This shows maps the casualties to the relative size of the country.
This makes it hard to figure out exactly which country is hurting the most, but it dramatically shows how bad some places have it compared to the rest of the world. Anyone who is not shocked by seeing this is a psychopathic personality type.
There's a vastly depressing humor in all of this: both sides are monopolistic scum, so the least you can do is enjoy watching the evil twins fight amongst themselves. It's a really grim joke.
The 30% "tax" that Apple charges at the App Store is immune to market forces. It makes no difference what sells or how much, Apple gets a phenomenal markup. It's all reward, no risk. When this happens at a large scale it means that capitalism is dead, and all the remains is monopoly.
And before the ideological right zombies start chanting "free market" in unison, remember that there is a duopoly: Android and IOS. Now that Blackberry is toast (pun intended), there is only a choice between a closed overly priced ecosystem and an anarchistic platform that is known to be insecure. I don't have the reference at hand, but someone at Google recently stated that security is not guaranteed for Android. Google washes their hands, and the phone providers (another tribe of monopolists) see no need to put any money into customer protection. The big cellular providers want it to be a felony to jailbreak your smartphone. They literally want to threaten users in jail for doing their own patches, so good luck on fixing that security breach on your own. Capitalism at it's best. A real "free market".
Amazon is also a real piece of work. Their business model is all about not paying any tax to anybody anywhere anytime. See post that proceeds this about them owing the French government $1 Billion.
The inequality between the taxation of brick and mortar stores and Amazon gives them a huge competitive advantage. The playing field is a level as a cliff. Amazon is at the top, their competitors are at the bottom and Amazon getd rocks for free to drop off the cliff.
Amazon also has the publishers in a headlock. They dictate how much the publishers can charge before the Amazon markup. They also demand, and get, exclusivity on Kindle over other platforms.
Both Amazon and Apple engage in the kind of "free market capitalism" that made the Soprano's famous: pay us or you won't be around very much longer. They have the same relationship with the market that a pig farmer has to his pigs. The pigs have very little say in the matter.
"Provide incentives for private industry". Really? I've never visited that universe.
Over here in the real world, "private industry" acts like the United Launch Alliance: an intrenched monopoly with zero incentive to bring down launch costs. The same for the other long time players, like ArianeSpace and the Russians.
The only disruption to this cozy international cartel is SpaceX and the like. Note that these are all privately funded by technocrats who made huge fortunes in software. No one had to go out and raise money for these ventures. The investors are the founders, and they have very deep pockets.
It is impossible to raise money for this kind of business in capital markets because it's easier and more profitable to make money the old fashioned way: steal it.
Just look at the example of the FCC deciding to squash net neutrality. Hire regulators via the revolving door, pay out some bribe/campaign contributions, get legislation that you wrote passed as laws: instant profit!!! Why waste time and money on something as iffy as outer space?
So real innovation and risk taking is not the product of "private industry", it's a hobby of a few individuals who succeeded in the past. They could have as easily bought a major league sports franchise like Mark Cuban.
Is it likely that the next generation of successful entrepreneurs will have the space bug? Because if they don't then the only way we'll get to Mars, or make use of space resources is through governments. Any near term profit in space comes from satellites at synchronous orbit or below. No profit or incentive for long term capital investment any further out.
The only other reason to go is nationalism. That's why the Chinese are going to the moon. The US will opt out because none of the entrenched "private industry" players see sufficient guaranteed profit in their pig trough. It's so much easier to raise prices for Netflicks.
Gosh, I wonder if that will have any practical impact?
In radio this is called Payola where record companies pay to get their records played. It's illegal. There were congressional hearings about it in the 50's and 60's. It continues to this day.
Now the "business model" of paying for content delivery is legal. And there is no limit on campaign spending. Guess what will happen in the next election?
No major news outlet will report when news conglomerates up their rates for political programming so only big players will be able to afford airtime. Remember cable/broadcast/newspapers are now single corporate entities, and money talks.
How long will it take for differential pricing to drive Al Jazeera off the air? Remember they're just a bunch of terrorists! The same for RT (Russian Television) and any non-US centric new outlets as well. I expect NHK will be OK because they will self censor perceived criticism.
Expect the political programming on PBS to disappear as well. Remember that they criticize Corporate America, and it's Bad for Business. Don't worry, you'll get to keep Nature, NOVA and Antique Roadshow. Keep sucking on that pacifier.
Ever notice that PBS NOVA gets "major funding" from the Kock (pronounced COCK) brothers? When was the last time NOVA did a program on global climate change? Sound of crickets...
Welcome to Plutocratic America. No democracy, no free press, no capitalism. Nothing to see here, just move along.
This is not the first humanoid robot for this purpose. Meet PETMAN
PETMAN is an anthropomorphic robot designed for testing chemical protection clothing. Natural agile movement is essential for PETMAN to simulate how a soldier stresses protective clothing under realistic conditions.
Unlike previous suit testers that had a limited repertoire of motion and had to be supported mechanically, PETMAN balances itself and moves freely; walking, bending and doing a variety of suit-stressing calisthenics during exposure to chemical warfare agents. PETMAN also simulates human physiology within the protective suit by controlling temperature, humidity and sweating, all to provide realistic test conditions.
Although it's hard to tell from dueling press releases, it appears that PETMAN is more sophisticated and moves much more autonomously then Porton Man. I assume that it is also a lot more expensive.
Amdahl discussed his original idea for lookahead with John Backus "two or three times". "And John thought what I had proposed initially, he couldn't do a compiler for. So we went ahead and redid it. And we came out with the thing that was the look-ahead structure of the STRETCH." [p. 71, Norberg]. Amdahl recalls that "principally the look-ahead pre-fetched instructions to see branch instructions early enough so that we could get the succeeding instruction and data for each of the two alternative branch paths"
Arguably the first machine to use out-of-order execution was the CDC 6600 (1964), which used a scoreboard to resolve conflicts. In modern usage, such scoreboarding is considered to be in-order execution, not out-of-order execution, since such machines stall on the first RAW (Read After Write) conflict. Strictly speaking, such machines initiate execution in-order, although they may complete execution out-of-order.
From the same source:
About three years later, the IBM 360/91 (1966) introduced Tomasulo's algorithm, which made full out-of-order execution possible.
Even if this is true, the NSA will figure out a way to make it insecure. Under the pretense of security they insure that the ability to do evil things is built in to all communication technology.
Any business as big and monopolistic as Comcast is going to be completely corrupt. They don't make money, they steal money. This applies to all the big corporations, no matter what business they are in.
This example shows how low they will go to defraud their users. Just how many cable subscribers are using non-HDTV sets? This is obviously their lowest tier customer class, so it is likely that they are making the least amount of profit from these users. That is why they picked this group to gouge.
There no real relationship between what they charge and what the delivery cost is. The content charges are just as artificial. The only competition is how the profits from the overpriced service is divided up. The only looser is the customer.
This situation is normal when there is no real competition. It's identical to the telcos and the banks and the pharmaceutical companies and...
Currently about 400 tonnes of groundwater is streaming into the reactor basements from the hills behind the plant each day. The plant has accumulated about 300,000 tonnes of contaminated water, which is being stored in 1,200 tanks occupying a large swath of the Fukushima Daiichi site.
Eventually Tepco hopes to have enough space to store 800,000 tonnes, but fears are rising that it will run out of space sometime next year because it can't keep up with the flow of toxic water.
Your statement is meaningless because it is complete nonsense. In the real world the tsunami happened and there have been dramatic consequences. Putting the blame on the "anti-nuke community" verges on delusional thinking.
Are your suggesting that the water be dumped into the ocean? That would destroy an even larger area of the Japanese seafood industry. It would also violate numerous international treaties.
Since you seem to have all the answers, what's your solution? I'm sure that you response will be better then anyone in Japan or the international community has come up with so far, and it will be immediately adopted. I can't wait!
Do you keep your KKK robes hung up in the closet where they won't get wrinkled but someone might see them, or do you fold them in a drawer where they are out of sight but you have to iron them before you go out to a cross burning?
You're absolutely right. There is no truly open source hardware.
Since this is so outrageous, I suggest that you immediately give up using anything with a computer. No laptop, pads, desktop or smartphone. Get off the internet entirely. No GPS. No ATM or banking. No electricity, because all electric power generation uses evil closed source hardware.
In fact, the only way you can live and be free of all the closed source hardware is to go and live in the woods like Ted Kaczynski. I hope you do so, because then there would be one less self obsessed moron on Slashdot.
Factually incorrect: "Plus they are a heck a lot more reliable then they were 20+ years ago."
Over twenty years ago there were computers that hardware and software that were designed to work together. At least two of these systems had extra tag bits in memory that defined the memory contents. Specifically I am talking about Symbolics Lisp Machines and Burroughs Large Systems that natively ran Algol. I worked on both of these systems and they were intrinsically more reliable then any systems I know of today.
Because of the tagged memory they had hardware protection against a large class of errors that current systems encounter all the time. It was possible to find the bugs and eliminate them so they did not re-occur. It also protected against having undetected errors, which is a true nightmare.
Having hardware and software designed at the same time results in a better product. This is even more significant when the system is designed to run a specific high level language. Everything has less bugs.
Heck, Cray machines had ECC memory: SECDED. Single Error Correction, Double Error Detection. They needed it, because memory was not so reliable as today, but now you are lucky to just have a parity bit. All this work is going on, and no one has a clue if there are bad results or not.
As an industry we have gone backwards. That's not an opinion, it's an observation.
This isn't selling out resident workers, both green card holders and citizens. It's capitalism in action.
The US government is for sale, and the highest bidders get what they pay for. You buy enough legislation (and legislators) and you can make anything legal.
Want to make more money in the short run by gutting STEM employment and destroying US based intellectual capitial? No problem! (Just look at IBM).
Want to pay no US taxes while you plaster US flags on your equipment? You don't even have to make the flags in the US! (Caterpillar, a proud US giant.)
It really is equal opportunity at work. You don't even have to be a US company to buy what you want.
Stop whining, it's unpatriotic. You obviously don't love the US if you can't afford to buy you own slice of the American Dream. Tata Consultancy Services is clearly a much more important American Enterprise then any of the mere citizens who do useless things like live, vote and pay taxes in the US.
It's not like there is a "Government of the People, by the People and For the People" or any other nonsense like that.
Before Reagan there used to be something called "anit-trust". When some player in the private sector got too big, they would be "broken up" in order to insure "competition". That was in the old days where the US economy had something called "capitalism".
I know this sounds like a fantasy to many younger Slashdot readers, but it really did happen. Besides "capitalism" there were other obsolete ideas like "privacy", "justice", "voting rights", "free press" and "free travel". I'd encourage you to look this up, but then you might get on a list where suddenly you couldn't get on an airplane and they would never tell you why and you could never get off the list.
If you started to code before the rise of the internet, you learned how to function in a somewhat useful development environment. The infrastructure and tools for internet based programming are severely broken by those standards.
To a significant extent, all the practices that make a workable environment were abandoned for the internet. It's likely that the learning curve problem you are experiencing is a reflection how bad things have become for coders.
Take languages. With the possible exception of Python, all the languages associated with web development have glaring flaws. PHP is conceivably the worst language to ever gain broad acceptance. JavaScript does objects wrong and has evil lexical scoping rules. You have to be very careful or you can step on an assumption made by object in a library that you don't even know was loaded.
Thoughtful system design has been replaced by object oriented programming. The failed assumption is that if you have an object model, you must be doing a good job. This is a prime example of magical thinking. Just because it's all objects does not mean that it was done right. (I'm talking about you, Java).
Then there are the "non-standard" standards. The poster child is HTML in the browser. To reach the full user base web pages must code for multiple incompatible implementations. Chalk up a lot of this to Microsoft, but even they had a lot of help creating the garbage dump called web standards.
Frameworks take the mindset of spaghetti code, force it on the coder and then claim that they are really great. Take Cake/PHP. Using it is the equivalent of chewing on a mixture of crushed glass and push pins. It only seem useful if you have been swimming in the cesspit of PHP.
To be fair, I must say that JQuery is one of the best examples of software out there. I demonstrates that even given a flawed language like JavaScript, and the snake pit of inconsistent DOM implementations, elegant and useful software is possible. It's just too bad that there are very few tools that do such a good job.
So don't blame yourself. You are as smart and capable as you ever were, it's the work environment that has become degraded. If you come to grips with the current crop of shoddy software you can achieve your ends. A more fundamental issue is if you want to work in such a terrible situation. After having the experience of being productive, it's a real let down to experience using such a crap set of tools.
If you are not a member of one of various elites, you have no expectation of privacy, protection under the law, or economic security.
If you are a wealthy investor, top tier business executive, elected to a nationwide office, or famous and rich for any reason, your wealth and position will be protected by the economic, political, and military might of the US. Note: entertainers, particularly pro-athletes and popular musicians, can be dropped at any time. Heavily right wing affiliation will keep you in good standing. See Steven Seagal and Ted Nugent for examples.
The only real crime is interfering with a member of the elite. You can have every economic transaction, phone call, medical record, license plate tracking data and email in a secret database, but if anyone spies on a Member of Congress heads will roll, bureaucrats will loose their jobs and institutional budgets will be slashed.
You have the mentality of a peasant. Whatever the nobles do, it must be OK because they would never take advantage of their position at your expense. They're so much more deserving then you.
Let's use a car analogy: suppose that you buy gas at the same station that Google execs do. They get charged the rate that the gas costs at the refinery, and you pay retail. Their gas is 25% cheaper (made up value) then yours. You have to pay for shipping costs, infrastructure costs for the service station (electricity, upkeep), the salaries of everyone involved between the refinery and the pump, etc. All that stuff has to be paid for to get the gas to the pump, so you are subsidizing their gas.
Except it's not a private company selling the gas, it's government services paid for by your taxes.
In its 2011 'World's Billionaires' list, Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 136th-richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $7 billion. Google gave him a $100 million equity award in 2011 when he stepped down as CEO.[57]
According to insider transaction data available at Yahoo! Finance, Schmidt sold Google stock worth more than $6 billion from January to May 2013.
So you think it's fine to use tax money to make it cheaper for a guy worth $7 Billion to fly his private jet. What the hell is wrong with you?
It's their anti-science position. Going to Europa and finding alien life might encourage the teaching of evolutions in schools.
It will also interfere with their plan to teach that the Earth is a the center of the universe, and the eventual mandate to make it official policy that the world is flat.
That will put the godless atheists in their place: in the lower left corner of the flat world, where the climate is terrible and all the icky stuff collects at the bottom.
It's a common pattern. Someone has a dark secret and they end up persecuting those who have the same impulses. They simultaneously engage in behavior they see as evil while doing the same thing themselves. It's why we continuously hear about virulent ant-gay politicians and religious leaders who have a secret gay life. Just look for the people who are screaming loudly about a specific sin, and there you will find a greater then average concentration of sinners.
At some point in any belief system, reality demonstrates that the system is not a complete model of how the world works. Sometimes this is minor, and sometimes it's huge. If a believer becomes even more convinced that they are right after a extreme event, they have embraced delusional thinking. (Note: one of the differences between the scientific method and other belief systems is that new results are often are used as evidence to alter the belief, i.e. hypothesis, so the belief system expands.)
There are a lot of people these days, many of them readers of Slashdot, who espouse a belief system with a lot of delusional features: Libertarianism. This position, along with the similar political belief of the U.S. Republican Party, the British Torries and Canadian Conservatives share common beliefs. One prominent belief is that all government regulation of business is always evil. They are particularly adamant that financial regulation is always destructive.
An epic recent example is the admission by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who is self described as "lifelong libertarian Republican".
In Congressional testimony on October 23, 2008, Greenspan acknowledged that he was "partially" wrong in opposing regulation and stated "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity – myself especially – are in a state of shocked disbelief." Referring to his free-market ideology, Greenspan said: "I have found a flaw. I don't know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact." Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) then pressed him to clarify his words. "In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working," Waxman said. "Absolutely, precisely," Greenspan replied. "You know, that's precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well." Greenspan admitted fault in opposing regulation of derivatives and acknowledged that financial institutions didn't protect shareholders and investments as well as he expected.
Matt Taibbi described the Greenspan put and its bad consequences saying: "every time the banks blew up a speculative bubble, they could go back to the Fed and borrow money at zero or one or two percent, and then start the game all over", thereby making it "almost impossible" for the banks to lose money. He also called Greenspan a "classic con man" who, through political savvy, "flattered and bullshitted his way up the Matterhorn of American power and... jacked himself off to the attention of Wall Street for 20 consecutive years."
The failure of Mt. Gox is a inevitable consequence of an unregulated financial market. Bank failures were common in the U.S. from it's founding until modern baking regulation started after the Great Depression, when they became uncommon. This situation was stable until the Reagan Revolution, and steady removal of the previously working regulatory regime.
Greenspan is the poster child for the catastrophic effects of delusional right wing economic thinking, and the 2008 crash along with the current debt of the U.S. are the legacy. The world economy is still recovering from that disaster, and no one can say how long it will take for a full recovery. Note that the so called recovery of the financial markets is simply an extension of the policies that lead to the crash in the first place. What Matt Taibbi described is still happening: "they could go back to the Fed and borrow money at zero or one or two percent".
Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are the high tech realization of delusional right wing economic thinking. They are ideologically founded on the idea of avoiding government economic oversight. Lack of regulation inevitably leads to a boom/bust cycle and poisons economic growth
Slashdot Mirror
This shows the number of casualties as as per country as a circular area.
This shows maps the casualties to the relative size of the country. This makes it hard to figure out exactly which country is hurting the most, but it dramatically shows how bad some places have it compared to the rest of the world. Anyone who is not shocked by seeing this is a psychopathic personality type.
The 30% "tax" that Apple charges at the App Store is immune to market forces. It makes no difference what sells or how much, Apple gets a phenomenal markup. It's all reward, no risk. When this happens at a large scale it means that capitalism is dead, and all the remains is monopoly.
And before the ideological right zombies start chanting "free market" in unison, remember that there is a duopoly: Android and IOS. Now that Blackberry is toast (pun intended), there is only a choice between a closed overly priced ecosystem and an anarchistic platform that is known to be insecure. I don't have the reference at hand, but someone at Google recently stated that security is not guaranteed for Android. Google washes their hands, and the phone providers (another tribe of monopolists) see no need to put any money into customer protection. The big cellular providers want it to be a felony to jailbreak your smartphone. They literally want to threaten users in jail for doing their own patches, so good luck on fixing that security breach on your own. Capitalism at it's best. A real "free market".
Amazon is also a real piece of work. Their business model is all about not paying any tax to anybody anywhere anytime. See post that proceeds this about them owing the French government $1 Billion.
The inequality between the taxation of brick and mortar stores and Amazon gives them a huge competitive advantage. The playing field is a level as a cliff. Amazon is at the top, their competitors are at the bottom and Amazon getd rocks for free to drop off the cliff.
Amazon also has the publishers in a headlock. They dictate how much the publishers can charge before the Amazon markup. They also demand, and get, exclusivity on Kindle over other platforms.
Both Amazon and Apple engage in the kind of "free market capitalism" that made the Soprano's famous: pay us or you won't be around very much longer. They have the same relationship with the market that a pig farmer has to his pigs. The pigs have very little say in the matter.
Over here in the real world, "private industry" acts like the United Launch Alliance: an intrenched monopoly with zero incentive to bring down launch costs. The same for the other long time players, like ArianeSpace and the Russians.
The only disruption to this cozy international cartel is SpaceX and the like. Note that these are all privately funded by technocrats who made huge fortunes in software. No one had to go out and raise money for these ventures. The investors are the founders, and they have very deep pockets.
It is impossible to raise money for this kind of business in capital markets because it's easier and more profitable to make money the old fashioned way: steal it.
Just look at the example of the FCC deciding to squash net neutrality. Hire regulators via the revolving door, pay out some bribe/campaign contributions, get legislation that you wrote passed as laws: instant profit!!! Why waste time and money on something as iffy as outer space?
So real innovation and risk taking is not the product of "private industry", it's a hobby of a few individuals who succeeded in the past. They could have as easily bought a major league sports franchise like Mark Cuban.
Is it likely that the next generation of successful entrepreneurs will have the space bug? Because if they don't then the only way we'll get to Mars, or make use of space resources is through governments. Any near term profit in space comes from satellites at synchronous orbit or below. No profit or incentive for long term capital investment any further out.
The only other reason to go is nationalism. That's why the Chinese are going to the moon. The US will opt out because none of the entrenched "private industry" players see sufficient guaranteed profit in their pig trough. It's so much easier to raise prices for Netflicks.
In radio this is called Payola where record companies pay to get their records played. It's illegal. There were congressional hearings about it in the 50's and 60's. It continues to this day.
Now the "business model" of paying for content delivery is legal. And there is no limit on campaign spending. Guess what will happen in the next election?
No major news outlet will report when news conglomerates up their rates for political programming so only big players will be able to afford airtime. Remember cable/broadcast/newspapers are now single corporate entities, and money talks.
How long will it take for differential pricing to drive Al Jazeera off the air? Remember they're just a bunch of terrorists! The same for RT (Russian Television) and any non-US centric new outlets as well. I expect NHK will be OK because they will self censor perceived criticism.
Expect the political programming on PBS to disappear as well. Remember that they criticize Corporate America, and it's Bad for Business. Don't worry, you'll get to keep Nature, NOVA and Antique Roadshow. Keep sucking on that pacifier.
Ever notice that PBS NOVA gets "major funding" from the Kock (pronounced COCK) brothers? When was the last time NOVA did a program on global climate change? Sound of crickets...
Welcome to Plutocratic America. No democracy, no free press, no capitalism. Nothing to see here, just move along.
Although it's hard to tell from dueling press releases, it appears that PETMAN is more sophisticated and moves much more autonomously then Porton Man. I assume that it is also a lot more expensive.
http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/stretch.html
The CDC6600 a more advanced form in 1964.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-order_execution
From the same source:
Even if this is true, the NSA will figure out a way to make it insecure. Under the pretense of security they insure that the ability to do evil things is built in to all communication technology.
This example shows how low they will go to defraud their users. Just how many cable subscribers are using non-HDTV sets? This is obviously their lowest tier customer class, so it is likely that they are making the least amount of profit from these users. That is why they picked this group to gouge.
There no real relationship between what they charge and what the delivery cost is. The content charges are just as artificial. The only competition is how the profits from the overpriced service is divided up. The only looser is the customer.
This situation is normal when there is no real competition. It's identical to the telcos and the banks and the pharmaceutical companies and ...
No capitalism here, just move along.
So you want to argue this at the level of personal attacks? No problem.
Imagine that there was no reactor at Fukushima and there was a "freak tsunami". Would there be a radioactive water storage nightmare?
Your statement is meaningless because it is complete nonsense. In the real world the tsunami happened and there have been dramatic consequences. Putting the blame on the "anti-nuke community" verges on delusional thinking.
Are your suggesting that the water be dumped into the ocean? That would destroy an even larger area of the Japanese seafood industry. It would also violate numerous international treaties.
Since you seem to have all the answers, what's your solution? I'm sure that you response will be better then anyone in Japan or the international community has come up with so far, and it will be immediately adopted. I can't wait!
Do you keep your KKK robes hung up in the closet where they won't get wrinkled but someone might see them, or do you fold them in a drawer where they are out of sight but you have to iron them before you go out to a cross burning?
Since this is so outrageous, I suggest that you immediately give up using anything with a computer. No laptop, pads, desktop or smartphone. Get off the internet entirely. No GPS. No ATM or banking. No electricity, because all electric power generation uses evil closed source hardware.
In fact, the only way you can live and be free of all the closed source hardware is to go and live in the woods like Ted Kaczynski. I hope you do so, because then there would be one less self obsessed moron on Slashdot.
Over twenty years ago there were computers that hardware and software that were designed to work together. At least two of these systems had extra tag bits in memory that defined the memory contents. Specifically I am talking about Symbolics Lisp Machines and Burroughs Large Systems that natively ran Algol. I worked on both of these systems and they were intrinsically more reliable then any systems I know of today.
Because of the tagged memory they had hardware protection against a large class of errors that current systems encounter all the time. It was possible to find the bugs and eliminate them so they did not re-occur. It also protected against having undetected errors, which is a true nightmare.
Having hardware and software designed at the same time results in a better product. This is even more significant when the system is designed to run a specific high level language. Everything has less bugs.
Heck, Cray machines had ECC memory: SECDED. Single Error Correction, Double Error Detection. They needed it, because memory was not so reliable as today, but now you are lucky to just have a parity bit. All this work is going on, and no one has a clue if there are bad results or not.
As an industry we have gone backwards. That's not an opinion, it's an observation.
The US government is for sale, and the highest bidders get what they pay for. You buy enough legislation (and legislators) and you can make anything legal.
Want to make more money in the short run by gutting STEM employment and destroying US based intellectual capitial? No problem! (Just look at IBM).
Want to pay no US taxes while you plaster US flags on your equipment? You don't even have to make the flags in the US! (Caterpillar, a proud US giant.)
It really is equal opportunity at work. You don't even have to be a US company to buy what you want.
Stop whining, it's unpatriotic. You obviously don't love the US if you can't afford to buy you own slice of the American Dream. Tata Consultancy Services is clearly a much more important American Enterprise then any of the mere citizens who do useless things like live, vote and pay taxes in the US.
It's not like there is a "Government of the People, by the People and For the People" or any other nonsense like that.
Just saying...
I know this sounds like a fantasy to many younger Slashdot readers, but it really did happen. Besides "capitalism" there were other obsolete ideas like "privacy", "justice", "voting rights", "free press" and "free travel". I'd encourage you to look this up, but then you might get on a list where suddenly you couldn't get on an airplane and they would never tell you why and you could never get off the list.
To a significant extent, all the practices that make a workable environment were abandoned for the internet. It's likely that the learning curve problem you are experiencing is a reflection how bad things have become for coders.
Take languages. With the possible exception of Python, all the languages associated with web development have glaring flaws. PHP is conceivably the worst language to ever gain broad acceptance. JavaScript does objects wrong and has evil lexical scoping rules. You have to be very careful or you can step on an assumption made by object in a library that you don't even know was loaded.
Thoughtful system design has been replaced by object oriented programming. The failed assumption is that if you have an object model, you must be doing a good job. This is a prime example of magical thinking. Just because it's all objects does not mean that it was done right. (I'm talking about you, Java).
Then there are the "non-standard" standards. The poster child is HTML in the browser. To reach the full user base web pages must code for multiple incompatible implementations. Chalk up a lot of this to Microsoft, but even they had a lot of help creating the garbage dump called web standards.
Frameworks take the mindset of spaghetti code, force it on the coder and then claim that they are really great. Take Cake/PHP. Using it is the equivalent of chewing on a mixture of crushed glass and push pins. It only seem useful if you have been swimming in the cesspit of PHP.
To be fair, I must say that JQuery is one of the best examples of software out there. I demonstrates that even given a flawed language like JavaScript, and the snake pit of inconsistent DOM implementations, elegant and useful software is possible. It's just too bad that there are very few tools that do such a good job.
So don't blame yourself. You are as smart and capable as you ever were, it's the work environment that has become degraded. If you come to grips with the current crop of shoddy software you can achieve your ends. A more fundamental issue is if you want to work in such a terrible situation. After having the experience of being productive, it's a real let down to experience using such a crap set of tools.
If you are not a member of one of various elites, you have no expectation of privacy, protection under the law, or economic security.
If you are a wealthy investor, top tier business executive, elected to a nationwide office, or famous and rich for any reason, your wealth and position will be protected by the economic, political, and military might of the US. Note: entertainers, particularly pro-athletes and popular musicians, can be dropped at any time. Heavily right wing affiliation will keep you in good standing. See Steven Seagal and Ted Nugent for examples.
The only real crime is interfering with a member of the elite. You can have every economic transaction, phone call, medical record, license plate tracking data and email in a secret database, but if anyone spies on a Member of Congress heads will roll, bureaucrats will loose their jobs and institutional budgets will be slashed.
Suck it up. You count for nothing.
Let's use a car analogy: suppose that you buy gas at the same station that Google execs do. They get charged the rate that the gas costs at the refinery, and you pay retail. Their gas is 25% cheaper (made up value) then yours. You have to pay for shipping costs, infrastructure costs for the service station (electricity, upkeep), the salaries of everyone involved between the refinery and the pump, etc. All that stuff has to be paid for to get the gas to the pump, so you are subsidizing their gas.
Except it's not a private company selling the gas, it's government services paid for by your taxes.
Look at Eric Schmidt's compensation at Google.
So you think it's fine to use tax money to make it cheaper for a guy worth $7 Billion to fly his private jet. What the hell is wrong with you?
Sharks with lasers on their heads is so 20th century.
Who says that government is inefficient?
It will also interfere with their plan to teach that the Earth is a the center of the universe, and the eventual mandate to make it official policy that the world is flat.
That will put the godless atheists in their place: in the lower left corner of the flat world, where the climate is terrible and all the icky stuff collects at the bottom.
Your not so humorous bullshit comment falls into the category of "not even wrong".
It's a common pattern. Someone has a dark secret and they end up persecuting those who have the same impulses. They simultaneously engage in behavior they see as evil while doing the same thing themselves. It's why we continuously hear about virulent ant-gay politicians and religious leaders who have a secret gay life. Just look for the people who are screaming loudly about a specific sin, and there you will find a greater then average concentration of sinners.
Then you have to prove that you can be trusted to dive/pilot a flying car.
Given how the vast majority of people drive, almost no one passes the second test.
I'm not claiming that I do either. I also know that I should not ride a motorcycle because I don't have the right kind of attention for it.
There are a lot of people these days, many of them readers of Slashdot, who espouse a belief system with a lot of delusional features: Libertarianism. This position, along with the similar political belief of the U.S. Republican Party, the British Torries and Canadian Conservatives share common beliefs. One prominent belief is that all government regulation of business is always evil. They are particularly adamant that financial regulation is always destructive.
An epic recent example is the admission by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who is self described as "lifelong libertarian Republican".
The failure of Mt. Gox is a inevitable consequence of an unregulated financial market. Bank failures were common in the U.S. from it's founding until modern baking regulation started after the Great Depression, when they became uncommon. This situation was stable until the Reagan Revolution, and steady removal of the previously working regulatory regime.
Greenspan is the poster child for the catastrophic effects of delusional right wing economic thinking, and the 2008 crash along with the current debt of the U.S. are the legacy. The world economy is still recovering from that disaster, and no one can say how long it will take for a full recovery. Note that the so called recovery of the financial markets is simply an extension of the policies that lead to the crash in the first place. What Matt Taibbi described is still happening: "they could go back to the Fed and borrow money at zero or one or two percent".
Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are the high tech realization of delusional right wing economic thinking. They are ideologically founded on the idea of avoiding government economic oversight. Lack of regulation inevitably leads to a boom/bust cycle and poisons economic growth