Actually DNA technology as currently used to investigate crimes is not accurate.
DNA fingerprinting as used is only based on a few genetic markers, not full DNA sequencing. Sometimes as few as 8 or 12 markers are used. This means each combination of markers is the same for thousands of people.
Typically, this is not a problem for the situation when DNA is obtained from a crime scene and in parallel obtained from a suspect and then compared (the likellyhood of a false positive is something like 1 in 8 million).
It is however a problem when DNA is obtained from the crime scene and then a database of DNA samples (which, remember, does not contain a full DNA code, just the values for the markers) is searched for matches - because if the database is big enough, matches will be found for certain (after all, thousands of people have that exact same set of markers) and of late the government has been growing those databases as fast as possible.
So yeah, DNA fingerprinting has to be looked at with some skepticism and it did made sense for the defense to struck you out.
That makes sense, after all Atheism is being against religion while Agnosticism is having no religion.
Being activelly against an entire social movement does require a certain level of tunnel vision to paint all individuals in that group as sharing a set of bad personal characteristics which really are only shown by a subset of loud individuals in that group.
Frankly attacking a whole group for the actions of a minority of individuals is counter-productive. The silent majority is often disgusted by the actions of those self-proclaimed representantives of the group and would rather distance themselves from them.
Actually the recent push for creationism seems to have come almost entirelly from born-again type sects mostly in the US and some developing countries with mainly christian populations.
As far as I'm aware there is no push for creationism in Europe, not from Catholics, Protestants or Orthodox Christians. Some imported Christian sects (the kind that do public rituals of faith healing and banishing of bad spirits) do preach creationism, but those are a tiny minority, concentrated on the uneducated and downtrodden).
In that sense, especially in Western Europe, education has created a generation (actually, two generations by now) of critical thinkers, where even those who do have religious beliefs are not prone to blindly believe what the men of the cloth tell them.
My impression in Europe of crossing paths with people that are believers is that Religion has become far more a personal thing, a belief born from the inside rather than a set of ritualised social events.
Religion can and often is used as means of control of the (unwashed) masses: it's like a police in the brain and is far more effective than the police on the street.
Probably this is why America's founding father explicitly sought to separate the state ( and politics ) from religion.
Unfortunately, in this day and age when the US Constitution is completely disregarded, religion is once again a tool in the toolbox of politics.
Not all innovation is technical in nature. New ways to bring technology to people are also a domain for innovation.
If you want to build a better mousetrap, you don't focus solely on the mechanism that springs the trap - you also need to consider how to best get the mice to come to the trap.
The kind of innovation as Apple has been doing of late is making technology accessible and fashionable. Merging technology with fashion and making it very easy for non-technical people to use is something that nobody else in the Tech industry is doing well and why Apple is so successfull at the moment.
In that sense your post displays the same kind of limited horizons mindset that underpins the current stagnation of traditional tech companies like Microsoft - that of worrying far more about the mechanics of the device rather than how it's used.
As someone with a highly technical background (cut my teeth on the old Slackware Linux on floppies, can design embedded circuits and then code for them) I myself often have the particular kind of engineering blindness we can have when it comes to technology. However, mingling with people from far, far different backgrounds has made me realize that it is a form of short-sightness.
If the wind conditions are "No Wind" then a lighter than air platform (blimp) would probably be the best choice - certainly it would solve the problem of finding something that has a 20km minimum range and can carry 2 hi-def cameras: it would be very slow but have great staying power if there is no wind.
Somehow I think "No Wind" might be a simplification too far.
Guess what, plenty of managers know that Software Developers tend to be overly optimistic.
Worse, it's even a well known management technique to get Developers to give estimates and go along with them (even knowing they're far too optimistic) as a form getting "commitment to the deadlines" from the Developers, which innevitably results in crazy overtime.
Look around whenever you're again in one of those jobs where "it's the workers" - you'll notice that the ones that do the most overwork are invariably male and young. It's not by chance, they're the easiest to manipulate in that way.
In my experience of 15 years in the industry, people that always worked long hours because "that's the way everybody does it" don't actually know that overall productivity is much higher with shorter working hours.
Also, when going from longer-hours to shorter-hours one doesn't immediately get to the maximum productivity sweet-spot: if you've been working 80h-week, going to 40h-week will cut your productivity in half to begin with and it will take a couple of weeks before your productivity passes that of the 80h-week. In an environment where everybody does long-hours, people cutting down in overtime often give up (or are pressured into giving up) during the first few weeks when their body has not yet recovered enough from chronical burnout to compensate for the reduced number of hours.
My personal discovery of this only came when I moved from my native land (Portugal) where I worked 60h-weeks to Holland were if you're in the office after 6 PM your manager tells you to go home. It was an eye openner for me to see just how much more overall productivity (and lower stress and far fewer bugs) a Software Developer has in Holland's 40h-week system than in Portugal's 60h-week one.
When I moved to the UK I brought the Dutch 40h-week habit with me, and even though more than one of my managers tried to pressure me into staying in the office longer hours, my productivity was always better than my colleagues, my decisions were sharper and they always renewed my contract (I was working as a freelancer).
And heck, if you can do 8 hours of work at home in 2 hours, why not get 8 hours of pay! The key is productivity.
No, no, no!
Modern management evaluation techniques require that people are seen to work long hours so that management can claim that they work hard and make their people work hard.
In services industries, because results are hard to measure consistently, the perception of doing a lot of work is used to measure productivity. In addition to that, since in services projects are mostly unique and usually done done in response to needs of external actors, faster than expected delivery tends be followed by an idle period (since the next project "isn't ready to start yet") while in manufacturing, if you finish making a widget faster, you can immediatly start working on doing another widget.
The result is that in services efficiency is in fact treated as a bad thing - if you work smart, you're not visibly working hard and (worse) you finish your projects early and have periods of idleness while you wait for sales/management to catch up with new projects.
(I find it both funny and sad that in some cultures "working hard" is actually seen as a good thing, since by definition if you need to work hard either you or somebody else is not doing their job in an efficient maner)
The problem may be that you give people numerical and verbal reasoning tests. You are employing a human for a set of complex tasks, not measuring a robot to see if its arms fit a slot. The tests confirm nothing more than an interest in primitive puzzles and/or having practiced stupid recruitment tests, whittling out the most creative or intelligent who are either unable or unwilling to jump a few meaningless hoops.
Since my 18th year I have given myself a rule to not consider any position which requires a generic cognitive ability and/or personality test. Meaningless metrics are the bane of modern English work culture, from "performance targets" which encourage little more than gaming the system to "aptitude tests" which test little more than the willingness of an employer to pay for another con-man's puzzle book.
Your are not a "unique snowflake" for a potential employer, you are just one of hundreds and they're trying to filter out the worthless ones so that they do not spend hundreds of management man-hours interviewing people that barelly know the right side of the keyboard to type on.
Your interviewer doesn't care that you have strong opinions about the stupidity of their tests. They might even agree with you, but guess what: the other option - hundreds of mans hours wasted - is more expensive.
You are not experienced enough to be interviewing for a position where you will be given "creative freedom" - nobody gives that much freedom to somebody that hasn't proven himself first - so they don't care about your creativity.
They don't care if they miss a "good one". Plenty of those around, so they'll hapilly restrict themselves to only those willing to jump through the hops of doing the test.
By refusing to do the tests, you just show that you don't care enough to make a small effort. In other words: you're lazy
Take it from me: do the stupid tests, get the job, prove yourself professionally for a couple of years and you will never be asked again to do such tests by any future potential employers.
If you RTFA you'll see that in a company he was working in, they found out that the actual cost of doing development in India was 30% of doing it in the US and in India they did using a (much less flexible) hierarchical fashion rather than using processes like Scrum, so the return on investment of outsourcing to India was actually negative for them.
His point is that this is a problem with management in India, not with the capabilities of their dev people.
Furthermore, he points at the case of a Dutch company that manages to successfully work with distributed development in The Netherlands and India and that their secret is that they first create and train the teams together in Holland and them send half the team to India but have them continue to work together as a team. Essentially they export a Dutch style of management and teamwork to India and it works!
Yet another point was that a race to the bottom in costs will always be won by developing countries and that the advantage that developed countries have is in their proximity and intimate knowledge of the markets where their products are sold and thus their ability in developing products that are better suited to the needs of developed country consumers. This competitive advantage is not being exploited by most managers of developed world companies whose management practices are almost entirelly focused on cost-cutting rather than know-your-customer.
He points at Apple as an example of a company that is being successful by being customer focused.
This is quite orthogonal to automation since automathons are not exactly affected by management styles, are owned by the company (rather than being an external company you outsource to) and are hardly going to fund their own company using what they learned from their customers.
It's a bit of a contradiction: - If humanity could grow to pose a danger to the galaxy it would likelly destroy itself before that.
We (seem to) have survived the discovery of the power of the atom, but there are still plenty of challenges facing us as our technology advances, the next ones being in genetics (a man-made plague that wipes out our civilization) and nano-technology (out of control self reproducing nanites, i.e. the grey goo).
Any aliens concerned with us becoming a danger to the galaxy and yet willing to give us a chance would simply stay away from us and/or made sure we did not get access a feasible interstellar travel technology before we either evolved enough as a social species or destroyed ourselves.
Any aliens certain that we would become a danger to the galaxy would just leak the appropriate technologies to us and stand off while we proceeded to destroy ourselves with them.
On modern heroes & the democratisation of cult
on
The Post-Idea World
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· Score: 2
I would say that the dearth of grand-visions problem is twofold: - One one side, is the widespread, modern concept of the "hero", the one people others look up to. The "heroes" of today are sportsman and celebrities, not thinkers or explorers which both feeds and reflects a society that values luck, inherent ability and monetary success above all. - On the other side is the democratisation of culture, where everybody is supposed to have a voice and (unsurprisingly) those who think the least, react the fastest, use the shortest soundbites and shout the most drown out those who actually think about things.
It also doesn't help that nobody from the police ended up suspended for the killing of the Brazilian Electrician.
More recently, a newspaper salesman died after being attacked without provocation by a member of the riot police during some (mostly peaceful demonstrations) some years ago (and the newspaper salesman was not demonstrating, just trying to leave the area) and nobody went to jail for it.
In the UK, police officers don't answer for this kind of crime.
Add to this: - Distancing from the overall population (fewer cops that walk their beat and know the people of the neighbourhood, more ex-military types cruising about in police cars) - The emphasis in the last couple of year on conviction-targets (that's right, cops have targets to get X people convicted) rather than public-safety targets. - An almost complete reliance on using hard-power rather than soft-power (so the kid that throws a stone through a window and which in the past would be dealth with by a police officer taking him home and talking to his parents will now be arrested, taken to the station, fingerprinted and charged).
Things are even worse in London which suffers extra due to the big-city (lots of anonymous people) problem and has it's own police force which is more disfunctional than most other police forces in the UK (it's head is usually a politically adept type rather than an old-school professional, since the Mayor can and often does replace the head of the Met in reaction to the latest newspaper-pumped scare).
Just out of curiosity: - If you play a game which has a significant component of chance (i.e. random drops) which can be directly turned into money, would that not be considered gambling?
If that is so, would it not be the case that by hosting Real Money Auctions Blizaard is in fact running an online gambling facility (a bit like a Poker site).
Should they not be taxed and regulated as such then?
The modus operandi of government in the UK is "we must be seen to act, so do something, anything".
This applies as much to the police as with politicians, since in the last 10 or 15 years the police has progressivelly been politicised (with any high-level manager that didn't dance to the tune being sidelined) and they're usually called upon to be the tool that does the some kind of action for the cameras.
The outcome is that they cannot be trusted: have they got the right man? Have they got the wrong man? Who knows.
They got somebody and the media reported they're doing something, so the real objective of the operation has already been achived. Probably in 2 or 3 months time when this guy finally faces a court (the only part of the system that actually cares about finding out the truth, rather than convicting somebody) it's quite possible that he's found innocent (or maybe all they manage to pin on him is something minor) and they will quietly release him, since by then the media would have moved on.
As the recent News of The World debacle has shown, in the UK the press has a huge amount of influence and both the politicians and high-level management inside the police have been trained to quickly find somebody to sacrifice whenever the press demands blood.
There is a lot of work in Theatre about what makes acting feel real to the audience.
For example, reading about Status and Status transactions (in the domain of Improv) is a huge eye openner about how we (humans) pick up a lot of cues subconsciously and what kind of cues are they.
I suspect anthropomorphic androids will have to give out the right cues to be confortable for us, rather like an actor has to give out the right cues for a scene to feel right to the audience.
Doing things in ways others find dumb is the way to create a truly successful business.
Almost by definition, the only way to do things which is not tagged as dumb is the proven way, the way things are done by almost everybody and (lo-and-behold) the way countless well estabilished businesses do things now.
If you're starting a company that does things like everybody else, all you're going to be is a tiny player, with no real distinctive value offer (after all, you do it like everybody else), surrounded by large and well established competitors.
So the most successful business ideas that go from a glimer in somebody's eye to a full blown multi-million dollar business in less that a decade are the ones that involve doing "dumb" things. Things like providing for a customer need that everybody else though was not there or not worth the trouble (think Apple and iPhones), or approaching how to do something in a completely different way (thing how Google catalogs the web versus how Yahoo did it back then) or throwing out the assumptions that underpin an established business (look at the rise of free newspapers or how Apple sells technology as others sell fashion).
The only reason for a sovereign power to infiltrate an organisation made mostly of script-kiddy types that is mostly shaming private companies is to stop them.
Russians (and Chinese) almost certainly have their own info-espionage groups which are bound to be just as good as the best LulzSec types only much better funded and with access to things such as Windows source code, info on government mandated backdoors on software and hardware, custom hardware (think USB sticks with custom firmware or even PLAs for brute force hacking into WiFi networks), inside information obtained by good old field-work (think everything from physical violence & blackmail to pillow-talk) and even physical delivery of anything anywhere in the world (think dropping custom USB flash disks in the parking lot of a company you want to hack into).
The only reason this people might have to infiltrate the likes of LulzSec is to stop them from showing to the world some low-hanging-fruit-security-hole or other they might be exploiting to get access to some basic info.
I also work in IT in finance (investment banking, front-office) but I have a long background in working in other industries, including Software Products and Services.
I agree with what you say, having seen what you describe in multiple places (I'm a freelancer, so I change often enough).
I would say that an inability to bring in new blood is both a cause and a consequence of the inefficiency of IT in finance (in my estimation, about 3x more people are required in a finance environment that in an IT consultancy for the same kind of project).
The vast majority of people I see around me working IT in finance have made their career from the beginning inside that environment. They never saw or learned IT industry best practices and practice IT (from coding up to architecture and process management) like they see most people around them do it - the "finance-way". This applies to management also, where the same self-selection-for-finance-industry-old-hands also applies.
The end result is a lack strategical and tactical awareness: no sound development process, no management strategy, no design strategy, not even code-for-support practices, resulting in a lot of two-steps-forward-one-step-back coding, design and project management. This wastes (a lot of) time, in turn resulting in (as you point out) a lack of time to teach the business to any experienced software designers, developers or managers brought in from other industries.
With little or no new blood coming in, long-standing process flaws that were already solved in other industries remain and even when best practices are adopted, they're brought in for being fashionable in the industry (Agile just recently became the fashion du jour) rather than as well understood tools to solve a known problem (for example, properly done Agile would do wonders to aleviate the development issues that come from the fast changing requirements environment in investment banking front-office).
Since management all the way to the top is usually made up of industry old-hands, there is a lot of money sloshing around in finance (so the business is willing to spend a lot of money in hiring IT people), and most people in IT in finance believe that their top-pay must mean they're above average (they're not) this state of affairs persists.
Although his conclusion is sane, the way he went about to make it happen is overly complex.
In his specific scenario (running always the same SQL queries by primary key but with different parameters) he found out that CPU time spent in SQL parsing and Query cost estimation were resulting in CPU-bound throughtput for MySQL.
He then proceed to "fix" this by getting some library that allows direct access to MySQL's underlying database bypassing the SQL layer and rewritting his code to use this SQL-less way.
This is WAY too complex.
Simple solution: Use SQL Prepared Statements with bound parameters (i.e SELECT bla, bla2 FROM blatbl WHERE id=?). Prepared Statements only do SQL parsing and query cost estimation cost once, when the statement is created, thus using them would've removed the CPU cost without needing to add yet another layer to the software (which adds maintenance costs) or re-write it.
A lot (if not most) of performance issues with SQL databases that I have seen are issues of programmer ignorance rather than inherent problems of the DB engine or SQL itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually DNA technology as currently used to investigate crimes is not accurate.
DNA fingerprinting as used is only based on a few genetic markers, not full DNA sequencing. Sometimes as few as 8 or 12 markers are used. This means each combination of markers is the same for thousands of people.
Typically, this is not a problem for the situation when DNA is obtained from a crime scene and in parallel obtained from a suspect and then compared (the likellyhood of a false positive is something like 1 in 8 million).
It is however a problem when DNA is obtained from the crime scene and then a database of DNA samples (which, remember, does not contain a full DNA code, just the values for the markers) is searched for matches - because if the database is big enough, matches will be found for certain (after all, thousands of people have that exact same set of markers) and of late the government has been growing those databases as fast as possible.
So yeah, DNA fingerprinting has to be looked at with some skepticism and it did made sense for the defense to struck you out.
That makes sense, after all Atheism is being against religion while Agnosticism is having no religion.
Being activelly against an entire social movement does require a certain level of tunnel vision to paint all individuals in that group as sharing a set of bad personal characteristics which really are only shown by a subset of loud individuals in that group.
Frankly attacking a whole group for the actions of a minority of individuals is counter-productive. The silent majority is often disgusted by the actions of those self-proclaimed representantives of the group and would rather distance themselves from them.
Actually the recent push for creationism seems to have come almost entirelly from born-again type sects mostly in the US and some developing countries with mainly christian populations.
As far as I'm aware there is no push for creationism in Europe, not from Catholics, Protestants or Orthodox Christians. Some imported Christian sects (the kind that do public rituals of faith healing and banishing of bad spirits) do preach creationism, but those are a tiny minority, concentrated on the uneducated and downtrodden).
In that sense, especially in Western Europe, education has created a generation (actually, two generations by now) of critical thinkers, where even those who do have religious beliefs are not prone to blindly believe what the men of the cloth tell them.
My impression in Europe of crossing paths with people that are believers is that Religion has become far more a personal thing, a belief born from the inside rather than a set of ritualised social events.
Religion can and often is used as means of control of the (unwashed) masses: it's like a police in the brain and is far more effective than the police on the street.
Probably this is why America's founding father explicitly sought to separate the state ( and politics ) from religion.
Unfortunately, in this day and age when the US Constitution is completely disregarded, religion is once again a tool in the toolbox of politics.
Not all innovation is technical in nature. New ways to bring technology to people are also a domain for innovation.
If you want to build a better mousetrap, you don't focus solely on the mechanism that springs the trap - you also need to consider how to best get the mice to come to the trap.
The kind of innovation as Apple has been doing of late is making technology accessible and fashionable. Merging technology with fashion and making it very easy for non-technical people to use is something that nobody else in the Tech industry is doing well and why Apple is so successfull at the moment.
In that sense your post displays the same kind of limited horizons mindset that underpins the current stagnation of traditional tech companies like Microsoft - that of worrying far more about the mechanics of the device rather than how it's used.
As someone with a highly technical background (cut my teeth on the old Slackware Linux on floppies, can design embedded circuits and then code for them) I myself often have the particular kind of engineering blindness we can have when it comes to technology. However, mingling with people from far, far different backgrounds has made me realize that it is a form of short-sightness.
If the wind conditions are "No Wind" then a lighter than air platform (blimp) would probably be the best choice - certainly it would solve the problem of finding something that has a 20km minimum range and can carry 2 hi-def cameras: it would be very slow but have great staying power if there is no wind.
Somehow I think "No Wind" might be a simplification too far.
Guess what, plenty of managers know that Software Developers tend to be overly optimistic.
Worse, it's even a well known management technique to get Developers to give estimates and go along with them (even knowing they're far too optimistic) as a form getting "commitment to the deadlines" from the Developers, which innevitably results in crazy overtime.
Look around whenever you're again in one of those jobs where "it's the workers" - you'll notice that the ones that do the most overwork are invariably male and young. It's not by chance, they're the easiest to manipulate in that way.
In my experience of 15 years in the industry, people that always worked long hours because "that's the way everybody does it" don't actually know that overall productivity is much higher with shorter working hours.
Also, when going from longer-hours to shorter-hours one doesn't immediately get to the maximum productivity sweet-spot: if you've been working 80h-week, going to 40h-week will cut your productivity in half to begin with and it will take a couple of weeks before your productivity passes that of the 80h-week. In an environment where everybody does long-hours, people cutting down in overtime often give up (or are pressured into giving up) during the first few weeks when their body has not yet recovered enough from chronical burnout to compensate for the reduced number of hours.
My personal discovery of this only came when I moved from my native land (Portugal) where I worked 60h-weeks to Holland were if you're in the office after 6 PM your manager tells you to go home. It was an eye openner for me to see just how much more overall productivity (and lower stress and far fewer bugs) a Software Developer has in Holland's 40h-week system than in Portugal's 60h-week one.
When I moved to the UK I brought the Dutch 40h-week habit with me, and even though more than one of my managers tried to pressure me into staying in the office longer hours, my productivity was always better than my colleagues, my decisions were sharper and they always renewed my contract (I was working as a freelancer).
No, no, no!
Modern management evaluation techniques require that people are seen to work long hours so that management can claim that they work hard and make their people work hard.
In services industries, because results are hard to measure consistently, the perception of doing a lot of work is used to measure productivity. In addition to that, since in services projects are mostly unique and usually done done in response to needs of external actors, faster than expected delivery tends be followed by an idle period (since the next project "isn't ready to start yet") while in manufacturing, if you finish making a widget faster, you can immediatly start working on doing another widget.
The result is that in services efficiency is in fact treated as a bad thing - if you work smart, you're not visibly working hard and (worse) you finish your projects early and have periods of idleness while you wait for sales/management to catch up with new projects.
(I find it both funny and sad that in some cultures "working hard" is actually seen as a good thing, since by definition if you need to work hard either you or somebody else is not doing their job in an efficient maner)
Take it from me: do the stupid tests, get the job, prove yourself professionally for a couple of years and you will never be asked again to do such tests by any future potential employers.
I seem to remember something like this in some Science Fiction book. I do believe it might have been Fahrenheit 451.
Prior art!?
Not clean enough, according to your mom.
Apples and Oranges comparisson.
If you RTFA you'll see that in a company he was working in, they found out that the actual cost of doing development in India was 30% of doing it in the US and in India they did using a (much less flexible) hierarchical fashion rather than using processes like Scrum, so the return on investment of outsourcing to India was actually negative for them.
His point is that this is a problem with management in India, not with the capabilities of their dev people.
Furthermore, he points at the case of a Dutch company that manages to successfully work with distributed development in The Netherlands and India and that their secret is that they first create and train the teams together in Holland and them send half the team to India but have them continue to work together as a team. Essentially they export a Dutch style of management and teamwork to India and it works!
Yet another point was that a race to the bottom in costs will always be won by developing countries and that the advantage that developed countries have is in their proximity and intimate knowledge of the markets where their products are sold and thus their ability in developing products that are better suited to the needs of developed country consumers. This competitive advantage is not being exploited by most managers of developed world companies whose management practices are almost entirelly focused on cost-cutting rather than know-your-customer.
He points at Apple as an example of a company that is being successful by being customer focused.
This is quite orthogonal to automation since automathons are not exactly affected by management styles, are owned by the company (rather than being an external company you outsource to) and are hardly going to fund their own company using what they learned from their customers.
It's a bit of a contradiction:
- If humanity could grow to pose a danger to the galaxy it would likelly destroy itself before that.
We (seem to) have survived the discovery of the power of the atom, but there are still plenty of challenges facing us as our technology advances, the next ones being in genetics (a man-made plague that wipes out our civilization) and nano-technology (out of control self reproducing nanites, i.e. the grey goo).
Any aliens concerned with us becoming a danger to the galaxy and yet willing to give us a chance would simply stay away from us and/or made sure we did not get access a feasible interstellar travel technology before we either evolved enough as a social species or destroyed ourselves.
Any aliens certain that we would become a danger to the galaxy would just leak the appropriate technologies to us and stand off while we proceeded to destroy ourselves with them.
I would say that the dearth of grand-visions problem is twofold:
- One one side, is the widespread, modern concept of the "hero", the one people others look up to. The "heroes" of today are sportsman and celebrities, not thinkers or explorers which both feeds and reflects a society that values luck, inherent ability and monetary success above all.
- On the other side is the democratisation of culture, where everybody is supposed to have a voice and (unsurprisingly) those who think the least, react the fastest, use the shortest soundbites and shout the most drown out those who actually think about things.
Actually your walking carbon footprint is very much dependant on the type of food you eat:
- Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.
It also doesn't help that nobody from the police ended up suspended for the killing of the Brazilian Electrician.
More recently, a newspaper salesman died after being attacked without provocation by a member of the riot police during some (mostly peaceful demonstrations) some years ago (and the newspaper salesman was not demonstrating, just trying to leave the area) and nobody went to jail for it.
In the UK, police officers don't answer for this kind of crime.
Add to this:
- Distancing from the overall population (fewer cops that walk their beat and know the people of the neighbourhood, more ex-military types cruising about in police cars)
- The emphasis in the last couple of year on conviction-targets (that's right, cops have targets to get X people convicted) rather than public-safety targets.
- An almost complete reliance on using hard-power rather than soft-power (so the kid that throws a stone through a window and which in the past would be dealth with by a police officer taking him home and talking to his parents will now be arrested, taken to the station, fingerprinted and charged).
Things are even worse in London which suffers extra due to the big-city (lots of anonymous people) problem and has it's own police force which is more disfunctional than most other police forces in the UK (it's head is usually a politically adept type rather than an old-school professional, since the Mayor can and often does replace the head of the Met in reaction to the latest newspaper-pumped scare).
Just out of curiosity:
- If you play a game which has a significant component of chance (i.e. random drops) which can be directly turned into money, would that not be considered gambling?
If that is so, would it not be the case that by hosting Real Money Auctions Blizaard is in fact running an online gambling facility (a bit like a Poker site).
Should they not be taxed and regulated as such then?
The modus operandi of government in the UK is "we must be seen to act, so do something, anything".
This applies as much to the police as with politicians, since in the last 10 or 15 years the police has progressivelly been politicised (with any high-level manager that didn't dance to the tune being sidelined) and they're usually called upon to be the tool that does the some kind of action for the cameras.
The outcome is that they cannot be trusted: have they got the right man? Have they got the wrong man? Who knows.
They got somebody and the media reported they're doing something, so the real objective of the operation has already been achived. Probably in 2 or 3 months time when this guy finally faces a court (the only part of the system that actually cares about finding out the truth, rather than convicting somebody) it's quite possible that he's found innocent (or maybe all they manage to pin on him is something minor) and they will quietly release him, since by then the media would have moved on.
As the recent News of The World debacle has shown, in the UK the press has a huge amount of influence and both the politicians and high-level management inside the police have been trained to quickly find somebody to sacrifice whenever the press demands blood.
There is a lot of work in Theatre about what makes acting feel real to the audience.
For example, reading about Status and Status transactions (in the domain of Improv) is a huge eye openner about how we (humans) pick up a lot of cues subconsciously and what kind of cues are they.
I suspect anthropomorphic androids will have to give out the right cues to be confortable for us, rather like an actor has to give out the right cues for a scene to feel right to the audience.
Doing things in ways others find dumb is the way to create a truly successful business.
Almost by definition, the only way to do things which is not tagged as dumb is the proven way, the way things are done by almost everybody and (lo-and-behold) the way countless well estabilished businesses do things now.
If you're starting a company that does things like everybody else, all you're going to be is a tiny player, with no real distinctive value offer (after all, you do it like everybody else), surrounded by large and well established competitors.
So the most successful business ideas that go from a glimer in somebody's eye to a full blown multi-million dollar business in less that a decade are the ones that involve doing "dumb" things. Things like providing for a customer need that everybody else though was not there or not worth the trouble (think Apple and iPhones), or approaching how to do something in a completely different way (thing how Google catalogs the web versus how Yahoo did it back then) or throwing out the assumptions that underpin an established business (look at the rise of free newspapers or how Apple sells technology as others sell fashion).
The only reason for a sovereign power to infiltrate an organisation made mostly of script-kiddy types that is mostly shaming private companies is to stop them.
Russians (and Chinese) almost certainly have their own info-espionage groups which are bound to be just as good as the best LulzSec types only much better funded and with access to things such as Windows source code, info on government mandated backdoors on software and hardware, custom hardware (think USB sticks with custom firmware or even PLAs for brute force hacking into WiFi networks), inside information obtained by good old field-work (think everything from physical violence & blackmail to pillow-talk) and even physical delivery of anything anywhere in the world (think dropping custom USB flash disks in the parking lot of a company you want to hack into).
The only reason this people might have to infiltrate the likes of LulzSec is to stop them from showing to the world some low-hanging-fruit-security-hole or other they might be exploiting to get access to some basic info.
I also work in IT in finance (investment banking, front-office) but I have a long background in working in other industries, including Software Products and Services.
I agree with what you say, having seen what you describe in multiple places (I'm a freelancer, so I change often enough).
I would say that an inability to bring in new blood is both a cause and a consequence of the inefficiency of IT in finance (in my estimation, about 3x more people are required in a finance environment that in an IT consultancy for the same kind of project).
The vast majority of people I see around me working IT in finance have made their career from the beginning inside that environment. They never saw or learned IT industry best practices and practice IT (from coding up to architecture and process management) like they see most people around them do it - the "finance-way". This applies to management also, where the same self-selection-for-finance-industry-old-hands also applies.
The end result is a lack strategical and tactical awareness: no sound development process, no management strategy, no design strategy, not even code-for-support practices, resulting in a lot of two-steps-forward-one-step-back coding, design and project management. This wastes (a lot of) time, in turn resulting in (as you point out) a lack of time to teach the business to any experienced software designers, developers or managers brought in from other industries.
With little or no new blood coming in, long-standing process flaws that were already solved in other industries remain and even when best practices are adopted, they're brought in for being fashionable in the industry (Agile just recently became the fashion du jour) rather than as well understood tools to solve a known problem (for example, properly done Agile would do wonders to aleviate the development issues that come from the fast changing requirements environment in investment banking front-office).
Since management all the way to the top is usually made up of industry old-hands, there is a lot of money sloshing around in finance (so the business is willing to spend a lot of money in hiring IT people), and most people in IT in finance believe that their top-pay must mean they're above average (they're not) this state of affairs persists.
I read his article.
DON'T DO WHAT HE DID!
Although his conclusion is sane, the way he went about to make it happen is overly complex.
In his specific scenario (running always the same SQL queries by primary key but with different parameters) he found out that CPU time spent in SQL parsing and Query cost estimation were resulting in CPU-bound throughtput for MySQL.
He then proceed to "fix" this by getting some library that allows direct access to MySQL's underlying database bypassing the SQL layer and rewritting his code to use this SQL-less way.
This is WAY too complex.
Simple solution: Use SQL Prepared Statements with bound parameters (i.e SELECT bla, bla2 FROM blatbl WHERE id=?). Prepared Statements only do SQL parsing and query cost estimation cost once, when the statement is created, thus using them would've removed the CPU cost without needing to add yet another layer to the software (which adds maintenance costs) or re-write it.
A lot (if not most) of performance issues with SQL databases that I have seen are issues of programmer ignorance rather than inherent problems of the DB engine or SQL itself.
And here I was thinking that Sony was giving serious, practical advice to buyers of their TV sets and to their film division ...