I buy my games ate physical game stores for a very simple reason: - If they don't work or they're not what's advertised I can bring them back and get a refund.
This is true for any game I buy: there's no need to investigate the Software License of a game before I buy it (like in Steam) to make sure I can get a refund
Try doing that with digital distribution or even online stores.
What would've happen if they had released a game like this 5 years ago before DLC was fashionable - given that they had enough time to develop the content for the game and the expansion pack in time for the release, would they: - Not have developed the extra content? - Included it in the actual game?
For all we know they developed the game, then went around looking for what they could take out and sell separately, took that out and are selling it as an extra. Given that EA is the producer for this game, I wouldn't at all be surprised if that is the case.
To use a car analogy, it's as if they are selling a car with a manual clutch and 5 gears, only they disabled the 5th and are selling it separately. Sure, it's a perfectly good car and works as normal... as long as you don't try going faster than 60 miles/h
419 scams and phishing are completely different sorts of scenarios: - The first is an appeal to a person's greed that happens to be done via e-mail - The second is a forged and somewhat alarmist e-mail providing a link to access what appears to be your bank's system to correct a problem.
419 scams are just a common type of scam only done "via e-mail" and should be easily detectable to anybody knowledgeable in the ways of deceit (the appeal to one's greed makes it very obviously).
Phishing involved a forged e-mail (which means one needs to be aware that e-mails can be forged) demanding nothing of value from the recipient (just some time to check and correct a "problem") and providing a helpful link to the relevant site (said link looking ok for a non-technical person). The helpful link to the site is a common feature in e-mails from many companies (for example MySpace) and thus an e-mail with a link fits one mental pattern of "how these things usually work" and triggers no mental alarms if you're not aware of how phishing works.
Thus I'm not at all surprised that a non-technical member of the intelligence/law community could fall for a phishing e-mail.
So the real price for the full game is not the listed price but instead it's an extra $7
If they don't make this clear upfront in the game box (certainly the amazon.co.uk site says nothing about some of the game content being sold as an extra), I'm sure this breaks the rules in most countries in Europe (i.e they're selling an incomplete product) and is at least grounds for anybody that buys the game to bring it back to the store and get a full refund (which is why I never buy games online).
I've only moved here for the money (before that I was in Holland and before that Portugal) and will stick around as long as I make significant more money here than in countries with more honest political systems (like Holland but not Portugal). I don't have a family so I need not worry about things like having my kids go through state school around here.
If I didn't pay almost twice more in taxes in Holland than I do in the UK (I'm a freelancer and the dutch tax system penalizes freelancers a lot more than the UK one) I would still be there.
That said, with the weak pound and the increase in taxes that's coming in the UK (to pay off all the public debt taken to subsidize... err... save the banking industry) I'm seriously considering moving again (Switzerland has been sounding more and more attractive of late).
PS: Also, moving countries costs money - the more stuff you have the more expensive it is.
I think we all understand the need to for the intelligence services to keep some secrets.
What most of us are worried about is their focus on protecting information:
that causes political harm or embarrassment
- When people find out that MPs submitted expenses to parliament for buying duck-houses or cleaning moats... that's politically embarrassing. - When people find out that sitting ministers are evading taxes... that's politically embarrassing. - When people find out each and every situation of waste, incompetence and pure and simple disregard for the money that we pay in taxes on the part of politicians or people directly nominated or overseen by politicians... that's politically embarrassing.
Those leaks are often also politically damaging for those responsible for the problem.
And here we have the intelligence services' manual for protecting information from the which amongst other things directs them to protect "information that causes political harm or embarrassment" from the prying eyes of such evil people as... journalists.
If I didn't already believe that the UK is a corrupt and decadent nation, this would convince me.
So the PSP was such a good product that people where jailbreaking it and using it for all sorts of things (like playing movies), not just gaming. They were getting their games from independent sources and even playing PS1 games on it. They were playing movies directly from the memory stick without paying for Sony's overpriced movies.
Sony was selling the PSP at a loss and trying to make it up from overpriced games and overpriced movies. Since people were not buying as many games and movies from Sony as expected this wasn't working.
The old Sony (from 15 years ago) would've done the following: - Open up the console themselves so that people wouldn't need to jailbreak it - Pitch it as an open, portable multimedia + gaming device. Sell it for more money because people were buying it for the extra features.
The new Sony did the following: - Tried to patch the holes that allowed for the jailbreaking. These could only be patch with a new version of the console and new holes were discovered within a week of the old ones being patched. Consoles already out before the patch still had the old holes. - Came up with a completely new PSP with stronger DRM, such as having the firmware version tied to the games so that new games would force firmware upgrades thus closing existing holes in consoles with older firmware. The new PSP is NOT backwards compatible with the old one, adds no value for consumers (it actually reduces value) and costs more money.
Yet another situation where Sony shows how they went from a company that "was proud to do the best quality products and could sell them at a premium" to a Sony that "trades the quality-value that their brand name acquired in the past for pushing to consumers inferior products designed to have Sony get paid extra when users actually use their products".
This is why I stopped buying Sony altogether years ago (I distrust their products and expect them to, by design, force me to pay Sony extra money when use them) and never looked back.
Actually, London itself has problems with insufficient number of new houses being built. This is in part because no houses can be build in the green belt around London.
This why before the recession house prices increased faster in London and are now holding on better than in most other regions. This also why a while ago the Mayor of London announced a plan for having some of any new houses being built reserved for essential workers (such as nurses and firemen) since they were unable to afford a house in London.
Keep in mind that London is the destination for the vast majority of immigrants that come to the UK and (at least before the recession) was growing fast.
The population of London is expected to drop below 50% English by 2012. Would you want to let that happen with your own capital?
And the problem with that would be... ???
Really, I'm curious: - Would the increased percentage of people with black and olive skin in London alter the UK weather patterns due to increased capture of sun light causing higher temperatures in London? - Or maybe the decrease in lily-white people who need sun-protection cream factor 50 whenever a bit of sun comes out would kill the sun-protection cream industry in the UK? - Maybe your worry is the increase in accidental run-overs of people by cars during the night because darker skins are more difficult to spot in low light conditions?
To be honest, I do think the UK has immigration issues. - The problem is not the ethnical origin of the immigrants, their skin color or religion. - The problem is that the UK imports way too many people which are poor, uneducated and which don't know any trade for which there is a need of people here in the UK (they're mostly unskilled). Often enough they're farmers or slum-dwellers from far away places which just "crash-land" in a completely different environment.
There are plenty of poor, uneducated and unskilled British people, no need to bring in more from other countries.
The end result of the UK's policy on immigration until now is that loads of immigrants come in and out-compete the natives for the small pool of jobs for unskilled or little-educated people (the immigrants are frequently less demanding in terms of salary and living conditions, especially when they intend to just make money asap and get back to their country). To top it all up, the less worldly of those immigrants sometimes bring habits which the natives find unpleasant.
This has interesting side effects. For example, in London, one of the more expensive cities in the world to live in, in some neighborhoods getting a hair-cut from a barber or having you car hand-washed is cheaper than in anywhere else in Western Europe (£8 for the haircut, £5 for the car hand-wash).
When I went through high-school some years ago (actually almost 20), the time spent at school where I lived and studied (Portugal) was comparatively the same as in the US only distributed differently (at the time, summer school vacations in Portugal lasted 3 months, while all other vacation periods where about 1 week each).
At some point during my high-school years, one of my class-mates went to do a year's high-school in the US as part of a student exchange program and then came back. Now, in Portugal this was a slightly below average student, usually ending his year with (in a scale of 20) average grades around the 11 mark (10 is pass). After a year he came back from the US and proudly announced that over there he got A grades in almost all subjects.
That pretty much formed my opinion that high-school in the US was simply not demanding at all.
I very much suspect that, even now, the problem with US education is one of poor quality of teaching and ever lowering standards of evaluation for pass grades than one of how much time students spend at school.
This is yet another strike against "cloud computing" taking over. If they can order your account just plain zapped because a bank fucked up, I don't see how anyone's data is safe. At least if you had it stored at home or at work on your own machine, you'd at least know what the hell happened to it.
Actually this should scare the shit out of any company considering putting their data in "the cloud".
Think about it this way: a judge from any jurisdicion where Google has significant assets, where Google doing significant business in or where the data happens to reside in whole or in part can order your access to be terminated without recourse and your data deleted even if you are a completly innocent and uninvolved 3rd part to a wrongful action commited by somebody else.
I can easilly see the scenario where a US based company "mistakenly" sends confidential information to an e-mail address of one of their non-US based competitors (the mailbox being hosted in a "cloud" managed by a US company) and then gets a summary rulling from a US judge to "nuke" their competitor's data.
For me some of the transitions where "awakenings" while others just slowly dawned on me.
They might be different for others, the borders I defined are illustrational, some stages overlap and the order might be different (I did transition #4 before #3).
That said, I know plenty of people with lots of years in the industry who never did go through the later transitions (it's often hard to turn around from a "code oriented view" into a "what-does-my-software-achieve oriented view").
I still do a lot of coding. The difference is that nowadays long before I start coding I'm making sure that me (and others) will be doing the right coding to achieve the right objectives.
The duct tape programmer represents those developers that "just want to do it".
Their comfort zone is coding so they really what to start coding and "see things moving" asap. They'll work really hard, go down coding/design dead-ends and back, re-write whole sections of the code, work long hours and eventually deliver something.... that doesn't do what's actually needed (say, because a requirement wasn't double checked with the users, or the format of the data being exchanged with some other system wasn't properly hammered-down with the guys developing the other system or the chosen technology can't deliver the needed performance or any other of a million reasons). Crazy last minute adjustments and re-writtings follow and what comes out is a "not exactly what we needed app", from start held together with spit and chewing-gum.
Compare this with somebody that works smart and takes some time to prepare up front before starting coding (things like checking requirements, hammering down message formats, making sure the chosen technology can deliver) and at the end delivers something that not only works but also does what is needed and, just as important, keeps on working without requiring constant baby-sitting.
I don't think this guy ever worked with any software engineer with any significant amount of experience. Or maybe he just works with people that suck as software engineer.
The typical evolution towards wisdom in Software Engineering goes like this (simplified):
Starting by making small programs or programs supposed to be used only once (i.e. school assignments)
Transition 1: Discovery of code reusability, the problems with copy & paste coding and how using methods lets you partition your code into more easy to understand blocks - this is when one transitions beyond junior developer
Transition 2: Discovery of the concept of software design and how it makes for more adaptable code which is easier to understand and how it helps main complexity small as the size of the program increases - this is when one transitions into junior designer
Transition 3: Discover that there is such thing as too much design. That over-designing decreases maintenability, makes the code harder to understand by others and by oneself in the future. That the flexibility that the real world will require from the code will rarely match one's initial idea of what should be made flexible during design and that trying to create a top-to-bottom design that covers all eventualities actually results in an inflexible system. Above all, discovery of the value of the KISS approach: don't design/implement a specific something now because you think you will need it later, it is often easier to do it then if you do actually need it and you probably won't need it and are just making for big code instead of useful code. At the same time discover that newer isn't always better when it comes to software tools, languages and frameworks and that coolness and hype are really bad things to focus in when choosing something to use in an professional IT project - this is how you get medior designers and senior developers
Transition 4: Discover that creating software is actually a process not an act. That a lot of things serve as feed-ins to the actual design and development of software and a lot of things feed out from it. That software isn't just made, it lives, evolves and gets changed. That making an application is easy (no mater how big and complex) and making the right application which does what's need in the right way for the users of the application is what's hard. That the quality of your feed-ins (requirements, analysis, time, people and all manner of preparations) is much more relevant to the success of a project than the code or the design. That over the long run, the true quality of the code and design is measured by how easy it is to regression test, maintain, support, extend and by how fast new designers/developers can pick up the code (which are some of the feed outs) - this is how you get senior designers and technical analysts.
Transition 5: Discover that the applications your develop are part of an ecosystem. That software talks to software that talks to software. That many applications need to do many of the same things, only in slightly different ways. That standardizing (up to a level) things like certain kinds of exchange of information between applications or the kind of libraries used for certain common functional areas (such as multi-system logging, single-sign-on, messaging) will make for increased overall productivity and maintenability (develop and maintain a single implementation for each and distribute it as a library). Discover that standardizing on a reduced number of mature programming languages makes it easier to find people to work with them and move people around to different projects and systems - this is how you get technical architects
At best what the guy in the article is calling "duct-tape programmer" is somebody past the 3rd transition only and what he calls and "astronaut architect" is somebody past the 2nd transition only.
I would hardly call a junior designer type "architect".
They're also creating a significant risk of destroying genetic diversity, made worse by the fact that they own patents controlling the genotypes that are hedging out the others. Crop genetic diversity isn't just important in some hippie "plant multiculturalism" sense -- it's important if you plan on your children being able to eat in the future.
To explain this in simple terms: - Today's genetically modified insect repellent high yield crop might be tomorrow's "mana from the gods" for some crop pest or other.
If one plant in a crop which is composed of plants all sharing the exact same DNA is/becomes susceptible to one kind of crop pest/disease (which is bound to happen sooner or later since said pests/diseases are also exposed to evolutionary pressures), then the whole crop will be susceptible.
Biodiversity (even amongst the same species of family of plants and animals) makes our crops more resistant to this kind of scenarios.
Due to the way GM plants are created and the fact that things like terminator genes mean that for many GM plants natural reproduction is not viable, the number of DNA variants for any given GM species is limited and no natural evolution can take place. The result is whole fields covered in what essentially are clones (or a small number of variants) year-in-year-out, while the local pests/viruses/bacterias are evolving/adapting to be able to eat/infect that very small genetic pool of plants.
If on a wider scale a specific strain of a GM plant (say wheat) becomes a large percentage of the total crop of that kind of plant, then the conditions are set for a full-blown collapse of most of a year's crop of that plant at a global (or at least continental) level - for example having 90% of the wheat crop in both South-America and North-America die because those 90% are all a single kind of GM-wheat for which a highly deadly disease has just evolved.
Well, if somebody developed a 150% efficient solar cell I wouldn't care about cost.
Then again, you could use such a solar cell to power some high efficiency light producing device (say, a LED) which you would point at the solar cell thus getting back more energy than you used to power the light (i.e. free energy).
It's not bragging as in going around complimenting yourself all the time.
It's more nuanced than that, for example, celebrating your successes loudly or, when a problems pops-up that needs solving, (if you have it) pointing out your expertise and past experience on the relevant area and other such things.
To be ethical and fair, make sure that you also mention others when pointing out past successes (as in "Me and John worked in performance optimization at the database level for project X and got the application to work 4 times as fast. Maybe we can help out with this one too?"). Mentioning those (deserving) others that also contributed to a past success also avoids that you are thought of as an arrogant asshole by your peers, makes you look like a team player to the eyes of management and might even help to make sure that if a round of cuts comes around, those co-workers you have worked with which are competent but quiet will also be recognized as valuable and be kept (instead of some incompetent butt-kisser).
Many compounds used in modern medicine come from the natural world and many common substances do have some or other medicinal effect. Don't forget that penicillin is naturally produced by a fungus.
For a more recent example of an herb used in modern medicine, there's Artemesia, a Chinese herb which is currently one of the most effective treatments against malaria.
I've been using such a challenge-response mechanism with my Dutch bank for several years now.
It works together with the smart chip in your bank card: - At the appropriate points the bank website gives you a number that you enter in a little device where you have your bank card slotted. The device (using the smart chip in your bank card) calculates a response number which you type back in the bank website. If the numbers match you are given-access/have-pending-payments-approved.
No passwords or any other important keywords will ever go through the network or even enter your PC (and thus cannot be sniffed or keylogged). Your PIN code is needed to activate your bank card when first slotted into the device but even if somebody manages to visually see you type it (the only way to do it remotelly is to own your machine, turn on it's webcam and look through it at the right time), physical possession of the card is still needed.
The most significant weakness of this is some form of man-in-the-middle attack within a running session with the bank's website (maybe using a dynamically generated fake bank website front-end talking to the real one in the back-end and injecting payment operations in the appropriate moments).
Funnily enough I've moved to the UK where most banks are still comparativelly in the stone age (multiple-passwords is the most common of tricks). The best one I've used here (for my business account) is similar to the one from my Dutch bank but for initial authorization the smart card in your bank card does not receive a challenge-number, it just generates a number on it's own.
The truth is that most problems of unauthorized access to bank accounts via a bank's website are squarelly to blame on the banks themselves - any system relying on long-lived shared authorization codes (i.e. passwords) which must go through non-hardenned and potentially insecure devices (a user's PC, a browser, a network connection) is exceptionally unsafe and prone to be broken remotelly using automated means.
Even if users have the technical expertise to harden their own system, there are just too many potentially elements outside the user's control (the OS, thousands of network-listening applications, the actual browser, the SSL implementation used, the certification authorities, the bank's website implementation - to name just a couple) and vectors of attack. Using long-lived shared authorization codes which go through all sorts of potentially remotelly compromised systems for securing high-value targets is as dumb as it gets. To top it all up, if you happen to live in certain geographical locations, automated remote takeover of bank accounts is a low-risk-high-reward activity.
Safer systems exist and are deployed by some banks already (i.e. challenge-response systems relying on shared keys running inside hardenned devices - smart chip on the client, SAM on the server - and never coming out) but they cost money and most banks are not willing to spend it.
Until the banks get full financial responsability for this kind of intrusion, most won't do anything to provide an online banking environment which is not prone to them.
Lately it seems that the big companies are getting affected by patent trolls more than the little guys (they have more money). And the big corps have enough political clout to push through patent reform laws. So if they are getting hammered like this, why aren't they lobbying for patent reform? Are they just not getting hit hard enough?
I reckon that the big companies are using their own very large patent portfolios to keep any new entrants from the markets they dominate. Being large and slow moving, they will also get patents upfront covering new markets to "reserve the business space" for themselves while the rest of the company slowly moves to actually do something in that business space.
For any large and slow moving behemoth company, the ability to use patents to kill any potential future Google while they're still a toddler is priceless. Having to deal with patent trolls once in a while is peanuts in comparisson.
This is the antithesis of what patents are supposed to achieve (they're supposed to promote progress, while killing new and innovative companies does exactly the opposite).
I think that using tools makes people smarter, not dumber.
Making tools makes people smarter.
Using tools at most just empowers people to do certain things which they would not do otherwise.
That said, tools that replace certain abilities will result that people who use those tools loose said abilities or are less likely to gain them in the first place(how many people do you know from the newer generation that can calculate products and divisions in their heads?). This does make the less smart in that area, although not necessarily overall.
Moore's Law is already at its limit. The next step is two-prong: parallelism and hybrid (analog-digital) chips.
Actually the future in processors might be in optical processors and/or quantum processors, both of which are very different approaches from what we have now (especially the later).
Here's a simple thought experiment: If Evolution is false, what created swine flu? The only other possible explanation is that God is a dick, and I don't believe that.
Obviously the Flying Spaghetti Monster has touched the old flu virus with His Noodly Appendage and made it into swine flu as a warning to all who do not believe in His Greatness.
I would go even further - the logic exposed by the grand-parent can be used to justify the liberation of Chechnya, since it's population is clearly being oppressed by Russia, including killing of tens of thousands of Chechnya's residents and the installation of a murderous (just recently another journalist critical of the government was murdered) and oppressive puppet-government.
Slashdot Mirror
I buy my games ate physical game stores for a very simple reason:
- If they don't work or they're not what's advertised I can bring them back and get a refund.
This is true for any game I buy: there's no need to investigate the Software License of a game before I buy it (like in Steam) to make sure I can get a refund
Try doing that with digital distribution or even online stores.
What would've happen if they had released a game like this 5 years ago before DLC was fashionable - given that they had enough time to develop the content for the game and the expansion pack in time for the release, would they:
- Not have developed the extra content?
- Included it in the actual game?
For all we know they developed the game, then went around looking for what they could take out and sell separately, took that out and are selling it as an extra. Given that EA is the producer for this game, I wouldn't at all be surprised if that is the case.
To use a car analogy, it's as if they are selling a car with a manual clutch and 5 gears, only they disabled the 5th and are selling it separately. Sure, it's a perfectly good car and works as normal ... as long as you don't try going faster than 60 miles/h
419 scams and phishing are completely different sorts of scenarios:
- The first is an appeal to a person's greed that happens to be done via e-mail
- The second is a forged and somewhat alarmist e-mail providing a link to access what appears to be your bank's system to correct a problem.
419 scams are just a common type of scam only done "via e-mail" and should be easily detectable to anybody knowledgeable in the ways of deceit (the appeal to one's greed makes it very obviously).
Phishing involved a forged e-mail (which means one needs to be aware that e-mails can be forged) demanding nothing of value from the recipient (just some time to check and correct a "problem") and providing a helpful link to the relevant site (said link looking ok for a non-technical person). The helpful link to the site is a common feature in e-mails from many companies (for example MySpace) and thus an e-mail with a link fits one mental pattern of "how these things usually work" and triggers no mental alarms if you're not aware of how phishing works.
Thus I'm not at all surprised that a non-technical member of the intelligence/law community could fall for a phishing e-mail.
So the real price for the full game is not the listed price but instead it's an extra $7
If they don't make this clear upfront in the game box (certainly the amazon.co.uk site says nothing about some of the game content being sold as an extra), I'm sure this breaks the rules in most countries in Europe (i.e they're selling an incomplete product) and is at least grounds for anybody that buys the game to bring it back to the store and get a full refund (which is why I never buy games online).
I've only moved here for the money (before that I was in Holland and before that Portugal) and will stick around as long as I make significant more money here than in countries with more honest political systems (like Holland but not Portugal). I don't have a family so I need not worry about things like having my kids go through state school around here.
If I didn't pay almost twice more in taxes in Holland than I do in the UK (I'm a freelancer and the dutch tax system penalizes freelancers a lot more than the UK one) I would still be there.
That said, with the weak pound and the increase in taxes that's coming in the UK (to pay off all the public debt taken to subsidize ... err ... save the banking industry) I'm seriously considering moving again (Switzerland has been sounding more and more attractive of late).
PS: Also, moving countries costs money - the more stuff you have the more expensive it is.
I think we all understand the need to for the intelligence services to keep some secrets.
What most of us are worried about is their focus on protecting information:
- When people find out that MPs submitted expenses to parliament for buying duck-houses or cleaning moats ... that's politically embarrassing. ... that's politically embarrassing. ... that's politically embarrassing.
- When people find out that sitting ministers are evading taxes
- When people find out each and every situation of waste, incompetence and pure and simple disregard for the money that we pay in taxes on the part of politicians or people directly nominated or overseen by politicians
Those leaks are often also politically damaging for those responsible for the problem.
And here we have the intelligence services' manual for protecting information from the which amongst other things directs them to protect "information that causes political harm or embarrassment" from the prying eyes of such evil people as ... journalists.
If I didn't already believe that the UK is a corrupt and decadent nation, this would convince me.
So the PSP was such a good product that people where jailbreaking it and using it for all sorts of things (like playing movies), not just gaming. They were getting their games from independent sources and even playing PS1 games on it. They were playing movies directly from the memory stick without paying for Sony's overpriced movies.
Sony was selling the PSP at a loss and trying to make it up from overpriced games and overpriced movies. Since people were not buying as many games and movies from Sony as expected this wasn't working.
The old Sony (from 15 years ago) would've done the following:
- Open up the console themselves so that people wouldn't need to jailbreak it
- Pitch it as an open, portable multimedia + gaming device. Sell it for more money because people were buying it for the extra features.
The new Sony did the following:
- Tried to patch the holes that allowed for the jailbreaking. These could only be patch with a new version of the console and new holes were discovered within a week of the old ones being patched. Consoles already out before the patch still had the old holes.
- Came up with a completely new PSP with stronger DRM, such as having the firmware version tied to the games so that new games would force firmware upgrades thus closing existing holes in consoles with older firmware. The new PSP is NOT backwards compatible with the old one, adds no value for consumers (it actually reduces value) and costs more money.
Yet another situation where Sony shows how they went from a company that "was proud to do the best quality products and could sell them at a premium" to a Sony that "trades the quality-value that their brand name acquired in the past for pushing to consumers inferior products designed to have Sony get paid extra when users actually use their products".
This is why I stopped buying Sony altogether years ago (I distrust their products and expect them to, by design, force me to pay Sony extra money when use them) and never looked back.
Actually, London itself has problems with insufficient number of new houses being built. This is in part because no houses can be build in the green belt around London.
This why before the recession house prices increased faster in London and are now holding on better than in most other regions. This also why a while ago the Mayor of London announced a plan for having some of any new houses being built reserved for essential workers (such as nurses and firemen) since they were unable to afford a house in London.
Keep in mind that London is the destination for the vast majority of immigrants that come to the UK and (at least before the recession) was growing fast.
All the rest is correct.
And the problem with that would be ... ???
Really, I'm curious:
- Would the increased percentage of people with black and olive skin in London alter the UK weather patterns due to increased capture of sun light causing higher temperatures in London?
- Or maybe the decrease in lily-white people who need sun-protection cream factor 50 whenever a bit of sun comes out would kill the sun-protection cream industry in the UK?
- Maybe your worry is the increase in accidental run-overs of people by cars during the night because darker skins are more difficult to spot in low light conditions?
To be honest, I do think the UK has immigration issues.
- The problem is not the ethnical origin of the immigrants, their skin color or religion.
- The problem is that the UK imports way too many people which are poor, uneducated and which don't know any trade for which there is a need of people here in the UK (they're mostly unskilled). Often enough they're farmers or slum-dwellers from far away places which just "crash-land" in a completely different environment.
There are plenty of poor, uneducated and unskilled British people, no need to bring in more from other countries.
The end result of the UK's policy on immigration until now is that loads of immigrants come in and out-compete the natives for the small pool of jobs for unskilled or little-educated people (the immigrants are frequently less demanding in terms of salary and living conditions, especially when they intend to just make money asap and get back to their country). To top it all up, the less worldly of those immigrants sometimes bring habits which the natives find unpleasant.
This has interesting side effects. For example, in London, one of the more expensive cities in the world to live in, in some neighborhoods getting a hair-cut from a barber or having you car hand-washed is cheaper than in anywhere else in Western Europe (£8 for the haircut, £5 for the car hand-wash).
When I went through high-school some years ago (actually almost 20), the time spent at school where I lived and studied (Portugal) was comparatively the same as in the US only distributed differently (at the time, summer school vacations in Portugal lasted 3 months, while all other vacation periods where about 1 week each).
At some point during my high-school years, one of my class-mates went to do a year's high-school in the US as part of a student exchange program and then came back. Now, in Portugal this was a slightly below average student, usually ending his year with (in a scale of 20) average grades around the 11 mark (10 is pass). After a year he came back from the US and proudly announced that over there he got A grades in almost all subjects.
That pretty much formed my opinion that high-school in the US was simply not demanding at all.
I very much suspect that, even now, the problem with US education is one of poor quality of teaching and ever lowering standards of evaluation for pass grades than one of how much time students spend at school.
Actually this should scare the shit out of any company considering putting their data in "the cloud".
Think about it this way: a judge from any jurisdicion where Google has significant assets, where Google doing significant business in or where the data happens to reside in whole or in part can order your access to be terminated without recourse and your data deleted even if you are a completly innocent and uninvolved 3rd part to a wrongful action commited by somebody else.
I can easilly see the scenario where a US based company "mistakenly" sends confidential information to an e-mail address of one of their non-US based competitors (the mailbox being hosted in a "cloud" managed by a US company) and then gets a summary rulling from a US judge to "nuke" their competitor's data.
For me some of the transitions where "awakenings" while others just slowly dawned on me.
They might be different for others, the borders I defined are illustrational, some stages overlap and the order might be different (I did transition #4 before #3).
That said, I know plenty of people with lots of years in the industry who never did go through the later transitions (it's often hard to turn around from a "code oriented view" into a "what-does-my-software-achieve oriented view").
I still do a lot of coding. The difference is that nowadays long before I start coding I'm making sure that me (and others) will be doing the right coding to achieve the right objectives.
The duct tape programmer represents those developers that "just want to do it".
Their comfort zone is coding so they really what to start coding and "see things moving" asap. They'll work really hard, go down coding/design dead-ends and back, re-write whole sections of the code, work long hours and eventually deliver something .... that doesn't do what's actually needed (say, because a requirement wasn't double checked with the users, or the format of the data being exchanged with some other system wasn't properly hammered-down with the guys developing the other system or the chosen technology can't deliver the needed performance or any other of a million reasons). Crazy last minute adjustments and re-writtings follow and what comes out is a "not exactly what we needed app", from start held together with spit and chewing-gum.
Compare this with somebody that works smart and takes some time to prepare up front before starting coding (things like checking requirements, hammering down message formats, making sure the chosen technology can deliver) and at the end delivers something that not only works but also does what is needed and, just as important, keeps on working without requiring constant baby-sitting.
I don't think this guy ever worked with any software engineer with any significant amount of experience. Or maybe he just works with people that suck as software engineer.
The typical evolution towards wisdom in Software Engineering goes like this (simplified):
At best what the guy in the article is calling "duct-tape programmer" is somebody past the 3rd transition only and what he calls and "astronaut architect" is somebody past the 2nd transition only.
I would hardly call a junior designer type "architect".
To explain this in simple terms:
- Today's genetically modified insect repellent high yield crop might be tomorrow's "mana from the gods" for some crop pest or other.
If one plant in a crop which is composed of plants all sharing the exact same DNA is/becomes susceptible to one kind of crop pest/disease (which is bound to happen sooner or later since said pests/diseases are also exposed to evolutionary pressures), then the whole crop will be susceptible.
Biodiversity (even amongst the same species of family of plants and animals) makes our crops more resistant to this kind of scenarios.
Due to the way GM plants are created and the fact that things like terminator genes mean that for many GM plants natural reproduction is not viable, the number of DNA variants for any given GM species is limited and no natural evolution can take place. The result is whole fields covered in what essentially are clones (or a small number of variants) year-in-year-out, while the local pests/viruses/bacterias are evolving/adapting to be able to eat/infect that very small genetic pool of plants.
If on a wider scale a specific strain of a GM plant (say wheat) becomes a large percentage of the total crop of that kind of plant, then the conditions are set for a full-blown collapse of most of a year's crop of that plant at a global (or at least continental) level - for example having 90% of the wheat crop in both South-America and North-America die because those 90% are all a single kind of GM-wheat for which a highly deadly disease has just evolved.
Well, if somebody developed a 150% efficient solar cell I wouldn't care about cost.
Then again, you could use such a solar cell to power some high efficiency light producing device (say, a LED) which you would point at the solar cell thus getting back more energy than you used to power the light (i.e. free energy).
It's not bragging as in going around complimenting yourself all the time.
It's more nuanced than that, for example, celebrating your successes loudly or, when a problems pops-up that needs solving, (if you have it) pointing out your expertise and past experience on the relevant area and other such things.
To be ethical and fair, make sure that you also mention others when pointing out past successes (as in "Me and John worked in performance optimization at the database level for project X and got the application to work 4 times as fast. Maybe we can help out with this one too?"). Mentioning those (deserving) others that also contributed to a past success also avoids that you are thought of as an arrogant asshole by your peers, makes you look like a team player to the eyes of management and might even help to make sure that if a round of cuts comes around, those co-workers you have worked with which are competent but quiet will also be recognized as valuable and be kept (instead of some incompetent butt-kisser).
Many compounds used in modern medicine come from the natural world and many common substances do have some or other medicinal effect. Don't forget that penicillin is naturally produced by a fungus.
For a more recent example of an herb used in modern medicine, there's Artemesia, a Chinese herb which is currently one of the most effective treatments against malaria.
I've been using such a challenge-response mechanism with my Dutch bank for several years now.
It works together with the smart chip in your bank card:
- At the appropriate points the bank website gives you a number that you enter in a little device where you have your bank card slotted. The device (using the smart chip in your bank card) calculates a response number which you type back in the bank website. If the numbers match you are given-access/have-pending-payments-approved.
No passwords or any other important keywords will ever go through the network or even enter your PC (and thus cannot be sniffed or keylogged). Your PIN code is needed to activate your bank card when first slotted into the device but even if somebody manages to visually see you type it (the only way to do it remotelly is to own your machine, turn on it's webcam and look through it at the right time), physical possession of the card is still needed.
The most significant weakness of this is some form of man-in-the-middle attack within a running session with the bank's website (maybe using a dynamically generated fake bank website front-end talking to the real one in the back-end and injecting payment operations in the appropriate moments).
Funnily enough I've moved to the UK where most banks are still comparativelly in the stone age (multiple-passwords is the most common of tricks). The best one I've used here (for my business account) is similar to the one from my Dutch bank but for initial authorization the smart card in your bank card does not receive a challenge-number, it just generates a number on it's own.
The truth is that most problems of unauthorized access to bank accounts via a bank's website are squarelly to blame on the banks themselves - any system relying on long-lived shared authorization codes (i.e. passwords) which must go through non-hardenned and potentially insecure devices (a user's PC, a browser, a network connection) is exceptionally unsafe and prone to be broken remotelly using automated means.
Even if users have the technical expertise to harden their own system, there are just too many potentially elements outside the user's control (the OS, thousands of network-listening applications, the actual browser, the SSL implementation used, the certification authorities, the bank's website implementation - to name just a couple) and vectors of attack. Using long-lived shared authorization codes which go through all sorts of potentially remotelly compromised systems for securing high-value targets is as dumb as it gets. To top it all up, if you happen to live in certain geographical locations, automated remote takeover of bank accounts is a low-risk-high-reward activity.
Safer systems exist and are deployed by some banks already (i.e. challenge-response systems relying on shared keys running inside hardenned devices - smart chip on the client, SAM on the server - and never coming out) but they cost money and most banks are not willing to spend it.
Until the banks get full financial responsability for this kind of intrusion, most won't do anything to provide an online banking environment which is not prone to them.
I've never had unreasonable deadlines, and never, ever had last minute changes on a project.
*cough*
Now ... could I have my pony?
I reckon that the big companies are using their own very large patent portfolios to keep any new entrants from the markets they dominate. Being large and slow moving, they will also get patents upfront covering new markets to "reserve the business space" for themselves while the rest of the company slowly moves to actually do something in that business space.
For any large and slow moving behemoth company, the ability to use patents to kill any potential future Google while they're still a toddler is priceless. Having to deal with patent trolls once in a while is peanuts in comparisson.
This is the antithesis of what patents are supposed to achieve (they're supposed to promote progress, while killing new and innovative companies does exactly the opposite).
Making tools makes people smarter.
Using tools at most just empowers people to do certain things which they would not do otherwise.
That said, tools that replace certain abilities will result that people who use those tools loose said abilities or are less likely to gain them in the first place(how many people do you know from the newer generation that can calculate products and divisions in their heads?). This does make the less smart in that area, although not necessarily overall.
Actually the future in processors might be in optical processors and/or quantum processors, both of which are very different approaches from what we have now (especially the later).
Obviously the Flying Spaghetti Monster has touched the old flu virus with His Noodly Appendage and made it into swine flu as a warning to all who do not believe in His Greatness.
I would go even further - the logic exposed by the grand-parent can be used to justify the liberation of Chechnya, since it's population is clearly being oppressed by Russia, including killing of tens of thousands of Chechnya's residents and the installation of a murderous (just recently another journalist critical of the government was murdered) and oppressive puppet-government.