1. As a thing, it is the worldwide network that interconnects almost all of the smaller networks run by corporations, governments, and even families.
2. As a standard, it denotes the set of rules that have been adopted by most network owners, thus allowing all their networks to talk to one another (and a huge variety of software applications to use those networks).
"My WAP is open. It is intentionally so. My neighbours or anyone just generally passing by are free to share it. And people frequently do, according to my router's logs. It's not that I'm constantly needing those 6 MBit myself, so why would I mind anyone else using them".
Wow, what subversive pinko commie ideology is that? Sharing things free of charge with your neighbours, or - still worse - with total strangers? That's the kind of behaviour that troublemaker Jesus Christ was executed for advocating! No wonder the law comes down hard on it. Next thing you'll be suggesting we should start sharing source code with complete strangers, for Pete's sake.
"From their point of view, they need to have the software in a known state so that they can troubleshoot the hardware".
This isn't Bob's Computer Workshop we're talking about here, this is Hewlett Packard. As in Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. One of the very best electronic engineering and instrumentation vendors in the world for the past 60 years or more. I can download free software any day, within a few minutes, that does adequate testing of pretty much any part of any random computer without even touching the software!
That's before we even start in on the rights and wrongs of forcing a customer to change the software he has chosen to install on his own computer.
I recall an SF short story - I think it may have been by Asimov - recounting how the miniaturization of electronics leads to the Library of the Universe being progressively shrunk until it is about the size of a sugar cube. And then someone mislays it...
Pretty farsighted for the 1960s, when even Heinlein was writing stories about the distant future in which computers were still mainframe-sized.
Perhaps not entirely technical reasons. Why did Java take off at such tremendous speed and become so preeminent, when there are so many good languages out there? It's partly a matter of timing, but largely a question of mass psychology. For some reason, certain memes go howling into overdrive and enjoy a positive feedback loop that boosts their growth into the stratosphere.
When you find out exactly why these things happen, you can become the world's richest individual more or less overnight.
Note that the article writer is British, which goes some way to explain his tired, decadent attitude of, "Don't think about writing software, buy it instead". As others have logically asked, who writes the software we buy? If you're a British organization, the answer has traditionally been "Americans". Nowadays, it is increasingly getting to be "Russians, Finns, Indians, Brazilians, Germans... anyone but us".
How would it sound if a professor of medicine or surgery were to say, "Nowadays we have so many good drugs that doctors don't need to learn anatomy or physiology any more"? We'd call bullshit. It's recognized that a nation is most unwise to close down its shipbuilding, aerospace, pharmaceutical, etc. industries completely, because once the torch is dropped it can't be picked up again. Traditionally, knowledge is passed down from generation to generation. Let there be just one generation that loses those vital skills, and no subsequent generation will have the option of reacquiring them.
The sad truth is that business managers want the benefits of computing, but they are damned if they want to pay for it. Hence the "shortage of staff" - i.e. staff who will work for peanuts. Hence the proliferation of crappy, slow, unreliable software, written by undertrained, underpaid developers faced by unrealistic deadlines and told to make bricks without straw.
The basic problem we have - and it's a serious problem - is that almost all the people who make decisions about IT investment are fundamentally ignorant about computing. In fact, we actually need more computer science rather than less; but it could usefully be delivered in more accessible, easy-to-understand chunks.
1. What the British did has nothing to do with what the USA didn't do. Anyone can reply to criticism with "Well, you are not perfect either", but it is just a form of changing the subject.
2. Appeasement has got a bad name - in hindsight - but in fact it is simple common sense. Especially since less than 20 years had passed since "the war to end wars", in which many felt that millions had died for nothing. It was reasonable to see if Hitler would mellow once he got the recognition and concessions he wanted. Sure, British and French politicians were fooled - as were the Soviets - but then Hitler may well have been the most persuasive politician of the 20th century.
3. The Europeans tried appeasement until they saw clearly that it didn't work. Then the British and French declared war. But even then, when the nature of the Nazi regime was perfectly clear, the USA didn't even appease - it just ignored the situation.
"The US did everything short of sending troops to support the Allies in Europe..." Well, it clearly wasn't going to do that because it was not at war. It did everything that a neutral country could do, and a not particularly friendly neutral country at that. By the way, why did it not declare war in support of the democracies during 1939, 1940, or the first eight months of 1941?
"...sending billions of dollars of war materials..." All of which was paid for in full, first in cash, and then when Britain's reserves ran out, in the form of research, military and naval bases around the world, and anything else that would be accepted. I know, Britain made the final repayment last year! Yes, we have spent the last 60 years paying the USA back for all that "non-military" help.
"...escorting merchant ships across the Atlantic (and declaring those ships under US protection)..." As you naturally would, when they were loaded with your goods.
"...attempting to cut off the supply of oil to Japan..." Ah, yes. The clever strategy that actually triggered the war in the Pacific. As it turned out, that led directly to the Japanese conquest of almost all British possessions in the Far East, and created a serious threat against India and Australia. Thanks.
"The popular support for World War II just didn't exist in the US at the time..." Exactly. That was my point. Britain was fighting for its life against the most vicious, vile dictatorship any of us can recall; and most Americans just didn't give a damn. So don't go trying to pretend you engaged in some kind of crusade against evil, because all you did was to protect your own interests.
"No one ever accuses... the Americans for waiting two years while Hitler ran wild..."
I do. And it was two years, three months and a few days - between a third and a half the length of the entire war. During that period the Germans conquered most of Europe, came within an ace of conquering Britain, and reached the Moscow tramlines. While the USA, which in 1941-5 demonstrated that it was the greatest military power in the world, sat carefully examining its fingernails. I don't ever want to hear again how "we stood by you through the Blitz".
The USA did not enter the war until first Japan, then Germany declared war on it, leaving it no alternative but to fight. Yes, Hitler supported his ally even though he didn't have to, and it was greatly to his disadvantage - something the USA had consistently refused to do for Britain or France (or anyone else).
Having passed on its one chance to support democracy by fighting a truly loathsome dictator on principle (rather than waiting till he declared war on it) the USA has spent the subsequent 60 years beating up a long series of much weaker countries, leaving behind a trail of destruction that compares with the worst of the Nazi Blitzkrieg (that's German for "shock and awe", by the way).
" 'And as someone else noted, "if all the economists in the world were laid end to end it would be a very good thing".'
nobody ever said that. "
How would you know? I said it, for a start. And I am sure I recall reading it long ago. The fact that you can recall a similar Dorothy Parker quote (admittedly funnier, but then all Dorothy Parker quotes are) has no bearing on the matter.
"or your competitors will rape you and eat your corpse..."
I don't know about the USA, but in the UK companies are being raped and eaten all the time. No doubt refusal to face up to the facts of IT ranks high among the causes.
I'm not claiming that economic theory is completely wrong. It's just as intuitively obvious to me as to any economist that, other things being equal, demand drives supply. It's just that other things are not always equal - sometimes very much so, other times less so. Certainly, increased salaries in the Dot Com era were probably due - in part - to increased demand against a relatively fixed supply. But, then again, many Dot Com companies were sublimely confident that they were soon going to be Rich Rich RICH, so they were probably not as stingy as the managers of companies that stay in business long term.
My thesis is that, as well as demand and supply, there are social factors in play here. There is a vast chasm between programmers and PHBs, which allows the PHBs - to some extent - to treat the programmers like serfs or Untouchables. In fact, it would be fairer to treat them like lawyers, because their work is similarly demanding, and probably more important.
"Well, the Capitalist answer is that the shortage in qualified applications should cause the average salary within the industry to rise correspondingly".
Unfortunately for everyone but the capitalists, that turns out not to be the case. Please notice the critical obfuscating function performed in the quoted sentence by the word "should". That is, the average salary *should* rise if simplistic Economics 101 formulae about demand and supply held good in the real world. As it happens, they don't. A quick look at US business reveals that there must have been an appalling shortage of ambitious, self-centred, suit-wearing chair-warmers recently - because look where their average salaries have wound up! Someone put a rocket under those suckers, and believe me it wasn't "demand". It was the utter determination of managers (yes, we're talking about managers here) to make as much money as they possibly can while the sun shines. They are aided in this quest by the remarkable fact that everyone's salaries are decided by... well, what do you know - managers!
A couple of years ago, I had an interesting little chat with a director of a UK-based IT recruitment consultancy while we were both waiting for the next conference session to begin. Among other things, he let me know that all the companies he dealt with saw programmers as "very much like bricklayers", and none of them would dream of paying a programmer more than about $40K. When I asked what would happen if they couldn't find any takers, he said airily that his clients would simply defer their software projects until they could hire programmers at "the appropriate rate". In other words, the executives in question would rather eat their own lungs than pay a programmer more than a quarter of what they themselves get.
Quoting economic theory doesn't cut much ice, especially when it is directly contradicted by the observed facts. Unlike real sciences, economics is a big sheaf of educated guesswork, elegant models in search of an application, and clever people talking themselves into important jobs and big salaries. As someone once remarked, there is no economist so distinguished that you can't find another, equally distinguished, to call him a gold-plated liar. And as someone else noted, "if all the economists in the world were laid end to end it would be a very good thing".
I just don't understand it. For months, every media outlet I see or hear has been telling me, over and over, how dangerous Iran is, how it is working to acquire nuclear weapons, and how its having rocket capability makes everything still worse.
Yet I can't, for the life of me, see any facts to back up these assertions. It's beginning to feel as if Chicken Little has taken over the US and UK governments. Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK Iran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has scrupulously observed its provisions. (Relatively easy, when you don't have any nuclear weapons). It says that it wants to acquire nuclear power for peaceful purposes, and that it does not intend to build any nuclear weapons.
So our governments declare (with no evidence whatsoever that I can see) that the Iranians are lying, and that they are working on a nuclear weapons program. Therefore the UN must pass resolutions telling them to stop enrichment, and if they don't the USA will do what it usually does to countries that don't knuckle under and obey its instructions.
How does this stack up with Pakistan, which acquired nuclear weapons and has a stack of them ready to use? Or Israel, which AFAIK has not signed the NNP Treaty and has ignored more UN resolutions than I've had pizzas, and yet is assumed to have a stock of nuclear weapons ready to use? Or, come to that, with the USA and UK which plan to continue enhancing their nuclear weapons capability, in spite of their obligation under the NNP Treaty to work towards getting rid of it?
As the Iranians point out, their country has not attacked any other nation for at least 300 years - at which time it was under the control of foreign rulers anyway. How can it profit them laboriously to construct a paltry few crude, low-yield nuclear weapons, when the USA is ready to hit them with the full thermonuclear force it prepared for a war with the USSR?
I know which scares me more - the medium-sized nation with a track record of peaceful behaviour and no WMDs, or the big nation with tens of thousands of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, massive stocks of biological and chemical weapons, a defence budget about the size of the rest of the world's combined, and a record of attacking close to 2 dozen other nations since 1945, at the cost of 4 million or more lives.
That should be "res ipsa loquitur". Classic quotes can be classy, but only if you spell them right. Two mistakes in three words does not inspire confidence.
"To me it's useful - if I get a SMART warning, then I'm definitely backing up my drive and will replace it before it croaks."
Trouble is, you MAY lose a hard drive at any time - there is no way to be sure it won't happen. To be safe, you should:
1. Back up ALL your vital, indispensable data EVERY DAY. (Or less often, according to how much vital, indispensable data you are willing to lose). 2. Back up everything that would be inconvenient to lose, as often as you can reasonably manage. I suggest weekly at least. 3. Ideally, take complete image backups of your hard drives, so that in case of total drive failure you can just roll everything right back and carry on where you left off. People always grossly underestimate how long it will take (and how much trouble and perhaps cost they will incur) to rebuild a system from scratch. Even if you can find your %#&@ Microsoft CD/DVD case with the serial number without which you can't reinstall the software you paid for.
Once you reconcile yourself to the thought that backup is not a luxury but a basic essential, the cost and trouble are not too great. I prefer to backup my data daily to a large-capacity USB flash stick, and periodically do full backups to an external hard drive. But, if you have two or more drives and use less than half of each (quite common nowadays), why not maintain a copy of your first hard drive contents on the second drive, and vice versa? That way if any one spindle dies, you still have everything. If you have a network, you can do incremental backups to remote computers or a dedicated server.
"So, what about those who can afford their own planes? Will they be allowed more anonymity than those with fewer resources?"
Good point. It reminded me of the following classic quote:
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread". - Anatole France, 1844-1924
I try not to. In this case, as IANAL, I may have been wrong - although how do you know which jurisdiction and which set of laws I was referring to? And are you yourself a lawyer?
What I have heard about criminal conspiracies through the media tells me that, in practice, the authorities will find "acts in furtherance" if they want to. Suppose Homeland Security arrests some people who were chatting together about a hypothetical act of terrorism. Say it involves New York City. Want to bet the investigators can't find a single map of New York in the possession of at least one of the group? How about if some of them have - gasp - actually been there?
Of course, in today's USA all this is moot, as the rule of law no longer obtains. If the government doesn't like the look of someone - anyone - they just grab him, put him where he'll never hear the dogs bark, and that's that. Without a trial, who cares about the finer points of the law of conspiracy?
"There is, as of yet, no laws prohibiting thinking about committing a crime".
Strictly speaking, this is no doubt true. After all, how could you frame such laws, and how would you determine if anyone were guilty of breaking them?
On the other hand, conspiracy is a crime and may be a very serious one, punishable by long periods in prison. What is a conspiracy? It may be no more than two people discussing some things that they *might* do some time in the future. No criminal act, you see. But still deemed to be a crime. Why is conspiracy a crime and not intention? I believe the real reason is simply that intentions have not previously been detectable or provable.
There is a deeper, far more worrying implication. These and other similar experiments have shown that researchers can sometimes know exactly what another person is going to do *before that person himself knows*. (We'll ignore that 70 percent accuracy rate for the time being). I think you will agree that drives a coach and horses through the idea of free will, and hence of criminal responsibility. If you can know, before I make up my mind, that I am going to commit a crime, and you arrest me for that intention - or just to prevent the crime - how can anyone possibly argue that I made a decision to commit the crime? I never got that far!
I have always thought that the dichotomy between free will and predestination was fallacious, based on a lack of imagination or accurate language. I have an apple; I can either eat it, or leave it. Which will I do? Imagine God, who knows everything past, present, and future. He knows if I am going to eat the apple, just as he also knows when and how I shall die. If you prefer a non-religious alternative, consider the universe as a four-dimensional space in which all future events are just as fixed as past ones. Either way, the future is predetermined.
Yet, at the same time, we have free will from our own point of view - because we don't have any way of knowing what will happen in future, even the things that we are going to do. Until I have either eaten the apple or put it away, I may not know what I am going to do. Similarly, armed with a knife and faced with someone who has wronged me, I may either stab them or not. Do I "choose"? Well, yes, or the word "choose" means nothing. But there isn't a little man in my head making decisions for me. In short, when we say someone chooses to do something, it is mostly a "black box" description that is useful for talking about other people. Look inside yourself for choice, and it isn't really there. It's like a rainbow - visible only from a distance.
Experiments like these will eventually force us to confront the fact that punishing people for their "moral choices" is inconsistent with our scientific knowledge. We may well *choose* to go on doing so anyway, of course. Or we could shift our ground a little, and say that punishment is a way of conditioning people not to commit crimes - adjusting the expected outcome so that it is less likely to be an attractive one.
1. Colossus (one "l" only) was not a computer in the modern sense of the word, although it was an important precursor.
2. Turing's greatest contribution was theoretical, and dates back to his paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", which was written and published in 1936.
The cost of Ada compilers should not have been a problem, but a valuable feature. Ada was not meant to be used for writing games, trivial utilities, or ephemeral database apps a la VB. Instead, it was designed for making software as reliable and error-free as possible, so that it could be used in support of business, or in other important/critical applications. When you fly the Atlantic, do you try to do so using a paper aeroplane you whipped up yourself with parts from a DIY store, or do you pay for a flight on a proper airline? It's reasonable to assume that, where reliable software is needed, having a validated compiler is probably more important than having to pay a few thousand dollars for a compiler (and, let's not forget, a complete configuration management and build system, which comes with every valid Ada compiler).
Only a real PHB would quibble at that kind of cost.
Slashdot Mirror
The Internet means two main things.
1. As a thing, it is the worldwide network that interconnects almost all of the smaller networks run by corporations, governments, and even families.
2. As a standard, it denotes the set of rules that have been adopted by most network owners, thus allowing all their networks to talk to one another (and a huge variety of software applications to use those networks).
"My WAP is open. It is intentionally so. My neighbours or anyone just generally passing by are free to share it. And people frequently do, according to my router's logs. It's not that I'm constantly needing those 6 MBit myself, so why would I mind anyone else using them".
Wow, what subversive pinko commie ideology is that? Sharing things free of charge with your neighbours, or - still worse - with total strangers? That's the kind of behaviour that troublemaker Jesus Christ was executed for advocating! No wonder the law comes down hard on it. Next thing you'll be suggesting we should start sharing source code with complete strangers, for Pete's sake.
"From their point of view, they need to have the software in a known state so that they can troubleshoot the hardware".
This isn't Bob's Computer Workshop we're talking about here, this is Hewlett Packard. As in Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. One of the very best electronic engineering and instrumentation vendors in the world for the past 60 years or more. I can download free software any day, within a few minutes, that does adequate testing of pretty much any part of any random computer without even touching the software!
That's before we even start in on the rights and wrongs of forcing a customer to change the software he has chosen to install on his own computer.
"Just wandering, couldn't this be construed as fraud? Taken as an attempt to intentionally deceive people?"
Intentionally deceiving people isn't fraud - it's politics.
"...a detachable rare diamond that acts like a power button and a security key."
Anyone else see how that could conceivably backfire?
I recall an SF short story - I think it may have been by Asimov - recounting how the miniaturization of electronics leads to the Library of the Universe being progressively shrunk until it is about the size of a sugar cube. And then someone mislays it...
Pretty farsighted for the 1960s, when even Heinlein was writing stories about the distant future in which computers were still mainframe-sized.
Perhaps not entirely technical reasons. Why did Java take off at such tremendous speed and become so preeminent, when there are so many good languages out there? It's partly a matter of timing, but largely a question of mass psychology. For some reason, certain memes go howling into overdrive and enjoy a positive feedback loop that boosts their growth into the stratosphere.
When you find out exactly why these things happen, you can become the world's richest individual more or less overnight.
Note that the article writer is British, which goes some way to explain his tired, decadent attitude of, "Don't think about writing software, buy it instead". As others have logically asked, who writes the software we buy? If you're a British organization, the answer has traditionally been "Americans". Nowadays, it is increasingly getting to be "Russians, Finns, Indians, Brazilians, Germans... anyone but us".
How would it sound if a professor of medicine or surgery were to say, "Nowadays we have so many good drugs that doctors don't need to learn anatomy or physiology any more"? We'd call bullshit. It's recognized that a nation is most unwise to close down its shipbuilding, aerospace, pharmaceutical, etc. industries completely, because once the torch is dropped it can't be picked up again. Traditionally, knowledge is passed down from generation to generation. Let there be just one generation that loses those vital skills, and no subsequent generation will have the option of reacquiring them.
The sad truth is that business managers want the benefits of computing, but they are damned if they want to pay for it. Hence the "shortage of staff" - i.e. staff who will work for peanuts. Hence the proliferation of crappy, slow, unreliable software, written by undertrained, underpaid developers faced by unrealistic deadlines and told to make bricks without straw.
The basic problem we have - and it's a serious problem - is that almost all the people who make decisions about IT investment are fundamentally ignorant about computing. In fact, we actually need more computer science rather than less; but it could usefully be delivered in more accessible, easy-to-understand chunks.
"...it is unconstitutional for the government to confiscate the property of one and give it to another".
So you don't have taxes in the USA?
1. What the British did has nothing to do with what the USA didn't do. Anyone can reply to criticism with "Well, you are not perfect either", but it is just a form of changing the subject.
2. Appeasement has got a bad name - in hindsight - but in fact it is simple common sense. Especially since less than 20 years had passed since "the war to end wars", in which many felt that millions had died for nothing. It was reasonable to see if Hitler would mellow once he got the recognition and concessions he wanted. Sure, British and French politicians were fooled - as were the Soviets - but then Hitler may well have been the most persuasive politician of the 20th century.
3. The Europeans tried appeasement until they saw clearly that it didn't work. Then the British and French declared war. But even then, when the nature of the Nazi regime was perfectly clear, the USA didn't even appease - it just ignored the situation.
What I wrote was quite accurate.
"The US did everything short of sending troops to support the Allies in Europe..."
Well, it clearly wasn't going to do that because it was not at war. It did everything that a neutral country could do, and a not particularly friendly neutral country at that. By the way, why did it not declare war in support of the democracies during 1939, 1940, or the first eight months of 1941?
"...sending billions of dollars of war materials..."
All of which was paid for in full, first in cash, and then when Britain's reserves ran out, in the form of research, military and naval bases around the world, and anything else that would be accepted. I know, Britain made the final repayment last year! Yes, we have spent the last 60 years paying the USA back for all that "non-military" help.
"...escorting merchant ships across the Atlantic (and declaring those ships under US protection)..."
As you naturally would, when they were loaded with your goods.
"...attempting to cut off the supply of oil to Japan..."
Ah, yes. The clever strategy that actually triggered the war in the Pacific. As it turned out, that led directly to the Japanese conquest of almost all British possessions in the Far East, and created a serious threat against India and Australia. Thanks.
"The popular support for World War II just didn't exist in the US at the time..."
Exactly. That was my point. Britain was fighting for its life against the most vicious, vile dictatorship any of us can recall; and most Americans just didn't give a damn. So don't go trying to pretend you engaged in some kind of crusade against evil, because all you did was to protect your own interests.
"No one ever accuses... the Americans for waiting two years while Hitler ran wild..."
I do. And it was two years, three months and a few days - between a third and a half the length of the entire war. During that period the Germans conquered most of Europe, came within an ace of conquering Britain, and reached the Moscow tramlines. While the USA, which in 1941-5 demonstrated that it was the greatest military power in the world, sat carefully examining its fingernails. I don't ever want to hear again how "we stood by you through the Blitz".
The USA did not enter the war until first Japan, then Germany declared war on it, leaving it no alternative but to fight. Yes, Hitler supported his ally even though he didn't have to, and it was greatly to his disadvantage - something the USA had consistently refused to do for Britain or France (or anyone else).
Having passed on its one chance to support democracy by fighting a truly loathsome dictator on principle (rather than waiting till he declared war on it) the USA has spent the subsequent 60 years beating up a long series of much weaker countries, leaving behind a trail of destruction that compares with the worst of the Nazi Blitzkrieg (that's German for "shock and awe", by the way).
" 'And as someone else noted, "if all the economists in the world were laid end to end it would be a very good thing".'
nobody ever said that. "
How would you know? I said it, for a start. And I am sure I recall reading it long ago. The fact that you can recall a similar Dorothy Parker quote (admittedly funnier, but then all Dorothy Parker quotes are) has no bearing on the matter.
"or your competitors will rape you and eat your corpse..."
I don't know about the USA, but in the UK companies are being raped and eaten all the time. No doubt refusal to face up to the facts of IT ranks high among the causes.
I'm not claiming that economic theory is completely wrong. It's just as intuitively obvious to me as to any economist that, other things being equal, demand drives supply. It's just that other things are not always equal - sometimes very much so, other times less so. Certainly, increased salaries in the Dot Com era were probably due - in part - to increased demand against a relatively fixed supply. But, then again, many Dot Com companies were sublimely confident that they were soon going to be Rich Rich RICH, so they were probably not as stingy as the managers of companies that stay in business long term.
My thesis is that, as well as demand and supply, there are social factors in play here. There is a vast chasm between programmers and PHBs, which allows the PHBs - to some extent - to treat the programmers like serfs or Untouchables. In fact, it would be fairer to treat them like lawyers, because their work is similarly demanding, and probably more important.
"Well, the Capitalist answer is that the shortage in qualified applications should cause the average salary within the industry to rise correspondingly".
Unfortunately for everyone but the capitalists, that turns out not to be the case. Please notice the critical obfuscating function performed in the quoted sentence by the word "should". That is, the average salary *should* rise if simplistic Economics 101 formulae about demand and supply held good in the real world. As it happens, they don't. A quick look at US business reveals that there must have been an appalling shortage of ambitious, self-centred, suit-wearing chair-warmers recently - because look where their average salaries have wound up! Someone put a rocket under those suckers, and believe me it wasn't "demand". It was the utter determination of managers (yes, we're talking about managers here) to make as much money as they possibly can while the sun shines. They are aided in this quest by the remarkable fact that everyone's salaries are decided by... well, what do you know - managers!
A couple of years ago, I had an interesting little chat with a director of a UK-based IT recruitment consultancy while we were both waiting for the next conference session to begin. Among other things, he let me know that all the companies he dealt with saw programmers as "very much like bricklayers", and none of them would dream of paying a programmer more than about $40K. When I asked what would happen if they couldn't find any takers, he said airily that his clients would simply defer their software projects until they could hire programmers at "the appropriate rate". In other words, the executives in question would rather eat their own lungs than pay a programmer more than a quarter of what they themselves get.
Quoting economic theory doesn't cut much ice, especially when it is directly contradicted by the observed facts. Unlike real sciences, economics is a big sheaf of educated guesswork, elegant models in search of an application, and clever people talking themselves into important jobs and big salaries. As someone once remarked, there is no economist so distinguished that you can't find another, equally distinguished, to call him a gold-plated liar. And as someone else noted, "if all the economists in the world were laid end to end it would be a very good thing".
I just don't understand it. For months, every media outlet I see or hear has been telling me, over and over, how dangerous Iran is, how it is working to acquire nuclear weapons, and how its having rocket capability makes everything still worse.
Yet I can't, for the life of me, see any facts to back up these assertions. It's beginning to feel as if Chicken Little has taken over the US and UK governments. Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK Iran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has scrupulously observed its provisions. (Relatively easy, when you don't have any nuclear weapons). It says that it wants to acquire nuclear power for peaceful purposes, and that it does not intend to build any nuclear weapons.
So our governments declare (with no evidence whatsoever that I can see) that the Iranians are lying, and that they are working on a nuclear weapons program. Therefore the UN must pass resolutions telling them to stop enrichment, and if they don't the USA will do what it usually does to countries that don't knuckle under and obey its instructions.
How does this stack up with Pakistan, which acquired nuclear weapons and has a stack of them ready to use? Or Israel, which AFAIK has not signed the NNP Treaty and has ignored more UN resolutions than I've had pizzas, and yet is assumed to have a stock of nuclear weapons ready to use? Or, come to that, with the USA and UK which plan to continue enhancing their nuclear weapons capability, in spite of their obligation under the NNP Treaty to work towards getting rid of it?
As the Iranians point out, their country has not attacked any other nation for at least 300 years - at which time it was under the control of foreign rulers anyway. How can it profit them laboriously to construct a paltry few crude, low-yield nuclear weapons, when the USA is ready to hit them with the full thermonuclear force it prepared for a war with the USSR?
I know which scares me more - the medium-sized nation with a track record of peaceful behaviour and no WMDs, or the big nation with tens of thousands of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, massive stocks of biological and chemical weapons, a defence budget about the size of the rest of the world's combined, and a record of attacking close to 2 dozen other nations since 1945, at the cost of 4 million or more lives.
"res ipso loquitor"
That should be "res ipsa loquitur". Classic quotes can be classy, but only if you spell them right. Two mistakes in three words does not inspire confidence.
"To me it's useful - if I get a SMART warning, then I'm definitely backing up my drive and will replace it before it croaks."
Trouble is, you MAY lose a hard drive at any time - there is no way to be sure it won't happen. To be safe, you should:
1. Back up ALL your vital, indispensable data EVERY DAY. (Or less often, according to how much vital, indispensable data you are willing to lose).
2. Back up everything that would be inconvenient to lose, as often as you can reasonably manage. I suggest weekly at least.
3. Ideally, take complete image backups of your hard drives, so that in case of total drive failure you can just roll everything right back and carry on where you left off. People always grossly underestimate how long it will take (and how much trouble and perhaps cost they will incur) to rebuild a system from scratch. Even if you can find your %#&@ Microsoft CD/DVD case with the serial number without which you can't reinstall the software you paid for.
Once you reconcile yourself to the thought that backup is not a luxury but a basic essential, the cost and trouble are not too great. I prefer to backup my data daily to a large-capacity USB flash stick, and periodically do full backups to an external hard drive. But, if you have two or more drives and use less than half of each (quite common nowadays), why not maintain a copy of your first hard drive contents on the second drive, and vice versa? That way if any one spindle dies, you still have everything. If you have a network, you can do incremental backups to remote computers or a dedicated server.
"So, what about those who can afford their own planes? Will they be allowed more anonymity than those with fewer resources?"
Good point. It reminded me of the following classic quote:
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread". - Anatole France, 1844-1924
"Please don't contribute inaccurate information".
I try not to. In this case, as IANAL, I may have been wrong - although how do you know which jurisdiction and which set of laws I was referring to? And are you yourself a lawyer?
What I have heard about criminal conspiracies through the media tells me that, in practice, the authorities will find "acts in furtherance" if they want to. Suppose Homeland Security arrests some people who were chatting together about a hypothetical act of terrorism. Say it involves New York City. Want to bet the investigators can't find a single map of New York in the possession of at least one of the group? How about if some of them have - gasp - actually been there?
Of course, in today's USA all this is moot, as the rule of law no longer obtains. If the government doesn't like the look of someone - anyone - they just grab him, put him where he'll never hear the dogs bark, and that's that. Without a trial, who cares about the finer points of the law of conspiracy?
"There is, as of yet, no laws prohibiting thinking about committing a crime".
Strictly speaking, this is no doubt true. After all, how could you frame such laws, and how would you determine if anyone were guilty of breaking them?
On the other hand, conspiracy is a crime and may be a very serious one, punishable by long periods in prison. What is a conspiracy? It may be no more than two people discussing some things that they *might* do some time in the future. No criminal act, you see. But still deemed to be a crime. Why is conspiracy a crime and not intention? I believe the real reason is simply that intentions have not previously been detectable or provable.
There is a deeper, far more worrying implication. These and other similar experiments have shown that researchers can sometimes know exactly what another person is going to do *before that person himself knows*. (We'll ignore that 70 percent accuracy rate for the time being). I think you will agree that drives a coach and horses through the idea of free will, and hence of criminal responsibility. If you can know, before I make up my mind, that I am going to commit a crime, and you arrest me for that intention - or just to prevent the crime - how can anyone possibly argue that I made a decision to commit the crime? I never got that far!
I have always thought that the dichotomy between free will and predestination was fallacious, based on a lack of imagination or accurate language. I have an apple; I can either eat it, or leave it. Which will I do? Imagine God, who knows everything past, present, and future. He knows if I am going to eat the apple, just as he also knows when and how I shall die. If you prefer a non-religious alternative, consider the universe as a four-dimensional space in which all future events are just as fixed as past ones. Either way, the future is predetermined.
Yet, at the same time, we have free will from our own point of view - because we don't have any way of knowing what will happen in future, even the things that we are going to do. Until I have either eaten the apple or put it away, I may not know what I am going to do. Similarly, armed with a knife and faced with someone who has wronged me, I may either stab them or not. Do I "choose"? Well, yes, or the word "choose" means nothing. But there isn't a little man in my head making decisions for me. In short, when we say someone chooses to do something, it is mostly a "black box" description that is useful for talking about other people. Look inside yourself for choice, and it isn't really there. It's like a rainbow - visible only from a distance.
Experiments like these will eventually force us to confront the fact that punishing people for their "moral choices" is inconsistent with our scientific knowledge. We may well *choose* to go on doing so anyway, of course. Or we could shift our ground a little, and say that punishment is a way of conditioning people not to commit crimes - adjusting the expected outcome so that it is less likely to be an attractive one.
1. Colossus (one "l" only) was not a computer in the modern sense of the word, although it was an important precursor.
2. Turing's greatest contribution was theoretical, and dates back to his paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", which was written and published in 1936.
The cost of Ada compilers should not have been a problem, but a valuable feature. Ada was not meant to be used for writing games, trivial utilities, or ephemeral database apps a la VB. Instead, it was designed for making software as reliable and error-free as possible, so that it could be used in support of business, or in other important/critical applications. When you fly the Atlantic, do you try to do so using a paper aeroplane you whipped up yourself with parts from a DIY store, or do you pay for a flight on a proper airline? It's reasonable to assume that, where reliable software is needed, having a validated compiler is probably more important than having to pay a few thousand dollars for a compiler (and, let's not forget, a complete configuration management and build system, which comes with every valid Ada compiler).
Only a real PHB would quibble at that kind of cost.
"Agreed, like how AIGLX+Beryl isn't covered. However that is still considered beta currently..."
Well, all of Vista can be considered beta currently, so that isn't a differentiator.