In Canada we mostly created a long gun registry. The idea was to basically keep a record of what guns were where. Before it was cancelled it had cost 2 billion dollars to create.
I want you to think about that. There are 33 million Canadians. So assuming every Canadian has 10 guns we are talking 330 million gun records distributed among 33 million owner records and then assuming that we are all police with varying levels of access let's assume 33 million admin records. So assuming 5K per gun record and something similar for the user and admin records, we are talking about 2 Terabytes.
Unless we were to have started to store high resolution photos of all those guns we weren't talking about something that is much of a system at all. A few call centers, some extra security... Can anyone figure out where the 2 billion could possibly have been spent?
One could argue that at the time storage cost more but not 100,000 times more.
I suspect that you would love direct democracy because it enables the voter and takes power away from the party machines. Except that on many votes that count people can be oddly on the fence. Thus small voting blocks could repeatedly work together to throw in a fairly small number of votes and continuously get everything they want. Also with continuous voting the voting numbers would be low resulting in those voting blocks only having to be tiny. I could see in a municipal environment with 400,000 citizens having a voting block with 100 members would probably give you a near ironclad rule on anything but the biggest issues that come to the media's attention. All those seemingly stupid things about rezoning, etc would be ignored by the vast majority of qualified voters.
So the two modifications that I would make would be something where I would try to restrict any funding of organizing voting blocks, plus the other would be to make it so that if a minimum percent of voters didn't vote that the vote is effectively a no vote. I could see this happening on things like declaring May 18th, Jim Johnson memorial day.
But with voting blocks I could see some really really stupid and selfish laws being passed.
One other modification would potentially be a sober second thought delay. That a law passed would have some fairly robust delay before it would come up for a second vote. This way if someone slipped one in on Christmas eve that it would be exposed as stupid and shot down 6 months later or whatnot.
Then there would be an interesting set of constitutional ideals. Such as you can't vote spending unless you vote a matching tax.
Other keys would be that transparency would have to be wildly clear. So when the citizens would be voting on a stupid thing like a stadium all the contracts and whatnot would have to be in the open for all to read. No confidentiality agreements, proprietary stuff, etc. Ideally if anything is concealed voters could take it to a judge and shut the law or spending down on the spot.
Any technology that even slightly threatened the new would be shut down and tied up in red tape for whatever amount of time it took for the upstart companies to die. Skype, gone. Drudge, gone. Youtube, gone. Netflix, gone. Ebay, gone. Paypal, gone. Cellphones, gone. mp3 players, gone. Amazon, gone. Online grocery ordering, gone.
Look at Uber. Local taxi companies are proving which cities have corrupt city councils and which don't.
They actually keep the UK money mostly offshore and don't pay much tax on it at all. This is something that the companies have been lobbying for; the ability to bring the money back into the US at a low tax rate. Right now the large US companies have something like 2.1 Trillion dollars (an actual number not just one I picked out of the air) that is sitting offshore, largely untaxed. What they can use this money for is buying out foreign companies and overseas marketing and whatnot.
One could have said that of pretty much any company at the beginning. Dell just wanted to be bought out by Compaq, Microsoft just wanted to be bought out by IBM, Google just wanted to be bought out by Yahoo, and so on.
But without a fairly level playing field buyout is the only option. I am willing to bet that a buyout benefits the UK far less than fostering an environment where the companies can grow up into multinationals themselves.
What I don't understand about countries like the UK allowing this to happen is not the simple equation of lost tax revenues but the fact that a UK company that wants to compete with Apple or one of the other companies not paying taxes can't. Basically the UK is asking its companies to pay huge taxes and then compete against companies that don't.
This means that Apple can operate in most of the world's major economies without having to pay 20-40% of its profits to the governments. The local companies often do. Minimally this gives the tax avoiding companies that much more to dump into marketing, research, etc while still returning a healthy profit to their shareholders.
So when looking at the losses, the UK Germany and so on, should not just look at the lost taxes but the lost benefits of having the next Facebook, Apple, Google, etc be born in their countries. What is Google worth to the US beyond simple corporate tax revenues? I suspect that at first blush that having a Google in your country would be worth a shocking amount.
One of the problems with bug bounties is information control. I am not talking about the bugs leaking out or making the company look bad so much as the information is then clear for the higher ups in the company to see what bugs the outside world is discovering. Thus those in charge of security look at bug bounties as career damaging information they can't control. I am willing to guess that many submissions are made to bug bounty gathering organizations that are complete crap. People no doubt write in vague things such as "You are using the Monkey BM operating system which is known to have many flaws. You can send the cheque to..." Thus it is probably easy for the CSO to take a genuine flaw and file it under the category "spurious". The worse the flaw, and the more clear the evidence as to how damming it is no doubt are the ones that they want to make go away the fastest. The CSO probably is used to being Tyrannical to his own employees and many other employees of the company. Can you imagine if he called your boss within the company and indicated that you were presenting a threat to the company?
So when he pulled this shit and called up a company out of the blue he probably thought his reign of terror would apply there too.
So if I were his boss I would not only look into this one case but I would look to see how many other cases he suppressed. Then, I would carefully look into his behaviour in the office. I would suggest that they hire an outside company that can do anonymous surveying of his immediate underlings and others that he has dealt with to see if he is a bully. I would also look into any firings that he was involved with; especially if they were outside his direct purview. Did he have some guy escorted out of the building because he wanted his parking space?
"Do they have independent learning material on computing?" I think that in a strange way this fits with the UK initiative to get programming into schools. By making online learning "suspicious" it means that kids will only learn the "proper" way of thinking.
In a way I think that the worst nightmare for traditionalists is if kids start to learn more an more from uncontrolled resources. To a card carrying members of The System they can't think of anything worse than a way for people who won't play by the "rules" to be able to succeed. There are many people who go through life building up a perfect checklist of a resume which includes going to the proper schools. Online learning threatens this to the core.
This already backfired in Singapore and the result was that lots of people went out and got a crappy second car; a crappy car that polluted even more. Or their kids got a car, or their wife, or they paid a neighbour, or whatever rule was put in front of them people went around around.
A far better way would be a big bloody toll with every dime spent on good public transport.
Most people look at the fairly obvious cost savings that autonomous cars will provide but miss the less obvious ones.
For instance in many cities there is little competition among grocery stores because a few early movers grabbed up crap land where they could then afford to put up a huge store with a massive parking lot. Then the city either grew to surround their store, or the value in that section of the city went way up. Thus the barrier to entry is impossibly high. The only grocery store competition that I see in the cities that I have lived in happens at the edge of town where there is crap land still available. But with autonomous cars the advantage of having a massive parkinglot plummets so we will end up with far greater grocery competition. This may also be coupled with autonomous grocery delivery which will also drive up the levels of competition.
Then there will be the massive reduction in the amount of wasted safety crap that we haul around and pay for in a modern driven car. Thus, on roads with 100% autonomous cars we can opt for basically the minimum amount of car that keeps us off the road and keeps the weather out. Not only will this be a minimal car but due to the fact that it drives itself and does not need to "handle" well, it means that far less engineering will need to go into the manufacture of a personal vehicle. This then opens up the field of making cars to all kinds of interesting and new competitors.
Then there is the cost of all the traffic violations going away. Over the years this can either add up directly by incurring them or as a driver with no moving violations and few parking tickets I can say that I have spent way too much effort avoiding these. I have no idea how much I can value the knowledge that some predatory taxman(ticket issuing authority) isn't waiting to jump out and rape my wallet; but peace of mind must be worth something.
Then there are the wasted hours trying to find parking, the predatory costs of parking in many cities, the predatory pricing of most cab companies, the predatory pricing of car rentals, the predatory pricing of auto-body shops. All of those pretty much vanish or become wildly more competitive. For instance if I do own my own car and I want to let it go park itself then I don't really care where it parks. So if the convenient parking garage wants $20 an hour, it can be worth it for my car to drive anything up to $9.99 away for free parking or some variation thereof to find a combination of parking that saves me money. Or if my car is less than $20 per hour to run then I could just let it drive around on its own.
Then there isn't just the car sharing that everyone talks about but within a family car sharing. This sort of car sharing would not only be for the typical family of 2.5 kids but could easily be among larger family or friend groupings. I see no reason that many (not all though) of my family would be welcome to my car. Especially if some kind of service would then effectively bill them for their share. This would be most excellent when one or more people in a family group have a speciality vehicle such as a picktup truck. I could see a nice app where you select your "reserved" hours and then let other family members largely have at it. Again, ideally this would end up being like some kind of bill splitting app where they would get automatically dinged a usage fee. I don't want to share my personally owned car with strangers, but family and friends would be OK. Some people argue that the personal car will go away. I strongly disagree for commuters as the peak loading would then leave the "shared" cars as non-performing assets. Some car pooling and whatnot will somewhat eat up commuting but I don't want to be with a bunch of people every morning. I want some "me" time so even if I commuted I would still own a tiny little pod car.
So those are only a few of the strange cost savings that the average person would have as there are many hidden costs to owning a car. I suspect that as the situation e
If I were some kid who's parents wouldn't buy him a computer and I effectively had no money then the whole thing would be about scrounging. With scrounging the key is the ready availability of parts. This then makes things like the more recent Model B units the ones that I would want. The key being that they have a standard hdmi along with the composite video. Also they have 4 standard USB plugs.
I can probably scrounge up some discarded monitor which means the only thing that I am going to have to buy is an HDMI to DVI converter ($5). After that the world is awash in old wired mice and keyboards. It is also awash in things that put out 5V from the wall along with the USB cords. Internet is still going to be a problem so finding some USB Wi-fi is probably going to be the biggest challenge.
But there is no scrounging the strange little mini-hdmi. I have never seen one of those in my life or career. And for some reason there is no great surplus of USB hubs, and I have never seen a USB hub that connects to that little USB connector. Thus that would be an adapter that would be hard to find.
So I don't see this new Pi as something for the kid who has nothing, but ideal for people like me with money and giant parts' bins who are building IoT and robots.
But I am way out in Canada. I can tell you the in store price for one of these nine dollar boards will be $19.99 and ordering it will probably push the price closer to $30. For example I was at an electronics's store going out of business sale and they "discounted" their Pi 1 A+ all the way "down" to $35.
And for any Canadians reading this we also know about the "brokerage fees" that will probably be tacked on.
If for some reason this becomes wildly popular then some gut bacteria will happily evolve to eat the wood. It then may very well provide us with more sustenance. If I understand correctly Japanese people often have a gut bacteria that helps them to better digest Seaweed.
I don't think that Blackberry has ever fully understood that the end user is their actual customer. For years they have allowed IT departments and Telcos to cripple their devices. So it is basically zero surprise when they allow the government to cripple the device some more.
So after all these years let's check to see what their market share is: Oh look it is within a statistical margin of error of zero. Yup the one time king of the smartphone is so close to zero market share as to effectively be zero. I have visited a number of companies where BBs are still used and those employees are chomping at the bit to fire them into the toilet. I wonder if this news will somehow enamour them more, or will it just give them an extra reason to hate their phone.
I have worked with and hung out with people who have attempted this. I have even seen people who presented it as a defacto done deal, a complete new UI that was cool.
The only, and I mean only way that I have seen this work is that the marketing department saw it and lost their minds. They knew money when they saw it. Except that the higher ups within IT basically crapped their pants in anger. The last thing they wanted was some hero coming out of the ranks of their programmers. What next, a mobile friendly version?
So, assuming that you are not already a senior hoo haa then you can play career roulette; do a solid sample and show it to a few marketing people. Either you are their new best friend or the "product manager" will have set your corpse on fire.
BTW having new best friends in marketing can be very very powerful, but remember they are simplistic, irrational people. They want money and they don't want to work for it. They won't stick their necks out for you unless there is a buck in it for them. So when you show it to them hint that this won't happen without their supporting you. Then maybe, just maybe they will hoist you on their shoulders and carry you around the department. But they have the attention spans of a 5 year old so you have to pretty well drop one thing into their laps after another. No delays, no complicated stuff that requires explanation.
You want to do cool nerdy things, but the marketing department knows that cool makes them more money. Thus you must only look at it as cool things that make money. Leave the nerdy stuff out of it. When they ask, "Can you do it?" don't talk about code, APIs, legacy, or anything else, just say, "I will put some serious lipstick on this pig!!!" and then high five them.
If they don't high five you back then you are talking to the wrong marketing guys. Talk to the one in a midlife crisis who just bought a Harley. Remember you guys might have some vague notions that you build the product blah blah blah. But they are the guys who go out and hunt the big game, the customers. They are the guys who put food on the table so the cave women can make the pots. So when talking to them ask yourself, do I make pots, or I am I prepared to stab the bear with a spear?
As for this being a good idea. Making software intuitive and beautiful should be a no-brainer, yet so few so-called brains spend any time on it.
Did they move their operations from the US and fire all their US developers and only hire ones from countries with the strongest data protection laws and the weakest spy agencies?
No? Then they are NSA compromised. Here is a letter from the DOJ ordering you to cooperate with the NSA or go to jail. You can't show the letter to anyone or you go to jail. If you want to contest it you will first go to jail and then you will have to contest it in a special court where you can't get any evidence that is in your favour. So you stay in jail.
If companies like Siemens are using Cisco equipment then they are fools.
Basically I noted that a single type of person loved, as in passionately, absolutely loved SCRUM. This was someone who usually had some certifications or something extra on their degree such as an Masters in CS. These people had supplanted certifications and procedures for productivity. They would look upon ever growing spreadsheets and mounds of reports as equal or even more important to actually delivering a product. And delivering a great product wasn't even on their radar. They would use words like "Greatness" or whatever but they would also then point to some awkward technology or procedure and use undefended terms like best of breed.
Also I found that SCRUM was used as a leveller and credit taker. I watched many projects where there was clearly a single or small number of programmers who could produce a solid highly functional product on time. Usually they had an awesome track record until some SCRUM master would impose their process on an already working team. This way they could report how the project was going to higher ups and take pretty much 100% of the credit.
Seeing that I have seen SCRUM drive away the best programmers on many teams SCRUM could also then be used as a tool to redefine success. Instead of delivering a product of much value they would deliver beautiful reports and make it look like their efforts were heroic to get the product done. So when the product was a huge lump of crap it was despite their best efforts, and certainly not because.
There is only one place for SCRUM and that is in a highly boring development environment where the product is not measured by its actual value but by how well it meets the contracted requirements. SCRUM will make all kinds of claims to being able to pivot on client requirements but the reality is that about the only thing it can pivot on is if the salesman manages to convince the client to change the contract to include more money.
So as someone with well over 20 years of development experience where would I recommend that SCRUM be used? I would only use it in a large corporation where there was a department that I wanted to shut down and be able to lay off all the most useless managers and boneheaded programmers from that and other departments. Then I would use SCRUM as bait to lure them all to their career deaths. I would also insist that two join that department that you have at least two "industry recognized" certifications; preferably in something obsolete such as Novell.
Most engineers I have met can barely past muster as engineers. My favourite being a PEng who built a structure with steel baseplates and bolts to which a large aluminium arches were going to be placed. All in a salty environment. At the late point in construction when someone pointed out the concept of the galvanic scale, the engineering company had to eat the cost of the arches.
Then engineering company 2 designed concrete arches to replace the aluminium ones but proceeded to design ones that couldn't be transported to the location because of bridge heights and whatnot. This was pointed out by the guy who owned the concrete form company. So they redesigned them to be in two parts but the guy who ran the concrete company said that they would probably crack within weeks as it was a terrible design. The engineer told the concrete guy he didn't know what he was talking about as he wasn't an engineer. The concrete guy slid his business card over which had his name ending with P. Eng.
In the end the entire concrete arch structure was designed by the concrete guy and has performed flawlessly for over a decade.
The first two engineering companies were two of the "better" companies in town and the engineers in question are partners.
Do we want bridges designed by rank amateurs? Probably not, but at the same time all the bluster about engineers being professionally certified somehow protecting us from something is mostly a load of shit. More specifically they should be ranked by the success of their projects and those engineers/firms with poor records should be publicly outed.
In my multi decade software career I have repeatedly heard grumblings about somehow regulating those who can make software for money. The complaints were rarely aimed at software quality but more about raising the barrier to entry. It especially seemed to tick off people with a masters in CS or CE to watch as someone who trained themselves get hired into a plum position because that person new some cool hip technology while they were masters of something on the way out. I could never get a proper read on the attitudes of those with PhDs in CS as they tended to so hyper focus on some very narrow technology that they were sort of outside the loop.
But the theme was pretty constant. They were looking for a way to enforce seniority and a way to keep those who didn't have a "proper" education out.
But the simple reality is that anyone who has been responsible for hiring computer people will strongly attest that the modern CS degree does not ensure competency. Working in a huge firm does not result often result in valuable experience. Any hiring person will share amazing tales of people with "proper" educations not being able to pass the FizzBuzz test. Or people who have been working for impressive company X with a CS degree who can't do the slightest bit of ML, not because they haven't done it but because they are unable to do the rudiments of Linear Algebra or statistics; required courses for most CS degrees.
So at this point any region that creates a required certification, guild, or professional organization will simply be like Britain in the late 1800s when they placed onerous rules on automobiles such as the crazy flagman rule. This then basically shot the infant British car industry in the face. Plus we all can predict the outcome of any certification system as being one where major companies such as Oracle would stuff their dicks into it and somehow make Oracle knowledge a critical part.
The big targets are so very juicy. I can't see a team of world class hackers attacking my usedshoes.com site with $80 in annual sales. With a major cloud provider I can see national governments sponsoring hacks so robust that they may very well get agents hired on as staff within the provider themselves. Then once you are in the rewards are so very massive.
Any fool who uses Quicktime is well, a fool. So this is like complaining that bridges build from sponges are poor engineering. Who the hell with half a brain would do that.
But it is not the user who is a fool for using quicktime. It is the user for using some crap software from 1998 that installs Quicktime along with the crap software.
I have long argued that most software would be best off if it could just install the associated crap that the crap developers seem to think is a good idea alongside the software.
If anything good is going to come from this extreme sandboxing that comes part in parcel with appstores it is this single feature. No more trashing my entire system and installing toolbar/desktop/driver software for something that I run once a lifetime. I don't even like this stupid bridge crap that adobe tries to include.
Basically if the OS allows the software to run at any time after I have exited the application then the OS needs work. Unless I have explicitly allowed that software to run in the background, on startup, or to a schedule. If I were an even marginally more angry person I would regularly lose my monitors to my fist when crap like Java asks me to upgrade when I am 100% certain that A) I didn't install it, and B) if I did that I would have said, "NEVER UPDATE!!!!"
I find that many companies have some old guys who have uber mastered some old technology. They have a wall of certificates that cost a fortune that underline their mastery of some protocol, hardware, software solution, etc. Needless to say they can't even wrap their brains around the concept that some new technology has made their baby so irrelevant that you can't even find much common ground so as to compare.
But the most important pair of skills that these encrusted barnacles have mastered are politics and playing the org-chart seniority game.
So some guy will come along with technologies that really piss off the old farts so they will either fight the change with their dying breaths or even more skillfully they will be change enablers that will guide the new technology into the trash and the new employees out the exit.
So step one will be to volunteer to lead a change team who will assist the new guys with their transformation. Step two will be to make sure that there is a dotted line that goes up from the new hire to the old fart. Then they will begin raining death upon the project by convincing upper management that there should be a risk analysis done before anything else. Next there should be some documentation produced that will thoroughly lay out the best practices and procedures for this amazing change. Next a whole series of initiatives need to be started to document training, certifications, minimum acceptable standards and whatnot to make sure that this amazing technology is even more amazing.
But oh oh, the new hires don't have a JSON certification. Nor do they have a Redis certification. That is OK because some of the old farts do have a XML certification along with an Oracle one, both of those are fine replacements for JSON and Redis. The node.js site documents that there are many open bugs with node.js so Java is the better choice. Also nginx has a healthy number of open bugs, so based on the acceptable practices plan it should be swapped out for websphere.
And finally the marketing team did a focus group which showed that customers would much prefer an engineer installed application rather than something that could be accessed through the terribly insecure browser. Plus the blackberry people are going to send an expert to tie the new system into a blackberry only application. This is good because the company only has approved blackberries for internal use.
Oh where did those new guys go? It seems that they abandoned the project because they just couldn't keep up with the fast pace of our corporate culture.
And by old farts, I don't mean old in years. I have seen people in their 20s with the wall of certificates and an unwillingness to adapt to the tsunami of change.
Many scientists that I have watches go through the education system are very very very good at doing school. They are otherwise nearly entirely useless when it comes to science. The problem is that these people will get a 99 in math a 99 in various sciences, 99 in all subjects regardless of their actual interests and end up eating 99% of the positions and scholarships. At the end of their PhD they are also very good at playing the system so they end up with Tenure faster, somehow publish the most, and then grab the grants to basically go to the conferences and present their most perfect papers.
Yet they really haven't contributed much at all. I find the real, near mad scientist, great scientists often do well at school but they don't see education as a checklist but the pattern is that they excel at what interests them and at best do OK at what doesn't. The same if they make it to higher education. They will focus on something very cool but forget little things like term papers in early French literature.
Then if despite everything they make it into graduate studies they will start out by rocking the boat which doesn't usually go well and if miracle of miracles they make it through their papers will be at best infrequent as they are only interested in publishing things that count.
Next, they will have problems testing any theories or gathering any data with a grant budget of $8.
Then, if at any point, they left the academic system they are completely disregarded as rank amateurs or dilettantes.
So by massively expanding science funding, all the useless wastes of space are sponged up into the academic system with room to spare. Thus someone who actually has the capability to do things that count will discover that they will have the position and resources to do the amazing things they can.
So the reality is that if maybe there were three times as many scientists being funded the result would be 2 or 3 genuine breakthroughs per decade. But cutting science funding from that level even by a third could result in zero fundamental breakthroughs.
Basically science funding needs to be expanded until all of the teacher's pets have been mopped up, all the people who should have gone to work on wall street have been mopped up, and then finally they start running out of people who want to go into science.
But one of the absolute critical features is that science funding need not make anyone rich. The truly great ones really don't care about money. Give them enough to satiate their needs both for lifestyle and more importantly to do their work and that is it. There need not be any strange commercial partnerships that look great when the academics go out and start an Intel or two. Those sorts of things are great for different reasons but you won't attract the Feynmans and Einsteins.
As a tecnology person I have only ever seen HP as a trio of companies. One sells crappy laptops, one sells printers with exploitive prices for ink and toner, and the other has salesmen in cheap but still too slick suits trying to sell services that only make sense to techno-illiterate CEOs and board members. Not once in my life have I heard some respectable IT person put HP on any list of server technologies that they were even looking into, let alone buying.
The same when I used to see any business that had all IBM desktops. I would just laugh and say, "I wonder what the total cost per machine that is going to come to?" You could be certain that those machines were just part of a giant upsell as soon as some IBM saleman got his foot in the door during a golf game with some executives in the sucker company.
So if anyone is put out by this decision to close this technology it just certifies them as a fool.
They don't care about the hobby market. They do care about the market of delivered goods and things like police drones. Typically they would want to own the market for drones in the $20,000 plus range. But the problem is that if there are 200 companies making ever bigger drones for photographers, movie companies, and eventually fire and police then they will actually have to compete. But compete is not what the big aviation companies like to do. They like the regulators to take out their competition as best as possible first.
Basically this all comes under the category of the value add of having a huge barrier to entry.
So my guess is that they will do this through a size/range regulation. This way the little hobby companies will hit a wall where a tiny improvement in their drone would then cost them millions in regulatory costs. So they won't bother. Whereas without such a wall some of the hundreds of drone companies would just get bigger and bigger until basically they reach a drone large enough to satiate the needs of most customers. I suspect that the largest drone that will be needed for most purposes would be under 40Kg. But the smallest drone for doing things like shipping small parcels will be at least 5kg plus the parcel. So I will throw out the guess that the regulation will have a weight restriction somewhere in the 2-4Kg range. Thus I will just make the prediction of a 3Kg limit. Range is the other factor. A drone that must be something like line of sight is pretty much useless on a commercial front. Thus they will limit it to 500 yards or line of sight. Even a mile could be pretty useful so they won't go anywhere near that.
Then the information nazis will try to keep them away from any "Emergency operations." The last thing the police want is the next Rodney King being filmed by the next Spielberg.
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In Canada we mostly created a long gun registry. The idea was to basically keep a record of what guns were where. Before it was cancelled it had cost 2 billion dollars to create.
I want you to think about that. There are 33 million Canadians. So assuming every Canadian has 10 guns we are talking 330 million gun records distributed among 33 million owner records and then assuming that we are all police with varying levels of access let's assume 33 million admin records. So assuming 5K per gun record and something similar for the user and admin records, we are talking about 2 Terabytes.
Unless we were to have started to store high resolution photos of all those guns we weren't talking about something that is much of a system at all. A few call centers, some extra security... Can anyone figure out where the 2 billion could possibly have been spent?
One could argue that at the time storage cost more but not 100,000 times more.
I suspect that you would love direct democracy because it enables the voter and takes power away from the party machines. Except that on many votes that count people can be oddly on the fence. Thus small voting blocks could repeatedly work together to throw in a fairly small number of votes and continuously get everything they want. Also with continuous voting the voting numbers would be low resulting in those voting blocks only having to be tiny. I could see in a municipal environment with 400,000 citizens having a voting block with 100 members would probably give you a near ironclad rule on anything but the biggest issues that come to the media's attention. All those seemingly stupid things about rezoning, etc would be ignored by the vast majority of qualified voters.
So the two modifications that I would make would be something where I would try to restrict any funding of organizing voting blocks, plus the other would be to make it so that if a minimum percent of voters didn't vote that the vote is effectively a no vote. I could see this happening on things like declaring May 18th, Jim Johnson memorial day.
But with voting blocks I could see some really really stupid and selfish laws being passed.
One other modification would potentially be a sober second thought delay. That a law passed would have some fairly robust delay before it would come up for a second vote. This way if someone slipped one in on Christmas eve that it would be exposed as stupid and shot down 6 months later or whatnot.
Then there would be an interesting set of constitutional ideals. Such as you can't vote spending unless you vote a matching tax.
Other keys would be that transparency would have to be wildly clear. So when the citizens would be voting on a stupid thing like a stadium all the contracts and whatnot would have to be in the open for all to read. No confidentiality agreements, proprietary stuff, etc. Ideally if anything is concealed voters could take it to a judge and shut the law or spending down on the spot.
Any technology that even slightly threatened the new would be shut down and tied up in red tape for whatever amount of time it took for the upstart companies to die. Skype, gone. Drudge, gone. Youtube, gone. Netflix, gone. Ebay, gone. Paypal, gone. Cellphones, gone. mp3 players, gone. Amazon, gone. Online grocery ordering, gone.
Look at Uber. Local taxi companies are proving which cities have corrupt city councils and which don't.
They actually keep the UK money mostly offshore and don't pay much tax on it at all. This is something that the companies have been lobbying for; the ability to bring the money back into the US at a low tax rate. Right now the large US companies have something like 2.1 Trillion dollars (an actual number not just one I picked out of the air) that is sitting offshore, largely untaxed. What they can use this money for is buying out foreign companies and overseas marketing and whatnot.
One could have said that of pretty much any company at the beginning. Dell just wanted to be bought out by Compaq, Microsoft just wanted to be bought out by IBM, Google just wanted to be bought out by Yahoo, and so on.
But without a fairly level playing field buyout is the only option. I am willing to bet that a buyout benefits the UK far less than fostering an environment where the companies can grow up into multinationals themselves.
What I don't understand about countries like the UK allowing this to happen is not the simple equation of lost tax revenues but the fact that a UK company that wants to compete with Apple or one of the other companies not paying taxes can't. Basically the UK is asking its companies to pay huge taxes and then compete against companies that don't.
This means that Apple can operate in most of the world's major economies without having to pay 20-40% of its profits to the governments. The local companies often do. Minimally this gives the tax avoiding companies that much more to dump into marketing, research, etc while still returning a healthy profit to their shareholders.
So when looking at the losses, the UK Germany and so on, should not just look at the lost taxes but the lost benefits of having the next Facebook, Apple, Google, etc be born in their countries. What is Google worth to the US beyond simple corporate tax revenues? I suspect that at first blush that having a Google in your country would be worth a shocking amount.
One of the problems with bug bounties is information control. I am not talking about the bugs leaking out or making the company look bad so much as the information is then clear for the higher ups in the company to see what bugs the outside world is discovering. Thus those in charge of security look at bug bounties as career damaging information they can't control. I am willing to guess that many submissions are made to bug bounty gathering organizations that are complete crap. People no doubt write in vague things such as "You are using the Monkey BM operating system which is known to have many flaws. You can send the cheque to ..." Thus it is probably easy for the CSO to take a genuine flaw and file it under the category "spurious". The worse the flaw, and the more clear the evidence as to how damming it is no doubt are the ones that they want to make go away the fastest. The CSO probably is used to being Tyrannical to his own employees and many other employees of the company. Can you imagine if he called your boss within the company and indicated that you were presenting a threat to the company?
So when he pulled this shit and called up a company out of the blue he probably thought his reign of terror would apply there too.
So if I were his boss I would not only look into this one case but I would look to see how many other cases he suppressed. Then, I would carefully look into his behaviour in the office. I would suggest that they hire an outside company that can do anonymous surveying of his immediate underlings and others that he has dealt with to see if he is a bully. I would also look into any firings that he was involved with; especially if they were outside his direct purview. Did he have some guy escorted out of the building because he wanted his parking space?
"Do they have independent learning material on computing?" I think that in a strange way this fits with the UK initiative to get programming into schools. By making online learning "suspicious" it means that kids will only learn the "proper" way of thinking.
In a way I think that the worst nightmare for traditionalists is if kids start to learn more an more from uncontrolled resources. To a card carrying members of The System they can't think of anything worse than a way for people who won't play by the "rules" to be able to succeed. There are many people who go through life building up a perfect checklist of a resume which includes going to the proper schools. Online learning threatens this to the core.
This already backfired in Singapore and the result was that lots of people went out and got a crappy second car; a crappy car that polluted even more. Or their kids got a car, or their wife, or they paid a neighbour, or whatever rule was put in front of them people went around around.
A far better way would be a big bloody toll with every dime spent on good public transport.
Most people look at the fairly obvious cost savings that autonomous cars will provide but miss the less obvious ones.
For instance in many cities there is little competition among grocery stores because a few early movers grabbed up crap land where they could then afford to put up a huge store with a massive parking lot. Then the city either grew to surround their store, or the value in that section of the city went way up. Thus the barrier to entry is impossibly high. The only grocery store competition that I see in the cities that I have lived in happens at the edge of town where there is crap land still available. But with autonomous cars the advantage of having a massive parkinglot plummets so we will end up with far greater grocery competition. This may also be coupled with autonomous grocery delivery which will also drive up the levels of competition.
Then there will be the massive reduction in the amount of wasted safety crap that we haul around and pay for in a modern driven car. Thus, on roads with 100% autonomous cars we can opt for basically the minimum amount of car that keeps us off the road and keeps the weather out. Not only will this be a minimal car but due to the fact that it drives itself and does not need to "handle" well, it means that far less engineering will need to go into the manufacture of a personal vehicle. This then opens up the field of making cars to all kinds of interesting and new competitors.
Then there is the cost of all the traffic violations going away. Over the years this can either add up directly by incurring them or as a driver with no moving violations and few parking tickets I can say that I have spent way too much effort avoiding these. I have no idea how much I can value the knowledge that some predatory taxman(ticket issuing authority) isn't waiting to jump out and rape my wallet; but peace of mind must be worth something.
Then there are the wasted hours trying to find parking, the predatory costs of parking in many cities, the predatory pricing of most cab companies, the predatory pricing of car rentals, the predatory pricing of auto-body shops. All of those pretty much vanish or become wildly more competitive. For instance if I do own my own car and I want to let it go park itself then I don't really care where it parks. So if the convenient parking garage wants $20 an hour, it can be worth it for my car to drive anything up to $9.99 away for free parking or some variation thereof to find a combination of parking that saves me money. Or if my car is less than $20 per hour to run then I could just let it drive around on its own.
Then there isn't just the car sharing that everyone talks about but within a family car sharing. This sort of car sharing would not only be for the typical family of 2.5 kids but could easily be among larger family or friend groupings. I see no reason that many (not all though) of my family would be welcome to my car. Especially if some kind of service would then effectively bill them for their share. This would be most excellent when one or more people in a family group have a speciality vehicle such as a picktup truck. I could see a nice app where you select your "reserved" hours and then let other family members largely have at it. Again, ideally this would end up being like some kind of bill splitting app where they would get automatically dinged a usage fee. I don't want to share my personally owned car with strangers, but family and friends would be OK. Some people argue that the personal car will go away. I strongly disagree for commuters as the peak loading would then leave the "shared" cars as non-performing assets. Some car pooling and whatnot will somewhat eat up commuting but I don't want to be with a bunch of people every morning. I want some "me" time so even if I commuted I would still own a tiny little pod car.
So those are only a few of the strange cost savings that the average person would have as there are many hidden costs to owning a car. I suspect that as the situation e
If I were some kid who's parents wouldn't buy him a computer and I effectively had no money then the whole thing would be about scrounging. With scrounging the key is the ready availability of parts. This then makes things like the more recent Model B units the ones that I would want. The key being that they have a standard hdmi along with the composite video. Also they have 4 standard USB plugs.
I can probably scrounge up some discarded monitor which means the only thing that I am going to have to buy is an HDMI to DVI converter ($5). After that the world is awash in old wired mice and keyboards. It is also awash in things that put out 5V from the wall along with the USB cords. Internet is still going to be a problem so finding some USB Wi-fi is probably going to be the biggest challenge.
But there is no scrounging the strange little mini-hdmi. I have never seen one of those in my life or career. And for some reason there is no great surplus of USB hubs, and I have never seen a USB hub that connects to that little USB connector. Thus that would be an adapter that would be hard to find.
So I don't see this new Pi as something for the kid who has nothing, but ideal for people like me with money and giant parts' bins who are building IoT and robots.
But I am way out in Canada. I can tell you the in store price for one of these nine dollar boards will be $19.99 and ordering it will probably push the price closer to $30. For example I was at an electronics's store going out of business sale and they "discounted" their Pi 1 A+ all the way "down" to $35.
And for any Canadians reading this we also know about the "brokerage fees" that will probably be tacked on.
If for some reason this becomes wildly popular then some gut bacteria will happily evolve to eat the wood. It then may very well provide us with more sustenance. If I understand correctly Japanese people often have a gut bacteria that helps them to better digest Seaweed.
I don't think that Blackberry has ever fully understood that the end user is their actual customer. For years they have allowed IT departments and Telcos to cripple their devices. So it is basically zero surprise when they allow the government to cripple the device some more.
So after all these years let's check to see what their market share is: Oh look it is within a statistical margin of error of zero. Yup the one time king of the smartphone is so close to zero market share as to effectively be zero. I have visited a number of companies where BBs are still used and those employees are chomping at the bit to fire them into the toilet. I wonder if this news will somehow enamour them more, or will it just give them an extra reason to hate their phone.
I have worked with and hung out with people who have attempted this. I have even seen people who presented it as a defacto done deal, a complete new UI that was cool.
The only, and I mean only way that I have seen this work is that the marketing department saw it and lost their minds. They knew money when they saw it. Except that the higher ups within IT basically crapped their pants in anger. The last thing they wanted was some hero coming out of the ranks of their programmers. What next, a mobile friendly version?
So, assuming that you are not already a senior hoo haa then you can play career roulette; do a solid sample and show it to a few marketing people. Either you are their new best friend or the "product manager" will have set your corpse on fire.
BTW having new best friends in marketing can be very very powerful, but remember they are simplistic, irrational people. They want money and they don't want to work for it. They won't stick their necks out for you unless there is a buck in it for them. So when you show it to them hint that this won't happen without their supporting you. Then maybe, just maybe they will hoist you on their shoulders and carry you around the department. But they have the attention spans of a 5 year old so you have to pretty well drop one thing into their laps after another. No delays, no complicated stuff that requires explanation.
You want to do cool nerdy things, but the marketing department knows that cool makes them more money. Thus you must only look at it as cool things that make money. Leave the nerdy stuff out of it. When they ask, "Can you do it?" don't talk about code, APIs, legacy, or anything else, just say, "I will put some serious lipstick on this pig!!!" and then high five them.
If they don't high five you back then you are talking to the wrong marketing guys. Talk to the one in a midlife crisis who just bought a Harley. Remember you guys might have some vague notions that you build the product blah blah blah. But they are the guys who go out and hunt the big game, the customers. They are the guys who put food on the table so the cave women can make the pots. So when talking to them ask yourself, do I make pots, or I am I prepared to stab the bear with a spear?
As for this being a good idea. Making software intuitive and beautiful should be a no-brainer, yet so few so-called brains spend any time on it.
Did they move their operations from the US and fire all their US developers and only hire ones from countries with the strongest data protection laws and the weakest spy agencies?
No? Then they are NSA compromised. Here is a letter from the DOJ ordering you to cooperate with the NSA or go to jail. You can't show the letter to anyone or you go to jail. If you want to contest it you will first go to jail and then you will have to contest it in a special court where you can't get any evidence that is in your favour. So you stay in jail.
If companies like Siemens are using Cisco equipment then they are fools.
Basically I noted that a single type of person loved, as in passionately, absolutely loved SCRUM. This was someone who usually had some certifications or something extra on their degree such as an Masters in CS. These people had supplanted certifications and procedures for productivity. They would look upon ever growing spreadsheets and mounds of reports as equal or even more important to actually delivering a product. And delivering a great product wasn't even on their radar. They would use words like "Greatness" or whatever but they would also then point to some awkward technology or procedure and use undefended terms like best of breed.
Also I found that SCRUM was used as a leveller and credit taker. I watched many projects where there was clearly a single or small number of programmers who could produce a solid highly functional product on time. Usually they had an awesome track record until some SCRUM master would impose their process on an already working team. This way they could report how the project was going to higher ups and take pretty much 100% of the credit.
Seeing that I have seen SCRUM drive away the best programmers on many teams SCRUM could also then be used as a tool to redefine success. Instead of delivering a product of much value they would deliver beautiful reports and make it look like their efforts were heroic to get the product done. So when the product was a huge lump of crap it was despite their best efforts, and certainly not because.
There is only one place for SCRUM and that is in a highly boring development environment where the product is not measured by its actual value but by how well it meets the contracted requirements. SCRUM will make all kinds of claims to being able to pivot on client requirements but the reality is that about the only thing it can pivot on is if the salesman manages to convince the client to change the contract to include more money.
So as someone with well over 20 years of development experience where would I recommend that SCRUM be used? I would only use it in a large corporation where there was a department that I wanted to shut down and be able to lay off all the most useless managers and boneheaded programmers from that and other departments. Then I would use SCRUM as bait to lure them all to their career deaths. I would also insist that two join that department that you have at least two "industry recognized" certifications; preferably in something obsolete such as Novell.
Name some names. Telling me that some random third party library out there has this is a huge pile of steaming useless information. Name some names.
Most engineers I have met can barely past muster as engineers. My favourite being a PEng who built a structure with steel baseplates and bolts to which a large aluminium arches were going to be placed. All in a salty environment. At the late point in construction when someone pointed out the concept of the galvanic scale, the engineering company had to eat the cost of the arches.
Then engineering company 2 designed concrete arches to replace the aluminium ones but proceeded to design ones that couldn't be transported to the location because of bridge heights and whatnot. This was pointed out by the guy who owned the concrete form company. So they redesigned them to be in two parts but the guy who ran the concrete company said that they would probably crack within weeks as it was a terrible design. The engineer told the concrete guy he didn't know what he was talking about as he wasn't an engineer. The concrete guy slid his business card over which had his name ending with P. Eng.
In the end the entire concrete arch structure was designed by the concrete guy and has performed flawlessly for over a decade.
The first two engineering companies were two of the "better" companies in town and the engineers in question are partners.
Do we want bridges designed by rank amateurs? Probably not, but at the same time all the bluster about engineers being professionally certified somehow protecting us from something is mostly a load of shit. More specifically they should be ranked by the success of their projects and those engineers/firms with poor records should be publicly outed.
In my multi decade software career I have repeatedly heard grumblings about somehow regulating those who can make software for money. The complaints were rarely aimed at software quality but more about raising the barrier to entry. It especially seemed to tick off people with a masters in CS or CE to watch as someone who trained themselves get hired into a plum position because that person new some cool hip technology while they were masters of something on the way out. I could never get a proper read on the attitudes of those with PhDs in CS as they tended to so hyper focus on some very narrow technology that they were sort of outside the loop.
But the theme was pretty constant. They were looking for a way to enforce seniority and a way to keep those who didn't have a "proper" education out.
But the simple reality is that anyone who has been responsible for hiring computer people will strongly attest that the modern CS degree does not ensure competency. Working in a huge firm does not result often result in valuable experience. Any hiring person will share amazing tales of people with "proper" educations not being able to pass the FizzBuzz test. Or people who have been working for impressive company X with a CS degree who can't do the slightest bit of ML, not because they haven't done it but because they are unable to do the rudiments of Linear Algebra or statistics; required courses for most CS degrees.
So at this point any region that creates a required certification, guild, or professional organization will simply be like Britain in the late 1800s when they placed onerous rules on automobiles such as the crazy flagman rule. This then basically shot the infant British car industry in the face. Plus we all can predict the outcome of any certification system as being one where major companies such as Oracle would stuff their dicks into it and somehow make Oracle knowledge a critical part.
The big targets are so very juicy. I can't see a team of world class hackers attacking my usedshoes.com site with $80 in annual sales. With a major cloud provider I can see national governments sponsoring hacks so robust that they may very well get agents hired on as staff within the provider themselves. Then once you are in the rewards are so very massive.
Any fool who uses Quicktime is well, a fool. So this is like complaining that bridges build from sponges are poor engineering. Who the hell with half a brain would do that.
But it is not the user who is a fool for using quicktime. It is the user for using some crap software from 1998 that installs Quicktime along with the crap software.
I have long argued that most software would be best off if it could just install the associated crap that the crap developers seem to think is a good idea alongside the software.
If anything good is going to come from this extreme sandboxing that comes part in parcel with appstores it is this single feature. No more trashing my entire system and installing toolbar/desktop/driver software for something that I run once a lifetime. I don't even like this stupid bridge crap that adobe tries to include.
Basically if the OS allows the software to run at any time after I have exited the application then the OS needs work. Unless I have explicitly allowed that software to run in the background, on startup, or to a schedule. If I were an even marginally more angry person I would regularly lose my monitors to my fist when crap like Java asks me to upgrade when I am 100% certain that A) I didn't install it, and B) if I did that I would have said, "NEVER UPDATE!!!!"
I find that many companies have some old guys who have uber mastered some old technology. They have a wall of certificates that cost a fortune that underline their mastery of some protocol, hardware, software solution, etc. Needless to say they can't even wrap their brains around the concept that some new technology has made their baby so irrelevant that you can't even find much common ground so as to compare.
But the most important pair of skills that these encrusted barnacles have mastered are politics and playing the org-chart seniority game.
So some guy will come along with technologies that really piss off the old farts so they will either fight the change with their dying breaths or even more skillfully they will be change enablers that will guide the new technology into the trash and the new employees out the exit.
So step one will be to volunteer to lead a change team who will assist the new guys with their transformation. Step two will be to make sure that there is a dotted line that goes up from the new hire to the old fart. Then they will begin raining death upon the project by convincing upper management that there should be a risk analysis done before anything else. Next there should be some documentation produced that will thoroughly lay out the best practices and procedures for this amazing change. Next a whole series of initiatives need to be started to document training, certifications, minimum acceptable standards and whatnot to make sure that this amazing technology is even more amazing.
But oh oh, the new hires don't have a JSON certification. Nor do they have a Redis certification. That is OK because some of the old farts do have a XML certification along with an Oracle one, both of those are fine replacements for JSON and Redis. The node.js site documents that there are many open bugs with node.js so Java is the better choice. Also nginx has a healthy number of open bugs, so based on the acceptable practices plan it should be swapped out for websphere.
And finally the marketing team did a focus group which showed that customers would much prefer an engineer installed application rather than something that could be accessed through the terribly insecure browser. Plus the blackberry people are going to send an expert to tie the new system into a blackberry only application. This is good because the company only has approved blackberries for internal use.
Oh where did those new guys go? It seems that they abandoned the project because they just couldn't keep up with the fast pace of our corporate culture.
And by old farts, I don't mean old in years. I have seen people in their 20s with the wall of certificates and an unwillingness to adapt to the tsunami of change.
Many scientists that I have watches go through the education system are very very very good at doing school. They are otherwise nearly entirely useless when it comes to science. The problem is that these people will get a 99 in math a 99 in various sciences, 99 in all subjects regardless of their actual interests and end up eating 99% of the positions and scholarships. At the end of their PhD they are also very good at playing the system so they end up with Tenure faster, somehow publish the most, and then grab the grants to basically go to the conferences and present their most perfect papers.
Yet they really haven't contributed much at all. I find the real, near mad scientist, great scientists often do well at school but they don't see education as a checklist but the pattern is that they excel at what interests them and at best do OK at what doesn't. The same if they make it to higher education. They will focus on something very cool but forget little things like term papers in early French literature.
Then if despite everything they make it into graduate studies they will start out by rocking the boat which doesn't usually go well and if miracle of miracles they make it through their papers will be at best infrequent as they are only interested in publishing things that count.
Next, they will have problems testing any theories or gathering any data with a grant budget of $8.
Then, if at any point, they left the academic system they are completely disregarded as rank amateurs or dilettantes.
So by massively expanding science funding, all the useless wastes of space are sponged up into the academic system with room to spare. Thus someone who actually has the capability to do things that count will discover that they will have the position and resources to do the amazing things they can.
So the reality is that if maybe there were three times as many scientists being funded the result would be 2 or 3 genuine breakthroughs per decade. But cutting science funding from that level even by a third could result in zero fundamental breakthroughs.
Basically science funding needs to be expanded until all of the teacher's pets have been mopped up, all the people who should have gone to work on wall street have been mopped up, and then finally they start running out of people who want to go into science.
But one of the absolute critical features is that science funding need not make anyone rich. The truly great ones really don't care about money. Give them enough to satiate their needs both for lifestyle and more importantly to do their work and that is it. There need not be any strange commercial partnerships that look great when the academics go out and start an Intel or two. Those sorts of things are great for different reasons but you won't attract the Feynmans and Einsteins.
As a tecnology person I have only ever seen HP as a trio of companies. One sells crappy laptops, one sells printers with exploitive prices for ink and toner, and the other has salesmen in cheap but still too slick suits trying to sell services that only make sense to techno-illiterate CEOs and board members. Not once in my life have I heard some respectable IT person put HP on any list of server technologies that they were even looking into, let alone buying.
The same when I used to see any business that had all IBM desktops. I would just laugh and say, "I wonder what the total cost per machine that is going to come to?" You could be certain that those machines were just part of a giant upsell as soon as some IBM saleman got his foot in the door during a golf game with some executives in the sucker company.
So if anyone is put out by this decision to close this technology it just certifies them as a fool.
They don't care about the hobby market. They do care about the market of delivered goods and things like police drones. Typically they would want to own the market for drones in the $20,000 plus range. But the problem is that if there are 200 companies making ever bigger drones for photographers, movie companies, and eventually fire and police then they will actually have to compete. But compete is not what the big aviation companies like to do. They like the regulators to take out their competition as best as possible first.
Basically this all comes under the category of the value add of having a huge barrier to entry.
So my guess is that they will do this through a size/range regulation. This way the little hobby companies will hit a wall where a tiny improvement in their drone would then cost them millions in regulatory costs. So they won't bother. Whereas without such a wall some of the hundreds of drone companies would just get bigger and bigger until basically they reach a drone large enough to satiate the needs of most customers. I suspect that the largest drone that will be needed for most purposes would be under 40Kg. But the smallest drone for doing things like shipping small parcels will be at least 5kg plus the parcel. So I will throw out the guess that the regulation will have a weight restriction somewhere in the 2-4Kg range. Thus I will just make the prediction of a 3Kg limit. Range is the other factor. A drone that must be something like line of sight is pretty much useless on a commercial front. Thus they will limit it to 500 yards or line of sight. Even a mile could be pretty useful so they won't go anywhere near that.
Then the information nazis will try to keep them away from any "Emergency operations." The last thing the police want is the next Rodney King being filmed by the next Spielberg.