I should clarify, I don't think Free Software as a movement is a dangerous idea. What I am saying is that there are huge numbers of people out there that truly expect from 100's of man hours of work to simply get done in less than a week for peanuts. Free Software was never about the idea that people shouldn't get paid for their work, and those who think it is were missing Stallman's point.
As someone who has been paid for the last ten years to write open source software (mainly through research grants), what people should understand is that a large (the majority?) of open source projects are funded at least partially by government and large commercial interests so that they can cooperatively meet shared goals. Another source of resources for open source projects is well-paid developers who have enough free time to work for free on projects they enjoy. The training and skills they bring to their hobby is paid for by good jobs. Without a thriving, well-paid community of developers, the huge amount of free software out there simply wouldn't exist. This is a huge factor that drives open source development, and we should keep this in mind when we hear stories about the mythical coders in their mom's basement who are writing tons of free software. I'm not dismissing the many great projects that have simply been created to scratch an itch or do good in the world, just raising the serious point that developers need to get paid, and we can end up screwing ourselves if we paint a picture that gives people the expectation that we work for free.
We should also look at who produces most of the code. If we simply slap the label of developer on anyone who writes code, we may come away with the idea that because 40% of DEVELOPERS are hobbyists, that 40% of actual DEVELOPMENT/implementation is done by hobbyists. It would be like saying 80% of authors, defined as someone who spends 10 or more hours a month writing text (could be emails, could be text messages, etc.), are hobbyists.
Considering just how skewed productivity is among programmers, it wouldn't surprise me if this 40% collectively gets much less done than the pro's. That's not saying we shouldn't encourage people to make coding a hobby, but I think it's dangerous to present the idea to the world that code is a freely available resource that can easily be obtained for an extremely low cost or for free. I have to fight this quite a bit as a professional, because the expectations of some customers and employers is just incredibly out of line. Many of them will expect a project that requires 50K+ lines of code (and as a result, potentially hundreds of man hours of work)to take a couple of weeks and cost maybe $500 (to see what I mean look at sites like rentacoder).
It works great if the risk taker is poor or middle class and cash strapped, and I think that's what it is (or should be) intended for. Otherwise, I agree, it's ridiculous for a billionaire to use this method for funding, but that's why he's a billionaire (along with all the other billionaires). It's because he knows how to work the system and has few scruples.
Wrong, you haven't been reading closely enough. Boxing is actually safer than playing lineman, which is a total surprise. They are finding the worst injury in players that don't normally have a lot of concussions, but instead who play positions where they are constantly running into someone else at slower speeds, like lineman. When you play line, you have about 2 feet between you and the other guy, so you aren't building enough momentum to knock them out or to even realize that it's causing injury, but you are hitting them every play. It's a huge number of very small blows that is causing the most damage. No one knew this. Again, this is happening in players that have never been knocked out or shown any signs of trauma. It's a complete (literal) game changer because it means that ANY amount of repeated trauma, no matter how slight, has a cumulative effect that won't show up until much later.
You provide no evidence that you can find a cure far faster than you would ordinarily. In fact, a reasonable person might come to the conclusion that a bunch of distracted cancer researchers might get LESS work done when you force them to spend a considerable amount of time interacting with the public at large. Also, there is a huge bottleneck with respect to access to medical equipment, so what you are likely to end up with is a ton of uneducated guesses (the opposite of an educated guess/hypothesis), requiring a lot of time to sift through, and still have the issue of not having enough resources to test them. This is far from being the magic bullet that you confidently suggest it is.
I've always found the best way to find great news sources is to hold them accountable and stop using them when they screw up the big stories. For example, when the media was shocked by the 2008 crash, I wasn't. I had predicted it 5 years earlier (not necessarily when, but the fact that it would happen). How? I took a look at the small handful of pundits and bloggers that accurately predicted the demise of the tech bubble and looked at what they said would be the next bubble. If people actually started paying attention to the sources that get it right, vs the ones with the largest reach, places like FOX wouldn't exist. What I have found over the past decade is that far left independent news sources get it right far more often than mainstream (or far right) new sources.
The election is another great example. Some people weren't surprised, and those are the ones that we should look to next time, unless we enjoy being a bunch of dumbfounded idiots all the time.
Have the people cheering about ARM considered a career in sales and marketing? The arguments in favor of ARM dominating Intel on the desktop seem about as shallow and vacuous as the CISC vs RISC "debate" that occurred during the 90's, exactly what I'd expect from enthusiasts who have no understanding of how computers work. Yes, ARM does some great things in it's space, but claiming they will wipe Intel off the map is the kind of hyperbole I expect from uninformed stock market analysts, or for that matter a tech magazine looking to generate a few extra page hits (including slashdot), not serious engineering types.
In that situation the government is participating in the fraud, by granting the patent in the first place, which means it's ok.:) I say this tongue in cheek, and also, this problem might end with the patent office/court, but begins with wealthy "inventors" who have sought to bribe legislators into creating the system of "intellectual"* "property"** that we have today.
* last time I checked rounded corners don't require much intellect ** using property as a metaphor for ideas is intellectually dishonest
From what I understand, the driver model for 7 and 8 are the same, and if anything 8 seems to run faster on older hardware (probably due to removing aero, among other things). This isn't like the upgrade from XP to Vista, where a ton of stuff broke. I still won't use it, because I think creating two separate UI's for the Desktop was a horrible design choice and I need to get work done. They could have been elegant, and created a generic font/icon/UI scaling engine that would allow the OS to work on displays of any arbitrary resolution, but I suppose they thought ratcheting the Xbox 360's UI on top of Windows was the quick and dirty way to get it done. I actually just bought an upgrade to Ultimate Edition for my laptop, if that says anything about what I think of Windows 8.
You are confusing the end product (build) with the source code. Linux is still linux whether or not it is running on a refrigerator, router, or a workstation. The same goes for versions of Windows that are built for different hardware. Yes, they are different builds, but run on the same source kernel.
I find it pretty sad that even Allen is finding problems with it. I can't say I understand the necessity of making a workstation OS easy-to-use on a phone. They should have been focusing on making it work better on, you know, workstations. For example, I have 3960x1600 pixels of resolution on my current workstation, and windows is a complete dog in terms of window management. How exactly does Windows 8 address this? It doesn't, but gee, it works great on a cellphone/tablet, which maybe I'd care about if I actually ran Visual Studio on a fucking cell phone. As it stands, this UI is an inconsistent piece of garbage, whose sole purpose seems to be to force me to waste my time learning how to use their mobile UI, in the hopes that maybe I'll be more likely to buy one of their tablets.
Basically you are saying that anyone that doesn't watch tabloid news is an idiot? Because really, that's what you are implying, which is kind of funny when you think about it. There are a lot of people that don't keep up with Hollywood/tabloid news that are perfectly reasonable, sane, intelligent individuals.
What's really funny is when people are elitist about it. "Anyone that doesn't know about X is an idiot!" "Really? How would they have known it?" "By staying glued to their TV set,that's how." "I see."
You should study the history of anti-drug research. One of the original studies that claimed marijuana caused severe brain damaged basically put face masks on monkeys and had them inhaling nothing but smoke for a significant period of time. The cause of the brain damage was CO poisoning and general hypoxia, which should have been obvious to anyone with half a brain. No one breathes nothing but smoke when they smoke. That's what a lot of studies do, they give a subject 100x the dose that is used, or use some unusual delivery method, and perform the study on it, drawing absurd conclusions that aren't event remotely scientific.
The purpose? Funding, plain and simple. Studies that are anti-drug get lots of funding, and those that aren't, don't get approved (by the DEA when performed on humans) or funded. Why? Because the government funds the studies and the drug war is a political tool that they need evidence to support. A huge amount of science is shaped and steered through funding, and it absolutely biases the results.
If you are reasonably intelligent, this shouldn't surprise you. We've had quacks for the entire history of science and medicine, and many of them have used science to explain what is clearly a politically motivated status quo. Just look at all the studies that assumed minorities were inferior, and proposed to find out why (by measuring brain volume and other anatomical characteristics), without first checking the assumption that minorities were inferior.
I've had experience with pair programming. In my mind here are the pro's: 1. It keeps you engaged and prevents your mind from wandering. 2. It is a great way to teach junior level programmers, many of whom suffer from a lack of training and are thrown to the wolves in the beginning of their careers. I would have LOVED pair programming (in small doses) when I was starting out. It's a great way to learn things about a complex system that are not obvious. 3. Different people tend to approach problems differently, and this difference in perspective can make it easier to catch bugs that are not obvious to a single programmer.
The Cons: 1. When abused, it can reduce productivity by distracting coders and not allowing them the space they need to think. 2. It can create a hostile environment where the employee feels that they have no privacy, room to think, and where they are constantly being watched. This is part of why I think management loves it so much, they are outsourcing micro-management to their underlings. 3. It can reduce motivation of individual developers since the buck no longer stops with them, but instead is the group's (or pair's) responsibility. While diffusing some responsibility across the team is not a horrible idea, people tend not to be as motivated. I observed motivation take a big nose dive when the shop moved to XP, since people were no longer as accountable for finishing anything, they just had to come up with a BS explanation for what they did the past day during the scrum, and really, it's a lot easier to BS one day at a time than it is to explain just what the hell you've been doing the past two months. 4. Many poorly designed XP programming environments are inherently disrespectful, and are merely an attempt to turn a programming shop into a factory floor with no privacy. As a skilled programmer, I won't go along with this, and I actually refused to move into this kind of space at my last job, and instead left, along with the majority of seasoned developers.
Overall, I can get some of the benefits of pair programming by walking down the hall, grabbing another team member and saying, "Hey, could you take a look at this?", when I'm having trouble finding a bug. It shouldn't require them to sit there all day.
What's really sad, is that we have overworked people, and unemployed people. We have homeless people, and entire subdivisions sitting empty. Some of the people that are homeless actually worked on those houses. That's what happens when you have a society the doesn't care about justice, but instead about mindlessly following rules. I ask people,"Why not take the empty homes, and let people that actually worked on those homes live in them until we find a better use for them?" Most people react in horror, because there is a principle that they are defending. The principle is that it doesn't matter if people starve and die, nor does it matter all that much if someone acquired property through less than scrupulous means. The sanctity of their ill-acquired gains cannot be questioned, even if it means the guy who actually built the house is homeless. They mindlessly believe it produces the best outcome, but reality begs to differ.
People worry that if you take the decision of who gets property out of the hands of the market, even a little bit, that we'll descend into a totalitarian communist dungeon. But, there are more ways to slice the pie than competition and cooperation (or capitalism and communism). Our mistake as humans has been the idea that an unchanging set of rules will get the best set of results. I'm inclined to believe that any unchanging system that doesn't make a just outcome it's primary goal is subject to being gamed into oblivion. The rules, no matter what they are, should always be bent to get a just outcome.
Capitalism is a man made system just like any other. It is created by humans, and it is gamed by humans (quite easily). Ultimately people need to realize that it is up to all of us to figure out what we feel is a just outcome, and make sure that it happens, rather than leaving the outcome up to following a set of rules.
When I work 16 hours a day I'm not able to find time to get any housework done, and in general a lot of work on my personal todo list doesn't get done. There is such a thing as PERSONAL productivity, not just productivity for your employer. Of course, no one cares about the needs of workers. The needs of workers are invisible and completely left out of the definition of "productivity".
Really, let's think for two seconds. We have productivity levels that have skyrocketed (some of which is caused by overtime, but most of it due to automation and increased efficiency), 10%+ unemployment, college students that can't find work, and you are asking if 16 hour work days are productive?
Yes, those work days are a great brainwashing technique, just ask the U.S. army, or any medical residency training program, or your local fraternity. It's pretty well known that those kinds of hours (combined with sleep deprivation) are great for keeping people so broke down that they can't think for themselves. However, in the face of 10%+ unemployment, what are you, crazy? How about we employ the entire work force before we worry about making some of us work 16 hours a day.
I agree. The motives of big business are ridiculously transparent, and skeptics are nothing more than paid shills, yet another form of astroturfing. Businesses cut corners all the time to increase profits, and whether it's spilling oil in the ocean, or CO2 in the atmosphere, or crashing the economy, they couldn't give a shit less about the safety and well-being of the rest of us. They just don't want anyone forcing them to clean up their mess as it would eat into their massive record breaking profits. The thing is, that money has to be spent somewhere, and I'd much rather see that money spent creating jobs and hiring workers to clean up their mess, than see it spent on yachts and leer jets. Sure, the Yacht industry will take big hit, but the sacrifice is worth it in my opinion.
So, Forbes "solution" to the problems caused by an IPO is to do it earlier? The scenario described sounds like a great reason to NEVER put your company on the stock market, not to go public earlier. Of course, Forbes et al's solution is always to go with yet another market.
"Got a privately held company that participates in a free market economy? Great, put it on the stock market. Stock market not working out? Great, we'll create another market to trade on the perceived risk. Still not working out? That's ok, we've got a solution. That's right, another market." I'm sure if we just keep creating more markets we'll solve this problem.
Sorry for the delayed reply. Fortunately we live in an area where the power is reliable, so throwing out food hasn't been necessary. We keep it running when it goes out for a few days since it's more convenient. However, in practical terms, we could probably save some money by throwing out our food and renting a room (assuming the hotel has power and prices for rooms haven't spiked). It's definitely not practical, and for a long term outage (weeks to months), we'd just have to learn to do without. We have all natural gas for our appliances and fire place. Our generator can't run the AC, but can run the furnace blower, so the central heat works too. We also have a few propane space heaters, so we would be quite a bit better off in the winter if we had a power outage. It's really the heat that is the killer in Missouri.
Oh yeah, one thing I found out about a few years ago is propane powered refrigerators. For someone that is living on a farm, or in a remote location, it might be a good investment. They are very simple devices, with no moving parts, so even though they cost more, they should last quite a bit longer.
First, let's get back to the original statement I made: "skeptics" claim that the burden of proof is on those who say it will happen on a large scale, despite evidence that it IS happening on a large scale. This has never been the way science works. The burden of proof is on "skeptics" to explain why a reproducible, verifiable model on a small scale won't work on a large scale. They have no evidence, and are quite dishonestly trying to shift the burden of proof back on the scientists, knowing full well that on a large scale it will take a much longer time to acquire the kind of evidence they are seeking.
I was not quite as overly-precise as I needed to be. Note that in the first sentence, I qualified it with "despite evidence that it IS happening on a large scale". I left that qualification out in the remaining text for the sake of brevity. However, the fact that it was the first statement of that paragraph is significant. That's the one you should lend more weight to.
Here's the problem with your argument. It's not that it's incorrect in a general sense, it's that you are applying it to something that I am not trying to say, and are conveniently ignoring the context within which I said it. You are ignoring the very precise opening statement that I made, and cherry picking statements that I made after that, ignoring the previous, carefully chosen parameters that I had made earlier. Do I really need to qualify every single statement, over and over, even after I've already said precisely what I meant, over and over? Do you really think it's efficient for me to have to qualify every single sentence? Yes, there is a burden of proof for both sides, I may have incorrectly implied that only the skeptic needs to meet a burden of proof, but I think that the only people that came away thinking I was saying this were intellectually dishonest hair-splitters. Would any reasonable person come away with the idea that I was arguing that scientists don't have any burden of proof? No. Would it be more precise to say that a larger burden of proof is on those who would like to create multiple complex theories where a single unifying theory would suffice? Yes, it would, but I think most rational people would have figured that out based on what I wrote.
Let's take another example: We have Newtonian physics and we also have quantum physics. A larger amount of evidence was required for quantum physicists to explain why we needed a new model. While both "sides" have a burden of proof, it takes more proof to explain why we need to complicate our understanding of the world around us. This is because science doesn't just seek to explain things, it seeks to do so in the simplest way possible. (Einstein quote - "Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler"). When we come up with data that refutes pre-established models, it requires more scrutiny, period, as we don't want to unnecessarily complicate our model by including bad data.
The fact is, scientists are making every reasonable effort that they can to prove this is happening, but it's not reasonable to expect all of this data to be collected before we need to make a decision. In terms of social policy, it's reasonable to think we may have to act much sooner than this.
What AGW advocates are saying is: 1. We have a reproducible model on the small scale 2. We have significant evidence that this model is working on the large scale What "skeptics" are asserting is: 1. We can't apply the small scale model to the large scale model (they need to prove this, and they have a larger burden of proof to explain why an already established theory should be thrown out) 2. We won't pay attention to evidence that it is happening on a large scale until we can show it happening on a geologically significant time scale, perhaps some time after we go extinct.
In terms of item number one, when we formulate a hypothesis (often described as an "educated guess", in contrast to "completely naive guess that ignores all
Slashdot Mirror
I should clarify, I don't think Free Software as a movement is a dangerous idea. What I am saying is that there are huge numbers of people out there that truly expect from 100's of man hours of work to simply get done in less than a week for peanuts. Free Software was never about the idea that people shouldn't get paid for their work, and those who think it is were missing Stallman's point.
As someone who has been paid for the last ten years to write open source software (mainly through research grants), what people should understand is that a large (the majority?) of open source projects are funded at least partially by government and large commercial interests so that they can cooperatively meet shared goals. Another source of resources for open source projects is well-paid developers who have enough free time to work for free on projects they enjoy. The training and skills they bring to their hobby is paid for by good jobs. Without a thriving, well-paid community of developers, the huge amount of free software out there simply wouldn't exist. This is a huge factor that drives open source development, and we should keep this in mind when we hear stories about the mythical coders in their mom's basement who are writing tons of free software. I'm not dismissing the many great projects that have simply been created to scratch an itch or do good in the world, just raising the serious point that developers need to get paid, and we can end up screwing ourselves if we paint a picture that gives people the expectation that we work for free.
Right, all those almanac records have just up and disappeared. It's a "conspiracy".
We should also look at who produces most of the code. If we simply slap the label of developer on anyone who writes code, we may come away with the idea that because 40% of DEVELOPERS are hobbyists, that 40% of actual DEVELOPMENT/implementation is done by hobbyists. It would be like saying 80% of authors, defined as someone who spends 10 or more hours a month writing text (could be emails, could be text messages, etc.), are hobbyists.
Considering just how skewed productivity is among programmers, it wouldn't surprise me if this 40% collectively gets much less done than the pro's. That's not saying we shouldn't encourage people to make coding a hobby, but I think it's dangerous to present the idea to the world that code is a freely available resource that can easily be obtained for an extremely low cost or for free. I have to fight this quite a bit as a professional, because the expectations of some customers and employers is just incredibly out of line. Many of them will expect a project that requires 50K+ lines of code (and as a result, potentially hundreds of man hours of work)to take a couple of weeks and cost maybe $500 (to see what I mean look at sites like rentacoder).
It works great if the risk taker is poor or middle class and cash strapped, and I think that's what it is (or should be) intended for. Otherwise, I agree, it's ridiculous for a billionaire to use this method for funding, but that's why he's a billionaire (along with all the other billionaires). It's because he knows how to work the system and has few scruples.
I can say... wait, what was the question?
Automation is making unions MORE relevant than ever.
Wrong, you haven't been reading closely enough. Boxing is actually safer than playing lineman, which is a total surprise. They are finding the worst injury in players that don't normally have a lot of concussions, but instead who play positions where they are constantly running into someone else at slower speeds, like lineman. When you play line, you have about 2 feet between you and the other guy, so you aren't building enough momentum to knock them out or to even realize that it's causing injury, but you are hitting them every play. It's a huge number of very small blows that is causing the most damage. No one knew this. Again, this is happening in players that have never been knocked out or shown any signs of trauma. It's a complete (literal) game changer because it means that ANY amount of repeated trauma, no matter how slight, has a cumulative effect that won't show up until much later.
You provide no evidence that you can find a cure far faster than you would ordinarily. In fact, a reasonable person might come to the conclusion that a bunch of distracted cancer researchers might get LESS work done when you force them to spend a considerable amount of time interacting with the public at large. Also, there is a huge bottleneck with respect to access to medical equipment, so what you are likely to end up with is a ton of uneducated guesses (the opposite of an educated guess/hypothesis), requiring a lot of time to sift through, and still have the issue of not having enough resources to test them. This is far from being the magic bullet that you confidently suggest it is.
The only thing I find surprising is that someone in power actually cares enough to measure this sort of thing. They've known about this for decades.
I've always found the best way to find great news sources is to hold them accountable and stop using them when they screw up the big stories. For example, when the media was shocked by the 2008 crash, I wasn't. I had predicted it 5 years earlier (not necessarily when, but the fact that it would happen). How? I took a look at the small handful of pundits and bloggers that accurately predicted the demise of the tech bubble and looked at what they said would be the next bubble. If people actually started paying attention to the sources that get it right, vs the ones with the largest reach, places like FOX wouldn't exist. What I have found over the past decade is that far left independent news sources get it right far more often than mainstream (or far right) new sources.
The election is another great example. Some people weren't surprised, and those are the ones that we should look to next time, unless we enjoy being a bunch of dumbfounded idiots all the time.
Have the people cheering about ARM considered a career in sales and marketing? The arguments in favor of ARM dominating Intel on the desktop seem about as shallow and vacuous as the CISC vs RISC "debate" that occurred during the 90's, exactly what I'd expect from enthusiasts who have no understanding of how computers work. Yes, ARM does some great things in it's space, but claiming they will wipe Intel off the map is the kind of hyperbole I expect from uninformed stock market analysts, or for that matter a tech magazine looking to generate a few extra page hits (including slashdot), not serious engineering types.
In that situation the government is participating in the fraud, by granting the patent in the first place, which means it's ok. :) I say this tongue in cheek, and also, this problem might end with the patent office/court, but begins with wealthy "inventors" who have sought to bribe legislators into creating the system of "intellectual"*
"property"** that we have today.
* last time I checked rounded corners don't require much intellect
** using property as a metaphor for ideas is intellectually dishonest
From what I understand, the driver model for 7 and 8 are the same, and if anything 8 seems to run faster on older hardware (probably due to removing aero, among other things). This isn't like the upgrade from XP to Vista, where a ton of stuff broke. I still won't use it, because I think creating two separate UI's for the Desktop was a horrible design choice and I need to get work done. They could have been elegant, and created a generic font/icon/UI scaling engine that would allow the OS to work on displays of any arbitrary resolution, but I suppose they thought ratcheting the Xbox 360's UI on top of Windows was the quick and dirty way to get it done. I actually just bought an upgrade to Ultimate Edition for my laptop, if that says anything about what I think of Windows 8.
You are confusing the end product (build) with the source code. Linux is still linux whether or not it is running on a refrigerator, router, or a workstation. The same goes for versions of Windows that are built for different hardware. Yes, they are different builds, but run on the same source kernel.
I find it pretty sad that even Allen is finding problems with it. I can't say I understand the necessity of making a workstation OS easy-to-use on a phone. They should have been focusing on making it work better on, you know, workstations. For example, I have 3960x1600 pixels of resolution on my current workstation, and windows is a complete dog in terms of window management. How exactly does Windows 8 address this? It doesn't, but gee, it works great on a cellphone/tablet, which maybe I'd care about if I actually ran Visual Studio on a fucking cell phone. As it stands, this UI is an inconsistent piece of garbage, whose sole purpose seems to be to force me to waste my time learning how to use their mobile UI, in the hopes that maybe I'll be more likely to buy one of their tablets.
Basically you are saying that anyone that doesn't watch tabloid news is an idiot? Because really, that's what you are implying, which is kind of funny when you think about it. There are a lot of people that don't keep up with Hollywood/tabloid news that are perfectly reasonable, sane, intelligent individuals.
What's really funny is when people are elitist about it.
"Anyone that doesn't know about X is an idiot!"
"Really? How would they have known it?"
"By staying glued to their TV set,that's how."
"I see."
You should study the history of anti-drug research. One of the original studies that claimed marijuana caused severe brain damaged basically put face masks on monkeys and had them inhaling nothing but smoke for a significant period of time. The cause of the brain damage was CO poisoning and general hypoxia, which should have been obvious to anyone with half a brain. No one breathes nothing but smoke when they smoke. That's what a lot of studies do, they give a subject 100x the dose that is used, or use some unusual delivery method, and perform the study on it, drawing absurd conclusions that aren't event remotely scientific.
The purpose? Funding, plain and simple. Studies that are anti-drug get lots of funding, and those that aren't, don't get approved (by the DEA when performed on humans) or funded. Why? Because the government funds the studies and the drug war is a political tool that they need evidence to support. A huge amount of science is shaped and steered through funding, and it absolutely biases the results.
If you are reasonably intelligent, this shouldn't surprise you. We've had quacks for the entire history of science and medicine, and many of them have used science to explain what is clearly a politically motivated status quo. Just look at all the studies that assumed minorities were inferior, and proposed to find out why (by measuring brain volume and other anatomical characteristics), without first checking the assumption that minorities were inferior.
I've had experience with pair programming. In my mind here are the pro's:
1. It keeps you engaged and prevents your mind from wandering.
2. It is a great way to teach junior level programmers, many of whom suffer from a lack of training and are thrown to the wolves in the beginning of their careers. I would have LOVED pair programming (in small doses) when I was starting out. It's a great way to learn things about a complex system that are not obvious.
3. Different people tend to approach problems differently, and this difference in perspective can make it easier to catch bugs that are not obvious to a single programmer.
The Cons:
1. When abused, it can reduce productivity by distracting coders and not allowing them the space they need to think.
2. It can create a hostile environment where the employee feels that they have no privacy, room to think, and where they are constantly being watched. This is part of why I think management loves it so much, they are outsourcing micro-management to their underlings.
3. It can reduce motivation of individual developers since the buck no longer stops with them, but instead is the group's (or pair's) responsibility. While diffusing some responsibility across the team is not a horrible idea, people tend not to be as motivated. I observed motivation take a big nose dive when the shop moved to XP, since people were no longer as accountable for finishing anything, they just had to come up with a BS explanation for what they did the past day during the scrum, and really, it's a lot easier to BS one day at a time than it is to explain just what the hell you've been doing the past two months.
4. Many poorly designed XP programming environments are inherently disrespectful, and are merely an attempt to turn a programming shop into a factory floor with no privacy. As a skilled programmer, I won't go along with this, and I actually refused to move into this kind of space at my last job, and instead left, along with the majority of seasoned developers.
Overall, I can get some of the benefits of pair programming by walking down the hall, grabbing another team member and saying, "Hey, could you take a look at this?", when I'm having trouble finding a bug. It shouldn't require them to sit there all day.
What's really sad, is that we have overworked people, and unemployed people. We have homeless people, and entire subdivisions sitting empty. Some of the people that are homeless actually worked on those houses. That's what happens when you have a society the doesn't care about justice, but instead about mindlessly following rules. I ask people,"Why not take the empty homes, and let people that actually worked on those homes live in them until we find a better use for them?" Most people react in horror, because there is a principle that they are defending. The principle is that it doesn't matter if people starve and die, nor does it matter all that much if someone acquired property through less than scrupulous means. The sanctity of their ill-acquired gains cannot be questioned, even if it means the guy who actually built the house is homeless. They mindlessly believe it produces the best outcome, but reality begs to differ.
People worry that if you take the decision of who gets property out of the hands of the market, even a little bit, that we'll descend into a totalitarian communist dungeon. But, there are more ways to slice the pie than competition and cooperation (or capitalism and communism). Our mistake as humans has been the idea that an unchanging set of rules will get the best set of results. I'm inclined to believe that any unchanging system that doesn't make a just outcome it's primary goal is subject to being gamed into oblivion. The rules, no matter what they are, should always be bent to get a just outcome.
Capitalism is a man made system just like any other. It is created by humans, and it is gamed by humans (quite easily). Ultimately people need to realize that it is up to all of us to figure out what we feel is a just outcome, and make sure that it happens, rather than leaving the outcome up to following a set of rules.
When I work 16 hours a day I'm not able to find time to get any housework done, and in general a lot of work on my personal todo list doesn't get done. There is such a thing as PERSONAL productivity, not just productivity for your employer. Of course, no one cares about the needs of workers. The needs of workers are invisible and completely left out of the definition of "productivity".
Really, let's think for two seconds. We have productivity levels that have skyrocketed (some of which is caused by overtime, but most of it due to automation and increased efficiency), 10%+ unemployment, college students that can't find work, and you are asking if 16 hour work days are productive?
Yes, those work days are a great brainwashing technique, just ask the U.S. army, or any medical residency training program, or your local fraternity. It's pretty well known that those kinds of hours (combined with sleep deprivation) are great for keeping people so broke down that they can't think for themselves. However, in the face of 10%+ unemployment, what are you, crazy? How about we employ the entire work force before we worry about making some of us work 16 hours a day.
I agree. The motives of big business are ridiculously transparent, and skeptics are nothing more than paid shills, yet another form of astroturfing. Businesses cut corners all the time to increase profits, and whether it's spilling oil in the ocean, or CO2 in the atmosphere, or crashing the economy, they couldn't give a shit less about the safety and well-being of the rest of us. They just don't want anyone forcing them to clean up their mess as it would eat into their massive record breaking profits. The thing is, that money has to be spent somewhere, and I'd much rather see that money spent creating jobs and hiring workers to clean up their mess, than see it spent on yachts and leer jets. Sure, the Yacht industry will take big hit, but the sacrifice is worth it in my opinion.
So, Forbes "solution" to the problems caused by an IPO is to do it earlier? The scenario described sounds like a great reason to NEVER put your company on the stock market, not to go public earlier. Of course, Forbes et al's solution is always to go with yet another market.
"Got a privately held company that participates in a free market economy? Great, put it on the stock market. Stock market not working out? Great, we'll create another market to trade on the perceived risk. Still not working out? That's ok, we've got a solution. That's right, another market." I'm sure if we just keep creating more markets we'll solve this problem.
Sorry for the delayed reply. Fortunately we live in an area where the power is reliable, so throwing out food hasn't been necessary. We keep it running when it goes out for a few days since it's more convenient. However, in practical terms, we could probably save some money by throwing out our food and renting a room (assuming the hotel has power and prices for rooms haven't spiked). It's definitely not practical, and for a long term outage (weeks to months), we'd just have to learn to do without. We have all natural gas for our appliances and fire place. Our generator can't run the AC, but can run the furnace blower, so the central heat works too. We also have a few propane space heaters, so we would be quite a bit better off in the winter if we had a power outage. It's really the heat that is the killer in Missouri.
Oh yeah, one thing I found out about a few years ago is propane powered refrigerators. For someone that is living on a farm, or in a remote location, it might be a good investment. They are very simple devices, with no moving parts, so even though they cost more, they should last quite a bit longer.
First, let's get back to the original statement I made:
"skeptics" claim that the burden of proof is on those who say it will happen on a large scale, despite evidence that it IS happening on a large scale. This has never been the way science works. The burden of proof is on "skeptics" to explain why a reproducible, verifiable model on a small scale won't work on a large scale. They have no evidence, and are quite dishonestly trying to shift the burden of proof back on the scientists, knowing full well that on a large scale it will take a much longer time to acquire the kind of evidence they are seeking.
I was not quite as overly-precise as I needed to be. Note that in the first sentence, I qualified it with "despite evidence that it IS happening on a large scale". I left that qualification out in the remaining text for the sake of brevity. However, the fact that it was the first statement of that paragraph is significant. That's the one you should lend more weight to.
Here's the problem with your argument. It's not that it's incorrect in a general sense, it's that you are applying it to something that I am not trying to say, and are conveniently ignoring the context within which I said it. You are ignoring the very precise opening statement that I made, and cherry picking statements that I made after that, ignoring the previous, carefully chosen parameters that I had made earlier. Do I really need to qualify every single statement, over and over, even after I've already said precisely what I meant, over and over? Do you really think it's efficient for me to have to qualify every single sentence? Yes, there is a burden of proof for both sides, I may have incorrectly implied that only the skeptic needs to meet a burden of proof, but I think that the only people that came away thinking I was saying this were intellectually dishonest hair-splitters. Would any reasonable person come away with the idea that I was arguing that scientists don't have any burden of proof? No. Would it be more precise to say that a larger burden of proof is on those who would like to create multiple complex theories where a single unifying theory would suffice? Yes, it would, but I think most rational people would have figured that out based on what I wrote.
Let's take another example:
We have Newtonian physics and we also have quantum physics. A larger amount of evidence was required for quantum physicists to explain why we needed a new model. While both "sides" have a burden of proof, it takes more proof to explain why we need to complicate our understanding of the world around us. This is because science doesn't just seek to explain things, it seeks to do so in the simplest way possible. (Einstein quote - "Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler"). When we come up with data that refutes pre-established models, it requires more scrutiny, period, as we don't want to unnecessarily complicate our model by including bad data.
The fact is, scientists are making every reasonable effort that they can to prove this is happening, but it's not reasonable to expect all of this data to be collected before we need to make a decision. In terms of social policy, it's reasonable to think we may have to act much sooner than this.
What AGW advocates are saying is:
1. We have a reproducible model on the small scale
2. We have significant evidence that this model is working on the large scale
What "skeptics" are asserting is:
1. We can't apply the small scale model to the large scale model (they need to prove this, and they have a larger burden of proof to explain why an already established theory should be thrown out)
2. We won't pay attention to evidence that it is happening on a large scale until we can show it happening on a geologically significant time scale, perhaps some time after we go extinct.
In terms of item number one, when we formulate a hypothesis (often described as an "educated guess", in contrast to "completely naive guess that ignores all