A director of Marketing could be considered a company "Official". If he's "examines books, plays, news reports, motion pictures, radio and television programs, letters, cablegrams, etc., for the purpose of suppressing parts deemed objectionable on moral, political, military, or other grounds" and he uses the store to carry out such suppression, he's censoring.
The fact that there are alternative bookstores out there, out of his control, does not magically make what he's doing not censorship.
Don't be ridiculous. Williams-Sonoma is not a bookstore. There's no expectation that they'd carry a Stephen King novel. If they carry lots of cook books however, but refuse to carry other cook books because of their content, they are certainly censoring. They might have a good business reason to censor (like the cook books in question offer recipes for shit sandwiches) but it's still censorship.
Amazon is not a specialty bookstore. When they decide to drop a product (or refuse to stock it) purely because of its content, it's censorship. Again, there may be a good business reason for performing censorship, but it's still censorship.
What if tomorrow, Amazon announced that it would no longer sell any books that portrayed Christianity in a good light or promoted "Christian themes". Would you call that censorship? I would.
What's the difference between "the government screwing you on its own" and "a corporation gets the government to screw you"? I say there is no difference whatsoever. The final output is: you're screwed. The government is the muscle used to enforce corporate will.
I would argue that there is no government censorship in the USA. Companies decide they want to censor, and the government is merely the implementor.
And no matter how hard it is, these same idiots will keep claiming the prison system isn't hard enough. Isn't it time we start ignoring people who don't make any sense.
It's almost 2011. They all have mobile phones. Text a code number to the mobile phone associated with their userid. They have to enter the code to log in.
For users who still don't have a mobile, you shuffle them to the 'legacy' password login system, warning them along the way they're going the low-security path.
Our development efforts have been focused on new product while committing relatively little time to reviewing past work.
Software engineers, stop me if you've heard this one: "Don't worry about bugs or security holes! Just keep shoveling features in and ship! Audits? Code reviews?? Don't have time--gotta ship ship ship!"
Remember, "ideas are a dime a dozen" and "invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration".
This little catch-phrase is such bullshit.
It places undue importance on implementation. Sure, BAD ideas are a dime a dozen, but good ideas, well thought-out ideas, ideas that are feasible and implementable, and can be executed in time, are NOT a dime a dozen. Those ideas are worth 1000x their implementation.
As one of those "implementors" who would love to one day be the idea guy, I can tell you that implementation is not the hard part. Implementation is "by the book". It's formulaic. Give me any basic technical project, and I'll hammer out a workable implementation in pretty good time. Give me a more complicated idea with lots of different components, and I'll go get a few more implementors, put a spec together, and turn something out. Insert tab A into slot B.
There's no formula for coming up with the idea, though. What formula did the founders of Google, eBay, Amazon, etc. follow? I wake up every day trying to figure out what the next big idea will be. My fingers are ready to start typing out the code. Just waiting for the right idea. But these things don't fall out of trees! It's DAMN DIFFICULT.
Sure, it's easy to play monday morning quarterback after the idea has become successful. "Oh, Amazon is such a simple idea! I'm sure thousands of people had the idea for an online retailer years before they were founded! Hell, I had that idea back in the eighties!" Bullshit. If you did, you'd be Amazon right now.
Um, I don't know what part of Silicon Valley you live in and see a "competitive ISP market" but where I live in Sunnyvale, it's: Comcast (and AT&T if you live in just the right spot). I've lived all over the country, and when it comes to broadband availability and competition, Silicon Valley is as bad as or worse than most places. It's really an embarrassment, and it's inexcusable.
No, summary is more like: You can't say they 'give it away', because:
1. they transfer their 'donation' to a tax-free entity whose primary purpose is investment in domestic companies 2. they (and their heirs, probably US citizens) can control this money into perpetuity 3. any tiny profits left after overhead and costs are given to big US pharma companies at the end of the year 4. those US pharma companies then produce patented product that they can license or sell to poor countries, with terms extremely favorable to US business
At every stage in the game, profit is being made by someone in the USA, by the "donor", his family, or his business buddies, but they SAY they're merely "giving it away to less fortunate countries". It's total bullshit, and the people doing it need to be called on their bullshit and publicly shamed.
That only helps if your employer actually lets you use your time off. Often it's "Oh, we're in a crunch now. We can't let you take any of your time off. Sorry, but you lose it."
His response was to: "Indians love America. If only we let them come in here, work here, spend here, pay taxes here and keep the business here we will be so much better off." implying we are talking about visa workers.
I'll bring in a counter-example: The idea guy wants one faucet with hot water, one with cold water, and... one in the middle with luke-warm water.
The plumber (programmer) complains because nobody wrote a requirements document that specified the exact temperature of "luke-warm" and that producing such "luke-warm" water given only a source of cold and hot water was a "non-trivial" task that required $400,000 in capital and 3 man-years of development effort. When it was suggested that he simply mix the two sources into one, he started blabbering techno-giberish about water pressure and valve mechanics, and demanded an additional $50,000 for the scope creep....
You can have unreasonable people on both sides, you know...
- bugs. badly written code usually has a lot more bugs per feature than well-written code, plus it takes longer to find and fix them when they're reported. - speed with which you implement the new features they want. badly written code is hard to extend, and often completely breaks when new features are added. - performance. a customer isn't going to use your product if it takes twice as long to perform a simple task as your competitors. well-written code is easier to optimize.
Depends on the customer.
If that was true for all software products and all customers, please explain Quicken's success. That piece of junk fails all three of your criteria, but is still a super-successful product. Quicken's customers don't care about that stuff. They prefer a product that:
1. basically works 2. they're already familiar with
#2 is why being first with something that almost works is often better than being second or third with the perfect product.
No, you won't be. An Indian accepts a smaller salary than an American because he won't be spending it in America, he'll be spending it in India.
Uhh, let me get this straight. The Indian guy that's living here in America, rents an apartment in America, drives a car in America, eats in America, and goes out for entertainment in America is actually spending all his salary in India, and therefore can accept less in pay?
For example, our terms of service state that “you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.” It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy.
Cowards. implementing government-pressured censorship, then pointing to a nebulous "Terms of Service". They're publicly saying, "SEE! They didn't make us do it! It was our choice!!" while the gun is pointed at their heads off-camera.
Filter out keywords. Do your search with: -buy -purchase -price -shop
It would be really nice if shopping sites could all be on.com and useful informational stuff could all be on non.com domains, but that's as likely to happen as unicorns flying out of my butt.
The "higher density" argument is totally bogus, but it keeps getting trotted out over and over.
If that were a valid argument, we'd have companies offering 1GB/s service for $30, but limiting their offer to the large metro areas. They don't, not because it is technically impossible, but because they don't have to. The market is artificially controlled to let a few companies extract a lot of money for little service. Why offer 1GB/s for $30 when you can offer 8MB/s for $30 and get away with it?
The lack of broadband in the USA is not about land area or population density or cost. It's about greed and a total lack of competition.
I live in Silicon Valley, supposedly the heart of high-tech in the USA, and I pay a small fortune for a couple of MB/s. It's outrageous.
Yea, I had a chuckle at the summary, too. The company I work for (pretty nice, modern field, cross-platform mobile development) is desperately trying to hire good C++ programmers, but it's been impossible to find any decent ones. Sure, we get heaps of resumes, and we even bring a fair percentage in for interviews, but the problem is, nobody seems to know C++. They know "C with classes". They can tell you a little about inheritance and polymorphism, but only know the surface. They can't answer basic questions about STL, C++ cast operators, pure virtuals, const, etc. and don't know how to approach common day-to-day tasks that will come up like "What data structure or algorithm would you use to solve problem XYZ?" or "You see a bug with symptoms ABC, what would be your approach to solving it?"
If you know a little C++ (or any language), my advice would be to learn more of it.
"Grandma, this year I'm not coming home to see you for what might very well be your last Thanksgiving, because I'M GOING TO STAND UP FOR MY RIGHTS AND STICK IT TO THE TSA!!!"
Or, how about:
"Boss, I won't be traveling to Germany for the kick-off meeting with our client because I'm taking a MORAL STAND AGAINST THE TYRANNY OF THE US GOVERNMENT!"
They can and will get away with anything they want because flying is often people's only travel choice.
By some of the logic I've read here, you're a "guilty traitor with an obvious agenda" for simply posting estimates of how many people the US government has killed.
If they want to crush cross-platform development, then why aren't they moving to crush C or C++? Since C++ apps will run on just about every desktop and mobile platform out there (besides Blackberry).
Slashdot Mirror
A director of Marketing could be considered a company "Official". If he's "examines books, plays, news reports, motion pictures, radio and television programs, letters, cablegrams, etc., for the purpose of suppressing parts deemed objectionable on moral, political, military, or other grounds" and he uses the store to carry out such suppression, he's censoring.
The fact that there are alternative bookstores out there, out of his control, does not magically make what he's doing not censorship.
Don't be ridiculous. Williams-Sonoma is not a bookstore. There's no expectation that they'd carry a Stephen King novel. If they carry lots of cook books however, but refuse to carry other cook books because of their content, they are certainly censoring. They might have a good business reason to censor (like the cook books in question offer recipes for shit sandwiches) but it's still censorship.
Amazon is not a specialty bookstore. When they decide to drop a product (or refuse to stock it) purely because of its content, it's censorship. Again, there may be a good business reason for performing censorship, but it's still censorship.
What if tomorrow, Amazon announced that it would no longer sell any books that portrayed Christianity in a good light or promoted "Christian themes". Would you call that censorship? I would.
What's the difference between "the government screwing you on its own" and "a corporation gets the government to screw you"? I say there is no difference whatsoever. The final output is: you're screwed. The government is the muscle used to enforce corporate will.
I would argue that there is no government censorship in the USA. Companies decide they want to censor, and the government is merely the implementor.
And no matter how hard it is, these same idiots will keep claiming the prison system isn't hard enough. Isn't it time we start ignoring people who don't make any sense.
The Vehicle Identification Number number?
Is that like the Automated Teller Machine machine?
Or the Liquid Crystal Display display?
It's almost 2011. They all have mobile phones. Text a code number to the mobile phone associated with their userid. They have to enter the code to log in.
For users who still don't have a mobile, you shuffle them to the 'legacy' password login system, warning them along the way they're going the low-security path.
You don't say!
Our development efforts have been focused on new product while committing relatively little time to reviewing past work.
Software engineers, stop me if you've heard this one: "Don't worry about bugs or security holes! Just keep shoveling features in and ship! Audits? Code reviews?? Don't have time--gotta ship ship ship!"
Remember, "ideas are a dime a dozen" and "invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration".
This little catch-phrase is such bullshit.
It places undue importance on implementation. Sure, BAD ideas are a dime a dozen, but good ideas, well thought-out ideas, ideas that are feasible and implementable, and can be executed in time, are NOT a dime a dozen. Those ideas are worth 1000x their implementation.
As one of those "implementors" who would love to one day be the idea guy, I can tell you that implementation is not the hard part. Implementation is "by the book". It's formulaic. Give me any basic technical project, and I'll hammer out a workable implementation in pretty good time. Give me a more complicated idea with lots of different components, and I'll go get a few more implementors, put a spec together, and turn something out. Insert tab A into slot B.
There's no formula for coming up with the idea, though. What formula did the founders of Google, eBay, Amazon, etc. follow? I wake up every day trying to figure out what the next big idea will be. My fingers are ready to start typing out the code. Just waiting for the right idea. But these things don't fall out of trees! It's DAMN DIFFICULT.
Sure, it's easy to play monday morning quarterback after the idea has become successful. "Oh, Amazon is such a simple idea! I'm sure thousands of people had the idea for an online retailer years before they were founded! Hell, I had that idea back in the eighties!" Bullshit. If you did, you'd be Amazon right now.
Um, I don't know what part of Silicon Valley you live in and see a "competitive ISP market" but where I live in Sunnyvale, it's: Comcast (and AT&T if you live in just the right spot). I've lived all over the country, and when it comes to broadband availability and competition, Silicon Valley is as bad as or worse than most places. It's really an embarrassment, and it's inexcusable.
No, summary is more like: You can't say they 'give it away', because:
1. they transfer their 'donation' to a tax-free entity whose primary purpose is investment in domestic companies
2. they (and their heirs, probably US citizens) can control this money into perpetuity
3. any tiny profits left after overhead and costs are given to big US pharma companies at the end of the year
4. those US pharma companies then produce patented product that they can license or sell to poor countries, with terms extremely favorable to US business
At every stage in the game, profit is being made by someone in the USA, by the "donor", his family, or his business buddies, but they SAY they're merely "giving it away to less fortunate countries". It's total bullshit, and the people doing it need to be called on their bullshit and publicly shamed.
That only helps if your employer actually lets you use your time off. Often it's "Oh, we're in a crunch now. We can't let you take any of your time off. Sorry, but you lose it."
His response was to: "Indians love America. If only we let them come in here, work here, spend here, pay taxes here and keep the business here we will be so much better off." implying we are talking about visa workers.
So, without any kind of raise, you're working an extra hour and skipping lunch, and they're getting 100% more productivity out of you.
Sounds like you've got it all figured out, chap...
I'll bring in a counter-example: The idea guy wants one faucet with hot water, one with cold water, and... one in the middle with luke-warm water.
The plumber (programmer) complains because nobody wrote a requirements document that specified the exact temperature of "luke-warm" and that producing such "luke-warm" water given only a source of cold and hot water was a "non-trivial" task that required $400,000 in capital and 3 man-years of development effort. When it was suggested that he simply mix the two sources into one, he started blabbering techno-giberish about water pressure and valve mechanics, and demanded an additional $50,000 for the scope creep....
You can have unreasonable people on both sides, you know...
- bugs. badly written code usually has a lot more bugs per feature than well-written code, plus it takes longer to find and fix them when they're reported.
- speed with which you implement the new features they want. badly written code is hard to extend, and often completely breaks when new features are added.
- performance. a customer isn't going to use your product if it takes twice as long to perform a simple task as your competitors. well-written code is easier to optimize.
Depends on the customer.
If that was true for all software products and all customers, please explain Quicken's success. That piece of junk fails all three of your criteria, but is still a super-successful product. Quicken's customers don't care about that stuff. They prefer a product that:
1. basically works
2. they're already familiar with
#2 is why being first with something that almost works is often better than being second or third with the perfect product.
Uhh, let me get this straight. The Indian guy that's living here in America, rents an apartment in America, drives a car in America, eats in America, and goes out for entertainment in America is actually spending all his salary in India, and therefore can accept less in pay?
For example, our terms of service state that “you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.” It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy.
Cowards. implementing government-pressured censorship, then pointing to a nebulous "Terms of Service". They're publicly saying, "SEE! They didn't make us do it! It was our choice!!" while the gun is pointed at their heads off-camera.
Wait for $20/gal gasoline and watch driving habits change.
Filter out keywords. Do your search with: -buy -purchase -price -shop
It would be really nice if shopping sites could all be on .com and useful informational stuff could all be on non .com domains, but that's as likely to happen as unicorns flying out of my butt.
The "higher density" argument is totally bogus, but it keeps getting trotted out over and over.
If that were a valid argument, we'd have companies offering 1GB/s service for $30, but limiting their offer to the large metro areas. They don't, not because it is technically impossible, but because they don't have to. The market is artificially controlled to let a few companies extract a lot of money for little service. Why offer 1GB/s for $30 when you can offer 8MB/s for $30 and get away with it?
The lack of broadband in the USA is not about land area or population density or cost. It's about greed and a total lack of competition.
I live in Silicon Valley, supposedly the heart of high-tech in the USA, and I pay a small fortune for a couple of MB/s. It's outrageous.
Yea, I had a chuckle at the summary, too. The company I work for (pretty nice, modern field, cross-platform mobile development) is desperately trying to hire good C++ programmers, but it's been impossible to find any decent ones. Sure, we get heaps of resumes, and we even bring a fair percentage in for interviews, but the problem is, nobody seems to know C++. They know "C with classes". They can tell you a little about inheritance and polymorphism, but only know the surface. They can't answer basic questions about STL, C++ cast operators, pure virtuals, const, etc. and don't know how to approach common day-to-day tasks that will come up like "What data structure or algorithm would you use to solve problem XYZ?" or "You see a bug with symptoms ABC, what would be your approach to solving it?"
If you know a little C++ (or any language), my advice would be to learn more of it.
Good luck with that.
"Grandma, this year I'm not coming home to see you for what might very well be your last Thanksgiving, because I'M GOING TO STAND UP FOR MY RIGHTS AND STICK IT TO THE TSA!!!"
Or, how about:
"Boss, I won't be traveling to Germany for the kick-off meeting with our client because I'm taking a MORAL STAND AGAINST THE TYRANNY OF THE US GOVERNMENT!"
They can and will get away with anything they want because flying is often people's only travel choice.
They have thousands of laws, so in most cases the police can find something with which to charge you if they put their minds to it.
I think this only serves to demonstrate that there are, in general, way, way too many laws on the books.
By some of the logic I've read here, you're a "guilty traitor with an obvious agenda" for simply posting estimates of how many people the US government has killed.
If they want to crush cross-platform development, then why aren't they moving to crush C or C++? Since C++ apps will run on just about every desktop and mobile platform out there (besides Blackberry).