It's still a copyright violation when an individual (thus not a business) downloads music or software for the purpose of evaluation (thus not for profit and with the intent of paying for it later) without the copyright holder's authorization.
Similarly, if a charity downloads images from the net and uses them in a campaign to call people's attention to problem X, it's still a copyright violation.
Copyright legislation still it illegal to copy something without authorization from the copyright holder even if only not-for-profit uses and with the best of intentions.
This is not just a peculiarity of Swedish Copyright laws.
I would reckon that this is probably one of the biggest reasons why so many of us here at/. are against Copyrights and other forms of Intellectual Property: it restricts and punishes common, not for profit uses of things like sounds, images and text.
And then let's not forget the spatial dimensions in addition to the frequency dimension - jamming signals originate from one or more sources at specific locations so this could also be used in eliminating interference from jammers.
I remebers from reading a bit of the GSM spec that mobile phones includes adaptative antenna and algorithms that allow retrieving a usefull signal not just from the direct line of sight transmission (from the mobile tower) but also from multiple reflections with different path lengths. Could not the same techniques be used to, instead of boosting a signal, offset that signal?
Is reading Google's intentions from the Google logo the new Phrenology or would it be more akin to practices of divination such as reading the future from tea-leaves or the entrails of recently slaughtered goats?
I love how Slashdot is dominated by liberal sentiments until it comes to our jobs, then it's 100% anti-immigration, dominated with rhetoric that sounds like theminute men [wikipedia.org]. It's sad that you were modded insightful instead of troll.
If you look harder you will find that Slashdot is dominated by moral liberal sentiments - i.e. against laws that criminalize victimless behaviours, such as drug consumption - but not by economic liberal sentiments. In fact, after the banking crash, posts by true believers in unfettered Capitalism and the Free Market as solutions for all problems are extremely rare.
It's thus not at all inconsistent when you see somebody defending decriminalization for drug consumption in one post and more investment in training and hiring local workers in another.
(PS - There is some logic in stimulating local hiring as means of increasing the share of income that a local economy gets from companies: - Large companies are international: they spend money in many countries and pay dividends to owners all over the world. - Locally hired workers on the other hand are... well...local: they typically spend most of their income in the country they are in. - An increase in profits of a company will thus result in a lesser stimulous to a local economy than hiring more workers locally and/or paying them higher wages.)
As a (very) senior developer and a contractor (so I do lots of interviewing), the single biguest problem I have is when the guy sitting across the table from you is actually less qualified than you.
It can get pretty interesting when they throw you a seemingly trivial coding problem and you have to explain lower level coding choices that look strange to the less trained eye but are the result of learning from past mistakes and taking in account concerns like ease of support, lower cost of maintenability and robustness against misuse when other (more junior) developers change/use that code the future.
Some of the dumbest questions I've got where things like "Explain the benefits of designing for flexibility" (Answer: Don't unless you have clear up-front requirements for flexibility in a certain domain or experience shows you that "this always changes later". Follow the KISS principle, keep the code tidy and straightforward, refactor later if needed: it's cheaper than adding loads of never used "infrastructure" code that just makes the code bigger, harder to follow and costlier to maintain)
Terminally careless, stupid people remove themselves from the gene pool, in the process putting themselves forward for a Darwin Award and this is bad because???
If you make a habit of walking in the middle of a road (either crossing it or walking along it) without due care, you're bound to be run over sooner or later.
I've been using the Internet for a long time, since when it was just an University network and before AOL and in all the docs, READMEs, RFCs and FAQs that I read over the last 28 years, not once was "The right to profit" ever been mentioned as a fundamental principle of the Internet.
Being Portuguese and having lived many years in Holland and now in England I can tell you that there are huge cultural differences between those countries.
An example relevant for this thread: a perfectly normal Dutch directness (for example, if you do a bad job on something they will tell it to your face, in a plain direct way, neither using insulting words nor run-around methaphors ) : - In Holland, it's normal. People just take it in their stride, maybe ask why and try to improve. - In England it's considered rude and even insulting - it make the recepient go defensive. An Englishman might even lash back at you for it, even if he is actually guilty. - In Portugal, if coming from a stranger it might be considered insulting but it just makes people feel bad. If it's from somebody you know and trust, you listen to their complaint.
Thus I'm not at all surprised that a Brit will argue that maybe freedom of speach should stop at the point you insult others. I would be very surprised to hear that argument from a Dutch person and somewhat surprised to hear it from a Portuguese.
It's worse than that: - Most large systems are not designed by people that know how to design large systems
Essentially most large systems where grown organically and are not properly modularized with clean well defined compartments and interfaces.
This results in crazy dependencies across seemingly unrelated parts of the system (as in Part A treats a certain kind of data in a certain way because it "Always come from part B like that", while Part B just passes the data over from Part C, so A depends on C but it's not visible).
The end result of this is that sometimes even miniscule changes in configuration (say, enable empty values in a certain field in a GUI) can result in massive errors downstream where you least expected them.
In such systems, pretty much any change is a risk, be it code, configuration in files, configuration in database or even having a new guy in the department that enters a certain kind of data.
Everyone agrees that developers should never have access to production...Unless they're the developer, in which case it's different.
Developers should not have access to Production and I say this as a developer.
Having a way to check logs in Production, maybe read the databases yes, more than that, no.
Two reasons, one "good" and one bad: - If people have access to Production willy-nilly, sooner or later they will break it. This can even be true for Support people only they're the ones getting calls at 5 AM to fix it, so they soon learn not to do it. - Forcing a proper release procedure avoids creating expectations on non-developers (read managers/clients) that minor changes are fast to do and put in prod. Nothing like a Release Procedure in place to instantly kill any expectations of the "you can do this change in 5 minutes" type and create some space for actually doing UAT testing of even those seemingly innocuous changes that sometimes end up poluting a database with garbage beyond the point of recoverability.
I work in finance and I've seen more than once cases of seemingly innocuous fixes done in Prod that brought down the systems for several hours, pretty much paralising the business and costing millions in lost business. This more often happens is seemingly non-mission-critical systems (where Prod access is more likelly to be open) that turn out to be required for know critical systems to keep on working.
Nah, measuring results which are not absolutes would be too hard.
Nowadays, certainly in the UK, performance is usually measured using easy to measure absolute things like how long do you sit in your chair every day, not by measuring actual results.
Management in the UK is mostly crap (and I say this from experience and by comparisson with other countries where I also worked) and it's not by chance that this country has the lowest productivity in the services sector in all of Europe.
Working in IT in Investment Banking in London (and having worked in both IT and Banking companies previously outside the UK) I can tell you that the level amateurism and the amount of manpower wasted around here are staggering: In my rough estimate we need 3 times as many people then otherwise due to things like improper design for maintenability, lack of any Software Development Process, improper physical work environments and almost zero re-usability.
Most of European countries have more than 2 ellectable parties unlike the US were the only 2 ellectable parties defend the same vested interests but have 2 different public faces to deceive the plebes.
Also average education in Europe is higher (lower and mid-level schools systems are beter than the US).
In addition to that, most European countries have long histories of being under and fighting dictatorships, conquering powers and oppressive monarchies (the US had ONE revolution while your average European country has been throwing out conquerors since before the times of the Roman Empire). While in the US people talk loudly about the need for less government (while government actually concentrates on promoting the interests of a minority) in Europe governments are less prone to promote some minority of people at the cost of the majority (otherwise they would, at the very least be faced with massive strikes and maybe rebellion) - the contrast between the talk of less government in the US and the government that actually has to please the citizens in most of Europe kinda reminds me of the saying from my country that "The dog that barks is not the one that bites": in Europe we "bark" less but "bite" when needed.
Last but not least, in most of Europe there's still a belief in social safety nets (avoiding that people fall too far into poverty) and social fairness (avoiding that those with more resources, like rich individuals and large companies, get more benefits than those with less resources), ideas which in the US would be shouted-away by the brainwashed ignorant masses as communism.
That said, Europe is a large place with many languages and cultures - things can vary quite a bit, for example, between Northern European countries and Mediterranean Countries. Also of late many American cultural and economical practices have been imported, more so to places with a weak history of throwing out oppressors - though the recent recession has 'caused a re-evaluation of the "success" of the American Model.
The US has the highest percentage of it own population incarcerated of any country in the world (at a bit above 100 per 10000).
So either the US has a much higher percentage of criminals that the rest of the world or the US is blantanly breaking the rights of millions of it's citizens (like by incarcerating people for victimless crimes).
If invasion to defend human rights is justified, the US is one of the better candidates for being invaded.
In countries where there are real consumer protection laws (pretty much all developed countries but the US), if you buy a game in a store and it doesn't work in your machine, you can easilly go back and get a refund (in the UK the magic words are "Not fit for purpose" and "Trading standards").
However, it's almost impossible to have your consumer rights respected by an online trader, especially one not based in the same country as you are.
This is why I don't buy games online anymore (unless we're talking about stupendously cheap stuff like those from GoG).
Steam is even worse in this respect since in effect your ability to play the games you buy is tied to their good will (if they "loose" your account with all your games in it, what can you do?)
If what happened to GP had happened to me, I would have gone back to the store and gotten a refund, only loosing a bit of time but not being $40 out of pocket.
For a really old one, there's Nibbles which came with MS-DOS.
It was one of the example programs that came with QBasic. Text based, including shared-screen-shared-keyboard multiplayer. Surprisingly addictive in multiplayer mode, it didn't play correctly in more modern, faster machines (due to an easy to fix bug with the delay calculation code) and was last seen packaged with, I believe, NT 4.0
Plenty of hours wasted on that one during colleage when we should've been doing course work...
While the Acela is capable of 150mph it's actual average speed is only 80 mph - this is about the same speed as an Express Train (normal train, few stops) in Europe.
For a good example of how it should be, check this
All the rest is cars. Public transport is only as efficient as cars of the same type. For example, a diesel car is the same as a diesel train (in real operating scenarios).
Actually the contents of the article beyond the for-shock-value graphic are quite interesting. If you read further down you see that the author recommends to actually use mass-transit where available instead of the car.
The numbers for mass transit efficiency are so low because the average number of passengers transported by a specific type of mass transit across the whole country (not just urban) in the US is very low. This in turn is because even though during some periods buses and trains are full, for most of the time they run empty or almost empty (at least outside urban areas).
A fully loaded bus or train is very energy efficient compared to a car on a per-passenger basis, but there are plenty of areas and plenty of periods where/when those buses and trains run almost empty which lowers the overall average efficiency per-passenger.
However this brings an interesting paradox: - By using mass transit you are actually increasing it's efficiency since it would be running anyway (whether you use it or not) and by adding one more passenger you decrease the energy usage per-passenger (people weight very little compared to the actual vehicle so one more person barelly increases the energy consumed). - By using a car, you only increase the car's energy efficiency per-passenger if you carpool: if you take one more car and travel solo you actually decrease cars' energy efficiency (again, from the article, you see that the average number of people in a car is 1.57)
Not only that, but from the article commuter-rail numbers are still better than car numbers by about 25% and this is for US diesel-powered commuter trains only. If you check the numbers for East Japan Rail (at the bottom) which is much closer to Europe, you see it's twice as energy efficient as using a car.
Even more interesting, if you take the energy efficiency for the TGV (high-speed train in Europe), which is electric and travels with an average passenger load of 80%, from here and convert them into BTU/passenger-mile, you end up with 229 BTU/Passenger-mile which in that article's graphic puts it at the bottom, below the electric scooter/trike and almost 20(!) times more efficient than car travel (it's also way much faster).
The whole article does in fact read as a recommendation for setting up more electric commuter trains in urban environments and to cover long distance with electric powered high-speed trains rather than inneficient diesel trains.
One could make the case that the notion of property for physical things is natural - "I have aquired/received it therefore it's mine". How many times have you heard small kids fight about something and one of them says "It's mine, it's mine".
From the notion of property (aka ownership) in the physical realm to the notion of property rights (aka being entitled to control what is done with one's things and choosing if/when/how to part with them) is a natural evolution: it's simply a mechanism to avoid conflict in a group - any societies where individual-ownership was not coupled with some form of property-rights planted the seeds of their own downfall by weakening themselves due to internal conflict and were destroyed. It helps that physical ownership is usually easilly tracked (it's either something movable in the possession of somebody, locked or something wholy immovable whose ownership status is kept in a centralized place) and thus it's easy to avoid ownership conflicts.
Intellectual property on the other hand is an unnatural construct - it is not natural to refrain oneself of re-telling something one heard in an open context. Stories and jokes are naturally told and retold and yet, intellectual property says that the inventor of the story/joke "owns it" and can decide if somebody else can tell it, no mater how many degrees of separation there are between them: this does not slot in naturally with human social behaviour. Unlike physical ownership, ownership of ideas is incredibly hard to keep track of, both because they are self-reproducing and because there in an unlimited supply of new ones.
Intellectual property does not prevent conflict by moderating natural impulses - instead it creates new conflicts by extending ownership to an size-unlimited space. It does not increase efficiency in human societies (as physical property rights do by avoiding resources being wasted in ownership conflicts), but instead it decreases efficiency by imposing on all a duty to keep track of the ownership of all ideas.
Even for it's stated aims (the promotion of ideas), Intellectual Property has not in fact been proven to work: the percieved "growth in ideas" since the 19th century can just as easilly have come from an increase in numbers for manking (the world population has increase almost 7-fold since 1800), an increase in the spread of ideas due to mass-media (newspapers, radio, TV) and an increase in "keeping-count" of ideas which is a product of Intellectual Property laws (nobody counted "innovations" before patents where created). In fact, during their strongest growth periods most societies openly ignored Intellectual Property while Intellectual Ownership concerns seem to increase in periods of stagnation.
And your point is? Email from these pressure groups are in no way invalid if they are from his constituents. Just because a Tory politician doesn't agree with the stance taken by pressure groups such as 38 degrees, doesn't give him the right to withdraw a valuable communications channel to his constituents. You can be sure that if those emails are in support of the MPs pet project, he would be openly inviting more email correspondence.
Let me put this in perspective by giving you an easier to visualize methaphor: - Imagine that an MP sets up an open session with his constituents, maybe in a local town hall which takes 200 people. - His intention is to get questions from members of the public and answer the as best as he can, maybe picking up some of the cases he hears about and checking int them further. - During the whole session, there is a group of 10 people which came in together and spend the whole time shouting out loud how they want something specific done, drowning everybody else during the whole session and pretty much not letting anybody else be heard.
Those 10 people represent only 5% of everybody in that hall and (due to self-selection, since they gathered and came together on purpose) represent a much smaller proportion of the overall voters in the constituency.
This is basically what some "pressure groups" do, only they do it via e-mail. While they do deserve a voice, they do not deserve to be heard above and over other constituents.
In my example above, if the 10 people disturbing the open session were not forcefully thrown out (probably by the other constituents that also came in to voice their problems), then the MP would simply stop it after a while. If this kept happening, he would never do one of those open sessions again.
That said, in the e-mail case the MP's solution for this should not have been to remove his e-mail address from the site. Instead he should set up a blacklist of abusers of the system (preferably automatic) which would simply send those e-mails to an alternative low priority queue (such as a different e-mail address) which would only be looked at when the normal queue was empty.
If he really wanted to be fair, people would be removed from the blacklist after not abusing the system for a while.
This would neatly turn e-mail spamming into a self-defeating technique if done frequently.
In fact, if you make the maths, buying the phone upfront and getting a cheaper contract is cheaper overall that taking an expensive 2 years contract that includes the phone unless you really plan on using the 500 minutes (or whatever) every month.
Been doing this for 10 years now and couldn't be happier.
I once worked with an Apple fanboy back in the day (when Apple had barelly started their latest run of success with the iPod) and he was the person most pathologically incapable of reciving criticism (of himself or Apple) that I ever met.
He was also a never ending source of entertainment for those of us mean enough to bait him...
A smart lobsterman will not sit idly by but will sell futures on his haul
Not "'smart' lobsterman", more like "'knowledgeable in finance and having the tools and access to buy lobster derivatives' lobsterman".
You see lobstermen are knowledgeable in their area (catching lobster) but rarelly in other complex areas such as commodities derivatives.
Professional traders use the same principles as Car Mechanics - they can sqeeze the customers for more money 'cause said customers don't know much about trading/auto-repairs.
... but will sell futures on his haul (before he leaves0 at $3.75, guaranteeing him that price (up to some quantity) instead of trying to sell on the spot market...
This being a futures contract, your hypotetical lobsterman has just created an exposure to the risk that, if the lobster price goes above what he contracted to sell for and he doesn't bring in the haul specified in the contract or more, he will have to obtain the missing quantity of lobster (at the higher market price) in order to satisfy his end of the contract or pay the difference between contracted price and market price to close that part of the futures contract.
In other words, to maintain his price against a trader rigging the market, the lobterman has increased his downside risk.
I'm also curious on how the lobsterman will obtain the working capital to cover any margin calls as prices move between when he took the contract and when he docked back with his lobster haul.
Well, Google (used to?) hire their people based in scholastic achievement and the ability to solve strange non-real-life problems and which are self-proclaimed idea-masters
(Exactly the kind of people that don't want to "lower themselves to the level of the 'normals'")
Then they promote an internal culture of elitism and "circle jerk" in which "We work at Google because we're so good and we're so good because we work at Google" on what are essentially high-intelect-low-soft-skills people (easy to manipulate, sink easilly into groupthink).
It's thus not surprising that most of Google's applications turn out to be not so great on the usuability front and never really polished to perfection (since their creators do not have the patience for the essential slow plodding effort of making them smooth working and bug free).
I am in fact highy surprised that they have any applications at all which are successfull in a context where technical (so OSes don't count): maybe they mistakenly hired somebody really experienced instead of a bright-eyed-just-graduated-masters-holder?
Funilly enough this ties back to the crisis of news reporting: - There is no more in-depth news reporting in daily news media: the ones that on their own words are at or ahead of the "curve" just parrot events, hear-saying and gossip.
In fact, thinking about it, the main reason I come to Slashdot is for the further in-depth analysis which are the comments.
For example, just look at some of the articles about the Internet filter in Australia: - You'll see comments from ozzies explaining how the current Australian government has to pander to politicians from a specific conservative state to keep support for other laws. - You'll see comments explaining how the state is set-up in Australia (i.e. the dual-chamber system) - You'll see technology comments on the technical viability of such sytems. - You'll be pointed out other similar systems in other countries and past news about those systems.
When was the last time that any mainstream daily news media actually had an article about some political decision in some country of other and actually explained the political background in that country and/or pointed out similar decisions in other countries and subsequent results?
In fact, when was the last time that any mainstream daily news media had an article about basic human rights, liberty and/or privacy?
An this is not just limited to ideological subjects: - Go to articles about medicine and you're likelly to find comments from doctors. - Go to articles about a scientific area and you're likelly to find comments from researchers in that area. - Go to (the early) articles about the oil-spill in the Gulf and you'll find comments from people that work in propection in the oil industry.
For all the dross, baseless opinionating and ad hominem attacks, almost any Slashdot article together with it's comments has more in-depth reporting than almost any "news story" in daily mainstream news media today.
PS: I say "daily" news media because I believe some of the weekly and monthly magazines - you know, the ones behind the curve - do have more in-depth news reporting.
Slashdot Mirror
It's still a copyright violation when an individual (thus not a business) downloads music or software for the purpose of evaluation (thus not for profit and with the intent of paying for it later) without the copyright holder's authorization.
Similarly, if a charity downloads images from the net and uses them in a campaign to call people's attention to problem X, it's still a copyright violation.
Copyright legislation still it illegal to copy something without authorization from the copyright holder even if only not-for-profit uses and with the best of intentions.
This is not just a peculiarity of Swedish Copyright laws.
I would reckon that this is probably one of the biggest reasons why so many of us here at /. are against Copyrights and other forms of Intellectual Property: it restricts and punishes common, not for profit uses of things like sounds, images and text.
And then let's not forget the spatial dimensions in addition to the frequency dimension - jamming signals originate from one or more sources at specific locations so this could also be used in eliminating interference from jammers.
I remebers from reading a bit of the GSM spec that mobile phones includes adaptative antenna and algorithms that allow retrieving a usefull signal not just from the direct line of sight transmission (from the mobile tower) but also from multiple reflections with different path lengths. Could not the same techniques be used to, instead of boosting a signal, offset that signal?
Is reading Google's intentions from the Google logo the new Phrenology or would it be more akin to practices of divination such as reading the future from tea-leaves or the entrails of recently slaughtered goats?
If you look harder you will find that Slashdot is dominated by moral liberal sentiments - i.e. against laws that criminalize victimless behaviours, such as drug consumption - but not by economic liberal sentiments. In fact, after the banking crash, posts by true believers in unfettered Capitalism and the Free Market as solutions for all problems are extremely rare.
It's thus not at all inconsistent when you see somebody defending decriminalization for drug consumption in one post and more investment in training and hiring local workers in another.
(PS - There is some logic in stimulating local hiring as means of increasing the share of income that a local economy gets from companies: ... well ...local: they typically spend most of their income in the country they are in.
- Large companies are international: they spend money in many countries and pay dividends to owners all over the world.
- Locally hired workers on the other hand are
- An increase in profits of a company will thus result in a lesser stimulous to a local economy than hiring more workers locally and/or paying them higher wages.)
As a (very) senior developer and a contractor (so I do lots of interviewing), the single biguest problem I have is when the guy sitting across the table from you is actually less qualified than you.
It can get pretty interesting when they throw you a seemingly trivial coding problem and you have to explain lower level coding choices that look strange to the less trained eye but are the result of learning from past mistakes and taking in account concerns like ease of support, lower cost of maintenability and robustness against misuse when other (more junior) developers change/use that code the future.
Some of the dumbest questions I've got where things like "Explain the benefits of designing for flexibility" (Answer: Don't unless you have clear up-front requirements for flexibility in a certain domain or experience shows you that "this always changes later". Follow the KISS principle, keep the code tidy and straightforward, refactor later if needed: it's cheaper than adding loads of never used "infrastructure" code that just makes the code bigger, harder to follow and costlier to maintain)
Terminally careless, stupid people remove themselves from the gene pool, in the process putting themselves forward for a Darwin Award and this is bad because???
If you make a habit of walking in the middle of a road (either crossing it or walking along it) without due care, you're bound to be run over sooner or later.
I've been using the Internet for a long time, since when it was just an University network and before AOL and in all the docs, READMEs, RFCs and FAQs that I read over the last 28 years, not once was "The right to profit" ever been mentioned as a fundamental principle of the Internet.
Openess and interoperability: yes, profit: no.
There's a lot of Europeans in Europe.
Being Portuguese and having lived many years in Holland and now in England I can tell you that there are huge cultural differences between those countries.
An example relevant for this thread: a perfectly normal Dutch directness (for example, if you do a bad job on something they will tell it to your face, in a plain direct way, neither using insulting words nor run-around methaphors ) :
- In Holland, it's normal. People just take it in their stride, maybe ask why and try to improve.
- In England it's considered rude and even insulting - it make the recepient go defensive. An Englishman might even lash back at you for it, even if he is actually guilty.
- In Portugal, if coming from a stranger it might be considered insulting but it just makes people feel bad. If it's from somebody you know and trust, you listen to their complaint.
Thus I'm not at all surprised that a Brit will argue that maybe freedom of speach should stop at the point you insult others. I would be very surprised to hear that argument from a Dutch person and somewhat surprised to hear it from a Portuguese.
It's worse than that:
- Most large systems are not designed by people that know how to design large systems
Essentially most large systems where grown organically and are not properly modularized with clean well defined compartments and interfaces.
This results in crazy dependencies across seemingly unrelated parts of the system (as in Part A treats a certain kind of data in a certain way because it "Always come from part B like that", while Part B just passes the data over from Part C, so A depends on C but it's not visible).
The end result of this is that sometimes even miniscule changes in configuration (say, enable empty values in a certain field in a GUI) can result in massive errors downstream where you least expected them.
In such systems, pretty much any change is a risk, be it code, configuration in files, configuration in database or even having a new guy in the department that enters a certain kind of data.
Developers should not have access to Production and I say this as a developer.
Having a way to check logs in Production, maybe read the databases yes, more than that, no.
Two reasons, one "good" and one bad:
- If people have access to Production willy-nilly, sooner or later they will break it. This can even be true for Support people only they're the ones getting calls at 5 AM to fix it, so they soon learn not to do it.
- Forcing a proper release procedure avoids creating expectations on non-developers (read managers/clients) that minor changes are fast to do and put in prod. Nothing like a Release Procedure in place to instantly kill any expectations of the "you can do this change in 5 minutes" type and create some space for actually doing UAT testing of even those seemingly innocuous changes that sometimes end up poluting a database with garbage beyond the point of recoverability.
I work in finance and I've seen more than once cases of seemingly innocuous fixes done in Prod that brought down the systems for several hours, pretty much paralising the business and costing millions in lost business. This more often happens is seemingly non-mission-critical systems (where Prod access is more likelly to be open) that turn out to be required for know critical systems to keep on working.
Nah, measuring results which are not absolutes would be too hard.
Nowadays, certainly in the UK, performance is usually measured using easy to measure absolute things like how long do you sit in your chair every day, not by measuring actual results.
Management in the UK is mostly crap (and I say this from experience and by comparisson with other countries where I also worked) and it's not by chance that this country has the lowest productivity in the services sector in all of Europe.
Working in IT in Investment Banking in London (and having worked in both IT and Banking companies previously outside the UK) I can tell you that the level amateurism and the amount of manpower wasted around here are staggering: In my rough estimate we need 3 times as many people then otherwise due to things like improper design for maintenability, lack of any Software Development Process, improper physical work environments and almost zero re-usability.
Most of European countries have more than 2 ellectable parties unlike the US were the only 2 ellectable parties defend the same vested interests but have 2 different public faces to deceive the plebes.
Also average education in Europe is higher (lower and mid-level schools systems are beter than the US).
In addition to that, most European countries have long histories of being under and fighting dictatorships, conquering powers and oppressive monarchies (the US had ONE revolution while your average European country has been throwing out conquerors since before the times of the Roman Empire). While in the US people talk loudly about the need for less government (while government actually concentrates on promoting the interests of a minority) in Europe governments are less prone to promote some minority of people at the cost of the majority (otherwise they would, at the very least be faced with massive strikes and maybe rebellion) - the contrast between the talk of less government in the US and the government that actually has to please the citizens in most of Europe kinda reminds me of the saying from my country that "The dog that barks is not the one that bites": in Europe we "bark" less but "bite" when needed.
Last but not least, in most of Europe there's still a belief in social safety nets (avoiding that people fall too far into poverty) and social fairness (avoiding that those with more resources, like rich individuals and large companies, get more benefits than those with less resources), ideas which in the US would be shouted-away by the brainwashed ignorant masses as communism.
That said, Europe is a large place with many languages and cultures - things can vary quite a bit, for example, between Northern European countries and Mediterranean Countries. Also of late many American cultural and economical practices have been imported, more so to places with a weak history of throwing out oppressors - though the recent recession has 'caused a re-evaluation of the "success" of the American Model.
The US has the highest percentage of it own population incarcerated of any country in the world (at a bit above 100 per 10000).
So either the US has a much higher percentage of criminals that the rest of the world or the US is blantanly breaking the rights of millions of it's citizens (like by incarcerating people for victimless crimes).
If invasion to defend human rights is justified, the US is one of the better candidates for being invaded.
In countries where there are real consumer protection laws (pretty much all developed countries but the US), if you buy a game in a store and it doesn't work in your machine, you can easilly go back and get a refund (in the UK the magic words are "Not fit for purpose" and "Trading standards").
However, it's almost impossible to have your consumer rights respected by an online trader, especially one not based in the same country as you are.
This is why I don't buy games online anymore (unless we're talking about stupendously cheap stuff like those from GoG).
Steam is even worse in this respect since in effect your ability to play the games you buy is tied to their good will (if they "loose" your account with all your games in it, what can you do?)
If what happened to GP had happened to me, I would have gone back to the store and gotten a refund, only loosing a bit of time but not being $40 out of pocket.
For a really old one, there's Nibbles which came with MS-DOS.
It was one of the example programs that came with QBasic. Text based, including shared-screen-shared-keyboard multiplayer. Surprisingly addictive in multiplayer mode, it didn't play correctly in more modern, faster machines (due to an easy to fix bug with the delay calculation code) and was last seen packaged with, I believe, NT 4.0
Plenty of hours wasted on that one during colleage when we should've been doing course work ...
While the Acela is capable of 150mph it's actual average speed is only 80 mph - this is about the same speed as an Express Train (normal train, few stops) in Europe.
For a good example of how it should be, check this
Actually the contents of the article beyond the for-shock-value graphic are quite interesting. If you read further down you see that the author recommends to actually use mass-transit where available instead of the car.
The numbers for mass transit efficiency are so low because the average number of passengers transported by a specific type of mass transit across the whole country (not just urban) in the US is very low. This in turn is because even though during some periods buses and trains are full, for most of the time they run empty or almost empty (at least outside urban areas).
A fully loaded bus or train is very energy efficient compared to a car on a per-passenger basis, but there are plenty of areas and plenty of periods where/when those buses and trains run almost empty which lowers the overall average efficiency per-passenger.
However this brings an interesting paradox:
- By using mass transit you are actually increasing it's efficiency since it would be running anyway (whether you use it or not) and by adding one more passenger you decrease the energy usage per-passenger (people weight very little compared to the actual vehicle so one more person barelly increases the energy consumed).
- By using a car, you only increase the car's energy efficiency per-passenger if you carpool: if you take one more car and travel solo you actually decrease cars' energy efficiency (again, from the article, you see that the average number of people in a car is 1.57)
Not only that, but from the article commuter-rail numbers are still better than car numbers by about 25% and this is for US diesel-powered commuter trains only. If you check the numbers for East Japan Rail (at the bottom) which is much closer to Europe, you see it's twice as energy efficient as using a car.
Even more interesting, if you take the energy efficiency for the TGV (high-speed train in Europe), which is electric and travels with an average passenger load of 80%, from here and convert them into BTU/passenger-mile, you end up with 229 BTU/Passenger-mile which in that article's graphic puts it at the bottom, below the electric scooter/trike and almost 20(!) times more efficient than car travel (it's also way much faster).
The whole article does in fact read as a recommendation for setting up more electric commuter trains in urban environments and to cover long distance with electric powered high-speed trains rather than inneficient diesel trains.
One could make the case that the notion of property for physical things is natural - "I have aquired/received it therefore it's mine". How many times have you heard small kids fight about something and one of them says "It's mine, it's mine".
From the notion of property (aka ownership) in the physical realm to the notion of property rights (aka being entitled to control what is done with one's things and choosing if/when/how to part with them) is a natural evolution: it's simply a mechanism to avoid conflict in a group - any societies where individual-ownership was not coupled with some form of property-rights planted the seeds of their own downfall by weakening themselves due to internal conflict and were destroyed. It helps that physical ownership is usually easilly tracked (it's either something movable in the possession of somebody, locked or something wholy immovable whose ownership status is kept in a centralized place) and thus it's easy to avoid ownership conflicts.
Intellectual property on the other hand is an unnatural construct - it is not natural to refrain oneself of re-telling something one heard in an open context. Stories and jokes are naturally told and retold and yet, intellectual property says that the inventor of the story/joke "owns it" and can decide if somebody else can tell it, no mater how many degrees of separation there are between them: this does not slot in naturally with human social behaviour. Unlike physical ownership, ownership of ideas is incredibly hard to keep track of, both because they are self-reproducing and because there in an unlimited supply of new ones.
Intellectual property does not prevent conflict by moderating natural impulses - instead it creates new conflicts by extending ownership to an size-unlimited space. It does not increase efficiency in human societies (as physical property rights do by avoiding resources being wasted in ownership conflicts), but instead it decreases efficiency by imposing on all a duty to keep track of the ownership of all ideas.
Even for it's stated aims (the promotion of ideas), Intellectual Property has not in fact been proven to work: the percieved "growth in ideas" since the 19th century can just as easilly have come from an increase in numbers for manking (the world population has increase almost 7-fold since 1800), an increase in the spread of ideas due to mass-media (newspapers, radio, TV) and an increase in "keeping-count" of ideas which is a product of Intellectual Property laws (nobody counted "innovations" before patents where created). In fact, during their strongest growth periods most societies openly ignored Intellectual Property while Intellectual Ownership concerns seem to increase in periods of stagnation.
Let me put this in perspective by giving you an easier to visualize methaphor:
- Imagine that an MP sets up an open session with his constituents, maybe in a local town hall which takes 200 people.
- His intention is to get questions from members of the public and answer the as best as he can, maybe picking up some of the cases he hears about and checking int them further.
- During the whole session, there is a group of 10 people which came in together and spend the whole time shouting out loud how they want something specific done, drowning everybody else during the whole session and pretty much not letting anybody else be heard.
Those 10 people represent only 5% of everybody in that hall and (due to self-selection, since they gathered and came together on purpose) represent a much smaller proportion of the overall voters in the constituency.
This is basically what some "pressure groups" do, only they do it via e-mail. While they do deserve a voice, they do not deserve to be heard above and over other constituents.
In my example above, if the 10 people disturbing the open session were not forcefully thrown out (probably by the other constituents that also came in to voice their problems), then the MP would simply stop it after a while. If this kept happening, he would never do one of those open sessions again.
That said, in the e-mail case the MP's solution for this should not have been to remove his e-mail address from the site. Instead he should set up a blacklist of abusers of the system (preferably automatic) which would simply send those e-mails to an alternative low priority queue (such as a different e-mail address) which would only be looked at when the normal queue was empty.
If he really wanted to be fair, people would be removed from the blacklist after not abusing the system for a while.
This would neatly turn e-mail spamming into a self-defeating technique if done frequently.
Here's a handy solution:
- Buy an unlocked phone.
In fact, if you make the maths, buying the phone upfront and getting a cheaper contract is cheaper overall that taking an expensive 2 years contract that includes the phone unless you really plan on using the 500 minutes (or whatever) every month.
Been doing this for 10 years now and couldn't be happier.
I once worked with an Apple fanboy back in the day (when Apple had barelly started their latest run of success with the iPod) and he was the person most pathologically incapable of reciving criticism (of himself or Apple) that I ever met.
He was also a never ending source of entertainment for those of us mean enough to bait him ...
Not "'smart' lobsterman", more like "'knowledgeable in finance and having the tools and access to buy lobster derivatives' lobsterman".
You see lobstermen are knowledgeable in their area (catching lobster) but rarelly in other complex areas such as commodities derivatives.
Professional traders use the same principles as Car Mechanics - they can sqeeze the customers for more money 'cause said customers don't know much about trading/auto-repairs.
This being a futures contract, your hypotetical lobsterman has just created an exposure to the risk that, if the lobster price goes above what he contracted to sell for and he doesn't bring in the haul specified in the contract or more, he will have to obtain the missing quantity of lobster (at the higher market price) in order to satisfy his end of the contract or pay the difference between contracted price and market price to close that part of the futures contract.
In other words, to maintain his price against a trader rigging the market, the lobterman has increased his downside risk.
I'm also curious on how the lobsterman will obtain the working capital to cover any margin calls as prices move between when he took the contract and when he docked back with his lobster haul.
Guard dog sellers publish "survey" that says most chickens think that "our chicken-coop should have more of 'our' foxes".
Well, Google (used to?) hire their people based in scholastic achievement and the ability to solve strange non-real-life problems and which are self-proclaimed idea-masters
(Exactly the kind of people that don't want to "lower themselves to the level of the 'normals'")
Then they promote an internal culture of elitism and "circle jerk" in which "We work at Google because we're so good and we're so good because we work at Google" on what are essentially high-intelect-low-soft-skills people (easy to manipulate, sink easilly into groupthink).
It's thus not surprising that most of Google's applications turn out to be not so great on the usuability front and never really polished to perfection (since their creators do not have the patience for the essential slow plodding effort of making them smooth working and bug free).
I am in fact highy surprised that they have any applications at all which are successfull in a context where technical (so OSes don't count): maybe they mistakenly hired somebody really experienced instead of a bright-eyed-just-graduated-masters-holder?
Funilly enough this ties back to the crisis of news reporting:
- There is no more in-depth news reporting in daily news media: the ones that on their own words are at or ahead of the "curve" just parrot events, hear-saying and gossip.
In fact, thinking about it, the main reason I come to Slashdot is for the further in-depth analysis which are the comments.
For example, just look at some of the articles about the Internet filter in Australia:
- You'll see comments from ozzies explaining how the current Australian government has to pander to politicians from a specific conservative state to keep support for other laws.
- You'll see comments explaining how the state is set-up in Australia (i.e. the dual-chamber system)
- You'll see technology comments on the technical viability of such sytems.
- You'll be pointed out other similar systems in other countries and past news about those systems.
When was the last time that any mainstream daily news media actually had an article about some political decision in some country of other and actually explained the political background in that country and/or pointed out similar decisions in other countries and subsequent results?
In fact, when was the last time that any mainstream daily news media had an article about basic human rights, liberty and/or privacy?
An this is not just limited to ideological subjects:
- Go to articles about medicine and you're likelly to find comments from doctors.
- Go to articles about a scientific area and you're likelly to find comments from researchers in that area.
- Go to (the early) articles about the oil-spill in the Gulf and you'll find comments from people that work in propection in the oil industry.
For all the dross, baseless opinionating and ad hominem attacks, almost any Slashdot article together with it's comments has more in-depth reporting than almost any "news story" in daily mainstream news media today.
PS: I say "daily" news media because I believe some of the weekly and monthly magazines - you know, the ones behind the curve - do have more in-depth news reporting.