It's even more complicated than that: - It's a well known military adage that you attack your enemy where it is weakest, not strongest.
A bunch of (relatively) poorly armed civilians attacking well armed, well prepared military targets is at best a form of ritual suicide.
I would change the definition of terrorist to be somebody that purposefully attacks civilian targets and/or willingly accepts civilian casualties with the objective of terrorizing the civilians into compliance.
Note that this definition does include state actors - states often act as terrorists.
Even under this definition, you can still say that some in the Resistance during WW2 were terrorists: the executions of "collaborators" were done to induce compliance in others by terror.
Interestingly enough, in my family the wives are often the more intelligent ones. This is more so in the previous generation (i.e. amongst my aunts and uncles).
Given my cultural background (Portuguese) and the fact that most of my family comes from the countryside and has a low average level of education, it's interesting enough to see that while the men are "the man in the house" and supposedly make the decisions, the women do a lot of "convincing" on them and in some couples are the actual main decision makers.
Certainly in the social and cultural environment for the previous generation, it's often in the woman's best interest to not be seen by the men as "visibly" intelligent.
In my own generation, where pretty much all of us are city-folk with a degree, things seem more balanced. Certainly my female cousins expect (and often get) an environment where they are co-decision-makers.
As a warmish rather than hot chick, I think, in general, that the smarter the man the more he values intelligence. Or that's what I keep telling myself, anyway.
As a guy, all I can tell you is that... it's complicated
There are a couple of axis to consider, the first and the simplest is: - Yes, some guys are attracted to intelligent women. A more or less rule of thumb is that the more cultured a guy is, the more he's interested in women with brains of their own. This is however dependent on culture (i.e. in some societies, visible intelligence from a woman is considered bad, while in others it's considered attractive) and the educational level (people with University education are much more likely to find intelligence in others attractive than people with no education).
The other thing to consider is that guys pretty much have 2 main currents when it comes to being attracted to a woman (forgive me the blunt language that will follow - it's helps make things clear): 1) Women that they would like to shag the brains out of. 2) Women that they would like to marry and have kids with.
Now, a mentally well integrated guy will look towards a woman in both ways at the same time. However, many men will tend to have some form of partitioning, in which some women are seen more under one light and some under the other one - there is even a psychological disease called (something like) the-whore-and-the-Madonna complex where a guy will look at some women completely in one way and to others in the other way.
To simplify: - Hot (tight revealing clothes, short skirts) and dumb women will mostly attract guys via the mental pathway number 1 (this is when a guy is said to be "thinking with his dick"). This will likely lead to a one-off (also when the guy is intelligent and cultured) but not much more. - Nice, caring girls will attract guys via the mental pathway number 2. If such a woman does get married with a guy and does nothing to be attractive, she might very well find herself in a situation where he's cheating on her (with hot and dumb ones).
Visible intelligence mostly affects guys via the mental path number 2, although the non-visible aspects of intelligence (i.e. things like good taste and the ability to "spar well" in the game of seduction) will attract guys via the mental path number 1.
My advice: - Aim at both. Being visually attractive (i.e. keeping in shape, dressing nicely and with taste without being sluttish) will attract guys from one way without looking dumb while being smart/intelligent will attract them (at least the intelligent and cultured ones) from the other. Making a little effort to look attractive without overdoing it (i.e. don't fall in the trap of too much visible makeup and/or a really short a skirt and/or a very tightly fitting dress) will make an intelligent woman very attractive in all ways.
PS: My advice does not apply if you're going for the not so intelligent guys.
I reckon that being specialists in one technical area or other, many of us are actually knowledgeable enough about technology and technology companies to know that newer is not the same as better.
As such, the old-hands amongst us we feel bound by duty and ethics to inform the bright-eyed, young and inexperienced amongst us of that.
Not that it makes any difference most of the time...
If you're doing a document for company use, you're on a corporate network were there are shared folders for... wait for it... sharing. Also everybody has the same version of document editing software.
If you're doing a document for personal use, how often do you have to share it? Of those times, how often do you have to share it with more than one person? If you have to do it often, do you really still save your documents in the latest and greatest version of Office and use Rapidshare for it or have you learned to "saving as Office 2001 and putting it in a shared Net-drive for your group that you setup a while ago for peanuts (my ISP includes that in their £14 per-year hosting package)".
I expect that those that share documents in a non-professional environment either do it so rarely that they fall into all the pit-fall or they do it so often that they've long learned to live without needing "integrated multi-user document editing" solutions.
Selling the "cloud" as a cooperative work platform for home users seems to me like a solution looking for a problem.
I was looking into the whole LED lighting thing about a year ago, and I see that you missed the most important cons about LEDs: - In a size that fits a standard socket, they still can't put out the same amount of illumination (as measured in lumens) as either CFLs or Incandescent. - Typical LED illumination is highly directional (i.e. spot type lighting) while both CFLs and Incandescent provide more diffused lighting. Current solutions for making the light from LED lamps more diffuse reduce efficiency and decrease the amount of light they put out.
Given that over the it's lifetime, LED lamps are even cheaper per-lumen as CFLs, in my view the issues I pointed above are the most significant ones.
Probably because the major source of CO2 is burning fossil fuels, most notably Oil derivatives and Gas.
Said Oil and Gas mostly come from unstable or dangerous nations or nations that promote violent and extremist forms of religion (for example, Wahabism, one of the most xenophobic forms of Islam is practiced and promoted by Saudi Arabia, to the point of them paying for madrassas all over the Islamic world to teach the locals to "hate the infidels").
Almost everybody across the political spectrum in Western nations agrees that stopping the transfer of money to most of those places is a "Good Thing".
Thus in the specific case of reducing CO2 emissions, the interests of the Green Left neatly dovetail with the interests of the Nationalistic Right.
A future of all-electric transportation fed with electricity from nuclear power would probably satisfy everybody involved (notice that even the pro-Ecology mainstream has accepted nuclear as the least bad option).
while I don't advocate writing your bank details in 10-foot high letters of fire on Macchu Picchu
If he managed to write his bank details in 10-foot high letters of fire in Machu Picchu he would either be treated as god by the local Inca-descendants, throw to jail by the Peruvian authorities (for desecrating a World Heritage Site) or both. Having his bank account stolen would be the least of his problems.
Please let me know how your community of Anarchists solves Tragedy of the Commons problems with shared resources and sorts out conflicts with other communities without having some form of centralized organization-and-control and without their citizens killing each other, depleting said shared resources or being wiped-out by another community that does have some form of centralized organization-and-control.
It all boils down to trust (or more specifically lack of it) on the Game review sites.
I'm not overly surprised that people don't base their buying decisions primarily on the review scores from game-sites. In most sites I've seen one or all of the following:
Creeping scores: games coming out now get higher average scores than games that came out 2 or 3 years ago
No mention of the bugs: a game might be full to the brim with bugs on release day and yet there is no mention of it or a passing reference to "the version we tested had some problems but this is a pre-release version and they should be solved before release" (not!)
Hype: game sites are the main culprits in creating/maintaining hype on often undeserving games. For example, before release Spore was being hyped to death by most game sites as a grand, revolutionary game - as it turns out, it wasn't even that much of a fun game and after release the hype-machine went suddenly quiet
Shallow reviews on just the beginning of the game: a lot of reviews sound like the person doing it just played the game for a couple of hours and then wrote the review. Plenty of games out there become pointless and boring after a couple of hours playing them, and yet that's often not mentioned in the game reviews
No mention of intrusive DRM: often enough the games come out with crazy phone-home, only works if Internet is always on, DVD-Writer-breaking DRM which installs a rootkit in our machine and yet not a peep about it in the main gaming sites. I suppose some might mention it if the activation process involved "chop your grandmother into little pieces and send them to the following address..." but must would not
Personally, I usually wait a while after the game is out and then go check user reviews. If your discount the "100%, great thing since sliced bread" ones (which come from fanboys) you'll usually be able to get a good picture of all the above mentioned points that the game sites miss (bugs, long-term (re)playability, intrusive DRM, hands-on-beyond-hype experience)
Lets see if I got this right: - The legislators of the 2nd largest western economy, pushed by lobbyists and in order to further the economic gains of companies based in their economic zone try to interfere in the internal affairs of the top largest western economy.
Sure, that's bound to work.
It's just as likely succeed as it would be if members of the European Parliament where trying to influence the US competition authorities with regards to European companies that have activities in US soil.
It's very simple, if Oracle wants to sell in the European markets they have to obey the European fair-competition rules. If they don't like them they can leave the market. In the same way, if any European company wants to sell in the US market they have to obey the US fair-competition rules or leave the market.
Honestly, Oracle having the legislators of a sovereign nation trying to influence the due process in an totally different economic and political block might very well be construed as an insult and have the opposite effect of what they intend.
What's next, will we have the People's Assembly of China send a letter to the European Commission saying "You guys over-reacted on the whole toxic paint on child's toys thing" ???
I have a Vodafone mobile dongle and it costs me £15 per 1GB for pre-pay and they are hardly the cheapest ones out there.
They don't have my name or any other contact information on me (I went to the store in person, bought the dongle and paid in cash) so anything I do through it cannot be associated with my name (as long as I never "load more money" into that account with a credit/debit card).
That said, at £15 a GB, file-sharing is only really worth it if what you're downloading is music (in the UK, if buy MP3 music tracks from places like iTunes or Amazon it will cost you in about £1.00 - aprox. $1.50 - per track) or DivX compressed movies.
Speed-wise, it is quite fast, between 1Mb/s - 3Mb/s downstream.
The truth is that we don't really know how successful police really are at "catching their man".
For all the fancy "Police investigation" TV Series where the good guys always end up getting the bad guys, in the Real World the only feedback we get comes from the media, and while they will happily publish news of the kind "Dangerous Murderer Caught" they don't exactly tend to publish news of the kind "Five Years Past And Dangerous Murderer Still Loose".
Broad statements about how the police always catches their man when sufficiently motivated probably result of an outsider perception which was build upon from an information flow where successes are loudly celebrated while continuous failure is hidden and silent.
Certainly finance companies in Canary Wharf in London (and also the City) are the kind of place where when they fire you, they call to to come to a meeting to tell you that you're fired after which they escort you down to the lobby where your stuff is packed and waiting for you while your access card has already been revoked.
I would hardly be surprised if most of the people working around here that have any information worth it (mostly client contacts, I suspect) are keeping copies on the side "just in case".
Banking in London is very much a cut-throat environment. I suspect the same is true for Wall Street.
That said, I suspect the actual survey is bogus: people around here wouldn't admit any plans to "steal corporate data if I'm fired" to strangers.
In my case, for example, my parents were both from very poor farmer families.
They moved to the city, studied at night after work to finish high-school and slowly progressed up to what's essentially lower middle class. Even so, they choose to only have one child (me) because they knew they couldn't afford to have their kids go through university if they had more than one - I still remember that when I was 8 I had to sleep in the sofa in the living room in an apartment and the paint would peel from the walls due to humidity and improper construction.
For myself, it so happens that I'm good with intellectual endeavors so I managed to go through High-School and University without needing any extra (paid) tutoring. Now, 15 years past the end of my education and 3 countries later, my income is in the top 10% of the country where I live (UK) in, roughly 7 times the average around here. Compared to where I came from, my income is probably 20+ times the average income there.
A lot of my success is my own doing (the intellectual abilities, the taking the risks of changing jobs, employment styles and countries) but all of that is based on my parents choices: - Their choice of moving to the city. - Their choice of furthering their education. - Their choice of only having one kid. - Their choice of pushing me to go through University instead of putting me to work when I was 16. not to mention the values they taught me, some of which came from my grandparents.
Had my parents not made those choices they did or taught me the values they taught me, my own skills and abilities might not have been enough to make me go much further beyond just another poor peasant.
In the end, a bright kid with unlucky, dumb, inept or just plain screwed-up parents (say a single-mother junkie) will be way much more likely to end up in a life of poverty than a dumb kid with reliable, educated and wealthy parents.
It only works if the project is small enough that a sole person or a small team (max 3 persons) can take ownership of the whole code base.
If you do the cleanup you suggested on just part of the code, you're only introducing "yet another style of coding" to the code base: congratulations, you've just increased the complexity of the code base and made it less stable.
I've seen this kind of code where multiple people at different times have tried to "enforce their vision" in the code they controlled: without exception this resulted in systems composed of multiple blocks of code which fit badly with other blocks of code (thus often any changes to one block of code will break something else somewhere else), each different enough that you have to figure out each one in turn as if they were different code bases.
After learning how to properly cleanup and refactor code, the next lesson a Software Engineer learns is to do it like a surgeon: carefully, precisely and in such way that other parts are not damaged.
I believe that no developer can ever become a good or great developer without having done significant maintenance on someone else's code - your really only learn the true value of "coding for maintainability" (i.e. basics like commenting complex code, avoiding copy and paste, fail-fast code and such) when you're landed with fixing/improving code that was done without any such concerns.
That said, software maintenance is often a frustrating, painful process in anything but the freshest of code (and sometimes even is code "just out of the over").
It's especially unpleasant when one is faced with fixing/changing software where some or all of the design or the code were done by (often long gone) less experienced software developers.
The bad news is that as you become more experienced you see more and more "glaring problems" with the design/coding on any system you have to fix/improve, which can be infuriating at times (for example, when the design and development of an important sub-system was given to a team composed wholly of average/below-average developers with 4 years of less of experience and you are tasked with fixing it)
The good news is that the outsourcing wave has caused a bubble in IT in India, resulting in loads of people joining IT for the money (most of which should never have done so) so there is a whole lot of really, really bad code out there which will be providing freelancers (like me) with highly-paid maintenance work for years to come.
The point of the parent is that in real life the likelihood of a Software Engineer to have to implement their own algorithm is as close to zero as to be statistically insignificant.
Most of the time, you're a lot more likely to, and will get much bigger performance improvements from: - Architectural/Design decisions aiming at boosting performance (i.e. things like distributed processing, memory caches, file caches, streaming processing instead of bulk processing and others) - SQL query optimization. - Teaching junior developers to avoid traditional performance pitfalls. - Dedicating 10% of your time to find and improve those bits of a system that take 90% of the time in a process (often enough these are things like I/O and needless database access, which have very little to do with algorithms).
None of this is taught in Universities.
I still remember lots of really cool things I learned while taking a Degree, a couple of which have even proven useful when I least expected it. That said, the only really useful thing I came out of University with was the ability to learn things fast - something many people can pick-up on the job.
For all the coolness factor in learning Neural Networks, I current work with at least 2 other people that have learned it also (even one that has a Masters on it) and none of us does anything remotely related to it or is likely to ever do it.
After the end of the Time of Ideologies (when at least once in a while there was a chance that a bright-eyed individual who wanted to improve the world was elected to public office - even if many could be seen as misguided, their hearth was in the right place), most of the so called Modern Democracies have become systems where Politicians are a separate "class" of people, politics is a "family business" and people are elected based on how good/truthful/wise they look on television and how well they tell people what they want to hear (in other words, they're Salesmen).
In my opinion, a system where one votes for people one has never met personally does not work - we just end up electing cheaters, posers and liars, since those are best at "looking the part". I'm a firm believer that Democracy has to come from the bottom to the top, starting with small numbers of people (around 1000) electing representatives which then elect the next layer and so one until the top. The TV Show style voting we have now is only good for selecting singers/performers/reality-tv-finalists, not the men and women that will represent one's interests and manage one's country.
It's not at all a problem if other people have loads of kids... as long as my taxes don't go to pay for them.
That way there will be plenty of hamburger flippers, car-washers and garbage-men to keep the world moving for my one or two highly educated descendants in pushy jobs.
Although I'd rather that people had fewer kids so that everybody can afford to give their kids a better education and better chances in life, it's 100% up to them whether to do so or not.
Slashdot Mirror
It's even more complicated than that:
- It's a well known military adage that you attack your enemy where it is weakest, not strongest.
A bunch of (relatively) poorly armed civilians attacking well armed, well prepared military targets is at best a form of ritual suicide.
I would change the definition of terrorist to be somebody that purposefully attacks civilian targets and/or willingly accepts civilian casualties with the objective of terrorizing the civilians into compliance.
Note that this definition does include state actors - states often act as terrorists.
Even under this definition, you can still say that some in the Resistance during WW2 were terrorists: the executions of "collaborators" were done to induce compliance in others by terror.
Interestingly enough, in my family the wives are often the more intelligent ones. This is more so in the previous generation (i.e. amongst my aunts and uncles).
Given my cultural background (Portuguese) and the fact that most of my family comes from the countryside and has a low average level of education, it's interesting enough to see that while the men are "the man in the house" and supposedly make the decisions, the women do a lot of "convincing" on them and in some couples are the actual main decision makers.
Certainly in the social and cultural environment for the previous generation, it's often in the woman's best interest to not be seen by the men as "visibly" intelligent.
In my own generation, where pretty much all of us are city-folk with a degree, things seem more balanced. Certainly my female cousins expect (and often get) an environment where they are co-decision-makers.
Knowing my mother, I suspect she would be really freaked-out if she gave birth to 0.1 or 0.3 of a child ...
As a guy, all I can tell you is that ... it's complicated
There are a couple of axis to consider, the first and the simplest is:
- Yes, some guys are attracted to intelligent women. A more or less rule of thumb is that the more cultured a guy is, the more he's interested in women with brains of their own. This is however dependent on culture (i.e. in some societies, visible intelligence from a woman is considered bad, while in others it's considered attractive) and the educational level (people with University education are much more likely to find intelligence in others attractive than people with no education).
The other thing to consider is that guys pretty much have 2 main currents when it comes to being attracted to a woman (forgive me the blunt language that will follow - it's helps make things clear):
1) Women that they would like to shag the brains out of.
2) Women that they would like to marry and have kids with.
Now, a mentally well integrated guy will look towards a woman in both ways at the same time. However, many men will tend to have some form of partitioning, in which some women are seen more under one light and some under the other one - there is even a psychological disease called (something like) the-whore-and-the-Madonna complex where a guy will look at some women completely in one way and to others in the other way.
To simplify:
- Hot (tight revealing clothes, short skirts) and dumb women will mostly attract guys via the mental pathway number 1 (this is when a guy is said to be "thinking with his dick"). This will likely lead to a one-off (also when the guy is intelligent and cultured) but not much more.
- Nice, caring girls will attract guys via the mental pathway number 2. If such a woman does get married with a guy and does nothing to be attractive, she might very well find herself in a situation where he's cheating on her (with hot and dumb ones).
Visible intelligence mostly affects guys via the mental path number 2, although the non-visible aspects of intelligence (i.e. things like good taste and the ability to "spar well" in the game of seduction) will attract guys via the mental path number 1.
My advice:
- Aim at both. Being visually attractive (i.e. keeping in shape, dressing nicely and with taste without being sluttish) will attract guys from one way without looking dumb while being smart/intelligent will attract them (at least the intelligent and cultured ones) from the other. Making a little effort to look attractive without overdoing it (i.e. don't fall in the trap of too much visible makeup and/or a really short a skirt and/or a very tightly fitting dress) will make an intelligent woman very attractive in all ways.
PS: My advice does not apply if you're going for the not so intelligent guys.
I reckon that being specialists in one technical area or other, many of us are actually knowledgeable enough about technology and technology companies to know that newer is not the same as better.
As such, the old-hands amongst us we feel bound by duty and ethics to inform the bright-eyed, young and inexperienced amongst us of that.
Not that it makes any difference most of the time ...
If you're doing a document for company use, you're on a corporate network were there are shared folders for ... wait for it ... sharing. Also everybody has the same version of document editing software.
If you're doing a document for personal use, how often do you have to share it? Of those times, how often do you have to share it with more than one person? If you have to do it often, do you really still save your documents in the latest and greatest version of Office and use Rapidshare for it or have you learned to "saving as Office 2001 and putting it in a shared Net-drive for your group that you setup a while ago for peanuts (my ISP includes that in their £14 per-year hosting package)".
I expect that those that share documents in a non-professional environment either do it so rarely that they fall into all the pit-fall or they do it so often that they've long learned to live without needing "integrated multi-user document editing" solutions.
Selling the "cloud" as a cooperative work platform for home users seems to me like a solution looking for a problem.
I was looking into the whole LED lighting thing about a year ago, and I see that you missed the most important cons about LEDs:
- In a size that fits a standard socket, they still can't put out the same amount of illumination (as measured in lumens) as either CFLs or Incandescent.
- Typical LED illumination is highly directional (i.e. spot type lighting) while both CFLs and Incandescent provide more diffused lighting. Current solutions for making the light from LED lamps more diffuse reduce efficiency and decrease the amount of light they put out.
Given that over the it's lifetime, LED lamps are even cheaper per-lumen as CFLs, in my view the issues I pointed above are the most significant ones.
Probably because the major source of CO2 is burning fossil fuels, most notably Oil derivatives and Gas.
Said Oil and Gas mostly come from unstable or dangerous nations or nations that promote violent and extremist forms of religion (for example, Wahabism, one of the most xenophobic forms of Islam is practiced and promoted by Saudi Arabia, to the point of them paying for madrassas all over the Islamic world to teach the locals to "hate the infidels").
Almost everybody across the political spectrum in Western nations agrees that stopping the transfer of money to most of those places is a "Good Thing".
Thus in the specific case of reducing CO2 emissions, the interests of the Green Left neatly dovetail with the interests of the Nationalistic Right.
A future of all-electric transportation fed with electricity from nuclear power would probably satisfy everybody involved (notice that even the pro-Ecology mainstream has accepted nuclear as the least bad option).
If he managed to write his bank details in 10-foot high letters of fire in Machu Picchu he would either be treated as god by the local Inca-descendants, throw to jail by the Peruvian authorities (for desecrating a World Heritage Site) or both. Having his bank account stolen would be the least of his problems.
Please let me know how your community of Anarchists solves Tragedy of the Commons problems with shared resources and sorts out conflicts with other communities without having some form of centralized organization-and-control and without their citizens killing each other, depleting said shared resources or being wiped-out by another community that does have some form of centralized organization-and-control.
Oracle would only have themselves to blame: by lobbying to get the US Senate involved they themselves made it political.
It all boils down to trust (or more specifically lack of it) on the Game review sites.
I'm not overly surprised that people don't base their buying decisions primarily on the review scores from game-sites. In most sites I've seen one or all of the following:
Personally, I usually wait a while after the game is out and then go check user reviews. If your discount the "100%, great thing since sliced bread" ones (which come from fanboys) you'll usually be able to get a good picture of all the above mentioned points that the game sites miss (bugs, long-term (re)playability, intrusive DRM, hands-on-beyond-hype experience)
I'm still waiting for the brave new world where you can roll-up your display into a case the size of a pen
The whole "display on a contact lens" is even more vaporware than that.
Lets see if I got this right:
- The legislators of the 2nd largest western economy, pushed by lobbyists and in order to further the economic gains of companies based in their economic zone try to interfere in the internal affairs of the top largest western economy.
Sure, that's bound to work.
It's just as likely succeed as it would be if members of the European Parliament where trying to influence the US competition authorities with regards to European companies that have activities in US soil.
It's very simple, if Oracle wants to sell in the European markets they have to obey the European fair-competition rules. If they don't like them they can leave the market. In the same way, if any European company wants to sell in the US market they have to obey the US fair-competition rules or leave the market.
Honestly, Oracle having the legislators of a sovereign nation trying to influence the due process in an totally different economic and political block might very well be construed as an insult and have the opposite effect of what they intend.
What's next, will we have the People's Assembly of China send a letter to the European Commission saying "You guys over-reacted on the whole toxic paint on child's toys thing" ???
I have a Vodafone mobile dongle and it costs me £15 per 1GB for pre-pay and they are hardly the cheapest ones out there.
They don't have my name or any other contact information on me (I went to the store in person, bought the dongle and paid in cash) so anything I do through it cannot be associated with my name (as long as I never "load more money" into that account with a credit/debit card).
That said, at £15 a GB, file-sharing is only really worth it if what you're downloading is music (in the UK, if buy MP3 music tracks from places like iTunes or Amazon it will cost you in about £1.00 - aprox. $1.50 - per track) or DivX compressed movies.
Speed-wise, it is quite fast, between 1Mb/s - 3Mb/s downstream.
The truth is that we don't really know how successful police really are at "catching their man".
For all the fancy "Police investigation" TV Series where the good guys always end up getting the bad guys, in the Real World the only feedback we get comes from the media, and while they will happily publish news of the kind "Dangerous Murderer Caught" they don't exactly tend to publish news of the kind "Five Years Past And Dangerous Murderer Still Loose".
Broad statements about how the police always catches their man when sufficiently motivated probably result of an outsider perception which was build upon from an information flow where successes are loudly celebrated while continuous failure is hidden and silent.
Certainly finance companies in Canary Wharf in London (and also the City) are the kind of place where when they fire you, they call to to come to a meeting to tell you that you're fired after which they escort you down to the lobby where your stuff is packed and waiting for you while your access card has already been revoked.
I would hardly be surprised if most of the people working around here that have any information worth it (mostly client contacts, I suspect) are keeping copies on the side "just in case".
Banking in London is very much a cut-throat environment. I suspect the same is true for Wall Street.
That said, I suspect the actual survey is bogus: people around here wouldn't admit any plans to "steal corporate data if I'm fired" to strangers.
It's complicated.
In my case, for example, my parents were both from very poor farmer families.
They moved to the city, studied at night after work to finish high-school and slowly progressed up to what's essentially lower middle class. Even so, they choose to only have one child (me) because they knew they couldn't afford to have their kids go through university if they had more than one - I still remember that when I was 8 I had to sleep in the sofa in the living room in an apartment and the paint would peel from the walls due to humidity and improper construction.
For myself, it so happens that I'm good with intellectual endeavors so I managed to go through High-School and University without needing any extra (paid) tutoring. Now, 15 years past the end of my education and 3 countries later, my income is in the top 10% of the country where I live (UK) in, roughly 7 times the average around here. Compared to where I came from, my income is probably 20+ times the average income there.
A lot of my success is my own doing (the intellectual abilities, the taking the risks of changing jobs, employment styles and countries) but all of that is based on my parents choices:
- Their choice of moving to the city.
- Their choice of furthering their education.
- Their choice of only having one kid.
- Their choice of pushing me to go through University instead of putting me to work when I was 16.
not to mention the values they taught me, some of which came from my grandparents.
Had my parents not made those choices they did or taught me the values they taught me, my own skills and abilities might not have been enough to make me go much further beyond just another poor peasant.
In the end, a bright kid with unlucky, dumb, inept or just plain screwed-up parents (say a single-mother junkie) will be way much more likely to end up in a life of poverty than a dumb kid with reliable, educated and wealthy parents.
I think you just created a new style of humor all on you own!
It only works if the project is small enough that a sole person or a small team (max 3 persons) can take ownership of the whole code base.
If you do the cleanup you suggested on just part of the code, you're only introducing "yet another style of coding" to the code base: congratulations, you've just increased the complexity of the code base and made it less stable.
I've seen this kind of code where multiple people at different times have tried to "enforce their vision" in the code they controlled: without exception this resulted in systems composed of multiple blocks of code which fit badly with other blocks of code (thus often any changes to one block of code will break something else somewhere else), each different enough that you have to figure out each one in turn as if they were different code bases.
After learning how to properly cleanup and refactor code, the next lesson a Software Engineer learns is to do it like a surgeon: carefully, precisely and in such way that other parts are not damaged.
I believe that no developer can ever become a good or great developer without having done significant maintenance on someone else's code - your really only learn the true value of "coding for maintainability" (i.e. basics like commenting complex code, avoiding copy and paste, fail-fast code and such) when you're landed with fixing/improving code that was done without any such concerns.
That said, software maintenance is often a frustrating, painful process in anything but the freshest of code (and sometimes even is code "just out of the over").
It's especially unpleasant when one is faced with fixing/changing software where some or all of the design or the code were done by (often long gone) less experienced software developers.
The bad news is that as you become more experienced you see more and more "glaring problems" with the design/coding on any system you have to fix/improve, which can be infuriating at times (for example, when the design and development of an important sub-system was given to a team composed wholly of average/below-average developers with 4 years of less of experience and you are tasked with fixing it)
The good news is that the outsourcing wave has caused a bubble in IT in India, resulting in loads of people joining IT for the money (most of which should never have done so) so there is a whole lot of really, really bad code out there which will be providing freelancers (like me) with highly-paid maintenance work for years to come.
The point of the parent is that in real life the likelihood of a Software Engineer to have to implement their own algorithm is as close to zero as to be statistically insignificant.
Most of the time, you're a lot more likely to, and will get much bigger performance improvements from:
- Architectural/Design decisions aiming at boosting performance (i.e. things like distributed processing, memory caches, file caches, streaming processing instead of bulk processing and others)
- SQL query optimization.
- Teaching junior developers to avoid traditional performance pitfalls.
- Dedicating 10% of your time to find and improve those bits of a system that take 90% of the time in a process (often enough these are things like I/O and needless database access, which have very little to do with algorithms).
None of this is taught in Universities.
I still remember lots of really cool things I learned while taking a Degree, a couple of which have even proven useful when I least expected it. That said, the only really useful thing I came out of University with was the ability to learn things fast - something many people can pick-up on the job.
For all the coolness factor in learning Neural Networks, I current work with at least 2 other people that have learned it also (even one that has a Masters on it) and none of us does anything remotely related to it or is likely to ever do it.
After the end of the Time of Ideologies (when at least once in a while there was a chance that a bright-eyed individual who wanted to improve the world was elected to public office - even if many could be seen as misguided, their hearth was in the right place), most of the so called Modern Democracies have become systems where Politicians are a separate "class" of people, politics is a "family business" and people are elected based on how good/truthful/wise they look on television and how well they tell people what they want to hear (in other words, they're Salesmen).
In my opinion, a system where one votes for people one has never met personally does not work - we just end up electing cheaters, posers and liars, since those are best at "looking the part". I'm a firm believer that Democracy has to come from the bottom to the top, starting with small numbers of people (around 1000) electing representatives which then elect the next layer and so one until the top. The TV Show style voting we have now is only good for selecting singers/performers/reality-tv-finalists, not the men and women that will represent one's interests and manage one's country.
No, no, no.
It's not at all a problem if other people have loads of kids ... as long as my taxes don't go to pay for them.
That way there will be plenty of hamburger flippers, car-washers and garbage-men to keep the world moving for my one or two highly educated descendants in pushy jobs.
Although I'd rather that people had fewer kids so that everybody can afford to give their kids a better education and better chances in life, it's 100% up to them whether to do so or not.
the Saturday Night Slashdot Special
a.k.a. the Drive-By Trolling Account