I don't think you can ever say that an IT company will still be in 5 years time, no matter how good their financial fundamentals look today. And if they want to avoid being sued out of business, they probably won't sign up to a contract with the kind of guarantees and penalties that you really want.
The answer is to not get tied into a single service provider. You need a cloud computing solution that is standard-based (formal or defacto) and that lots of providers are supporting. And you have to be prepared to migrate your stuff if/when the industry moves on to the next version of the standard... or the next "big leap forward" after cloud computing.
If such a control scheme was deemed to be against the US national interest, it would be vetoed by the US. Ditto for the other permanent members. So how does this make it bad for ICANN's power to be transferred to the United Nations?
"And Mr Supervisor, most other academics would consider an attempt to force them to cite our software in their papers as obnoxious, and borderline unethical. Indeed, many of them faced with such a license would refuse to use our software as a matter of principle."
The purpose of a citation is to refer the reader of my papers to other work that I judge to be relevant to the topic of my paper. The purpose is not to boost the citation count of someone else's work.
Of course, as an academic myself, not citing the paper for some software that I used, is sloppy anyway.
As an academic myself, I'd say that it depends on the circumstances. For example, if you were writing an "extended abstract" with a 1 or 2 page limit, you wouldn't have space to cite everything. And this where a software license that forced citation would be a bad thing. It could force you to leave out other citations that were far more worthy.
You could say that the taxpayers deserve it for voting for such an obviously bad mayor. Or for taking so little interest in local politics that they couldn't be bothered to vote against him.
The mayor was acting on behalf of "the people", with the weight of the power bestowed on him by "the people". So, IMO, it is the "the people" who should ultimately take the responsibility for his abuse of power. If the courts can sanction the mayor personally, all well and good. If not, then responsibility again falls on "the people" for not electing people who will pass the laws to make that an option for the courts.
If you have qualifications, experience and track record, what have you got to fear from a some testing?
Is the idea of proving yourself to them is beneath your dignity? If so, they probably wouldn't want to test you anyway.
Is it that you are worried that you are not good enough to pass their tests? Or that someone else will do better than you? Well, tough. Nobody owes you a job!
First option, you have no job.
Second option you probably end up with no job and a reputation as a troublemaker.
Third option you probably end up with no job, and maybe a criminal record as well.
I hope that you and your fellow environmental ostriches have a cool $50M each for a one way ticket to Venus in 2075. Better start saving now!
If you sold your car, cut back on your power bill, stopped flying to visit your mother every second week... think how much money you'd be saving towards that big trip:-)
You're removing the engineers who haven't recently seen the problem you're asking.
Exactly! For our coding exercises, we tried to pick problems that candidates were unlikely to have encountered before. If an engineer (given a hint or two) could not make a half-decent attempt at solving a novel problem, it was a sign that they were not a good fit for the work that our team had to do.
Obviously, were looking for other attributes and skills as well. Our interview process was typically an all-day affair, and we didn't reject people if they "failed" on one design / coding exercise.
In my last job, middle to senior level developers were involved in the process of screening and interviewing candidates to join their team. It was common practice to ask questions that involved coding on a whiteboard... or over the phone.
This was not done to torture candidates (or the interviewers for that matter). We were trying to find out things like the following:
Could the candidate actually program competently. You would be surprised the number of candidates who "exaggerate" (i.e. lie about) their programming skills.
Could the candidate think through a problem and come up with a good algorithm on the fly.
Could the candidate perform under pressure.
These are all important attributes that you want to know about a developer... before he / she joins your team and messes up an important project for you.
Don't dismiss MDA as being expensive and useless. There are MDA-based tools out there that are free and do a pretty good job, once you figure out how best to use them. The best example is Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) which takes models specified as ECore models, an XML (XMI) syntax plus a stack of Java library code including, in-memory representation, instance editors, validators and persistence via XML serialization or SDO.
Actually, ECore is not UML. It really based on MOF which is the meta-model for UML. You can think of MOF as being a subset of UML object notation, with some of the more sophisticated UML object modelling features (e.g. N-ary associations, association classes, stereotypes, etc) left out. EMF augments the ECore model with a "GenModel" which allow the developer to tune various aspects of the code, etc generation. This is a concrete example of MDA's PIM/PSM view of the world.
EMF works, at least for some problem domains. I've used it successfully for two significant projects which involved representing, editing and using relatively complex metadata. The secret to using EMF successfully is to understand their limitations, and to not try to be too ambitious in what you do. For example, I would NOT try to use EMF to generate code for a fine-grained transactional system, or one that required browser-based editing.
What if you cause a fatal traffic accident while driving 20-30 MPH under the speed limit?
Take a look at these statisticsLife is full of challenges and ways to kill yourself. I don't want to live in a world where every rough edge is smoothed off just to keep people with a low tolerance of life to tell other people what to do.
I've got no problem with you doing things that may end up killing you...
provided you don't put other people at risk at the same time.
If you manage to survive to an age where you have children, you might just
learn to understand this point of view. If you want to drive fast, take
up speedway racing or something. Or you could try free climbing or cave
diving, or clearing land mines, or...
Traffic fatalities are going down as speeds are generally headed up. In otherwords, there is statistical link between travelling faster than the speed limit an fatalities.
According to the report linked above, someone travelling at 85 kph in a
60kph zone is greter than 50 times (yes FIFTY times) more likely to
have a crash resulting in fatality or serious injury than someone driving at
the speed limit. Is that what you mean?
Driving is not like pushing a cart around a supermarket.
True, and that is why we have driving licenses and driving tests. But equally, driving is not just a game for testosterone ridden male juveniles with a death
wish. It is something that most adults need to be able to do to get by in
modern society. And as such, the rights of your claimed 90% "incompetent"
drivers to drive safely outweigh the rights of the other 10% to drive like
maniacs.
How about when your father is having a heart attack and there is no local ambulance?
But what if you cause a fatal traffic accident while driving your father
to the hospital at 20 to 30 mph above the speed limit?
Having some government nanny controlling my accelerator is not welcome or appropriate.
Tell that to someone who has lost a relative in a traffic accident caused
by speeding. I think my right to protection from being killed by a
road maniac trumps your "right" to break the law by speeding, even if you
think you have a justification.
Enforcement of the law is up to the police, not some computer...
Are you prepared to fund the cost of putting thousands of extra police
cars on the road to enforce the speeding laws?
Besides, don't long distance trucks have to have speed limiters fitted
by law in the USA? They do in Australia!
... that may have buggy software
This is hypothetical, and (IMO) highly unlikely. If people can build
software reliable enough to fly an A370, or run an embedded heart
defibrilator, they can surely build something as simple as this in a
safe manner.
- and how much is it going to cost for this big-brother system that is
able to monitor every vehicle on the roads?
Unfortunately, cost is likely to be the big stumbling block.
... by cutting down the environental costs of keeping your unnecessary stuff running, manufacturing it in the first place and disposing of it when you want to upgrade to the next new-fangled gadget.
I'm not going to address your insults and attempts to prove that you are smart,
but...
...adults who typically can tell the difference between forcing and encouraging another adult to do something.
That is the nub of the issue. There are situations where this distinction between forcing and encouraging is blurry; e.g. when one party is manipulating
the other. There are also situations where the person who incites a wrongful act deserves more blame than any single individual who commits the act; e.g.
when someone incites a race riot.
Both of these apply in this case. The P2P operators are (arguably) implicitly encouraging foolish and impressionable young people to break the law... and indirectly making money out of this. And the P2P operators are (arguably)
more to blame for the total "harm" to the record companies than any one of the file sharers.
It is debatable whether the illegal music copying is "wrong" and whether the actual "harm" claimed by the record companies is real. But the fact that
Grokster settled for $50M says that they know who the courts would
have "blamed" and "punished". In the face of this, legalistic quibbling
about "liability" versus "contributory liability" is irrelevant.
You have contradicted yourself. First you say that you say you think they
are not liable. Then you say that "their free speech can be found to be contributory, a lesser liability". A lesser liability IS a liability.
Besides, my point was about what the general population would think that
the legal system should do. Your typical citizen doesn't know or
want to know about the legal distinctions. He / she simply knows that
people who incite other people to do "wrong" things deserve to be punished.
The problem is that there is no consensus on what is "wrong" in this context.
But returning to what I said. In hindsight, there probably is a significant minority of US citizens who firmly believe that the doctrine of Free Speech should absolve them of legal responsibility for just about everything they say, except shouting "Fire". And the consequences for US society
are plain to see.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer is to not get tied into a single service provider. You need a cloud computing solution that is standard-based (formal or defacto) and that lots of providers are supporting. And you have to be prepared to migrate your stuff if/when the industry moves on to the next version of the standard ... or the next "big leap forward" after cloud computing.
And that is all hard to do.
We invented koalas and Crocodile Dundee. What better credentials could you ask for?
If such a control scheme was deemed to be against the US national interest, it would be vetoed by the US. Ditto for the other permanent members. So how does this make it bad for ICANN's power to be transferred to the United Nations?
My rubber Donald wants to volunteer to be part of this experiment. Does anyone know where he can sign up?
"And Mr Supervisor, most other academics would consider an attempt to force them to cite our software in their papers as obnoxious, and borderline unethical. Indeed, many of them faced with such a license would refuse to use our software as a matter of principle."
The purpose of a citation is to refer the reader of my papers to other work that I judge to be relevant to the topic of my paper. The purpose is not to boost the citation count of someone else's work.
Of course, as an academic myself, not citing the paper for some software that I used, is sloppy anyway.
As an academic myself, I'd say that it depends on the circumstances. For example, if you were writing an "extended abstract" with a 1 or 2 page limit, you wouldn't have space to cite everything. And this where a software license that forced citation would be a bad thing. It could force you to leave out other citations that were far more worthy.
The mayor was acting on behalf of "the people", with the weight of the power bestowed on him by "the people". So, IMO, it is the "the people" who should ultimately take the responsibility for his abuse of power. If the courts can sanction the mayor personally, all well and good. If not, then responsibility again falls on "the people" for not electing people who will pass the laws to make that an option for the courts.
Actually, it says something about your company's (lack of) internal QA that that garbage code ever made it to a customer site!
Is the idea of proving yourself to them is beneath your dignity? If so, they probably wouldn't want to test you anyway.
Is it that you are worried that you are not good enough to pass their tests? Or that someone else will do better than you? Well, tough. Nobody owes you a job!
This person obviously does not appreciate the beer :-)
And the beer is good :-)
And base 1 :-)
First option, you have no job. Second option you probably end up with no job and a reputation as a troublemaker. Third option you probably end up with no job, and maybe a criminal record as well.
If you sold your car, cut back on your power bill, stopped flying to visit your mother every second week ... think how much money you'd be saving towards that big trip :-)
You do understand that you can never give someone an interview problem that is truly representative of what they would encounter in their job?
Exactly! For our coding exercises, we tried to pick problems that candidates were unlikely to have encountered before. If an engineer (given a hint or two) could not make a half-decent attempt at solving a novel problem, it was a sign that they were not a good fit for the work that our team had to do.
Obviously, were looking for other attributes and skills as well. Our interview process was typically an all-day affair, and we didn't reject people if they "failed" on one design / coding exercise.
This was not done to torture candidates (or the interviewers for that matter). We were trying to find out things like the following:
These are all important attributes that you want to know about a developer ... before he / she joins your team and messes up an important project for you.
Don't dismiss MDA as being expensive and useless. There are MDA-based tools out there that are free and do a pretty good job, once you figure out how best to use them. The best example is Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) which takes models specified as ECore models, an XML (XMI) syntax plus a stack of Java library code including, in-memory representation, instance editors, validators and persistence via XML serialization or SDO.
Actually, ECore is not UML. It really based on MOF which is the meta-model for UML. You can think of MOF as being a subset of UML object notation, with some of the more sophisticated UML object modelling features (e.g. N-ary associations, association classes, stereotypes, etc) left out. EMF augments the ECore model with a "GenModel" which allow the developer to tune various aspects of the code, etc generation. This is a concrete example of MDA's PIM/PSM view of the world.
EMF works, at least for some problem domains. I've used it successfully for two significant projects which involved representing, editing and using relatively complex metadata. The secret to using EMF successfully is to understand their limitations, and to not try to be too ambitious in what you do. For example, I would NOT try to use EMF to generate code for a fine-grained transactional system, or one that required browser-based editing.
Take a look at these statistics Life is full of challenges and ways to kill yourself. I don't want to live in a world where every rough edge is smoothed off just to keep people with a low tolerance of life to tell other people what to do.
I've got no problem with you doing things that may end up killing you ...
provided you don't put other people at risk at the same time.
If you manage to survive to an age where you have children, you might just
learn to understand this point of view. If you want to drive fast, take
up speedway racing or something. Or you could try free climbing or cave
diving, or clearing land mines, or ...
Traffic fatalities are going down as speeds are generally headed up. In otherwords, there is statistical link between travelling faster than the speed limit an fatalities.
According to the report linked above, someone travelling at 85 kph in a 60kph zone is greter than 50 times (yes FIFTY times) more likely to have a crash resulting in fatality or serious injury than someone driving at the speed limit. Is that what you mean?
Driving is not like pushing a cart around a supermarket.
True, and that is why we have driving licenses and driving tests. But equally, driving is not just a game for testosterone ridden male juveniles with a death wish. It is something that most adults need to be able to do to get by in modern society. And as such, the rights of your claimed 90% "incompetent" drivers to drive safely outweigh the rights of the other 10% to drive like maniacs.
But what if you cause a fatal traffic accident while driving your father to the hospital at 20 to 30 mph above the speed limit?
Having some government nanny controlling my accelerator is not welcome or appropriate.
Tell that to someone who has lost a relative in a traffic accident caused by speeding. I think my right to protection from being killed by a road maniac trumps your "right" to break the law by speeding, even if you think you have a justification.
Enforcement of the law is up to the police, not some computer ...
Are you prepared to fund the cost of putting thousands of extra police cars on the road to enforce the speeding laws? Besides, don't long distance trucks have to have speed limiters fitted by law in the USA? They do in Australia!
This is hypothetical, and (IMO) highly unlikely. If people can build software reliable enough to fly an A370, or run an embedded heart defibrilator, they can surely build something as simple as this in a safe manner.
- and how much is it going to cost for this big-brother system that is able to monitor every vehicle on the roads?
Unfortunately, cost is likely to be the big stumbling block.
... by cutting down the environental costs of keeping your unnecessary stuff running, manufacturing it in the first place and disposing of it when you want to upgrade to the next new-fangled gadget.
The concept of a registry is not a bad one per se. The problem is that Microsoft's implementation of the registry concept stinks.
That is the nub of the issue. There are situations where this distinction between forcing and encouraging is blurry; e.g. when one party is manipulating the other. There are also situations where the person who incites a wrongful act deserves more blame than any single individual who commits the act; e.g. when someone incites a race riot.
Both of these apply in this case. The P2P operators are (arguably) implicitly encouraging foolish and impressionable young people to break the law ... and indirectly making money out of this. And the P2P operators are (arguably)
more to blame for the total "harm" to the record companies than any one of the file sharers.
It is debatable whether the illegal music copying is "wrong" and whether the actual "harm" claimed by the record companies is real. But the fact that Grokster settled for $50M says that they know who the courts would have "blamed" and "punished". In the face of this, legalistic quibbling about "liability" versus "contributory liability" is irrelevant.
s/in this context/in the context of music copying/
Besides, my point was about what the general population would think that the legal system should do. Your typical citizen doesn't know or want to know about the legal distinctions. He / she simply knows that people who incite other people to do "wrong" things deserve to be punished. The problem is that there is no consensus on what is "wrong" in this context.
But returning to what I said. In hindsight, there probably is a significant minority of US citizens who firmly believe that the doctrine of Free Speech should absolve them of legal responsibility for just about everything they say, except shouting "Fire". And the consequences for US society are plain to see.