That's a lie that's told over and over again to justify massive wealth inequity. But after the first couple of million, you've got enough to live a very comfortable life, and there's no relationship between comfort and a desire to create. In fact, quite the opposite is true: It's adversity that is the mother of invention.
And here I thought adversity made you get a second job at McDonald's to pay your rent because your immediate needs are so precarious that you can't afford to think about the long run. Or at work, the people running from one near-disaster to the next don't ever get around to fixing the causes because they're too busy putting out fires. Sure poor people do get creative at stretching their dollars, but rich people get creative at finding ways to make their life more convenient, pleasurable or exotic. For example I'm pretty sure the reasons GPUs are where they are today is because I and many other gamers have spent lots of money on graphics card for nothing other than our pixel-pushing pleasure. Our comfort - the fact that we got time to waste playing video games and the money to pay for it - drove that innovation, not our adversity.
Who says they "can't survive without nicotine" except you? If the only requirement is that they take one several times a day, then large parts of the workforce are coffee addicts. A smoker isn't intoxicated like an alcoholic is any more than the coffee drinkers. Harmful to the body? Yeah sure, and if you're snacking chocolate all day that probably is too but that's not a firing reason. Yes, they have to take a break because these days they're chased out of the building but try checking how much goof off time other people have, many non-smokers are equally or less productive than the smokers.
The whole mess starts to make sense when you realize the country is being run by a bunch of non professionals. How many actual economist or even accounts are in Congress and they handle all the money! Do you know the most common profession Congressmen come out of? The law as in lawyers.
Congress is the legislative branch of the government, they make laws. Lawyers are professionals in the field of law. What else should they be experts in? If a Congressman was an expert in medicine, what should he do when the issue is transportation or defense or criminal law or whatever else - abstain 95% of the time? If they're not getting good input on what laws are needed, then that's the problem not expecting them to be masters in whatever field is up for debate. Being an extremely skilled doctor doesn't actually mean you're qualified to organize a health care system either, there's a completely different set of skills needed to organize the treatment of patients than knowing how to personally diagnose and treat a single patient.
As for accountants, they're excellent at keeping track of your money but they're not the people who make investment decisions. They haven't got a clue what medical value something has until you convert that into dollars. Now put a doctor, an accountant and hopefully a hospital manager in the same room then you can start making some progress. No matter how you twist it you're probably going to need a multi-disciplinary team to work out good solutions and if it has to be passed up to a single person then the common denominator in all the things that are passed to Congress is that they're about the law. Besides careful what you wish for, before you have experts on intellectual property law making all the decisions on intellectual property law and ex-DEA officers making drug laws. It's not always expertise that is called for.
And no, enterprise doesn't favor cheaper per GB over faster and quieter, they prefer the solution which provides the best return on investment. If a big company can get more work done in a shorter amount of time for less money outside of the IT cost, they're going to buy a solid state solution.
Actually, most enterprises seem to suffer from Not My Budget(TM) syndrome. I've wasted many hours on storage/memory/network/software issues because there's budget for a $150/hour consultant spending three hours working around a problem but not a $100 upgrade to solve it. It's like telling a carpenter to work without power tools, sure he can but don't blame him when things go slooooooooooooow.
if you're feeding an entire city block off a single access point, you've got several dozen people contending for that same chunk of bandwidth
Not to mention coverage issues, try asking someone who's installed wireless in a hotel how hard it is to get good coverage to every room. You will also have new pockets of interference and poor coverage every time someone adds their own AP for their non-WiFi Internet service. And even if the coverage is good, the stronger the signal the lower level of output does your mobile device require to operate which means longer battery life. That is very noticeable on a cell phone when I'm in the city center with full signal compared to being on the edge of coverage and my cell phone is shouting at max power to be heard. There's no such thing as a too strong wireless signal, "spot" service that reaches only the devices it needs with a high localized signal strength is the ideal for the home. On the go there's 3G/LTE+++ for different needs.
Depends on who "most" is. Many business users will never use up 120GB, even with Windows+WinSXS eating 20-30 of them. A lot of people just aren't very media heavy, they do email and facebook and some digicam photos but nothing to fill a disk. Just like many people that run Steam for games don't actually have very good gaming cards or high resolution monitors - just check the Steam survey. Even Intel and their IGPs have 10%+ market share. Having a cheap bulk drive is no problem though, if you're not in a single-slot laptop.
My electricity is a regulated utility, but I still pay by the kWh. That's kilowatt hour, in case the US has some weird non-metric unit. Why should the Internet be any different? I want fast burst speed when I'm downloading 10GB from Steam, but I don't need it 24x7 just like I want my 2000W stove to work when I need it but most of the time I only have a 10W light bulb on. Doing some quick math I could download about 18.5 TB in a month, I think even in my craziest month I was at less than 5% of that. If they had a gigabyte rollover like many Usenet servers have then on average maybe 1-2%. I wouldn't mind faster burst speed, gigabit Internet when I need it would be great even if the cap stayed the same. But without any caps you have a no-limit situation where somebody could decide that transferring 300TB in a month is okay.
I got a few certifications, but they only involved showing up to a test. Nobody trained me for them, it was all self-study materials like books and prep exams along with hands-on experimentation and googling. By training I'm thinking courses or classes on how to do things, in my experience I usually get there faster on my own since I can skip all the things I do understand and jump right into the things I don't. Some kinds of training are useful though, but usually not the hard technological subjects. Usually the computer is brutally honest in its feedback that what you wrote is a piece of trash and won't run or at least won't do what you wanted it to. Then you figure it out until you get it right...
'If a civilization wants to hide, it's certainly possible to hide,' says Wright, 'but it requires massive amounts of deliberate engineering across an entire civilization.'"
If a civilization with a Dyson sphere has any reason to hide, it's probably for a civilization with interstellar flight and then I'd think you'd quite easily find the black spot. Unless you assume they got a system to route or absorb/emit starlight from one side of the sphere to the other. But since we're far into science fiction land already, why not...
If you can't tell, I'm getting at a completely post-labor society here, which is probably still quite a ways off, but not outside the realm of thinking.
Not as long as people want to be serviced by other people, until people want to stick their head into a hair cutting machine and have beer served by a robot we'll still need hair dressers and waiters so we can't all be these "post-labor" people. What may happen though is that the value of labor relative to the value of money diminishes, we're still offering services to each other but the 1%ers become ridiculously rich. They can have whatever products or services they want from us and it costs them "nothing" or reasonably close enough and even high end workers like doctors or engineers would just be making peanuts, oh sure you'll still beat the guy working at McDonald's but it'd be like two Africans living on $1 and $2/day comparing salaries to them. Sure you make double what the other guy does, but they're still two poor people.
If I had to eat as little food as models usually do, I'd also spent forever deciding what I'd use that tiny little quota on. You don't have many ounces of fat on your body before you're a "plus size" model.
I don't, for lunch anyway... but that's because I usually buy lunch at work so it's either a hot dish or some kind of sandwich or some kind of salad with variation within each of those three. Even if I make lunch packs myself I usually rotate what's on them as I empty packages. Can't really comment on breakfast since I usually skip it.
Your average 8 character lower/upper/0-9 password has ~48 bits of crypto strength, a few characters give or take won't change that. And that's plenty if say someone is trying to hack a slashdot account, I'm sure they'd notice 2^48 log-on attempts. But if they can get their hands on the encrypted password database then it's far too easy to recover the password. The longer the password, the fewer of them are you likely to remember and the more you're likely to reuse them so you're probably actually making things worse. Use a proper password hash with salting and it's practically unrecoverable.
It's never really a capacity issue. With enough money you can always build new fabs or you can have someone else produce for you.
I think you're forgetting how long the pipeline is between building a fab and it coming operational. You have to commit long before you know what your and the competitor's chips will be like, if you gamble that your next CPU line is a smashing hit and massively increase capacity but you're wrong you can have a company-killing loss on your hands. Sure the risk is spread a little for manufacturing companies but they too won't build massive new capacity without massive commitments. I doubt that within any single architecture AMD could increase their market share with more than half. So if they're at 20%, with a smashing hit I think they're at most 30%. Two in a row and 45%. If they go for the hat trick then 67%. But then AMD can't have any Bulldozers and Intel can't have any Core 2s.
I think you're putting the cart before the horse here, AMD isn't lowering prices to give you a great deal they're lowering prices because consumers don't think it's worth the price AMD is asking for. Right now AMD doesn't have a CPU they can charge $200+ for except their server line Opterons. That's not good for AMD and in the long run it's not good for the consumers either. Their APUs are quite okay but I think AMD is setting themselves up for a squeeze as Intel and ARM clash in battle for domination of the new mobile devices, the competition there is going to be intense.
Not entirely true. Good security is based on 3 things:
- something only you have (your graphics card, a physical key)
- something only you know (a password)
- something only you are (biometrics, typing patterns)
Good authentication is based on 3 things. Good security depends on a lot more, like not getting hacked so they can go crazy with your credentials. My online bank uses two-factor authentication for each unknown/big transfer so the integrity of my bank account is pretty good, but pretty much all confidentiality is out the window if they can piggyback on your connection and if the security is only at the gate then the rest too. I'm not concerned about my authentication tokens, they're fairly safe. It's the devices I input them to that worry me.
Nice, but how bout correlation is a math formula, on the other hand causation has a ten page philosophical wikipedia page and even though Hume died like 300 years ago this year people are still arguing about it, with the exception that on the internet everyone agrees correlation isn't it, which I guess is at least some progress.
The reason causation has a ten page philosophical page is that on the macro scale everything is a result of and happen in conjunction with a gazillion butterfly effects that were either present or absent, in fact the physical article is quite short. Imagine for a murder every detail that happened in both the murderer's and victim's life who lead them there, they're all causally necessary but we put the blame on the killer. Not the policeman who forgot his bulletproof west at home or the kids who teased the murderer in third grade or the parents for conceiving him. It tries to give weight and quality to those causes that depends on the state of mind, say attempted arson is a lot more "dominating" relative to poor fire safety than an accident even if the fire is physically identical. And it all depends on how well the person could predict or control the chain of effects set in motion.
Causality is easy. Causal responsibility - which by the way is not just about assigning blame, but also things like credit - is very hard. For example, you are hanging off a cliff and another person clings to you but you can't hold on. Either you kick him off so he falls to his death or you both fall to your deaths. In no case is there a question of physical cause and effect, but would you philosophically cause his death by kicking him off or was he dead either way? What if you can hold on another minute, is that murder? Five minutes? Fifty years? I mean he's human, he's eventually going to die - you're not really changing the outcome. What if you're 100% sure you can pull yourself up, but only 99,9% sure you'll both fall to your deaths and a 0,1% chance that you through superhuman strength will pull you both up? It's hard not to get philosophical.
I think you've drawing the conclusion the wrong way, because we have a vague idea of the causal relationship the correlation is collaborative evidence. There's lots and lots of things that correlate that my mind dismisses because it's absurd or there's obviously an underlying cause for it. I would say my investigation of the missing cookies would be far more causal - "Why are they gone? Probably because someone has eaten them. Who likes cookies? Who had access to the cookies? Who do I know has been in their presence recently?" Or as a prosecutor would say it: Motive, means and opportunity. I'd not go into any random correlation, like it was sunny outside when the cookies were here, now it's night and they're gone. Because even though it's clearly correlated, it's absurd that the sunset stole my cookies.
Yeah, because we'll make a mesh wireless network between the US, Europe and Australia, I don't foresee any problems there. Or even between big cities with a lot of nothing in between. Why reinvent the physical layer? If you got Internet, you can connect to any kind of overlay network, sort of like a global VPN. Or if you've seen Inception, like an Internet inside the Internet. Unless the outlaw that too, but then you're already living in a oppressive regime and got bigger issues than Internet regulation.
1) If your software has been released to the public (i.e. because you released it to the public) the assumption is that you want others to use it. Elsewise, keep it on your hard drive and stop polluting sourceforge. Too many people it seems have the mentality that they can just share their own dog food and others will want to lick the bowl. The thought process is basically "well, I can't sell this, but if I just give it away, maybe it'll make me famous and lead to something big." It's just a really lazy form of greed and opportunism, and thank goodness it doesn't work.
By writing the code you've done all the work and throwing it out there costs nothing, in case someone finds it useful. Nothing more was implied nor guaranteed, did a rotten piece of source code you got from Sourceforge steal your girlfriend or run over your dog or something?
If you're not interested in docs, good for you, move along, the article does not apply to you as a reader of docs, only as a producer of code that nobody else wants to use.
Fair enough, if you're sure it's the documentation and not an awkward interface to poor code - I'd probably keep working on those two. Well working interfaces calling good code gets used, while a turd is still a turd even if you document it.
Do your best to keep people happy, keep them wanting to come to work every day, and just stoically accept the fact that over half the team really doesn't give a shit outside "get the job done, get paid".
And most the other half doesn't give a shit outside "get the job done well, get a pay raise or a promotion". Seriously most people are at work for the money, either money now or money later. The rest is about creating intangible benefits that aren't easy to compare to other companies, if it was only paychecks it'd be a cutthroat transparent market. But if you make it so employees like their job including all the team building and other benefits a lot of them will stay on because they don't know if they'll like their next one or not. It's always hard to leave a job where you feel well, no matter how much greener the pastures look on the other side of the fence.
The first assumption is that you're actually writing it for somebody else and not yourself. In many cases if you've scratched your own itch, then you're happy and any comments are notes to self, not documentation for others. The second assumption is that you could, that it's only a lack of willpower. To many people coding a piece of software makes the logic of it so apparently obvious that they don't understand why it needs documentation, at least not any that's useful to anyone with a black box understanding of the code. The third assumption is that they're not once bitten, twice shy from useless or even misleading documentation and just decided that the code is the ultimate truth of what the code does and don't want to make any external document that won't stay in sync.
That would describe what you did, but not how you did it in neither quality or effort. If you're on a scrum or scrummish team you probably already have this in your daily stand-up, we actually do it sitting down but there's a round around the table on what you did get done, will be doing and any issues/assistance you might need. That's entirely for productivity reasons though, not motivating people that aren't pulling their share.
Obviously there are a lot of people who won't get any kind of funding and that's perfectly normal, it'd be a pretty strange world if everyone got the money they asked for. That doesn't say much about the relative merits of crowdfunding versus investor funding.
Yes, they absolutely could, and did. A five-second delay was added when the guy got out of his car (why then and not before, and why it wasn't a one-minute delay, I don't know)
As I understand it a five second delay has become the de facto delay for all "live" events to stop swearing (bleeping), wardrobe malfunctions, flashers and whatever else would hurt America's sensibilities. The reason it's not more than 5 seconds is obvious for sports games - if it was a minute other people would get the result on texts and blogs and radio ruining it for the people watching. Okay maybe in this case a minute would have been fine but I understand why they didn't make it harder than delay/no delay. And they even managed to screw that up....
Slashdot Mirror
That's a lie that's told over and over again to justify massive wealth inequity. But after the first couple of million, you've got enough to live a very comfortable life, and there's no relationship between comfort and a desire to create. In fact, quite the opposite is true: It's adversity that is the mother of invention.
And here I thought adversity made you get a second job at McDonald's to pay your rent because your immediate needs are so precarious that you can't afford to think about the long run. Or at work, the people running from one near-disaster to the next don't ever get around to fixing the causes because they're too busy putting out fires. Sure poor people do get creative at stretching their dollars, but rich people get creative at finding ways to make their life more convenient, pleasurable or exotic. For example I'm pretty sure the reasons GPUs are where they are today is because I and many other gamers have spent lots of money on graphics card for nothing other than our pixel-pushing pleasure. Our comfort - the fact that we got time to waste playing video games and the money to pay for it - drove that innovation, not our adversity.
Who says they "can't survive without nicotine" except you? If the only requirement is that they take one several times a day, then large parts of the workforce are coffee addicts. A smoker isn't intoxicated like an alcoholic is any more than the coffee drinkers. Harmful to the body? Yeah sure, and if you're snacking chocolate all day that probably is too but that's not a firing reason. Yes, they have to take a break because these days they're chased out of the building but try checking how much goof off time other people have, many non-smokers are equally or less productive than the smokers.
The whole mess starts to make sense when you realize the country is being run by a bunch of non professionals. How many actual economist or even accounts are in Congress and they handle all the money! Do you know the most common profession Congressmen come out of? The law as in lawyers.
Congress is the legislative branch of the government, they make laws. Lawyers are professionals in the field of law. What else should they be experts in? If a Congressman was an expert in medicine, what should he do when the issue is transportation or defense or criminal law or whatever else - abstain 95% of the time? If they're not getting good input on what laws are needed, then that's the problem not expecting them to be masters in whatever field is up for debate. Being an extremely skilled doctor doesn't actually mean you're qualified to organize a health care system either, there's a completely different set of skills needed to organize the treatment of patients than knowing how to personally diagnose and treat a single patient.
As for accountants, they're excellent at keeping track of your money but they're not the people who make investment decisions. They haven't got a clue what medical value something has until you convert that into dollars. Now put a doctor, an accountant and hopefully a hospital manager in the same room then you can start making some progress. No matter how you twist it you're probably going to need a multi-disciplinary team to work out good solutions and if it has to be passed up to a single person then the common denominator in all the things that are passed to Congress is that they're about the law. Besides careful what you wish for, before you have experts on intellectual property law making all the decisions on intellectual property law and ex-DEA officers making drug laws. It's not always expertise that is called for.
And no, enterprise doesn't favor cheaper per GB over faster and quieter, they prefer the solution which provides the best return on investment. If a big company can get more work done in a shorter amount of time for less money outside of the IT cost, they're going to buy a solid state solution.
Actually, most enterprises seem to suffer from Not My Budget(TM) syndrome. I've wasted many hours on storage/memory/network/software issues because there's budget for a $150/hour consultant spending three hours working around a problem but not a $100 upgrade to solve it. It's like telling a carpenter to work without power tools, sure he can but don't blame him when things go slooooooooooooow.
if you're feeding an entire city block off a single access point, you've got several dozen people contending for that same chunk of bandwidth
Not to mention coverage issues, try asking someone who's installed wireless in a hotel how hard it is to get good coverage to every room. You will also have new pockets of interference and poor coverage every time someone adds their own AP for their non-WiFi Internet service. And even if the coverage is good, the stronger the signal the lower level of output does your mobile device require to operate which means longer battery life. That is very noticeable on a cell phone when I'm in the city center with full signal compared to being on the edge of coverage and my cell phone is shouting at max power to be heard. There's no such thing as a too strong wireless signal, "spot" service that reaches only the devices it needs with a high localized signal strength is the ideal for the home. On the go there's 3G/LTE+++ for different needs.
Depends on who "most" is. Many business users will never use up 120GB, even with Windows+WinSXS eating 20-30 of them. A lot of people just aren't very media heavy, they do email and facebook and some digicam photos but nothing to fill a disk. Just like many people that run Steam for games don't actually have very good gaming cards or high resolution monitors - just check the Steam survey. Even Intel and their IGPs have 10%+ market share. Having a cheap bulk drive is no problem though, if you're not in a single-slot laptop.
It needs to be regulated like a public utility.
My electricity is a regulated utility, but I still pay by the kWh. That's kilowatt hour, in case the US has some weird non-metric unit. Why should the Internet be any different? I want fast burst speed when I'm downloading 10GB from Steam, but I don't need it 24x7 just like I want my 2000W stove to work when I need it but most of the time I only have a 10W light bulb on. Doing some quick math I could download about 18.5 TB in a month, I think even in my craziest month I was at less than 5% of that. If they had a gigabyte rollover like many Usenet servers have then on average maybe 1-2%. I wouldn't mind faster burst speed, gigabit Internet when I need it would be great even if the cap stayed the same. But without any caps you have a no-limit situation where somebody could decide that transferring 300TB in a month is okay.
I got a few certifications, but they only involved showing up to a test. Nobody trained me for them, it was all self-study materials like books and prep exams along with hands-on experimentation and googling. By training I'm thinking courses or classes on how to do things, in my experience I usually get there faster on my own since I can skip all the things I do understand and jump right into the things I don't. Some kinds of training are useful though, but usually not the hard technological subjects. Usually the computer is brutally honest in its feedback that what you wrote is a piece of trash and won't run or at least won't do what you wanted it to. Then you figure it out until you get it right...
'If a civilization wants to hide, it's certainly possible to hide,' says Wright, 'but it requires massive amounts of deliberate engineering across an entire civilization.'"
If a civilization with a Dyson sphere has any reason to hide, it's probably for a civilization with interstellar flight and then I'd think you'd quite easily find the black spot. Unless you assume they got a system to route or absorb/emit starlight from one side of the sphere to the other. But since we're far into science fiction land already, why not...
If you can't tell, I'm getting at a completely post-labor society here, which is probably still quite a ways off, but not outside the realm of thinking.
Not as long as people want to be serviced by other people, until people want to stick their head into a hair cutting machine and have beer served by a robot we'll still need hair dressers and waiters so we can't all be these "post-labor" people. What may happen though is that the value of labor relative to the value of money diminishes, we're still offering services to each other but the 1%ers become ridiculously rich. They can have whatever products or services they want from us and it costs them "nothing" or reasonably close enough and even high end workers like doctors or engineers would just be making peanuts, oh sure you'll still beat the guy working at McDonald's but it'd be like two Africans living on $1 and $2/day comparing salaries to them. Sure you make double what the other guy does, but they're still two poor people.
If I had to eat as little food as models usually do, I'd also spent forever deciding what I'd use that tiny little quota on. You don't have many ounces of fat on your body before you're a "plus size" model.
I don't, for lunch anyway... but that's because I usually buy lunch at work so it's either a hot dish or some kind of sandwich or some kind of salad with variation within each of those three. Even if I make lunch packs myself I usually rotate what's on them as I empty packages. Can't really comment on breakfast since I usually skip it.
Your average 8 character lower/upper/0-9 password has ~48 bits of crypto strength, a few characters give or take won't change that. And that's plenty if say someone is trying to hack a slashdot account, I'm sure they'd notice 2^48 log-on attempts. But if they can get their hands on the encrypted password database then it's far too easy to recover the password. The longer the password, the fewer of them are you likely to remember and the more you're likely to reuse them so you're probably actually making things worse. Use a proper password hash with salting and it's practically unrecoverable.
It's never really a capacity issue. With enough money you can always build new fabs or you can have someone else produce for you.
I think you're forgetting how long the pipeline is between building a fab and it coming operational. You have to commit long before you know what your and the competitor's chips will be like, if you gamble that your next CPU line is a smashing hit and massively increase capacity but you're wrong you can have a company-killing loss on your hands. Sure the risk is spread a little for manufacturing companies but they too won't build massive new capacity without massive commitments. I doubt that within any single architecture AMD could increase their market share with more than half. So if they're at 20%, with a smashing hit I think they're at most 30%. Two in a row and 45%. If they go for the hat trick then 67%. But then AMD can't have any Bulldozers and Intel can't have any Core 2s.
I think you're putting the cart before the horse here, AMD isn't lowering prices to give you a great deal they're lowering prices because consumers don't think it's worth the price AMD is asking for. Right now AMD doesn't have a CPU they can charge $200+ for except their server line Opterons. That's not good for AMD and in the long run it's not good for the consumers either. Their APUs are quite okay but I think AMD is setting themselves up for a squeeze as Intel and ARM clash in battle for domination of the new mobile devices, the competition there is going to be intense.
Not entirely true. Good security is based on 3 things:
- something only you have (your graphics card, a physical key)
- something only you know (a password)
- something only you are (biometrics, typing patterns)
Good authentication is based on 3 things. Good security depends on a lot more, like not getting hacked so they can go crazy with your credentials. My online bank uses two-factor authentication for each unknown/big transfer so the integrity of my bank account is pretty good, but pretty much all confidentiality is out the window if they can piggyback on your connection and if the security is only at the gate then the rest too. I'm not concerned about my authentication tokens, they're fairly safe. It's the devices I input them to that worry me.
Nice, but how bout correlation is a math formula, on the other hand causation has a ten page philosophical wikipedia page and even though Hume died like 300 years ago this year people are still arguing about it, with the exception that on the internet everyone agrees correlation isn't it, which I guess is at least some progress.
The reason causation has a ten page philosophical page is that on the macro scale everything is a result of and happen in conjunction with a gazillion butterfly effects that were either present or absent, in fact the physical article is quite short. Imagine for a murder every detail that happened in both the murderer's and victim's life who lead them there, they're all causally necessary but we put the blame on the killer. Not the policeman who forgot his bulletproof west at home or the kids who teased the murderer in third grade or the parents for conceiving him. It tries to give weight and quality to those causes that depends on the state of mind, say attempted arson is a lot more "dominating" relative to poor fire safety than an accident even if the fire is physically identical. And it all depends on how well the person could predict or control the chain of effects set in motion.
Causality is easy. Causal responsibility - which by the way is not just about assigning blame, but also things like credit - is very hard. For example, you are hanging off a cliff and another person clings to you but you can't hold on. Either you kick him off so he falls to his death or you both fall to your deaths. In no case is there a question of physical cause and effect, but would you philosophically cause his death by kicking him off or was he dead either way? What if you can hold on another minute, is that murder? Five minutes? Fifty years? I mean he's human, he's eventually going to die - you're not really changing the outcome. What if you're 100% sure you can pull yourself up, but only 99,9% sure you'll both fall to your deaths and a 0,1% chance that you through superhuman strength will pull you both up? It's hard not to get philosophical.
I think you've drawing the conclusion the wrong way, because we have a vague idea of the causal relationship the correlation is collaborative evidence. There's lots and lots of things that correlate that my mind dismisses because it's absurd or there's obviously an underlying cause for it. I would say my investigation of the missing cookies would be far more causal - "Why are they gone? Probably because someone has eaten them. Who likes cookies? Who had access to the cookies? Who do I know has been in their presence recently?" Or as a prosecutor would say it: Motive, means and opportunity. I'd not go into any random correlation, like it was sunny outside when the cookies were here, now it's night and they're gone. Because even though it's clearly correlated, it's absurd that the sunset stole my cookies.
Yeah, because we'll make a mesh wireless network between the US, Europe and Australia, I don't foresee any problems there. Or even between big cities with a lot of nothing in between. Why reinvent the physical layer? If you got Internet, you can connect to any kind of overlay network, sort of like a global VPN. Or if you've seen Inception, like an Internet inside the Internet. Unless the outlaw that too, but then you're already living in a oppressive regime and got bigger issues than Internet regulation.
1) If your software has been released to the public (i.e. because you released it to the public) the assumption is that you want others to use it. Elsewise, keep it on your hard drive and stop polluting sourceforge. Too many people it seems have the mentality that they can just share their own dog food and others will want to lick the bowl. The thought process is basically "well, I can't sell this, but if I just give it away, maybe it'll make me famous and lead to something big." It's just a really lazy form of greed and opportunism, and thank goodness it doesn't work.
By writing the code you've done all the work and throwing it out there costs nothing, in case someone finds it useful. Nothing more was implied nor guaranteed, did a rotten piece of source code you got from Sourceforge steal your girlfriend or run over your dog or something?
If you're not interested in docs, good for you, move along, the article does not apply to you as a reader of docs, only as a producer of code that nobody else wants to use.
Fair enough, if you're sure it's the documentation and not an awkward interface to poor code - I'd probably keep working on those two. Well working interfaces calling good code gets used, while a turd is still a turd even if you document it.
Do your best to keep people happy, keep them wanting to come to work every day, and just stoically accept the fact that over half the team really doesn't give a shit outside "get the job done, get paid".
And most the other half doesn't give a shit outside "get the job done well, get a pay raise or a promotion". Seriously most people are at work for the money, either money now or money later. The rest is about creating intangible benefits that aren't easy to compare to other companies, if it was only paychecks it'd be a cutthroat transparent market. But if you make it so employees like their job including all the team building and other benefits a lot of them will stay on because they don't know if they'll like their next one or not. It's always hard to leave a job where you feel well, no matter how much greener the pastures look on the other side of the fence.
The first assumption is that you're actually writing it for somebody else and not yourself. In many cases if you've scratched your own itch, then you're happy and any comments are notes to self, not documentation for others. The second assumption is that you could, that it's only a lack of willpower. To many people coding a piece of software makes the logic of it so apparently obvious that they don't understand why it needs documentation, at least not any that's useful to anyone with a black box understanding of the code. The third assumption is that they're not once bitten, twice shy from useless or even misleading documentation and just decided that the code is the ultimate truth of what the code does and don't want to make any external document that won't stay in sync.
That would describe what you did, but not how you did it in neither quality or effort. If you're on a scrum or scrummish team you probably already have this in your daily stand-up, we actually do it sitting down but there's a round around the table on what you did get done, will be doing and any issues/assistance you might need. That's entirely for productivity reasons though, not motivating people that aren't pulling their share.
Obviously there are a lot of people who won't get any kind of funding and that's perfectly normal, it'd be a pretty strange world if everyone got the money they asked for. That doesn't say much about the relative merits of crowdfunding versus investor funding.
Yes, they absolutely could, and did. A five-second delay was added when the guy got out of his car (why then and not before, and why it wasn't a one-minute delay, I don't know)
As I understand it a five second delay has become the de facto delay for all "live" events to stop swearing (bleeping), wardrobe malfunctions, flashers and whatever else would hurt America's sensibilities. The reason it's not more than 5 seconds is obvious for sports games - if it was a minute other people would get the result on texts and blogs and radio ruining it for the people watching. Okay maybe in this case a minute would have been fine but I understand why they didn't make it harder than delay/no delay. And they even managed to screw that up....