I am always happy to write-up fine-print boilerplate that tells the customer exactly how they are responsible and all warranties are null and void if they don't run my software exactly as I intended and tested it.
The field of software ethics is STREWN with glaring examples of developer negligence (which almost always arises from management/planning/budgetary negligence), resulting in loss-of-life. Best example I can think of was the radiation machines that over-dosed patients. Glaring code-error was the result of insufficient testing. Not even operator error, or poor UI design, or an "oops, I didn't even think of that" kind of thing. Some spreadsheet jockey wanted his bonus, and wanted to deliver on a schedule, and didn't budget enough time for proper testing. End of story. Of course the company was sued and held liable and paid out huge sums to injured parties. There are tons of other situations that aren't even as straightforward though. And for those situations, there's always a PICNC. Problem Inbetween Chair-n Computer.
. . . I just hope that Elon Musk is prepared for WHEN, (not if) a human dies on one of his vehicles. He's never been really good at public relations. . .
The source of that problem, really, is the ATK/Thiokol SRB boosters. The source of THAT problem was that these external strap-on boosters were congressionally-mandated components. (also-known-as. . . . PORK). In fact, the replacement system, Ares, was mandated, also, to use ATK boosters. It was designed to use the 5-segment boosters that ATK PROMISED to deliver in 1979, and never did.
The SRB's burn unevenly, causing immense vibrations, which shook-loose the external tank insulation. (among many other unnecessary problems). The insulation caused much of the tile damage. This was responsible for the loss of Columbia.
The loss of Challenger, of course, was due to a faulty seal on the side of a Thiokol booster.
Solid-fuel rockets in manned spaceflight is a ridiculous absurdity, and while I mourn the loss of NASA's heavy-lift capability, I think that it HAD to happen this way. Because we had politicians designing rockets, not rocket-scientists.
The shuttle was a GREAT idea that was absolutely ruined on capitol-hill. I am amazed that it ever flew.
That said: ATK/Thiokol makes GREAT ballistic missiles. Senators just need to stay out of the rocket-design business. Write the check and stay the fuck out of it.
This is a just universe. And it will follow that up with a serious punching in the afterlife. Since scripture is literally a graven image, scriptural literalism is literally idolatry. So those folks are gonna burn in hell buh bye.
Why does everything have to have a big IPO to be considered a "success"?
I understand that private corporations are "bad and evil" from a governance perspective. (not that having public stock changes governance. That often makes the moral-hazard situation WORSE - - lots of money, and NO real moral hazard).
The benchmark mythology of the "successful innovative dotcom" arose out of the late 1990's; and the accompanying horrid deregulation of the stock-market. At the time, I watched co-workers as they OBSESSIVELY monitored stock prices on a continuous basis, at their desktops. They ignored analysts on news shows, and in articles, who talked about "traditional P-E ratios" - and instead, believed in what they wanted to believe: That this was a "new economy", and that the dotcoms were DIFFERENT, and that the old rules no longer applied. No seriously. The pundits started saying this, as P-E ratios shot past 20, to 100, and higher, and prices kept going up and up, and people started talking about retiring on UN-OFFERED OPTIONS, in their mid-20's.
This bubble, and accompanying IPO boom; we'd like to imagine it was because the internet was awesome (well, it WAS!) and that computer geniuses are awesome (we ARE!) and it was the time of the revenge of the NERDS dammit! (well, no, not really . . . ) this was really all a big pump-and-dump scam, designed to remove excess wealth from the middle-class.
You go back to your major index graphs. DJIA, NASDAQ, S&P, and scope them out from 1996 to present day. If you look at stocks through the lens of traditional P-E ratios, through the recent summer-of-2011 crash, they are FINALLY getting back in-line to where they *should* have been. The bubble kept them over-inflated for about 15 years. There were some exceptions. Apple. Google. Microsoft. This was *hype* that was robbed from much older, larger companies that have been sucked dry. DEC, HP, SUN, IBM, etc.
Facebook does not need to have a "big IPO" to be successful.
That was the "big-lie" of the Enron age. It allowed a few very wealthy investors to cash in. It allowed some of the best innovators to cash in. Some of the others, who weren't already independently wealthy, from the anecdotes I've heard - they diversified and sheltered . . . and tried to dodge the crash in 2000-2002. But most of them have lost most of the huge IPO fortunes they made in the late 1990's.
The gig was really "up" when Enron crashed - - - but there were still plentiful suckers out there for the IPO market. Why not - there's one born every minute. The money hasn't dried up, because the FED keeps printing more and more. They spewed it out through the home-mortgage/bankruptcy industry, right up through about 2005-2008, when the change in bankruptcy laws and mark-to-market rules began to force the market back into some semblance of sanity. The result? An economic armageddon, and a several-year adjustment in pricing to reflect the actual reality that is being forced in the credit, commodities, and securities markets by the new rules. There is still more adjustment to come, of course. Watch for a gold-crash, real-soon now.
So - whether Gropeon, or Faceplant have an IPO really has FUCK-ALL to do with whether they have successful business models. We can't just magically create money and hand it out to everyone - because it will create bubbles, (or "managed inflation"). And we can't then, just funnel all this newly created money to a few individuals, because that creates class inequality, and completely fucks up our political system (as we're watching happen over the past 3 years) - which has a serious potential for violent revolution. Which is not a prosperity-creating proposition, for anyone, in a civilization that has nuclear weapons.
We seem to have solved the problem on the regulatory, and fiscal policy side. And, I think that the business/industrial side of things has got this figured out. Zuckerman has created a nice prospect, and built it up, and no, it's not perfect, but it sure as
For the most part, I think a large proportion of college classes have already been "commoditized" by Universities, by assigning adjunct professors, teaching at off-campus locations or 1000+ student lecture-hall settings, etc.
In these cases - these types of courses should very well, absolutely be taught on line.
Universities are trying to provide some kind of perceived "value" for the CONSIDERABLE dollars that students pay.
The value is: 1.- the ability to put "I went to this school, and completed studies successfully" at the bottom of one's CV/resume - - - which leads to (presumably, hopefully) a secure, and productive ability to earn an income. 2. - the social, professional, and business contacts with classmates, which one carries forward into their future life. 3.- the "experience" of being able to live life in an academic community, unfettered with "real life" concerns. Party till you puke, be true to your school, root for your team, etc. etc.
Live on-campus, and you can get all 3, but you're perhaps "wasting" a lot of your time and money on some of the core required classes that can just as effectively (and much more bang-for-the-buck) be taught on-line.
However, if you take a completely on-line curriculum, you will miss out on #2 and #3.
I don't think (my personal opinion) that #3 is really all that important. Just an extension of the WORST parts of High School? Over Rated. And #2 can be of limited value for some people, anyway. But say you go to a really reputable school, and take a class from a well-known teacher on-line - that teacher could open doors for you, answer questions, if you see them face-to-face, in a context of a 4-year specialty program, but in the context of an on-line program, where the automation tools allow that teacher to teach perhaps 100 times the students? There will be no personal, lasting, relationship. That student could be the next John Nash, but if he doesn't get that rapport with the teacher, and maybe have a game of chess one afternoon, or talk about a book or an idea for a project - then the online class isn't going to provide that student with that opportunity: WORST OF ALL: all of society is deprived of the creative spark that was to otherwise have occurred from the interaction of two creative geniuses - which was turned into a nearly anonymous membership on several class rosters, never meeting face-to-face, and never really connecting on a personal level.
So; in conclusion: Some classes, are too hands-on for online schools. (I think, your science classes that require labwork, OBVIOUSLY, and your studio art classes too, etc.) Some classes, where students are getting into a specialty field of study, should not be taught on line, either.
But I *do* think that probably 70-80% of what is taught at Universities can and should be done on line, if only to make the experience more affordable and accessible to a wider audience, and to intensify the experience for those classes where the students must attend in-person.
I think the public cares enough. They start freaking WARS over this stuff. We have fought wars that have killed millions, and bankrupted our civilization. They kill over things like, the legitimacy of the "King James Version" being the only true form of the bible. Had they the sense to compare its OT sections to the DSS; maybe this argument can be dismissed, and the KJV fuckers can shut the hell up forever.
Giving out only PART of the text "for the benefit of the scholars" ???
I don't "get" that. How can a scholar study a single passage out of the context of the greater whole?
IMNSHO: Information wants to be free. Anyone who tells you any different is trying to sell you something.
This was a bizarre, one-off niche-case where these workers were just standing in the way of progress. With the kind of talent and experience and connections it took to GET that education specialty in the first place, there is ZERO doubt in my mind that most of these individuals are going to find gainful employment elsewhere: maybe NOT at $400/hr.
There are millions of unemployed in this country - perhaps tens of thousands, even maybe hundreds of thousands, of educated, skilled, engineers who are in the $20-$80/hr range. They were standing in the way of progress too. Most of them fled to other fields. Teaching. Real-estate sales. IT. Other small-business. These people weren't really even replaced by "AI". They were made redundant by industry consolidation, and corrupt trade policy and labor practices.
I would be far more likely to feel sad for "my own kind", than for these elitist bourgeois "lawyers' assistants".
If we're to use the car-analogy, I could say that I've done everything from vacuum crumbs out of back-seats, to wax jobs, to oil changes, to valve-jobs, to write ECU code for custom tunes, to design fuel-injector systems for army jeeps.
Some of what we do is routine, and boring. (most of it is) - Some is exciting, and stretches our skills beyond where we thought we'd ever go. None of it is what we thought we'd be doing when we were writing our first "Hello World" in school.
Almost all of it defies categorization. And that's how it really should be. Because as soon as you let them put you in a pigeonhole, that's a column on a spreadsheet that they can zero out when the budget gets tough next quarter.
I would say that our #1 technology need (humanity) - is to find a way to convince other humans that civilization (a social contract) is necessary; OR - to find a way to let those who decide to opt out, opt out without fucking up the world for the rest of us.
I especially like TrackMeNot; because it counter-spams the trackers. It submits fake search traffic back to the search engines, so they think I'm constantly submitting all these random searches on all kinds of crap. Add to this: I habitually browse from 4 different profiles, depending on whether I'm doing "professional", "personal/social", "hobby", or "research/school" (I have my own rationale for how I break those down) browsing. I've even used a fifth profile for "personal/family" at times. Different variation of my name, birthday, address, and other personal information.
I've always wanted to write an add-on that just randomly browses a bunch of sites, like trackmenot does for searches. Just to piss-off the cookie trackers. But I don't want to peg my traffic too much. Feed them SO much bogus info, that the supposed "good" info they have doesn't do them any good. Keep the signal-to-noise ratio LOW.
If Congress had let rocket scientists design the shuttle, instead of lobbyists, not only would NASA have achieved the design goals, but it would have been a safer system, and we would have been able to afford to invest on new technology and follow-on systems.
ATK(Morton-Thiokol)/Lockheed/Boeing, and their congressional Pork-Piggie enablers killed the goose that laid the golden egg. And as a result, yes, NASA looks embarrassing. But they can hardly help the design constraints that were forced upon them by IGNORANT LEGISLATIVE FIAT. And Neil Armstrong should know better, for fuck's sake~!
The other interesting political points; are about how dickheads like Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, and Ahmadinijad, use the development of nuclear power - (oh, and I'm sure that the US did this back in the day) as some kind of technical PISSING CONTEST, to bully other regional (or global powers) . . . oh, look at our marvelous industrial power and technology. Suck our industrial, nuclear cocks, bitches! Don't fuck with us, we can make BOMBS now!
And it's nothing but self-serving arrogant posturing of politicians, so they can feel secure about their diminutive stature when they're at the negotiating table with their enemies. . . (etc).
. . . and the result, is putting their own people at dire risk. Because they never gave a flying fuck about clean, cheap, safe power. They wanted the big phallic symbol to wave around the conference table.
Slashdot Mirror
All I have to say, in reply,, to my fellow citizens, is: "Keep shopping at Wal Mart. Suckers."
I am always happy to write-up fine-print boilerplate that tells the customer exactly how they are responsible and all warranties are null and void if they don't run my software exactly as I intended and tested it.
The field of software ethics is STREWN with glaring examples of developer negligence (which almost always arises from management/planning/budgetary negligence), resulting in loss-of-life. Best example I can think of was the radiation machines that over-dosed patients. Glaring code-error was the result of insufficient testing. Not even operator error, or poor UI design, or an "oops, I didn't even think of that" kind of thing. Some spreadsheet jockey wanted his bonus, and wanted to deliver on a schedule, and didn't budget enough time for proper testing. End of story. Of course the company was sued and held liable and paid out huge sums to injured parties. There are tons of other situations that aren't even as straightforward though. And for those situations, there's always a PICNC. Problem Inbetween Chair-n Computer.
. . . I just hope that Elon Musk is prepared for WHEN, (not if) a human dies on one of his vehicles. He's never been really good at public relations. . .
"half the tiles" is an exaggeration.
The source of that problem, really, is the ATK/Thiokol SRB boosters.
The source of THAT problem was that these external strap-on boosters were congressionally-mandated components. (also-known-as. . . . PORK). In fact, the replacement system, Ares, was mandated, also, to use ATK boosters. It was designed to use the 5-segment boosters that ATK PROMISED to deliver in 1979, and never did.
The SRB's burn unevenly, causing immense vibrations, which shook-loose the external tank insulation. (among many other unnecessary problems). The insulation caused much of the tile damage. This was responsible for the loss of Columbia.
The loss of Challenger, of course, was due to a faulty seal on the side of a Thiokol booster.
Solid-fuel rockets in manned spaceflight is a ridiculous absurdity, and while I mourn the loss of NASA's heavy-lift capability, I think that it HAD to happen this way. Because we had politicians designing rockets, not rocket-scientists.
The shuttle was a GREAT idea that was absolutely ruined on capitol-hill. I am amazed that it ever flew.
That said: ATK/Thiokol makes GREAT ballistic missiles. Senators just need to stay out of the rocket-design business. Write the check and stay the fuck out of it.
This is a just universe. And it will follow that up with a serious punching in the afterlife.
Since scripture is literally a graven image, scriptural literalism is literally idolatry.
So those folks are gonna burn in hell buh bye.
I'm supposed to not be a dick about the things I don't like.
No. They have to be in cyberspace. Leave that to the Anonymous folks.
Why does everything have to have a big IPO to be considered a "success"?
I understand that private corporations are "bad and evil" from a governance perspective. (not that having public stock changes governance. That often makes the moral-hazard situation WORSE - - lots of money, and NO real moral hazard).
The benchmark mythology of the "successful innovative dotcom" arose out of the late 1990's; and the accompanying horrid deregulation of the stock-market. At the time, I watched co-workers as they OBSESSIVELY monitored stock prices on a continuous basis, at their desktops. They ignored analysts on news shows, and in articles, who talked about "traditional P-E ratios" - and instead, believed in what they wanted to believe: That this was a "new economy", and that the dotcoms were DIFFERENT, and that the old rules no longer applied. No seriously. The pundits started saying this, as P-E ratios shot past 20, to 100, and higher, and prices kept going up and up, and people started talking about retiring on UN-OFFERED OPTIONS, in their mid-20's.
This bubble, and accompanying IPO boom; we'd like to imagine it was because the internet was awesome (well, it WAS!) and that computer geniuses are awesome (we ARE!) and it was the time of the revenge of the NERDS dammit! (well, no, not really . . . ) this was really all a big pump-and-dump scam, designed to remove excess wealth from the middle-class.
You go back to your major index graphs. DJIA, NASDAQ, S&P, and scope them out from 1996 to present day. If you look at stocks through the lens of traditional P-E ratios, through the recent summer-of-2011 crash, they are FINALLY getting back in-line to where they *should* have been. The bubble kept them over-inflated for about 15 years. There were some exceptions. Apple. Google. Microsoft. This was *hype* that was robbed from much older, larger companies that have been sucked dry. DEC, HP, SUN, IBM, etc.
Facebook does not need to have a "big IPO" to be successful.
That was the "big-lie" of the Enron age. It allowed a few very wealthy investors to cash in. It allowed some of the best innovators to cash in. Some of the others, who weren't already independently wealthy, from the anecdotes I've heard - they diversified and sheltered . . . and tried to dodge the crash in 2000-2002. But most of them have lost most of the huge IPO fortunes they made in the late 1990's.
The gig was really "up" when Enron crashed - - - but there were still plentiful suckers out there for the IPO market. Why not - there's one born every minute. The money hasn't dried up, because the FED keeps printing more and more. They spewed it out through the home-mortgage/bankruptcy industry, right up through about 2005-2008, when the change in bankruptcy laws and mark-to-market rules began to force the market back into some semblance of sanity. The result? An economic armageddon, and a several-year adjustment in pricing to reflect the actual reality that is being forced in the credit, commodities, and securities markets by the new rules. There is still more adjustment to come, of course. Watch for a gold-crash, real-soon now.
So - whether Gropeon, or Faceplant have an IPO really has FUCK-ALL to do with whether they have successful business models. We can't just magically create money and hand it out to everyone - because it will create bubbles, (or "managed inflation"). And we can't then, just funnel all this newly created money to a few individuals, because that creates class inequality, and completely fucks up our political system (as we're watching happen over the past 3 years) - which has a serious potential for violent revolution. Which is not a prosperity-creating proposition, for anyone, in a civilization that has nuclear weapons.
We seem to have solved the problem on the regulatory, and fiscal policy side. And, I think that the business/industrial side of things has got this figured out. Zuckerman has created a nice prospect, and built it up, and no, it's not perfect, but it sure as
NCLB was nothing more but a complicated union-busting scam.
No matter how you feel about unions. . . it was not about the children.
For the most part, I think a large proportion of college classes have already been "commoditized" by Universities, by assigning adjunct professors, teaching at off-campus locations or 1000+ student lecture-hall settings, etc.
In these cases - these types of courses should very well, absolutely be taught on line.
Universities are trying to provide some kind of perceived "value" for the CONSIDERABLE dollars that students pay.
The value is:
1.- the ability to put "I went to this school, and completed studies successfully" at the bottom of one's CV/resume - - - which leads to (presumably, hopefully) a secure, and productive ability to earn an income.
2. - the social, professional, and business contacts with classmates, which one carries forward into their future life.
3.- the "experience" of being able to live life in an academic community, unfettered with "real life" concerns. Party till you puke, be true to your school, root for your team, etc. etc.
Live on-campus, and you can get all 3, but you're perhaps "wasting" a lot of your time and money on some of the core required classes that can just as effectively (and much more bang-for-the-buck) be taught on-line.
However, if you take a completely on-line curriculum, you will miss out on #2 and #3.
I don't think (my personal opinion) that #3 is really all that important. Just an extension of the WORST parts of High School? Over Rated. And #2 can be of limited value for some people, anyway. But say you go to a really reputable school, and take a class from a well-known teacher on-line - that teacher could open doors for you, answer questions, if you see them face-to-face, in a context of a 4-year specialty program, but in the context of an on-line program, where the automation tools allow that teacher to teach perhaps 100 times the students? There will be no personal, lasting, relationship. That student could be the next John Nash, but if he doesn't get that rapport with the teacher, and maybe have a game of chess one afternoon, or talk about a book or an idea for a project - then the online class isn't going to provide that student with that opportunity: WORST OF ALL: all of society is deprived of the creative spark that was to otherwise have occurred from the interaction of two creative geniuses - which was turned into a nearly anonymous membership on several class rosters, never meeting face-to-face, and never really connecting on a personal level.
So; in conclusion:
Some classes, are too hands-on for online schools. (I think, your science classes that require labwork, OBVIOUSLY, and your studio art classes too, etc.)
Some classes, where students are getting into a specialty field of study, should not be taught on line, either.
But I *do* think that probably 70-80% of what is taught at Universities can and should be done on line, if only to make the experience more affordable and accessible to a wider audience, and to intensify the experience for those classes where the students must attend in-person.
I think the public cares enough. They start freaking WARS over this stuff. We have fought wars that have killed millions, and bankrupted our civilization. They kill over things like, the legitimacy of the "King James Version" being the only true form of the bible. Had they the sense to compare its OT sections to the DSS; maybe this argument can be dismissed, and the KJV fuckers can shut the hell up forever.
Giving out only PART of the text "for the benefit of the scholars" ???
I don't "get" that. How can a scholar study a single passage out of the context of the greater whole?
IMNSHO: Information wants to be free.
Anyone who tells you any different is trying to sell you something.
That's going to be a while. Life of the author + 90 years is a very long time in this case.
FoxNews has not provided a whole heck of a lot of coverage of Green Party candidates for 2012. Or, for that matter, ever.
I wonder if there could be any parallel?
This was a bizarre, one-off niche-case where these workers were just standing in the way of progress. With the kind of talent and experience and connections it took to GET that education specialty in the first place, there is ZERO doubt in my mind that most of these individuals are going to find gainful employment elsewhere: maybe NOT at $400/hr.
There are millions of unemployed in this country - perhaps tens of thousands, even maybe hundreds of thousands, of educated, skilled, engineers who are in the $20-$80/hr range. They were standing in the way of progress too. Most of them fled to other fields. Teaching. Real-estate sales. IT. Other small-business. These people weren't really even replaced by "AI". They were made redundant by industry consolidation, and corrupt trade policy and labor practices.
I would be far more likely to feel sad for "my own kind", than for these elitist bourgeois "lawyers' assistants".
When human work becomes obsolete, and unemployment crosses some threshold, there will be widespread revolts.
Well then, thank goodness we've already invented the machine-gun.
If we're to use the car-analogy, I could say that I've done everything from vacuum crumbs out of back-seats, to wax jobs, to oil changes, to valve-jobs, to write ECU code for custom tunes, to design fuel-injector systems for army jeeps.
Some of what we do is routine, and boring. (most of it is) - Some is exciting, and stretches our skills beyond where we thought we'd ever go. None of it is what we thought we'd be doing when we were writing our first "Hello World" in school.
Almost all of it defies categorization. And that's how it really should be. Because as soon as you let them put you in a pigeonhole, that's a column on a spreadsheet that they can zero out when the budget gets tough next quarter.
Abstinence: The "I told you so" cure.
I would say that our #1 technology need (humanity) - is to find a way to convince other humans that civilization (a social contract) is necessary; OR - to find a way to let those who decide to opt out, opt out without fucking up the world for the rest of us.
Nope. Easiest is Cygwin.
I especially like TrackMeNot; because it counter-spams the trackers. It submits fake search traffic back to the search engines, so they think I'm constantly submitting all these random searches on all kinds of crap. Add to this: I habitually browse from 4 different profiles, depending on whether I'm doing "professional", "personal/social", "hobby", or "research/school" (I have my own rationale for how I break those down) browsing. I've even used a fifth profile for "personal/family" at times. Different variation of my name, birthday, address, and other personal information.
I've always wanted to write an add-on that just randomly browses a bunch of sites, like trackmenot does for searches. Just to piss-off the cookie trackers. But I don't want to peg my traffic too much. Feed them SO much bogus info, that the supposed "good" info they have doesn't do them any good. Keep the signal-to-noise ratio LOW.
If Congress had let rocket scientists design the shuttle, instead of lobbyists, not only would NASA have achieved the design goals, but it would have been a safer system, and we would have been able to afford to invest on new technology and follow-on systems.
ATK(Morton-Thiokol)/Lockheed/Boeing, and their congressional Pork-Piggie enablers killed the goose that laid the golden egg. And as a result, yes, NASA looks embarrassing. But they can hardly help the design constraints that were forced upon them by IGNORANT LEGISLATIVE FIAT. And Neil Armstrong should know better, for fuck's sake~!
The other interesting political points; are about how dickheads like Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, and Ahmadinijad, use the development of nuclear power - (oh, and I'm sure that the US did this back in the day) as some kind of technical PISSING CONTEST, to bully other regional (or global powers) . . . oh, look at our marvelous industrial power and technology. Suck our industrial, nuclear cocks, bitches! Don't fuck with us, we can make BOMBS now!
And it's nothing but self-serving arrogant posturing of politicians, so they can feel secure about their diminutive stature when they're at the negotiating table with their enemies. . . (etc).
. . . and the result, is putting their own people at dire risk. Because they never gave a flying fuck about clean, cheap, safe power. They wanted the big phallic symbol to wave around the conference table.
Why don't you have a nice fresh plate of sushi then?
. . . unimaginative lab assistant.
I already patented outlawing patenting loopholes! SUCKERS!