of sense if you think about it. Gender doesn't even have to enter into it. Who really wants to be someone else's gimp? What's the point of having all of the talent and necessary abilities if you're just going to work for someone else.
It's closer to the capitalist ideal that women are NOT trying to just manage someone else's mega corp.
It's agenda should be to be above all of this political nonsense. The facts should be the only thing that matters. They should not focus on any sort of ideology to distort their work. They should not seek to "prove" or "disprove" anything or allow any sacred cows to get in their way.
People (intentionally) confuse science versus technology in order to muddle and obscure issues that have nothing to do with science. There needs to be LESS of that kind of nonsense rather than more.
Why do you think that people have a problem with "global warming"? The same can be said of astronomy too. It's just that there are no highly disruptive public policy agendas being driven by it.
I fully realize that everything we think we know about exo-planets may be complete bullshit. There's no way of really knowing until we actually go out there. Nobody that thinks they are "scientists" or "support science" should have any delusions about anything.
The first thing you need to be willing to embrace is the fact that we might be wrong about everything. It's not religion.
Big power hungry desktops don't use 200 watts anymore.
Also, those "power efficient" tablets aren't self-reliant. Anything interesting will require the use of a more powerful machine somewhere. That machine may be far away across an entire sea of devices creating the network required to connect the tablet to it's missing computing power.
More importantly, the DNC hack is entirely irrelevant. It's a side show to distract Democrats from the fact that they aren't as popular as they think they are, they aren't as competent as they think they are, and they pushed a really bad candidate on everyone.
They've cocooned themselves in a reality distortion bubble where the 90s never happened.
If you think that government research leads to a usable pill, then you don't really have any clue what you're talking about.
"Evil corporations" are the ones that spend the money to implement stuff and see if it actually works. Quite often, the pure research fails to yield a useful drug and that private investment is wasted.
Socialists will happily tell you that drug development is actually a government enterprise.
We spend a great deal of money on new drug development. A bit less than half is basic research funded by the government. The larger portion is the final development process required to create an actual product. Private enterprise handles that.
The final push to market is both extremely risky and extremely expensive. If you gut private economic incentives, you will be slitting your own throats.
Slashdot simply doesn't have the volume of garbage to pull this off. Slashdot is a pea shooter on a modern battlefield.
Facebook, on the other hand, is like grandma's chain letters on steroids with everyone contributing to the feedback loop and reality distortion filters.
Although modern marketing in general is all about abusing your adrenal system in order to keep your attention. That has bled over into journalism. Facebook just then takes it up a notch.
Except the last time I saw them try this it was a disaster. They chose some out of the way location where no good talent would re-locate to. This client came back to our group after this disaster and after all of the legacy employees with all of the tribal knowledge had been laid off.
They would have to shuffle all of their teams in order to implement anything like this.
Not convinced it would actually benefit IBM in the slightest. Although I am sure they think differently.
Slashdot Mirror
Open source code contributed by "mere hobbyists" is actually some of the better stuff I've seen. The hobbyists seem to make up fewer excuses to do things in the most moronic manner possible. They don't have endless policies and procedures that they then eagerly toss aside at the earliest opportunity.
I dunno. "Programming patches" seems like child's play compared to the actual hacking that bands did in the 70s.
Considering that you could pick this up from old sitcom reruns, why in the HELL do you think it's a sign of pretense?
The ethical problems have nothing to do with coding. The ethical problems are purely a function of the people you work for. Either they are engaged in socially positive activities or they aren't. Google despite all of the hate it gets is really the tip of the iceberg here.
There are plenty of companies where their employees should lose sleep over what colossal anti-social leeches those companies are. It doesn't matter in what capacity you're employed by one of them. You could just be the janitor and you're contributing to the evil.
Coding has nothing in particular to do with it.
I was bothered by the "surgery is fun" and "engineering is easy" parts. I would expect the more competent surgeons and engineers to think exactly like that. You really don't want your life in the hands of people that aren't into their jobs.
This is much more true for surgeons and real engineers.
Competent people in any technical field should be much like the people that populated Brave New World minus the genetic and psychological engineering.
We already have a market as large as the EU. Chances are that they don't have the excess capacity to handle a shortage on our end and vice versa.
Besides, this stuff is already made all over the world to begin with. This shortage may be due to a factory in India that failed it's FDA inspections and got taken offline.
That's retarded. You don't prescribe an drug because it's cheap. You prescribe it because it's effective. Drug A & B are not in any way the same. Even if they are targeted therapies for the same defective gene, they are going to have wildly different results and side effects.
This kind of bullshit is what leads to stupid insurance companies forcing crap on you that doesn't work at all and might even make your condition worse.
Mainframes and Unix are entirely two separate and competing entities. They have their own operating systems.
If a mainframe is running a Unix "VM", it's probably Linux.
Forget about the ambulance chasers you want to vilify.
The local prosecutor will nail your ass to the wall for this kind of nonsense. Even without tort reform, serious medical malpractice can rise to the level of a crime even in the US.
Forget Perry Mason. At this level you have to worry about Judge Dredd.
Either that or prison.
Doctors have found that when they get rid of medical malpractice that they still have to worry about going to prison for gross negligence. Apparently that doesn't just magically go away because you've managed to avoid one aspect of personal responsibility.
> Because postponing chemotherapy and open-heart surgery is so safe, amirite?
It's safer than operating like you're on a 19th century battlefield.
This isn't software where you can slap something together with zero discipline of any kind and "patch it later".
I dunno. There is one special lady out there who's work may enable me to have a normal life span.
I don't care if half of the field is female. I care about results. It's the quality of people you should care about rather than the quantity.
Oddly enough, a lot of women have told the corporations to fuck off and strike out on their own. This is true even among the women that want to be part of the Cx0 class.
This makes a certain amount of sense if you think about it. Gender doesn't even have to enter into it. Who really wants to be someone else's gimp? What's the point of having all of the talent and necessary abilities if you're just going to work for someone else.
It's closer to the capitalist ideal that women are NOT trying to just manage someone else's mega corp.
It's agenda should be to be above all of this political nonsense. The facts should be the only thing that matters. They should not focus on any sort of ideology to distort their work. They should not seek to "prove" or "disprove" anything or allow any sacred cows to get in their way.
People (intentionally) confuse science versus technology in order to muddle and obscure issues that have nothing to do with science. There needs to be LESS of that kind of nonsense rather than more.
The media doesn't elevate girls that are simply taking care of business. That's simply not part of their narrative.
Sure, you can go beat the bushes for this stuff but it's not what's going to be presented to the general public.
Why do you think that people have a problem with "global warming"? The same can be said of astronomy too. It's just that there are no highly disruptive public policy agendas being driven by it.
I fully realize that everything we think we know about exo-planets may be complete bullshit. There's no way of really knowing until we actually go out there. Nobody that thinks they are "scientists" or "support science" should have any delusions about anything.
The first thing you need to be willing to embrace is the fact that we might be wrong about everything. It's not religion.
Big power hungry desktops don't use 200 watts anymore.
Also, those "power efficient" tablets aren't self-reliant. Anything interesting will require the use of a more powerful machine somewhere. That machine may be far away across an entire sea of devices creating the network required to connect the tablet to it's missing computing power.
More importantly, the DNC hack is entirely irrelevant. It's a side show to distract Democrats from the fact that they aren't as popular as they think they are, they aren't as competent as they think they are, and they pushed a really bad candidate on everyone.
They've cocooned themselves in a reality distortion bubble where the 90s never happened.
Switzerland is the size of one large US city.
Sadly that is quite often the case with some of these more extreme drugs. The side effects aren't much worse than what you are already dealing with.
If you think that government research leads to a usable pill, then you don't really have any clue what you're talking about.
"Evil corporations" are the ones that spend the money to implement stuff and see if it actually works. Quite often, the pure research fails to yield a useful drug and that private investment is wasted.
Socialists will happily tell you that drug development is actually a government enterprise.
We spend a great deal of money on new drug development. A bit less than half is basic research funded by the government. The larger portion is the final development process required to create an actual product. Private enterprise handles that.
The final push to market is both extremely risky and extremely expensive. If you gut private economic incentives, you will be slitting your own throats.
Vanco can destroy your kidneys. You have to stay on top of that stuff. Stuff like Vanco is no long term solution.
Slashdot simply doesn't have the volume of garbage to pull this off. Slashdot is a pea shooter on a modern battlefield.
Facebook, on the other hand, is like grandma's chain letters on steroids with everyone contributing to the feedback loop and reality distortion filters.
Although modern marketing in general is all about abusing your adrenal system in order to keep your attention. That has bled over into journalism. Facebook just then takes it up a notch.
Except the last time I saw them try this it was a disaster. They chose some out of the way location where no good talent would re-locate to. This client came back to our group after this disaster and after all of the legacy employees with all of the tribal knowledge had been laid off.
They would have to shuffle all of their teams in order to implement anything like this.
Not convinced it would actually benefit IBM in the slightest. Although I am sure they think differently.