Every week, yet another IT business-man / manager/columnist which fondly remembers the Internet Bubble comes up with yet another theory on how IT/Internet/Networking is causing/will cause an infinite boom of growth and properity and those which do not jump onto the train of [fill in something he's trying to sell] will be left behind in the dust.
I thought the Bursting of the Bubble had cured people of falling for this kind of arguments (which were used over and over again during the Bubble to justify insane valuations for companies which never made a cent).
Guess the leeches didn't gave up on trying to suck the fools dry yet.
GSM doesn't mean that the phone is free from carrier lockdown
It is if you buy your own phone and THEN get the SIM card from the carrier.
Make the maths: i bet even there the total cost of the 1 or 2 years subscription you're locked into if you get a phone from the carrier is more than the price of a new phone.
As an added benefict, subscriptions for SIM Only users (those that bring their own phone) are usually cheaper for the same number of minutes/texts/whatever than the equivalent subscriptions with phone. Same thing for pre-pay.
Belief in evolution is a dividing point between rational people and the 'faithful'.
I wouldn't say the 'faithful' i would instead say the 'blind, ignorant and faithful or those who fake being faithful for the purpose of manipulating the faithful'
One can be a believer in a higher power without blindly and unquestionably accepting one of man's interpretation of a holy book.
Faith is not the problem: those that are stupid and faithful and those which manipulate the other's faith for the purpose of achieving their selfish earthly objectives are the problem.
This is just as truth of the Creationist segment of the US' cristian right as it is of the Middle Eastern Jihadists.
Disclaimer: I am an agnostic (not an atheist since i actually respect some people which are believers) but i did had a religious phase when i was a teenager and i've met several scientists which are themselfs believers (so i'm well aware that science and fait are not incompatible).
My point was not that everybody should, as a principle, have access to information collected on what everybody else does in public.
My point was that this kind of system gets setup and yet, "somehow", it always ends up being used by a minority to check on everybody else, while at the same time that same minority makes sure they cannot be checked uppon "due to security reasons".
My point being, if we're going to provide someone with the means to virtually stalk anybody they choose to, then to keep them honest, those means should be available to everybody and should allow watching of everybody else (no exceptions).
Who watches over the watchers?
I reckon those that can be watch should be able to watch the watchers.
Re:We already have this in the UK
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Manhattan 1984
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You clearly don't live in the same area of London as i do. Around here, there are plenty of (either poor or just cheap) people with 10+ years cars (a real old, but still usable car can be bought for less that 500 GBP).
Come to think of it, at 8 pounds a day (source), if you use your car to commute to London every working day, then at 48 * 5 * 8 = 1920 pounds (52 weeks - 1 month vacations TIMES 5 days a week TIMES 8 pounds), the cost of the road tax significantly outweights other costs (for example, road tax is about 150 pounds a year). Come to think of it, with 1920 pounds one can even buy a decent 1994 Mercedes around here.
And by the way, the last reports i saw put the current levels of congestion at 7% below the ones when the "Congestion Charge" was introduced (unfortunatly the source of this is one of those free newspapers given out at the tube stations, so no online references - sorry) not 26%.
While i personally believe people should commute to the center of any city as much as possible via public transportation (underground - aka tube - coverage in London is excelent, even if the tube is very prone to delays), the current "Congestion charge" (which should be called the "London Road Tax" imho) is clearly a thinly disguised Tax, not a congestion control mechanism.
Now, if the procedings of the "Congestion Charge" were actually used to improve traffic conditions in and around London (from experience, compared with other big cities in Europe, the great circular roads around London are a total joke) and to facilitate access to public transportation (for example, by building big parking areas outside London next to train/tube stations which would then "feed" the passengers into the rest of the London tube network) then i would start to believe that this is not a Tax. As it is, the money from the road tax is being used by Ken Livingstone to increase the number of traffic wardens (= more parking tickets), promote his own pet causes and go visit Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
Altough i have yet to pay a cent in "congestion charges" (i live in London and recently got myself a really cheap car only because I need it to access areas OUTSIDE London which are far from public transportation), i still get majorly pissed off with the spin portraying this tax as a "congestion control mechanism", the fact that the congestion charging zone keeps getting extended (and will eventually cover the place where i live, making me pay a reduced charge, even though i use my car to get OUT of London, not in) and the way the money made with this tax is being wasted with increasing the Mayor's bureaucracy and promoting his pet political causes instead of really fixing the problems with the whole traffic and public transportation infrastructure in London.
The Mayor has used some of the money on token investments in Bus lanes and such, but as any Londoner would tell you, buses are the slowest way to get anywhere in London, mostly because they take long, winding paths through the middle of the neighbourhoods, not around them.
The real big (read costly) issues (such as the ageing tube and the lack of an integrated public transport infrastructure to feed commuters to and out of London) have barelly been touched.
I really don't understand why people keep pointing to privacy issues when it comes to your PUBLIC movements. Tracking your phone records and such is a different story, as that information is actually private. Where you go in public isn't private to begin with. It's PUBLIC, get it? That information is already out there for everyone to see. Not to mention the fact that if you're driving in a car, you're on a road, which is a government controlled area. I can't believe anyone thinks they should be able to drive in Manhattan, and their whereabouts should remain private!
You're absolutely right!
I would go even further, since all this system does is track what people do in PUBLIC, I believe all persons should have free and unrestricted access to this system and ALL the information collected by it. And i do mean ALL, that means all tracking of politicians, police officers, celebreties, cheating wifes/husbands, bosses, co-workers, your daughter, and anybody one feels like stalking virtually.
After all, all this system does is track things people do in PUBLIC - nobody should have any expectation of privacy from anything they do in PUBLIC!!!
A lot of the hunger in the present world is due to localized insuficience of resources to feed the number of people living in an area.
This in turn is mostly due to the explosive growth of the human population in those areas (and also due to things like desertification, which are in turn mostly due to overgrazing)
This explosive growth of human population happens in places which traditionally had high birth rates and high mortality rates, but which nowadays do not have high (or quite as high) mortality rates as before.
[Grab the age distribution graphic of any African country and you'll notice how exceptionally young their population is by comparisson with, for example, the US]
This decrease in mortality rates came about with modern medicine, mordern hygiene practices and humanitarian aid, such as food aid.
A good example of this is Ethiopia, a great deal of which has had food crisis on and off for the last 20 years at least (probably more, but i ain't old enough to remember) and were land has been split further and further as it got passed to each new generation to the point that land tracts are now often not big enough to feed a family.
Maybe the "think of the children" crowd should get down from their high horses and start thinking of tomorrow's children. A bit more of investment in population controls instead of blindly throwing money at food aid might mean that in 20 years time we won't have three times the number of starving children as we have today. Unfortunatly, it's so much more easy to sell the idea of food aid for the children of today (i especially like the quasi-manipulative use of emotion-inducing pictures of african children) than it is to sell population control for the children of tomorrow...
PS: Yeah, i'm really sour about this. Ever since i was a kid and my mother would get me to eat the food i didn't like by saying how the "children in Africa would love to be able to eat food that good" i've been paying attention to this problem. Consistently i see that a food crisis comes up, most money is spent on food aid and very little on population control, so that some years later bigger, worse and more frequent food crisis happen in the same place. Things are a lot worse now than 20 years ago, with almost constant food crisis in many parts of Africa and whole areas being almost wholy dependent on food aid. Whenever i see that the average age in some of those countries is less than 18 years old, i can but think on how bad things will be in another 20 years. In my most sour moments, i even wonder if many of those at the top of the Aid Industry are not in it for the cushy jobs, the money and the prestige more than they are in it for the people.
They should patent it so that they can monetise their discovery.
That way, when somebody comes up with the means of making a perfect lens which is only nanometers thick (something required for this "reversion" to work), they can bring their patent and make millions out of somebody else's work.
That is, if somebody goes to the trouble of trying to find how to make such a lens since these guys would have a patent on what's likely the only money making application of said lens. But that shouldn't be a problem since everybody else will glady spent countless time in a likelly to never succeed research path purelly for the glory of the potential discovery, while in the full knowledge that if and when they come up with a way of making such a lens, these guys would stand to make a huge ammount of $$$...
Besides, if these guys don't patent this, they will have no incentive to keep researching and will likelly just give up on physics so as to live a simple life of poverty, away from the cheap cookies of physics conferences and the unpleasentess of being the target of much admiration and respect for making important discoveries.
Clearly patenting everything creates incentives all around for everybody to keep doing research and fill in the gaps on everybody else's patents.
I have to agree on this one - if you're doing long hours you're probably just covering up for some manager which underestimates project's durations out of incompetency or for brownie points and a fat bonus (as in, knowingly overselling the teams capabilities) or which underestimates the need for more personell (that would be for the 24/7 on call part) again for a fat bonus.
The funny part is that overworking doesn't really work in software development - tired people make stupid mistakes which have to be tracked-down and fixed, in the process consuming more time than whatever extra hours the developers are doing. The only "pro" of long hours is that, when the project is late, the manager will excuse himself with middle management by pointing at a "hard working team" which "couldn't deliver on time" because it was "clearly impossible". This unfortunatly will work with most middle managers (especially in companies where there are no good examples), since they themselfs are quite clueless about how a proper software development process looks like and fall into the common mistake of thinking "hard working" is always a good when in fact "smart working" is actually the best.
[As a side-note i have a good example to give to all those out there that think "hard working" is a good thing:
"Imagine two guys breaking stone. One uses a small hammer and works the hardest he can for 12h/day. The other uses a pneumatic drill and works 8h/day at a relaxed pace with a number of breaks. The first works "hard", the second works "smart". Guess who delivers the most results!???"]
A most interesting effect is that, if you're good at what you do and you stand for yourself and don't overwork, you'll actually be more likelly to deliver good software on time than the rest of the team and the managers will love you for it ('cause you make them look good).
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By the way, from my experience, after having kids, it's a lot harder for women to cope with long hours than for guys. This seems to be because in most western countries there is still a lot of expectation that women will invest more time in "taking care of the kids" than men.
That said, i work as a contractor and have worked in 8 different positions in 3 different countries. Of all of them, in only 1 case was there no women working as developers in the company (this was in a small software house in Holland), though in most places the proportion of women to men in software development was between 1 to 4 and 1 to 2. Also, women with kids where a lot less likelly to work long hours than men (with or without kids).
You seem to be basing most of your rationale on the idea that a good product makes money.
That simply isn't so: as countless examples show, the most technically advanced/perfect product is nothing without the right business model.
For example, consider the low market penetration of PocketPCs and compare this with the success of the Blackberry (which, technology-wise, is pretty much a parred down PocketPC connecting to proprietary servers).
Good products don't make money if people don't wanna buy it, and sometimes it's the shoddiest product with the better business model that wins *cough* VHS, Betamax *cough*
Many of those "never a day with profit" companies that crashed miserably once the bubble burst were actually founded by technical people, not management school graduates.
The truth is, the business management guys sometimes do have interesting business plans but usually lack the knowledge to understand if they're actually based on something which can be done and how to do it. The techie guys on the other side, often have good technical ideas but lack the knowledge to know if and how those ideas can be turned into something commercially viable.
Often enough, half the skill in delivering a good joke is in the visual clues one gives (especially when you're being ironic) and in the written medium (especially short articles) without emoticons, all those visual clues are lost.
For example, it's one thing to say:
- Slackware is clearly the easiest, most user friendly Linux distro.
and another to say
- Slackware is clearly the easiest, most user friendly Linux distro;^D
In the end it all boils down to what objective do you want to achieve and how much time do you have to do it.
TeX is incredibly powerfull and can do pretty much everything you want to have a perfect document. The downside is that mastering TeX takes a long time and creating any document which is not long enough so as to justify designing a clean, well defined, structure and set of structural elements takes a lot more time with TeX than with (Open) Office.
The thing is, most of us don't have that much time available for documentation in our professional occupations since that is not our core occupation, and just want to finish the damn document so that we can go back to doing the real work.
It's not by chance that TeX is only really popular in academia and with those whose work is to create perfectly formated document (for publishing)...
Here's me simplifying the examples in your post for you:
I'm suspicious of the intentions of group X when they say Y since the did something (bad) Z in the past
That's pretty much basic human opinion forming and using in action: - Evaluate past actions and form an opinion on the Actor - Estimate the possible impact/intentions of the current actions of the Actor with the help of the opinion one has of said Actor
Usually it's more complicated that just forming the opinion from a single action of an Actor: - Normally we look at multiple action and their consequences. - We also often form our opinions from the opinions of trusted sources. - Time past since the actions in question will invalidate the opinion (as per the Democrats and slavery example above). - Future actions of the Actor or new insights/information on the past actions that formed our opinion can change the opinion.
Opinions are important because we're human: people are limited in that they lack the mental brainpower to (re)evaluate all the information on the actions/events on all the important actors in such a way that one can make timelly decisions on those actions/events. Opinions guide us into interpreting events/actions and making decisions on them when we lack the whole information and/or lack enough time or knowledge to evaluate all the information we have.
This is why the legal system and just about everyone with common sense looks only at the issues at hand rather than using their preexisting biases and stereotypes.
[Note: i'll disregard your "everyone with common sense" part as being argumentative and hardly a scientific consensus]
Opinions are of course only an indicator - suitable as a directional pointer but hardly adequate as the only means to make a decision that has wide implications: you might invite or not someone to a party based on your opinion of that person but (should) not take a decision on whether to convict or not somebody to 25 years in jail purelly on opinion.
This is why the legal system does not pass judgement based on opinion and instead takes the long way (and has special powers) to obtain as much information as possible about the actions/events and using large amounts of time and manpower (not to mention people with specialized knowledge) to interpret that information.
Unfortunatly none of us here on/. have the large amounts of time, manpower and the judicial powers to obtain all the information on Microsoft's most recent actions so as to reach a perfectly fair conclusion on what they're trying to accomplish: the best we can do is use our opinions formed on our interpretation of Microsoft's past action (and also based on the opinion of others) as a rough guide towards evaluations MS' latest action, then (maybe) dig a little bit on the publicly available information on this action and then form a conclusion and present it.
No important actions results from our conclusions and everybody is free to examine and re-interpret them at will so i don't see why they should not be shared and looked at by others even though they weren't arrived at via a full blown "due process".
By now i've lived in 3 countries, had 4 mobiles phones and 5 different providers.
Except for my first mobile phone, i always bought the phones unlocked, free of any contract and at full price.
Never had any problem changing countries/providers and take my phone with me. All i have to do is get a SIM from my new provider (tipically costs about $10 with quite a lot of free minutes) pop it in the phone and it just works.
Even beter, ever since the number portability laws came on, i can even keep my number when i change providers (in the same country, though).
To top it all up, the best deals out there are SIM-only offers, aimed at people like me that bring their own phones.
So what's the big difference to the US/Canada:
Standards, more specifically GSM, mean that any mobile phone sold in Europe will work with any European mobile phone provider
Consumer friendly laws, such as number portability, mean that the providers don't have the same latitude in using technological tricks to artificially lock their customers in
Not buying my mobile phones locked-in to a contract means that i'm a free agent and can quickly jump to another provider if i feel that my current provider is not providing me with value for the money (Vodafone kiss my *ss). Buying a mobile phone from a provider would mean giving up the liberty to change, and if you make your maths, the contract you're locked-into when getting a phone in such a away pretty much means you're paying the phone full price, only in monthly installements instead of fully up-front.
Actually above a certain altitude (3000 feet, at least in the UK) planes are not flown on altitude above sea medium level, but instead are flow on Flight Levels (FL). A Flight level is based on using a standard sea level pressure setting of 1013.2 millibars.
Basically you set the sea level pressure in your altimeter to be 1013.2 mb and read the altitude from your altimeter. Then you drop the last 2 digits and get the Flight Level. Thus if with a sea level pressure setting of 1013.2 mb your altimeter reads 12000 feet, this means you are flying on FL 120 (Flight Level 120). In the (quite exceptional) situation where the sea level air pressure in the area you are flying in is actually 1013.2, then altitude = FL * 100
Since above a certain altitude everybody is flying with the 1013.2 setting in their altimeters, even though FL does not give the real altitude, it's works perfectly for keeping vertical separation between planes.
PS: Around really tall mountains use of the lower FLs is not such a good idea;)
By the way IANACPBILFAPPL (I'm Not A Commercial Pilot But I'm Learning For A Private Pilot License)
3. Once a month or so we run into a highly talented programmer who has been in the industry for a long time and really know what they are doing. These guys are always interesting to talk to so I love doing interviews with them because I always learn something new. Unfortunately they are looking for a short term consulting gig and we are looking for people to stay with us in the long term.
Funny that you mention this - I work as a contractor (aka freelancer) and i would probably fit into category 3 if i ever interviewed with you guys. Actually from what i've seen, the best people in this field which remain technical usually stop working as permanent employees and become contractors.
I'll let you in on a secret - one of the biggest causes for this migration into contracting for the best in IT is that, if you're really good and you have a lot of work experience in IT, the vast majority of companies is not willing to pay you what you're worth if you remain technical, though they are perfectly willing to pay that and more if you're either management or a contractor. In other words, if you remain a permanent and want to continue in the technical path, eventually you become too expensive for what companies are willing to pay to techie people.
So yeah, for all your "we're really lacking qualified people" talk, the problem is still that you're not willing to pay enough money for those who have both the natural skills and the experience.
PS: Another great advantage of contracting is freedom and variety (as in, many new challenges). It might very well be that you are willing to pay the $$$ (though i doubt it, i've NEVER been offered as much for a perm position as i do as a contractor), but the work you do is just boring and/or not challenging enough.
As a contractor (aka freelancer) software engineer and analyst i have over the years learned to spot a number of indicators which are usually associated with the kind of groups/companies where software projects tend to be late and/or not deliver what the business needs. Here's a couple of indicators for that kind of place: - The bigger/more-complex projects have little or no analysis. - There is neither a formal Requirements Gathering stage nor (in Agile Programming) an easilly available user/user-representative with which to discuss business features. - Delivery of a project to a client is an unstructured process. In other words, there is no list of standard types of documents and deliverables to deliver which is common across projects. - Project planning does not have a built-in margin for unforseen problems and sometimes relies from the start in people working extra (unpaid) hours to make the budget. - Sales dictates the deadlines without consulting (or consulting but then ignoring) the technical side. - There are no specialized Testers. - There are no standardized software components, software frameworks, good practices or documentation for use across the company. - There is a vast number of software languages, software libraries or frameworks of different versions used across the projects done in the company. Similar projects use different languages/libraries/frameworks and/or use different major versions of those. Developers are totally free to choose the languages and libraries they want to use for the projects. Maintenability is not taken into consideration in the choice of languages/libraries which instead are chosen on the basis of "cool sounding", "fun" and "CV enhancing". - The project manager has little formal or informal power within the company beyond his subordinates (this is harder to spot but a surprisingly good predictor of failure).
There's quite a lot more, but these are some of the more obvious ones and i've seen all of them already more than once.
More in general, what software development environments where late or failed projects are common share is a failure to organize and/or a failure to prepare and/or lack of "soft skill" from project management and/or ignorance of the characteristics of the software development process.
Just the other day there was a documentary on BBC about the way many of the laws and acts passed in the last couple of years by the British parliement are used to curtail free speech.
For example, an old guy (we're talking 70 years old) was arrested under the powers given to the police by the Anti-Terrorism Act because he half-shouted "nonsense" during a speach by some government minister at a Labour Party conference.
Going back to the issue of cameras all over the place here in the UK, it all boils down to this: - Do you trust that all, or even most, of those that have access to that information are fair and honest?
The same guys which used the Anti-Terrorism Act to arrested a 70 year old man for saying "nonsense" at a government minister's speech, even though those same people, while clamoring for those extended powers to "fight terrorism", promised never to used it except against potential terrorists!!???
Having been born in a country which in the past was under the rule of a fascist dictatorship, i recognize in some of what i hear about the way things are here in the UK, many of the elements of the stories i heard about the way the secret police worked in fascist times and many elements from History books about the rise of dictatorships (the "internal enemy", the "arbitrary arrest powers with no oversight", the "enhanced surveilance powers", the stoking and use of widespread "irrational fear" to get those arrest and surveilance powers, the constant "state of alert")...
If we get a "deep economical crash" or an "extraordinarily bloody act of terrorism", all conditions are set for the rise of a "saviour"...
#9) If there's a high emphasis when selling the job on soft rewards such as "relaxed work environment", "casual wear", "group outings" then they're probably trying to pay you less than average for the same position and trying to compensate for it by throwing you some cheap bones. #10) "Opportunities for career growth", the "Potential for significant future increases in income" and in general any promises of future promotions are worth as much as the paper they're written on. #11) "Flexible working hours" = "We expect you to work more hours per day than we are willing to pay you for" #12) Any "payment" in things other than cash (for example, a company car) should always be converted into a cash equivalent when evaluating a position. Don't forget to apply an opportunity factor to non-cash offers: with plain ol' cash you to choose what to use that cash for and when to do it, while with non-cash beneficts (such as the above mentioned company car) the choice has been done for you already and often it comes with strings attached. An example: you get a Audi A4 as a company car, to be assigned to you 3 months after you started working for the company, which you cannot sell for 2 years and if you leave the company within those 2 years you loose the car. This is clearly worth a lot less than the equivalent amount in cash since: - It's pre-chosen as a car of a certain brand (maybe you wanted to use the money for a house intead, or some extra nice vacations, or maybe you wanted a different brand of car, or maybe a cheaper car AND some nice vacations) - The timing when you receive the car is fixed (maybe you just got a brand new car a month ago) - You do not immediatly get full ownership of the car (maybe after one year you want to sell it to get a different car, or maybe you want to leave the company because you want to move to a different country/state or maybe because they didn't turn out to be what you wanted).
In the side of IT that deals with software development, practical clothes are not a requirement. In this environment, what guides one's choice of clothes is confort and social rules.
Confort is self-explanatory, as for social rules, beyond the obvious generals social rules (going around naked is frowned upon in most environments) it usually tends to boil down to "statements" ("i am different", "i want to climb in this company", "i'm above concerns such as clothing", "i belong here", "i'm management material") and trying to fit in a group ("the guys with suits are sales and management", "the guys with jumpsuits are warehouse workers", "the guys with jeans are deliveries", "the guys in shorts and sandals are IT";))
As a contractor, having worked in all sorts of environments and all sorts of companies (from e-Commerce companies to Finance), i can tell you that i have found just as many people i respect and admire as professionals (and just as many that i find utterly incompetend and/or amateurish) in the "ultra-casual" environments as i have in the "full, conservative colors and cut, suit and tie" environments.
When evaluation a job/position, concentrating on clothing is a great way to loose sight of the things that really matter.
Your're right. That war has nothing to do with monopoly, and shouldn't be touched by EU. Both groups have more than enough cash to persuade whoever they want to join their camp. Overall the one with better connections and marketing power will win.
I would say that any mature adult that has frequented any kind of MMORPG is more than keenly aware of the hordes (no WoW pun intended) of emotionally unbalanced, immature, socially irresponsible teenagers running around the place, many of which that, protected under the cover of anonimity, find pleasure and boost their egos by trying to ruin other people's games.
The anonimity of the Internet removes some of the greatest shackels on action (retribution, public shaming, public shunning) for those which feel empowered and have their egos boosted by harassing others (typically, but not exclusively, the above mentioned immature teenagers).
This has been going on ever since the Internet has been opened to people beyond the confines of academia (probably even before).
Personally i would like adults only servers for most MMORPGs to avoid wasting any of my precious 3h/day of playing because of some griefing kid, but that's a different story...
Slashdot Mirror
Every week, yet another IT business-man / manager /columnist which fondly remembers the Internet Bubble comes up with yet another theory on how IT/Internet/Networking is causing/will cause an infinite boom of growth and properity and those which do not jump onto the train of [fill in something he's trying to sell] will be left behind in the dust.
I thought the Bursting of the Bubble had cured people of falling for this kind of arguments (which were used over and over again during the Bubble to justify insane valuations for companies which never made a cent).
Guess the leeches didn't gave up on trying to suck the fools dry yet.
It is if you buy your own phone and THEN get the SIM card from the carrier.
Make the maths: i bet even there the total cost of the 1 or 2 years subscription you're locked into if you get a phone from the carrier is more than the price of a new phone.
As an added benefict, subscriptions for SIM Only users (those that bring their own phone) are usually cheaper for the same number of minutes/texts/whatever than the equivalent subscriptions with phone. Same thing for pre-pay.
I wouldn't say the 'faithful' i would instead say the 'blind, ignorant and faithful or those who fake being faithful for the purpose of manipulating the faithful'
One can be a believer in a higher power without blindly and unquestionably accepting one of man's interpretation of a holy book.
Faith is not the problem: those that are stupid and faithful and those which manipulate the other's faith for the purpose of achieving their selfish earthly objectives are the problem.
This is just as truth of the Creationist segment of the US' cristian right as it is of the Middle Eastern Jihadists.
Disclaimer: I am an agnostic (not an atheist since i actually respect some people which are believers) but i did had a religious phase when i was a teenager and i've met several scientists which are themselfs believers (so i'm well aware that science and fait are not incompatible).
My point was not that everybody should, as a principle, have access to information collected on what everybody else does in public.
My point was that this kind of system gets setup and yet, "somehow", it always ends up being used by a minority to check on everybody else, while at the same time that same minority makes sure they cannot be checked uppon "due to security reasons".
My point being, if we're going to provide someone with the means to virtually stalk anybody they choose to, then to keep them honest, those means should be available to everybody and should allow watching of everybody else (no exceptions).
Who watches over the watchers?
I reckon those that can be watch should be able to watch the watchers.
You clearly don't live in the same area of London as i do. Around here, there are plenty of (either poor or just cheap) people with 10+ years cars (a real old, but still usable car can be bought for less that 500 GBP).
Come to think of it, at 8 pounds a day (source), if you use your car to commute to London every working day, then at 48 * 5 * 8 = 1920 pounds (52 weeks - 1 month vacations TIMES 5 days a week TIMES 8 pounds), the cost of the road tax significantly outweights other costs (for example, road tax is about 150 pounds a year). Come to think of it, with 1920 pounds one can even buy a decent 1994 Mercedes around here.
And by the way, the last reports i saw put the current levels of congestion at 7% below the ones when the "Congestion Charge" was introduced (unfortunatly the source of this is one of those free newspapers given out at the tube stations, so no online references - sorry) not 26%.
While i personally believe people should commute to the center of any city as much as possible via public transportation (underground - aka tube - coverage in London is excelent, even if the tube is very prone to delays), the current "Congestion charge" (which should be called the "London Road Tax" imho) is clearly a thinly disguised Tax, not a congestion control mechanism.
Now, if the procedings of the "Congestion Charge" were actually used to improve traffic conditions in and around London (from experience, compared with other big cities in Europe, the great circular roads around London are a total joke) and to facilitate access to public transportation (for example, by building big parking areas outside London next to train/tube stations which would then "feed" the passengers into the rest of the London tube network) then i would start to believe that this is not a Tax. As it is, the money from the road tax is being used by Ken Livingstone to increase the number of traffic wardens (= more parking tickets), promote his own pet causes and go visit Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
Altough i have yet to pay a cent in "congestion charges" (i live in London and recently got myself a really cheap car only because I need it to access areas OUTSIDE London which are far from public transportation), i still get majorly pissed off with the spin portraying this tax as a "congestion control mechanism", the fact that the congestion charging zone keeps getting extended (and will eventually cover the place where i live, making me pay a reduced charge, even though i use my car to get OUT of London, not in) and the way the money made with this tax is being wasted with increasing the Mayor's bureaucracy and promoting his pet political causes instead of really fixing the problems with the whole traffic and public transportation infrastructure in London.
The Mayor has used some of the money on token investments in Bus lanes and such, but as any Londoner would tell you, buses are the slowest way to get anywhere in London, mostly because they take long, winding paths through the middle of the neighbourhoods, not around them.
The real big (read costly) issues (such as the ageing tube and the lack of an integrated public transport infrastructure to feed commuters to and out of London) have barelly been touched.
You're absolutely right!
I would go even further, since all this system does is track what people do in PUBLIC, I believe all persons should have free and unrestricted access to this system and ALL the information collected by it. And i do mean ALL, that means all tracking of politicians, police officers, celebreties, cheating wifes/husbands, bosses, co-workers, your daughter, and anybody one feels like stalking virtually.
After all, all this system does is track things people do in PUBLIC - nobody should have any expectation of privacy from anything they do in PUBLIC!!!
A lot of the hunger in the present world is due to localized insuficience of resources to feed the number of people living in an area.
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This in turn is mostly due to the explosive growth of the human population in those areas (and also due to things like desertification, which are in turn mostly due to overgrazing)
This explosive growth of human population happens in places which traditionally had high birth rates and high mortality rates, but which nowadays do not have high (or quite as high) mortality rates as before.
[Grab the age distribution graphic of any African country and you'll notice how exceptionally young their population is by comparisson with, for example, the US]
This decrease in mortality rates came about with modern medicine, mordern hygiene practices and humanitarian aid, such as food aid.
A good example of this is Ethiopia, a great deal of which has had food crisis on and off for the last 20 years at least (probably more, but i ain't old enough to remember) and were land has been split further and further as it got passed to each new generation to the point that land tracts are now often not big enough to feed a family.
Maybe the "think of the children" crowd should get down from their high horses and start thinking of tomorrow's children. A bit more of investment in population controls instead of blindly throwing money at food aid might mean that in 20 years time we won't have three times the number of starving children as we have today. Unfortunatly, it's so much more easy to sell the idea of food aid for the children of today (i especially like the quasi-manipulative use of emotion-inducing pictures of african children) than it is to sell population control for the children of tomorrow
PS: Yeah, i'm really sour about this. Ever since i was a kid and my mother would get me to eat the food i didn't like by saying how the "children in Africa would love to be able to eat food that good" i've been paying attention to this problem. Consistently i see that a food crisis comes up, most money is spent on food aid and very little on population control, so that some years later bigger, worse and more frequent food crisis happen in the same place. Things are a lot worse now than 20 years ago, with almost constant food crisis in many parts of Africa and whole areas being almost wholy dependent on food aid. Whenever i see that the average age in some of those countries is less than 18 years old, i can but think on how bad things will be in another 20 years. In my most sour moments, i even wonder if many of those at the top of the Aid Industry are not in it for the cushy jobs, the money and the prestige more than they are in it for the people.
No, no, no.
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They should patent it so that they can monetise their discovery.
That way, when somebody comes up with the means of making a perfect lens which is only nanometers thick (something required for this "reversion" to work), they can bring their patent and make millions out of somebody else's work.
That is, if somebody goes to the trouble of trying to find how to make such a lens since these guys would have a patent on what's likely the only money making application of said lens. But that shouldn't be a problem since everybody else will glady spent countless time in a likelly to never succeed research path purelly for the glory of the potential discovery, while in the full knowledge that if and when they come up with a way of making such a lens, these guys would stand to make a huge ammount of $$$
Besides, if these guys don't patent this, they will have no incentive to keep researching and will likelly just give up on physics so as to live a simple life of poverty, away from the cheap cookies of physics conferences and the unpleasentess of being the target of much admiration and respect for making important discoveries.
Clearly patenting everything creates incentives all around for everybody to keep doing research and fill in the gaps on everybody else's patents.
QED
boing boing
i rest my case!
I have to agree on this one - if you're doing long hours you're probably just covering up for some manager which underestimates project's durations out of incompetency or for brownie points and a fat bonus (as in, knowingly overselling the teams capabilities) or which underestimates the need for more personell (that would be for the 24/7 on call part) again for a fat bonus.
The funny part is that overworking doesn't really work in software development - tired people make stupid mistakes which have to be tracked-down and fixed, in the process consuming more time than whatever extra hours the developers are doing. The only "pro" of long hours is that, when the project is late, the manager will excuse himself with middle management by pointing at a "hard working team" which "couldn't deliver on time" because it was "clearly impossible". This unfortunatly will work with most middle managers (especially in companies where there are no good examples), since they themselfs are quite clueless about how a proper software development process looks like and fall into the common mistake of thinking "hard working" is always a good when in fact "smart working" is actually the best.
[As a side-note i have a good example to give to all those out there that think "hard working" is a good thing:
"Imagine two guys breaking stone. One uses a small hammer and works the hardest he can for 12h/day. The other uses a pneumatic drill and works 8h/day at a relaxed pace with a number of breaks. The first works "hard", the second works "smart". Guess who delivers the most results!???"]
A most interesting effect is that, if you're good at what you do and you stand for yourself and don't overwork, you'll actually be more likelly to deliver good software on time than the rest of the team and the managers will love you for it ('cause you make them look good).
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By the way, from my experience, after having kids, it's a lot harder for women to cope with long hours than for guys. This seems to be because in most western countries there is still a lot of expectation that women will invest more time in "taking care of the kids" than men.
That said, i work as a contractor and have worked in 8 different positions in 3 different countries. Of all of them, in only 1 case was there no women working as developers in the company (this was in a small software house in Holland), though in most places the proportion of women to men in software development was between 1 to 4 and 1 to 2. Also, women with kids where a lot less likelly to work long hours than men (with or without kids).
You seem to be basing most of your rationale on the idea that a good product makes money.
That simply isn't so: as countless examples show, the most technically advanced/perfect product is nothing without the right business model.
For example, consider the low market penetration of PocketPCs and compare this with the success of the Blackberry (which, technology-wise, is pretty much a parred down PocketPC connecting to proprietary servers).
Good products don't make money if people don't wanna buy it, and sometimes it's the shoddiest product with the better business model that wins *cough* VHS, Betamax *cough*
Many of those "never a day with profit" companies that crashed miserably once the bubble burst were actually founded by technical people, not management school graduates.
The truth is, the business management guys sometimes do have interesting business plans but usually lack the knowledge to understand if they're actually based on something which can be done and how to do it. The techie guys on the other side, often have good technical ideas but lack the knowledge to know if and how those ideas can be turned into something commercially viable.
Same experience here.
;^D
Often enough, half the skill in delivering a good joke is in the visual clues one gives (especially when you're being ironic) and in the written medium (especially short articles) without emoticons, all those visual clues are lost.
For example, it's one thing to say:
- Slackware is clearly the easiest, most user friendly Linux distro.
and another to say
- Slackware is clearly the easiest, most user friendly Linux distro
In the end it all boils down to what objective do you want to achieve and how much time do you have to do it.
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TeX is incredibly powerfull and can do pretty much everything you want to have a perfect document. The downside is that mastering TeX takes a long time and creating any document which is not long enough so as to justify designing a clean, well defined, structure and set of structural elements takes a lot more time with TeX than with (Open) Office.
The thing is, most of us don't have that much time available for documentation in our professional occupations since that is not our core occupation, and just want to finish the damn document so that we can go back to doing the real work.
It's not by chance that TeX is only really popular in academia and with those whose work is to create perfectly formated document (for publishing)
That's pretty much basic human opinion forming and using in action:
- Evaluate past actions and form an opinion on the Actor
- Estimate the possible impact/intentions of the current actions of the Actor with the help of the opinion one has of said Actor
Usually it's more complicated that just forming the opinion from a single action of an Actor:
- Normally we look at multiple action and their consequences.
- We also often form our opinions from the opinions of trusted sources.
- Time past since the actions in question will invalidate the opinion (as per the Democrats and slavery example above).
- Future actions of the Actor or new insights/information on the past actions that formed our opinion can change the opinion.
Opinions are important because we're human: people are limited in that they lack the mental brainpower to (re)evaluate all the information on the actions/events on all the important actors in such a way that one can make timelly decisions on those actions/events. Opinions guide us into interpreting events/actions and making decisions on them when we lack the whole information and/or lack enough time or knowledge to evaluate all the information we have.
[Note: i'll disregard your "everyone with common sense" part as being argumentative and hardly a scientific consensus]
Opinions are of course only an indicator - suitable as a directional pointer but hardly adequate as the only means to make a decision that has wide implications: you might invite or not someone to a party based on your opinion of that person but (should) not take a decision on whether to convict or not somebody to 25 years in jail purelly on opinion.
This is why the legal system does not pass judgement based on opinion and instead takes the long way (and has special powers) to obtain as much information as possible about the actions/events and using large amounts of time and manpower (not to mention people with specialized knowledge) to interpret that information.
Unfortunatly none of us here on
No important actions results from our conclusions and everybody is free to examine and re-interpret them at will so i don't see why they should not be shared and looked at by others even though they weren't arrived at via a full blown "due process".
By now i've lived in 3 countries, had 4 mobiles phones and 5 different providers.
Except for my first mobile phone, i always bought the phones unlocked, free of any contract and at full price.
Never had any problem changing countries/providers and take my phone with me. All i have to do is get a SIM from my new provider (tipically costs about $10 with quite a lot of free minutes) pop it in the phone and it just works.
Even beter, ever since the number portability laws came on, i can even keep my number when i change providers (in the same country, though).
To top it all up, the best deals out there are SIM-only offers, aimed at people like me that bring their own phones.
So what's the big difference to the US/Canada:
Oh yeah!??? What about Nixon's feelings ????
I wonder how they'le deal with the poignant issues surrounding sexuality in WoW, for example naked elf dancing contests in Ironforge ...
Actually above a certain altitude (3000 feet, at least in the UK) planes are not flown on altitude above sea medium level, but instead are flow on Flight Levels (FL). A Flight level is based on using a standard sea level pressure setting of 1013.2 millibars.
;)
Basically you set the sea level pressure in your altimeter to be 1013.2 mb and read the altitude from your altimeter. Then you drop the last 2 digits and get the Flight Level. Thus if with a sea level pressure setting of 1013.2 mb your altimeter reads 12000 feet, this means you are flying on FL 120 (Flight Level 120). In the (quite exceptional) situation where the sea level air pressure in the area you are flying in is actually 1013.2, then altitude = FL * 100
Since above a certain altitude everybody is flying with the 1013.2 setting in their altimeters, even though FL does not give the real altitude, it's works perfectly for keeping vertical separation between planes.
PS: Around really tall mountains use of the lower FLs is not such a good idea
By the way IANACPBILFAPPL (I'm Not A Commercial Pilot But I'm Learning For A Private Pilot License)
Funny that you mention this - I work as a contractor (aka freelancer) and i would probably fit into category 3 if i ever interviewed with you guys. Actually from what i've seen, the best people in this field which remain technical usually stop working as permanent employees and become contractors.
I'll let you in on a secret - one of the biggest causes for this migration into contracting for the best in IT is that, if you're really good and you have a lot of work experience in IT, the vast majority of companies is not willing to pay you what you're worth if you remain technical, though they are perfectly willing to pay that and more if you're either management or a contractor. In other words, if you remain a permanent and want to continue in the technical path, eventually you become too expensive for what companies are willing to pay to techie people.
So yeah, for all your "we're really lacking qualified people" talk, the problem is still that you're not willing to pay enough money for those who have both the natural skills and the experience.
PS: Another great advantage of contracting is freedom and variety (as in, many new challenges). It might very well be that you are willing to pay the $$$ (though i doubt it, i've NEVER been offered as much for a perm position as i do as a contractor), but the work you do is just boring and/or not challenging enough.
As a contractor (aka freelancer) software engineer and analyst i have over the years learned to spot a number of indicators which are usually associated with the kind of groups/companies where software projects tend to be late and/or not deliver what the business needs. Here's a couple of indicators for that kind of place:
- The bigger/more-complex projects have little or no analysis.
- There is neither a formal Requirements Gathering stage nor (in Agile Programming) an easilly available user/user-representative with which to discuss business features.
- Delivery of a project to a client is an unstructured process. In other words, there is no list of standard types of documents and deliverables to deliver which is common across projects.
- Project planning does not have a built-in margin for unforseen problems and sometimes relies from the start in people working extra (unpaid) hours to make the budget.
- Sales dictates the deadlines without consulting (or consulting but then ignoring) the technical side.
- There are no specialized Testers.
- There are no standardized software components, software frameworks, good practices or documentation for use across the company.
- There is a vast number of software languages, software libraries or frameworks of different versions used across the projects done in the company. Similar projects use different languages/libraries/frameworks and/or use different major versions of those. Developers are totally free to choose the languages and libraries they want to use for the projects. Maintenability is not taken into consideration in the choice of languages/libraries which instead are chosen on the basis of "cool sounding", "fun" and "CV enhancing".
- The project manager has little formal or informal power within the company beyond his subordinates (this is harder to spot but a surprisingly good predictor of failure).
There's quite a lot more, but these are some of the more obvious ones and i've seen all of them already more than once.
More in general, what software development environments where late or failed projects are common share is a failure to organize and/or a failure to prepare and/or lack of "soft skill" from project management and/or ignorance of the characteristics of the software development process.
I live in the UK.
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Just the other day there was a documentary on BBC about the way many of the laws and acts passed in the last couple of years by the British parliement are used to curtail free speech.
For example, an old guy (we're talking 70 years old) was arrested under the powers given to the police by the Anti-Terrorism Act because he half-shouted "nonsense" during a speach by some government minister at a Labour Party conference.
Going back to the issue of cameras all over the place here in the UK, it all boils down to this:
- Do you trust that all, or even most, of those that have access to that information are fair and honest?
The same guys which used the Anti-Terrorism Act to arrested a 70 year old man for saying "nonsense" at a government minister's speech, even though those same people, while clamoring for those extended powers to "fight terrorism", promised never to used it except against potential terrorists!!???
Having been born in a country which in the past was under the rule of a fascist dictatorship, i recognize in some of what i hear about the way things are here in the UK, many of the elements of the stories i heard about the way the secret police worked in fascist times and many elements from History books about the rise of dictatorships (the "internal enemy", the "arbitrary arrest powers with no oversight", the "enhanced surveilance powers", the stoking and use of widespread "irrational fear" to get those arrest and surveilance powers, the constant "state of alert")
If we get a "deep economical crash" or an "extraordinarily bloody act of terrorism", all conditions are set for the rise of a "saviour"
#9) If there's a high emphasis when selling the job on soft rewards such as "relaxed work environment", "casual wear", "group outings" then they're probably trying to pay you less than average for the same position and trying to compensate for it by throwing you some cheap bones.
#10) "Opportunities for career growth", the "Potential for significant future increases in income" and in general any promises of future promotions are worth as much as the paper they're written on.
#11) "Flexible working hours" = "We expect you to work more hours per day than we are willing to pay you for"
#12) Any "payment" in things other than cash (for example, a company car) should always be converted into a cash equivalent when evaluating a position. Don't forget to apply an opportunity factor to non-cash offers: with plain ol' cash you to choose what to use that cash for and when to do it, while with non-cash beneficts (such as the above mentioned company car) the choice has been done for you already and often it comes with strings attached. An example: you get a Audi A4 as a company car, to be assigned to you 3 months after you started working for the company, which you cannot sell for 2 years and if you leave the company within those 2 years you loose the car. This is clearly worth a lot less than the equivalent amount in cash since:
- It's pre-chosen as a car of a certain brand (maybe you wanted to use the money for a house intead, or some extra nice vacations, or maybe you wanted a different brand of car, or maybe a cheaper car AND some nice vacations)
- The timing when you receive the car is fixed (maybe you just got a brand new car a month ago)
- You do not immediatly get full ownership of the car (maybe after one year you want to sell it to get a different car, or maybe you want to leave the company because you want to move to a different country/state or maybe because they didn't turn out to be what you wanted).
In the side of IT that deals with software development, practical clothes are not a requirement. In this environment, what guides one's choice of clothes is confort and social rules.
;))
Confort is self-explanatory, as for social rules, beyond the obvious generals social rules (going around naked is frowned upon in most environments) it usually tends to boil down to "statements" ("i am different", "i want to climb in this company", "i'm above concerns such as clothing", "i belong here", "i'm management material") and trying to fit in a group ("the guys with suits are sales and management", "the guys with jumpsuits are warehouse workers", "the guys with jeans are deliveries", "the guys in shorts and sandals are IT"
As a contractor, having worked in all sorts of environments and all sorts of companies (from e-Commerce companies to Finance), i can tell you that i have found just as many people i respect and admire as professionals (and just as many that i find utterly incompetend and/or amateurish) in the "ultra-casual" environments as i have in the "full, conservative colors and cut, suit and tie" environments.
When evaluation a job/position, concentrating on clothing is a great way to loose sight of the things that really matter.
Nowadays, there are actually sites out there rating the quality of CAM releases.
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A need existed and a business model appeared to fill that need.
I bet this is not the kind of "invisible hand of the market" that the industry lobbists have in mind when demanding less regulations
One word:
Cartel
I would say that any mature adult that has frequented any kind of MMORPG is more than keenly aware of the hordes (no WoW pun intended) of emotionally unbalanced, immature, socially irresponsible teenagers running around the place, many of which that, protected under the cover of anonimity, find pleasure and boost their egos by trying to ruin other people's games.
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The anonimity of the Internet removes some of the greatest shackels on action (retribution, public shaming, public shunning) for those which feel empowered and have their egos boosted by harassing others (typically, but not exclusively, the above mentioned immature teenagers).
This has been going on ever since the Internet has been opened to people beyond the confines of academia (probably even before).
Personally i would like adults only servers for most MMORPGs to avoid wasting any of my precious 3h/day of playing because of some griefing kid, but that's a different story