I don't think I've ever had any of my hairs put into vacuum before.
- he must have one hairy apartment!
--
On the other hand it would have been even cooler if they stuck a few atoms of each element from the periodic table onto his hair in the right order as well. Bonus points for doing it while the hair is still on his head. More bonus points for doing it to every hair on his head. Extra super bonus points for trying to go through TSA at a local airport with that kind of hair to see what would happen, would they detect things like uranium?
Seems to me their biggest problem is that they allowed clients with a known bug to become supernodes
OK, FTFA
Approximately 40% of all Skype users that were online crashed, taking down around 30% of all supernodes.
- so supposedly this means that 30% of the supernodes went offline due to the bug, is this correct?
But look at the number: 40% of ALL Skype users went offline! That's insane, that's almost half. At the same time ONLY 30% of the supernodes went offline due to this bug, right?
Something does not add up.
FTFA:
Clients that continued to be up and running, and clients that restarted the application had their network searches directed to the supernodes still running, leading to an overload of those. Since Skype has in place a protection when a supernode is overloaded, so it would not consume too much of a client’s system’s resources, the supernodes started to shutdown automatically one after another, leading to a generalized failure of the network.
- so the sequence of events is supposedly this:
1. Bug causes 40% of all Skype clients to stop functioning, this includes 30% of all supernodes.
2. The remaining 60% of all Skype clients relied on 70% of supernodes (in reality the non-supernodes are less than 60% there, maybe 55%?)
3. Some of the failed 40% clients restarted, but not all, and not all 30% of the supernodes restarted.
So I don't understand this, do the numbers make sense to everybody? Let's say 50% of all crashed clients were able to restart, so that's 20% of total clients that restarted, wouldn't that also mean that about 15% of supernodes restarted as well?
What kind of tolerance (normal node to supernode ratio) is Skype using, if just a relatively small spike of usage forced all supernodes to shutdown?
I don't know, this story smells of something, either it's just bad reporting (likely) or Skype is not telling all of the truth (also likely), but no way this is the entire picture.
Not true; businesses do not build large particle accelerators, radio telescopes, nor will businesses fund studies on rare and endangered species. Not all science creates profit.
- my point is more fundamental than that. Businesses may not require particle accelerators, but you will not get any particle accelerators built by a broke society.
Gov't that destroys economy by driving away capital investment and drives away businesses by regulations and taxes and subsidies to monopolies and generally various anti-business practices will end up broke.
Businesses drive forward the need for research, that's what happened in 19 century and in 20 as well, even on/. many research stories that are coming out are related to private businesses developing something new.
Sure, a private business is unlikely to build an expensive piece of equipment without some profit motive, but if there are no businesses and no investment and no economy, then you won't have any of that built either.
I left plenty comments on this topic refuting this notion, that what a dying economy needs is more scientists
AFAIC what a dying economy needs is morebusinessmen, people who will invest their savings and time into new ideas, which was the reason that science in the West accelerated in its development during the industrial revolution - business drives economy, increases wealth and drives science, nothing else can do it, only new business can do it.
Let's hope they are correct in their assessment and it's cheating that declined 70% (by the way, why not more than 70%?) as opposed to something else happening - like people cheating 70% MORE during all other times, not just during exams to throw off the statistics during the exams.
At the bottom of every research article is listed where the money comes from
- money only comes out of businesses.
Gov't can print fiat currency, sure, it can also borrow from others.
So gov't can steal your money by inflation (printing), it can steal your money by direct taxes (which is after all more honest than just printing and taxing your entire net worth).
Gov't can also steal the money from the future generations (you know, the proverbial children) by borrowing, which is taxing the future generations + interest upon those taxes, and in reality all of this goes towards destroying the host economy that gov't is living off of.
Yes, I do completely subscribe to 'that tripe'.
Gov't can steal your money, it can steal the children's money.
The basic research before any gov't was stealing the money was done completely privately, you fucking retard.
Yes, people were doing science much before your lovely gov't even existed, US and other histories are full of people doing science, some just because they were interested in it, doing it on the side, some working in actual businesses, doing research.
Today most of the science is done privately by private companies, and more and more of it is done not in the West at all, and for a good reason, but you are too stupid to understand it.
Do you know the real reason why it makes no sense to be a scientist in the West at this point?
It's because the West is not producing anything anymore. It's because the gov't has done enough damage to the economy, that businesses are not started, competition is impossible in the face of gov't subsidized/promoted/stimulated/bailed out/regulated for monopolies.
You cannot have science if you have no manufacturing. Manufacturing: capitalism + industrialization, is what made science possible and growing in the West in 19 century, it wasn't gov't, it was the push from the businesses to come up with new ways of doing stuff. At that point becoming an engineer was a very good idea for a new worker and becoming a scientist was really promoted, as engineers needed new stuff to be researched to do their jobs better.
The point is that a society cannot continue doing scientific research in production vacuum. It's not possible to have just a 'service based economy', without any production capacity and expect science to grow rather than to shrink and wither away.
Having the same cake and eating it... now that's a fantasy.
"Some kind of a businessman" have saved and invested their time and lives into industrializing the West with their capital, and their investment has created the environment that promoted sciences to develop. Also their investment has provided the West with so much wealth, that even such luxury spending as various gov't based semi-scientific research (semi, because gov't is only really interested in military applications of science before anything else).
The point is that without 'some kind of a businessman' there will be no wealth. There will be no environment, in which sciences are actually promoted, because do, as a possible end result, provide the engineering field with new possibilities of doing things that were impossible before, or doing things more efficiently, faster, cheaper, whatever.
You can ONLY rely on "some kind of a businessman" to increase the overall wealth of your society, and you can NEVER rely on any gov't ever doing it, because gov't is a committee that does not have to produce anything, it can just force people to give up their wealth (time and money and investment and capital) but it can never really produce anything.
You'll be LUCKY if you have "some kind of a businessman" left in your society, still trying to save and invest and provide capital and create goods that people want after the gov't is done destroying the currency your society deals in, after the gov't is done destroying the economy of its host society.
At the end, only "some kind of a businessman" will provide a nurturing environment that will allow sciences to move forward.
Gov't shouldn't be in business or science or education or healthcare or any kind of welfare programs at all. It also shouldn't own any assets, as it is terrible at asset management, because it's not an owner in any real sense, so it makes decisions like: 10million dollars liability cap for an deep ocean based oil drilling rig, etc.
Exactly what does this mean: PURE funding?
What is PURE and who is going to decide what KIND of science must be done with this so called 'pure' funding? Whose science gets done first?
No. The West in 19 century had developed so much of the science because new stuff was in demand by the engineering, and engineering was in demand by the capitalism, which bet on industrialization.
The science that was done, was done because in reality the market has provided enough of a push towards new material sciences, energy sciences, chemistry and physics, and the math had to catch up to explain the new phenomena. Even things like rocket science and computers, all of this was pushed for by the market, the first rockets were all home grown and then we know why the gov't provided money to promote more research in that area.
There is no such thing as 'pure', everything has a bias of some sort, somebody makes the final decisions and those decisions are more likely to be made for various reasons, which are far far away from being 'pure'.
- people have racism regardless of the system. USSR had plenty of racism and antisemitism as well, and it was a 'communist' country (in theory at least), I was born there so I can talk about racism and antisemitism in that country.
AFAIC the improvement of quality of life through increases of wealth during the 19 century only helped to reduce the racism in USA, it didn't increase it. Slavery itself was profitable, but not because the people profiting from it had specific ideology, in fact people profiting from slavery wouldn't be for free markets anyway, free market cannot include coercion and slavery is coercion. Industrialization and creation of powerful steam engines that started doing the work of people and increased production had deprecated the usefulness of slavery to a great extent, given that slave labor was used most often in the fields first and secondly in the very labor intensive process of production of sugars and fabrics, both of those have switched to automated labor (steam engines) during the 19 century, it even became more cost effective than slave labor to have machines do the work.
child labor
- as the world was mostly subsistence farmers before the industrial revolution took place, what do you think the culture of the farmers was before that time? The children were used as labor from early ages of 4-5 on the farms and I don't believe anybody can even make an argument that is based on morals about that situation when it was a matter of survival. In fact what would you have those children do? Before the industrial revolution they had very little chance of becoming independently wealthy, having any sort of education. Industrial revolution based on capitalism (savings and application of the saved capital to labor) has created the middle class - new small businesses, professionals and such, and it provided the society with enough automation and wealth to gradually get away from having to use child labor.
You are very judgmental about the people just centuries ago, who didn't have your kind of life style, where you can just sit in front of a computer rather than having to spend most of your day just producing food for yourself.
and the 19th century ended with the rise of the trusts
- irrelevant point. The current system is built around the governments that created and maintain and bail out and stimulate and subsidize and provide free money to the monopolies that large governments prefer to real competitive markets.
Large governments prefer monopolies, specifically because monopolies are inefficient and inefficiencies allow the monopolies to overcharge the customers and allow them to underpay and under invest all this, while taking the difference in profits and using those profits to grease up the very governments that are propping up the monopolies.
The trusts' only crime was that they competed with the governments for power. The famous case of Standard Oil has shown specifically, that the governments' first and only concern was that Standard Oil competed with the government too efficiently, and do not forget, by the time the company was broken up it had at least 6 competitors in the field. Standard Oil had very close ties to various governments around the world, it was a government propped monopoly, just like monopolies of today.
The more interesting case is Alcoa Aluminum, which was broken up due to the fact that it was so damn efficient and provided the product at such a low cost that nobody could compete with it. But that was the best outcome for the market - to have that company provide the material at that very low cost. No competition could arise specifically because that monopoly was so efficient. The market did not win, it lost from the braking up of that monopoly, because the efficiency of production went down, not up after the break up and the costs of aluminum went up, not down. There is no problem with a monopoly that is very e
There must not be any subsidies to anybody at all, regardless of your claims that 'society would not be possible'.
Society was possible when there was no farm subsidies, this was just a century ago and in fact food prices, while volatile (Nixon tried fixing the food prices and partially succeeded, while creating other problems, like the obesity epidemic) still are very low and went down over the course of the 19 century like all other prices, the USD became twice as valuable as it was at the beginning of the 19 century.
Since the Fed was created, the dollar was printed in ever increasing quantities, to maintain the growing government without boundaries, and the dollar lost value since then by a factor of 20.
I rather see strong and strengthening currency and price swings than failing currency and price fixing and unnecessary destruction of environment and resource mis-allocation.
This is evaluation of what precisely? All of those things are surely good to have, some are really a 'must have' especially if there is more than one developer. But in reality none of that answers the question: "is the software company a kind of company I would want to work at?"
There is nothing there about what kinds of projects the company is doing, what kind of working conditions are set, what kinds of flexibilities are allowed, there is nothing there about desire/ability of the company to require excellence or initiative, there is nothing there that helps you to understand if your work will be rewarded based on your contribution, etc.
Sure, there is probably correlation between a company that works on multiple projects and that can in principle allow the developers to work from home (for example) and things like 'distributed source control'. But that is maybe a correlations, not a causation.
Where are the questions about management structure? The types of projects that you'll be engaged in? The kind of initiative the company is expecting (or not expecting), the kind of documentation that will be expected, the kind of maintenance you'd be expected to do, the kind of work hours you'll be putting in, something to measure the expected stress levels due to scheduling/resource mis-allocations, etc? You need to understand those if you want to be able to make informed decisions on the compensation and work conditions you'll have.
The source control, etc., it's all good, but it's all irrelevant! That's because YOU can change it once you are on a project, I had to change those things many times, from source control implementation, to documentation structures, even management structure. The real question for me is always: what do you really expect me to deliver and given the levels of stress associated with it what will you be paying per hour? (contracts only of-course).
Hold on, hold on, you are now switching from your premise, that I am proposing a system that has never been successfully implemented.
So you are wrong and your original statement was either a flamebait or a troll, though the local communist/. moderators think that my comment that described the fact that USA had that system and it was working really well as a flamebait. Obviously they do not like the fact that the system I am proposing has been successfully implemented.
19 century didn't happen such an enormously long time ago, it happened only a few generations ago. Since then the world has gone through enough wars that it broke the working system that USA had (well, of-course the USA broke it from within, but the WWI was the original justification to implement the Federal Reserve, which became the beginning of destruction of Free Market capitalism because it allowed the gov't to grow immensely and take over the economy and destroy it.)
Also, yes, a couple of hundred of countries exist on this planet today, but until only 30 years ago, NONE of them has come close to the economic power that the USA became over the 19 century.
USA had an enormously powerful economy, all thanks to the Free Market that it allowed to exist over the 19 century. Over the 20 century US has squandered all that wealth and now it is a non-productive debtor, that prints money to monetize debt, exports inflation and has only a tiny fraction of the capital left in the country, while ironically a former Communist nation (China) is becoming more and more economically capitalistic in practice, China today is similar to what USA was in 19 century, and that is why China is growing its economy and is going to be the next super power, now, that it is the biggest producer of consumer goods in the world, which inevitably lead to it also eventually becoming the biggest innovator and science pushing nation.
Innovation depends on science and science depends on demand from the market. USA is lost because it lost its Free Market way.
Except it was not deregulation that caused the problem, it was PARTIAL deregulation that caused it.
It's just not possible to partially deregulate an industry by deregulating the end user costs, while regulating other aspects of it, subsidizing companies, etc.
I am against all regulation exactly for this reason - deregulate something partially and leave large portion of it regulated and you are going to be in that situation where things WILL become worse and unfortunately the politicians (and the stupid electorate) will blame free market for this problem.
- you are ignorant, that's the way the current gov't system wants you to be.
USA, 19 century, the country had unprecedented growth of wealth, the quality of life for all people went up dramatically, over that century (and before the creation of the Fed) the dollar gained in value by a factor of 2 (compare to the 20th century since the Fed was created with a mandate of price stability - it failed miserably, the dollar lost value by a factor of over 20).
The system that is not controlled by gov't is known to work very well, it's when gov't starts taking over the economy that the system starts failing eventually, especially if the economy that was taken over was very strong, so gov't could grow immensely, eventually killing the host economy by its uncontrollable growth. Gov't is a spending item, it does have reasons to exist (minimum military, justice system, cops/prisons) but when it gains ability to print money and get unlimited debt, it eventually gains too much power and destroys the host economy and society.
I am not talking about any 'perfect' system either, the 19 century wasn't perfect, but it was an excellent showcase of staggering growth of quality of life, change of economy from agrarian to industrial, creation of the middle class, eventual growth of wealth and fall of prices, that allowed quality of life to increase, new various economies to be created around the industrial one, innovation was accelerating, science was driven forward by the need of more capable engineering.
Today USA is burning through the last ounces of credit that is left over from that earlier system, eventually the US bond bubble will burst, just like the housing before it and the internet before it, all created and fed with 'free' gov't money and debt and destruction of capital by the gov't agenda of creating and maintaining monopolies.
USA will fall and eventually will have to be rebuilt, and it's not going to be any gov't power that will rebuild it, it will be just like always - private interest.
Gov't regulation does one thing, always that one thing and no other thing: increase costs by destroying the competition and mis-allocating resources.
There is nothing else gov't can do, it's not profit driven, it has no feed-back loops, it has no incentives to drive costs down, it has no incentives to increase competition.
It has all the incentives to reduce competition and to regulate the resulting monopolies, it makes much more money with monopolies than it ever could with real competition.
It was not a gov't that came up with idea of electricity, it was private individuals, it was not the gov't that came up with how to use electricity, it was private individuals.
Gov't can do one thing: take your wealth and spend it. There is nothing else it can do.
I don't think you have considered just what kind of abuse an airplane can take and still stay up.
Sure you can put a hole through a fuselage, but even with half of the walls missing, an airplane can still land safely, not like it hasn't happened before.
You are pretty much a douche-bag AFAIC, and a terrible one at that.
The guy did not sign up to be tortured by his own gov't without any indication that he is actually guilty of anything, and in fact, he hasn't signed up to be tortured by his gov't period, and people should not ever expect to be tortured by their gov't, well, unless of-course that's the kind of gov't we are talking about here, (and it looks like you are all for it, douche-bag), but that's exactly what the US is NOT supposed to be about - torturing people.
Well, sure, if your idea is to blow up a plane it's much simpler and less expensive than that, all you need is to buy and smuggle a small number of shoulder fired rocket propelled grenade launchers that may even be heat or otherwise guided and then you just wait by an airport for a plane.
If you want to take over a plane or over more than one plane, you can still do it by getting your own people to become 'TSA agents'.
Since terrorism seems to be all the rage nowadays, I give you this very simple plot:
1. A guy wants to blow up a plane, maybe even more than one. 2. He hires some other dudes who have the same ideas. 3. He gets one or more of his recruits to become TSA agents. The plot becomes a long one, but so what, if it takes a couple of years to implement even, as long as there is money... 4. Some of the people he hired do make it and become TSA agents. 5. The fake TSA agents bring weapons through the security check points themselves.
that's it, the rest is details left to imagination.
Nazis were aiming to destroy specific groups of people based on their ethnicity/religion. US is aiming at some very similar goals in the similar parts of the world even with similar people, just because those people are also not the best friends of Jews doesn't make the situation much better.
Sure, USA is not aiming at total annihilation of Muslims, but that maybe only because there are so many Muslims in the world.
Nazis had a bunch of goals related to destroying specific groups of people (like Jews), how far fetched is it to look at the politics and wars of USA today and draw parallels between Nazis exterminating the Jews and the overall anti-Muslim ideology that is now dominant in the US politics?
Nazis, they are reminding me of Nazis. They are Fascists somewhat, Fascists at least had labor unions electing top management of corporations from the most outstanding workers and have them represent the corporations in the gov't. In USA today there is no such democratic system in the corporate world - the CEOs and other management is NOT elected democratically from the company workers.
He is sitting in solitary confinement for over 200 days now, 23 hours a day he is alone, he is explicitely forbidden to sleep or exercise during the day, he is given 1 hour of 'exercise time', when he can walk around in a circle for that one hour.
That is torture, and it is designed to break Manning to make him come up with various false allegations against Julian Assange, so that Assange could then be charged with some conspiracy against the US gov't.
Slashdot Mirror
Martyn Poliakoff says:
I don't think I've ever had any of my hairs put into vacuum before.
- he must have one hairy apartment!
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On the other hand it would have been even cooler if they stuck a few atoms of each element from the periodic table onto his hair in the right order as well. Bonus points for doing it while the hair is still on his head. More bonus points for doing it to every hair on his head. Extra super bonus points for trying to go through TSA at a local airport with that kind of hair to see what would happen, would they detect things like uranium?
Seems to me their biggest problem is that they allowed clients with a known bug to become supernodes
OK, FTFA
Approximately 40% of all Skype users that were online crashed, taking down around 30% of all supernodes.
- so supposedly this means that 30% of the supernodes went offline due to the bug, is this correct?
But look at the number: 40% of ALL Skype users went offline! That's insane, that's almost half. At the same time ONLY 30% of the supernodes went offline due to this bug, right?
Something does not add up.
FTFA:
Clients that continued to be up and running, and clients that restarted the application had their network searches directed to the supernodes still running, leading to an overload of those. Since Skype has in place a protection when a supernode is overloaded, so it would not consume too much of a client’s system’s resources, the supernodes started to shutdown automatically one after another, leading to a generalized failure of the network.
- so the sequence of events is supposedly this:
1. Bug causes 40% of all Skype clients to stop functioning, this includes 30% of all supernodes.
2. The remaining 60% of all Skype clients relied on 70% of supernodes (in reality the non-supernodes are less than 60% there, maybe 55%?)
3. Some of the failed 40% clients restarted, but not all, and not all 30% of the supernodes restarted.
So I don't understand this, do the numbers make sense to everybody? Let's say 50% of all crashed clients were able to restart, so that's 20% of total clients that restarted, wouldn't that also mean that about 15% of supernodes restarted as well?
What kind of tolerance (normal node to supernode ratio) is Skype using, if just a relatively small spike of usage forced all supernodes to shutdown?
I don't know, this story smells of something, either it's just bad reporting (likely) or Skype is not telling all of the truth (also likely), but no way this is the entire picture.
Not true; businesses do not build large particle accelerators, radio telescopes, nor will businesses fund studies on rare and endangered species. Not all science creates profit.
- my point is more fundamental than that. Businesses may not require particle accelerators, but you will not get any particle accelerators built by a broke society.
Gov't that destroys economy by driving away capital investment and drives away businesses by regulations and taxes and subsidies to monopolies and generally various anti-business practices will end up broke.
Businesses drive forward the need for research, that's what happened in 19 century and in 20 as well, even on /. many research stories that are coming out are related to private businesses developing something new.
Sure, a private business is unlikely to build an expensive piece of equipment without some profit motive, but if there are no businesses and no investment and no economy, then you won't have any of that built either.
I left plenty comments on this topic refuting this notion, that what a dying economy needs is more scientists
AFAIC what a dying economy needs is more businessmen, people who will invest their savings and time into new ideas, which was the reason that science in the West accelerated in its development during the industrial revolution - business drives economy, increases wealth and drives science, nothing else can do it, only new business can do it.
Let's hope they are correct in their assessment and it's cheating that declined 70% (by the way, why not more than 70%?) as opposed to something else happening - like people cheating 70% MORE during all other times, not just during exams to throw off the statistics during the exams.
At the bottom of every research article is listed where the money comes from
- money only comes out of businesses.
Gov't can print fiat currency, sure, it can also borrow from others.
So gov't can steal your money by inflation (printing), it can steal your money by direct taxes (which is after all more honest than just printing and taxing your entire net worth).
Gov't can also steal the money from the future generations (you know, the proverbial children) by borrowing, which is taxing the future generations + interest upon those taxes, and in reality all of this goes towards destroying the host economy that gov't is living off of.
Yes, I do completely subscribe to 'that tripe'.
Gov't can steal your money, it can steal the children's money.
The basic research before any gov't was stealing the money was done completely privately, you fucking retard.
Yes, people were doing science much before your lovely gov't even existed, US and other histories are full of people doing science, some just because they were interested in it, doing it on the side, some working in actual businesses, doing research.
Today most of the science is done privately by private companies, and more and more of it is done not in the West at all, and for a good reason, but you are too stupid to understand it.
Do you know the real reason why it makes no sense to be a scientist in the West at this point?
It's because the West is not producing anything anymore. It's because the gov't has done enough damage to the economy, that businesses are not started, competition is impossible in the face of gov't subsidized/promoted/stimulated/bailed out/regulated for monopolies.
You cannot have science if you have no manufacturing. Manufacturing: capitalism + industrialization, is what made science possible and growing in the West in 19 century, it wasn't gov't, it was the push from the businesses to come up with new ways of doing stuff. At that point becoming an engineer was a very good idea for a new worker and becoming a scientist was really promoted, as engineers needed new stuff to be researched to do their jobs better.
The point is that a society cannot continue doing scientific research in production vacuum. It's not possible to have just a 'service based economy', without any production capacity and expect science to grow rather than to shrink and wither away.
Having the same cake and eating it... now that's a fantasy.
"some kind of a businessman", ha?
"Some kind of a businessman" have saved and invested their time and lives into industrializing the West with their capital, and their investment has created the environment that promoted sciences to develop. Also their investment has provided the West with so much wealth, that even such luxury spending as various gov't based semi-scientific research (semi, because gov't is only really interested in military applications of science before anything else).
The point is that without 'some kind of a businessman' there will be no wealth. There will be no environment, in which sciences are actually promoted, because do, as a possible end result, provide the engineering field with new possibilities of doing things that were impossible before, or doing things more efficiently, faster, cheaper, whatever.
You can ONLY rely on "some kind of a businessman" to increase the overall wealth of your society, and you can NEVER rely on any gov't ever doing it, because gov't is a committee that does not have to produce anything, it can just force people to give up their wealth (time and money and investment and capital) but it can never really produce anything.
You'll be LUCKY if you have "some kind of a businessman" left in your society, still trying to save and invest and provide capital and create goods that people want after the gov't is done destroying the currency your society deals in, after the gov't is done destroying the economy of its host society.
At the end, only "some kind of a businessman" will provide a nurturing environment that will allow sciences to move forward.
Gov't shouldn't be in business or science or education or healthcare or any kind of welfare programs at all. It also shouldn't own any assets, as it is terrible at asset management, because it's not an owner in any real sense, so it makes decisions like: 10million dollars liability cap for an deep ocean based oil drilling rig, etc.
Exactly what does this mean: PURE funding?
What is PURE and who is going to decide what KIND of science must be done with this so called 'pure' funding? Whose science gets done first?
No. The West in 19 century had developed so much of the science because new stuff was in demand by the engineering, and engineering was in demand by the capitalism, which bet on industrialization.
The science that was done, was done because in reality the market has provided enough of a push towards new material sciences, energy sciences, chemistry and physics, and the math had to catch up to explain the new phenomena. Even things like rocket science and computers, all of this was pushed for by the market, the first rockets were all home grown and then we know why the gov't provided money to promote more research in that area.
There is no such thing as 'pure', everything has a bias of some sort, somebody makes the final decisions and those decisions are more likely to be made for various reasons, which are far far away from being 'pure'.
Exactly what's wrong with being a businessman or a celebrity?
You have racism
- people have racism regardless of the system. USSR had plenty of racism and antisemitism as well, and it was a 'communist' country (in theory at least), I was born there so I can talk about racism and antisemitism in that country.
AFAIC the improvement of quality of life through increases of wealth during the 19 century only helped to reduce the racism in USA, it didn't increase it. Slavery itself was profitable, but not because the people profiting from it had specific ideology, in fact people profiting from slavery wouldn't be for free markets anyway, free market cannot include coercion and slavery is coercion. Industrialization and creation of powerful steam engines that started doing the work of people and increased production had deprecated the usefulness of slavery to a great extent, given that slave labor was used most often in the fields first and secondly in the very labor intensive process of production of sugars and fabrics, both of those have switched to automated labor (steam engines) during the 19 century, it even became more cost effective than slave labor to have machines do the work.
child labor
- as the world was mostly subsistence farmers before the industrial revolution took place, what do you think the culture of the farmers was before that time? The children were used as labor from early ages of 4-5 on the farms and I don't believe anybody can even make an argument that is based on morals about that situation when it was a matter of survival. In fact what would you have those children do? Before the industrial revolution they had very little chance of becoming independently wealthy, having any sort of education. Industrial revolution based on capitalism (savings and application of the saved capital to labor) has created the middle class - new small businesses, professionals and such, and it provided the society with enough automation and wealth to gradually get away from having to use child labor.
You are very judgmental about the people just centuries ago, who didn't have your kind of life style, where you can just sit in front of a computer rather than having to spend most of your day just producing food for yourself.
and the 19th century ended with the rise of the trusts
- irrelevant point. The current system is built around the governments that created and maintain and bail out and stimulate and subsidize and provide free money to the monopolies that large governments prefer to real competitive markets.
Large governments prefer monopolies, specifically because monopolies are inefficient and inefficiencies allow the monopolies to overcharge the customers and allow them to underpay and under invest all this, while taking the difference in profits and using those profits to grease up the very governments that are propping up the monopolies.
The trusts' only crime was that they competed with the governments for power. The famous case of Standard Oil has shown specifically, that the governments' first and only concern was that Standard Oil competed with the government too efficiently, and do not forget, by the time the company was broken up it had at least 6 competitors in the field. Standard Oil had very close ties to various governments around the world, it was a government propped monopoly, just like monopolies of today.
The more interesting case is Alcoa Aluminum, which was broken up due to the fact that it was so damn efficient and provided the product at such a low cost that nobody could compete with it. But that was the best outcome for the market - to have that company provide the material at that very low cost. No competition could arise specifically because that monopoly was so efficient. The market did not win, it lost from the braking up of that monopoly, because the efficiency of production went down, not up after the break up and the costs of aluminum went up, not down. There is no problem with a monopoly that is very e
There are PEOPLE on /.?
There must not be any subsidies to anybody at all, regardless of your claims that 'society would not be possible'.
Society was possible when there was no farm subsidies, this was just a century ago and in fact food prices, while volatile (Nixon tried fixing the food prices and partially succeeded, while creating other problems, like the obesity epidemic) still are very low and went down over the course of the 19 century like all other prices, the USD became twice as valuable as it was at the beginning of the 19 century.
Since the Fed was created, the dollar was printed in ever increasing quantities, to maintain the growing government without boundaries, and the dollar lost value since then by a factor of 20.
I rather see strong and strengthening currency and price swings than failing currency and price fixing and unnecessary destruction of environment and resource mis-allocation.
This is evaluation of what precisely? All of those things are surely good to have, some are really a 'must have' especially if there is more than one developer. But in reality none of that answers the question: "is the software company a kind of company I would want to work at?"
There is nothing there about what kinds of projects the company is doing, what kind of working conditions are set, what kinds of flexibilities are allowed, there is nothing there about desire/ability of the company to require excellence or initiative, there is nothing there that helps you to understand if your work will be rewarded based on your contribution, etc.
Sure, there is probably correlation between a company that works on multiple projects and that can in principle allow the developers to work from home (for example) and things like 'distributed source control'. But that is maybe a correlations, not a causation.
Where are the questions about management structure? The types of projects that you'll be engaged in? The kind of initiative the company is expecting (or not expecting), the kind of documentation that will be expected, the kind of maintenance you'd be expected to do, the kind of work hours you'll be putting in, something to measure the expected stress levels due to scheduling/resource mis-allocations, etc? You need to understand those if you want to be able to make informed decisions on the compensation and work conditions you'll have.
The source control, etc., it's all good, but it's all irrelevant! That's because YOU can change it once you are on a project, I had to change those things many times, from source control implementation, to documentation structures, even management structure. The real question for me is always: what do you really expect me to deliver and given the levels of stress associated with it what will you be paying per hour? (contracts only of-course).
Hold on, hold on, you are now switching from your premise, that I am proposing a system that has never been successfully implemented.
So you are wrong and your original statement was either a flamebait or a troll, though the local communist /. moderators think that my comment that described the fact that USA had that system and it was working really well as a flamebait. Obviously they do not like the fact that the system I am proposing has been successfully implemented.
19 century didn't happen such an enormously long time ago, it happened only a few generations ago. Since then the world has gone through enough wars that it broke the working system that USA had (well, of-course the USA broke it from within, but the WWI was the original justification to implement the Federal Reserve, which became the beginning of destruction of Free Market capitalism because it allowed the gov't to grow immensely and take over the economy and destroy it.)
Also, yes, a couple of hundred of countries exist on this planet today, but until only 30 years ago, NONE of them has come close to the economic power that the USA became over the 19 century.
USA had an enormously powerful economy, all thanks to the Free Market that it allowed to exist over the 19 century. Over the 20 century US has squandered all that wealth and now it is a non-productive debtor, that prints money to monetize debt, exports inflation and has only a tiny fraction of the capital left in the country, while ironically a former Communist nation (China) is becoming more and more economically capitalistic in practice, China today is similar to what USA was in 19 century, and that is why China is growing its economy and is going to be the next super power, now, that it is the biggest producer of consumer goods in the world, which inevitably lead to it also eventually becoming the biggest innovator and science pushing nation.
Innovation depends on science and science depends on demand from the market. USA is lost because it lost its Free Market way.
Except it was not deregulation that caused the problem, it was PARTIAL deregulation that caused it.
It's just not possible to partially deregulate an industry by deregulating the end user costs, while regulating other aspects of it, subsidizing companies, etc.
I am against all regulation exactly for this reason - deregulate something partially and leave large portion of it regulated and you are going to be in that situation where things WILL become worse and unfortunately the politicians (and the stupid electorate) will blame free market for this problem.
it has failed but none of where it has succeeded.
- you are ignorant, that's the way the current gov't system wants you to be.
USA, 19 century, the country had unprecedented growth of wealth, the quality of life for all people went up dramatically, over that century (and before the creation of the Fed) the dollar gained in value by a factor of 2 (compare to the 20th century since the Fed was created with a mandate of price stability - it failed miserably, the dollar lost value by a factor of over 20).
The system that is not controlled by gov't is known to work very well, it's when gov't starts taking over the economy that the system starts failing eventually, especially if the economy that was taken over was very strong, so gov't could grow immensely, eventually killing the host economy by its uncontrollable growth. Gov't is a spending item, it does have reasons to exist (minimum military, justice system, cops/prisons) but when it gains ability to print money and get unlimited debt, it eventually gains too much power and destroys the host economy and society.
I am not talking about any 'perfect' system either, the 19 century wasn't perfect, but it was an excellent showcase of staggering growth of quality of life, change of economy from agrarian to industrial, creation of the middle class, eventual growth of wealth and fall of prices, that allowed quality of life to increase, new various economies to be created around the industrial one, innovation was accelerating, science was driven forward by the need of more capable engineering.
Today USA is burning through the last ounces of credit that is left over from that earlier system, eventually the US bond bubble will burst, just like the housing before it and the internet before it, all created and fed with 'free' gov't money and debt and destruction of capital by the gov't agenda of creating and maintaining monopolies.
USA will fall and eventually will have to be rebuilt, and it's not going to be any gov't power that will rebuild it, it will be just like always - private interest.
No, the solution is NO regulation at all.
Gov't regulation does one thing, always that one thing and no other thing: increase costs by destroying the competition and mis-allocating resources.
There is nothing else gov't can do, it's not profit driven, it has no feed-back loops, it has no incentives to drive costs down, it has no incentives to increase competition.
It has all the incentives to reduce competition and to regulate the resulting monopolies, it makes much more money with monopolies than it ever could with real competition.
It was not a gov't that came up with idea of electricity, it was private individuals, it was not the gov't that came up with how to use electricity, it was private individuals.
Gov't can do one thing: take your wealth and spend it. There is nothing else it can do.
I don't think you have considered just what kind of abuse an airplane can take and still stay up.
Sure you can put a hole through a fuselage, but even with half of the walls missing, an airplane can still land safely, not like it hasn't happened before.
You are pretty much a douche-bag AFAIC, and a terrible one at that.
The guy did not sign up to be tortured by his own gov't without any indication that he is actually guilty of anything, and in fact, he hasn't signed up to be tortured by his gov't period, and people should not ever expect to be tortured by their gov't, well, unless of-course that's the kind of gov't we are talking about here, (and it looks like you are all for it, douche-bag), but that's exactly what the US is NOT supposed to be about - torturing people.
Of-course this has been lost now for decades.
Well, sure, if your idea is to blow up a plane it's much simpler and less expensive than that, all you need is to buy and smuggle a small number of shoulder fired rocket propelled grenade launchers that may even be heat or otherwise guided and then you just wait by an airport for a plane.
If you want to take over a plane or over more than one plane, you can still do it by getting your own people to become 'TSA agents'.
Since terrorism seems to be all the rage nowadays, I give you this very simple plot:
1. A guy wants to blow up a plane, maybe even more than one.
2. He hires some other dudes who have the same ideas.
3. He gets one or more of his recruits to become TSA agents. The plot becomes a long one, but so what, if it takes a couple of years to implement even, as long as there is money...
4. Some of the people he hired do make it and become TSA agents.
5. The fake TSA agents bring weapons through the security check points themselves.
that's it, the rest is details left to imagination.
Nazis were aiming to destroy specific groups of people based on their ethnicity/religion. US is aiming at some very similar goals in the similar parts of the world even with similar people, just because those people are also not the best friends of Jews doesn't make the situation much better.
Sure, USA is not aiming at total annihilation of Muslims, but that maybe only because there are so many Muslims in the world.
Nazis had a bunch of goals related to destroying specific groups of people (like Jews), how far fetched is it to look at the politics and wars of USA today and draw parallels between Nazis exterminating the Jews and the overall anti-Muslim ideology that is now dominant in the US politics?
Nazis, they are reminding me of Nazis. They are Fascists somewhat, Fascists at least had labor unions electing top management of corporations from the most outstanding workers and have them represent the corporations in the gov't. In USA today there is no such democratic system in the corporate world - the CEOs and other management is NOT elected democratically from the company workers.
He is sitting in solitary confinement for over 200 days now, 23 hours a day he is alone, he is explicitely forbidden to sleep or exercise during the day, he is given 1 hour of 'exercise time', when he can walk around in a circle for that one hour.
That is torture, and it is designed to break Manning to make him come up with various false allegations against Julian Assange, so that Assange could then be charged with some conspiracy against the US gov't.