There's no fundamental economic reason either for growth in the value of economic output to mean growth in energy use, or for growth to be required. But there's no reason why we must maximize growth, either. It's actually unemployment that's the big problem in recessions, not the reduction in output.
Our culture, especially within business, is, however, very hostile to the idea of using progress in production efficiency to produce a little more with fewer labour inputs rather than a lot more with constant labour inputs. Negotiating your salary with a potential employer is fine. Try negotiating your hours and it'll be considered unacceptable in most industries. For most people the one thing you're not allowed to buy with your increasing income is extra leisure time.
The purpose of an economy is to provide as much welfare for its citizens as it can given its resources. Having people work too much is just as much a failure to achieve this as leaving some people pointlessly idle, producing the wrong goods or producing them inefficiently.
How would newly issued US dollars be moved to Australia and lent at 5.7%? The investors would have to sell the US dollars to someone in exchange for AU dollars, meaning that those dollars are still circulating around the US economy.
If you print ANY amount of ADITIONAL money, UltraOne, it leads to inflation.
Not necessarily. Suppose that the economy ended up with too little money in it - meaning that the current price level was too high for the current money supply. This could happen in several ways - through increases in the money supply not keeping up with growth, through private sector destruction of broad money (loans repaid/written off and not re-made), through price increases made in the expectation of inflation which didn't come or through a fall in the velocity of money. You might think prices would fall, but that doesn't happen easily. Prices are written in to contracts and nominal falls have an important psychological impact, so it's heavily resisted. Creating money in these circumstances would increase output, not inflation.
The difficulty occurs if those circumstances reverse. Politicians and central bankers are not too good at taking the money away again when they ought to, although its quite possible for them to do it. THEN you get inflation. But it's not technically inevitable.
Current US M1 money supply is $1947bn (source) and M0 (notes and coins) about $1tn. Printing money causes more money to be created in the banking system, so expect M1 to go up by more than you increase M0 - probably in the same ratio, so by about double. (Double seems a very low ratio to me...a quick look at some statistics suggests it's unusually low internationally). So printing $15tn might increase the M1 money supply by $30tn, to fifteen times its current level. At current rates of increase, 13%pa, that wouldn't happen for a little over 20 years.
Although it wouldn't increase the current rate by a lot at the moment, from 13% to 18%, the current rate is unusually high and there's no getting away from it being huge additional increase in money supply beyond what's necessary to account for other changes in the economy over 20 years. If it all went in to inflation, so that US dollars fell in value by 30 times over 20 years, the inflation rate would be 14.5% higher. It'd have a large effect on the economy, even spread over many years. Plus, of course, other things would happen. The interest rate on new debt - public and private - would rocket as soon as anyone got wind of the idea. You wouldn't be able to just issue new bonds to pay for ones maturing in the wrong years because the US government would have to pay 16%+ on them. The same applies to any new borrowing due to new recessions, etc....so it's all too easy to end up printing even more new money to pay for that.
The economy may not be at capacity. The additional money may cause space capacity to be brought in to use. Unemployed people = spare capacity (not necessarily useful capacity, in good times many of the unemployed may have no useful purpose, but I doubt that's true now).
The velocity of money can change. If money changes hands half as often then there must be twice as much of it to have the same effect.
People get used to inflation. If everyone 'knows' that inflation is 5% then they increase their prices and salary demands over time and change their saving/borrowing decisions accordingly. This locks in that level of inflation....if the rate of increase of the money supply is reduced below the level that can sustain the 5% inflation then everyone individually sees that as a reduction in demand or salary and responds, the opposite of the process you approximately described. We can end up running below capacity again. So, loosening monetary policy can cause a one of increase in growth which stops when everyone gets used to the new inflation rate, tightening it again later to bring inflation back down causes a one off reduction.
Don't forget that the banking system creates and destroys money as loans are made and repaid/written off. Probably a lot of money was destroyed during the financial crisis.
As for the GPL – yes, you need to get a lawyer there, that is indeed a violation. Of course – if you coded this GPL code on their time, it's their copyright anyway, and they're free to use it any way they see fit.
Probably but not necessarily; it depends on contracts and jurisdictions. In the UK copyright transfers and exclusive licences can normally only be made in writing and if your employer doesn't get their paperwork sorted out you might find yourself the owner of the code. There would almost certainly be an implied licence to your employer to allow them to use it - you can't happily allow or assists someone in using your code and then complain later you didn't want them to - but those are determined by courts and supposed to be as small as possible as to legitimise the behaviour you allowed. It may be possible to revoke that licence and tell them they can't use it from now on. If it's like that here then I imagine there will be other places in the world where it's true.
Contracts with employers seem to vary - some claim copyright on everything you do, technically including things like hobby projects or personal correspondence (no idea how enforceable that is, though). Others specify 'in the course of your employment' or somesuch.
Even if the copyright IS owned by his employer it doesn't mean the GPL licence doesn't exist. The employer wouldn't be breaking it, of course, but they couldn't stop others using it. Not anyone prepared to see a case through to the end, anyway (which is quite possibly nobody). Did his boss agree to licensing them? Did he himself have the power to issue licences on behalf of the company? I'm a director where I work, so any contract I sign on behalf of the company is (almost) automatically legally valid whatever anyone else in the company thinks. AIUI, where I live contracts can be valid if someone who you'd expect to have the power to enter in to them on behalf of their employer has signed them...but if that employee was exceeding his powers it's possible he could be sued by the company. I don't know how it works for licences.
Very very much lawyer territory. Certainly, at a minimum, do a lot of research on your local laws and how they're enforced territory.
The wise person looks objectively at the evidence, not merely following the herd. Scientific consensus has been proven both right and wrong many times throughout history and shouldn't be considered an effective measure of how true or not a theory is.
The wise person looks objectively at the evidence within and around his own field but has no time left to look objectively at the evidence in every other field, or to learn enough that he could possibly keep up. Instead you look to see if the evidence available is effective at convincing those qualified to assess it. Even within a single field I can't imagine many people being stupid enough to do everything from first principles themselves rather than use experts, and not just for time reasons (how many 'wise' programmers write their own cryptography?).
The simple answer to your question is: "The budget should be based on income". You don't come up with a budget and then demand an income to match it. Unless you're the US gov't, apparently.
Basing a government's budget on its income means cutting back heavily during recessions and increasing spending during booms. That's a stupid thing to do for several reasons. There are costs associated with running down or ramping up government services - like training and recruiting staff. Demands on governments - unemployment benefits, crime and suchlike - go up when your income goes down and vice versa. Finally, cutting spending in a recession and increasing it in booms makes economic cycles worse.
Balancing the budget over the cycle is much better. The problem is that governments don't prepare for recessions during booms. The public don't care about the deficit or paying back debt when everything is going well and so politicians do nothing about it. All your measures would all get reversed once the deficit was out of the headlines and people's minds and crime/poverty/terrorism/war/healthcare/whatever was back in.
Unfortunately, almost all governments of almost all parties in almost all countries gain political advantage by attempting to spend their successors' tax revenues. Almost no governments ever pay down their debts except at the very worst time, in a crisis (some do, though not usually for long, and only when they're politically popular enough that they don't need to buy votes). I doubt very much that changing the politicians for new ones would solve that because voters generally don't care much about deficits and debts when there isn't a crisis. How many votes were there in 'Slash public services and the army and increase taxes!' in 2005? Government debt is too long term a problem for 3-6 year political cycles.
Ideally governments would pay down their debt during benign economic conditions to leave space to borrow at times like now. It'd need a new mechanism to make that happen because all politicians will be under similar pressure. How about a variable income tax that goes up automatically with the size of the total debt? Or maybe a body like a central bank charged with maintaining a long term target percentage of GDP. Whatever it is, it has to be something that politicians can't fiddle with to exchange for short term political advantage for long term pain - just as they do with interest rates and inflation in countries without independent central banks.
As for opposing tax rises at all costs, that's just silly. Trying to balance current spending with current revenue is one thing, opposing additional taxes to pay for services already delivered five years ago is extreme.
You may have OS and OS version independence, but you may not have web browser indepedence. And you can get quite a degree of OS version independence at least, and some OS independence and ease of installation/auto-update, especially if you use something like Java (which admittedly has its own disadvantages).
Server side crashes or failures can lose data, especially if your develoeprs are stupid. Porbably that's much rarer, but you do lose all your data at once. Client side crashes (or just unexpected browser or server behaviour) can lose small amounts of data, too, as anyone who's made the mistake of typing a lot of text in to a box in a web form rather than pasting it from a text editor can tell you.
I don't see why a web application would be easier for another developer to pick up.
The downside is a bit bigger than just speed, although speed is important (hint: in an interactive application a delay of a second or two is a very long time). The UI is never going to be quite as satisfactory and always a lot more mouse-intensive and fiddly. You're pretty much forced in to a page-based idiom. It's difficult to get the keyboard to work properly in a web application (accelerator keys? shortcuts? tab order? what do return and escape do?). It hasn't escaped users that most of the advantages to web apps are to the supplier/sysadmin and not to them. Web apps are always going to seem like an on-the-cheap alternative to users.
Grr, and this web browser keeps pausing and briefly ignoring my input as I type, leaving out some letters. Firefox appears to keep briefly thinking the page isn't responding because it's too damn slow.
Java can be a useful sort of in-between option, and has Java WebStart. Pity the UI takes so much work to make it look acceptable, and a pity it's difficult to make your application fit in with the platform, but it's certainly a lot more capable client-side.
Economics is rather limited in how well it can predict and advise, but even when it can people don't necessarily take notice. Quite a few of the housing booms around the world were quite obvious once you looked at price/rent or price/income ratios but people still bought houses. And I don't think you'd have found many economists to approve of governments persistently attempting to spend their successors' tax revenue during good economic conditions, either. Almost all governments do that, all over the world, because it's good politics.
If only one person knew how to brew beer, that knowledge would be very valuable. If everyone knows how to brew beer, that knowledge is less valuable.
Not to the economy as a whole. If there is a beer monopolist then less beer is produced, and there are people who would be prepared to pay more for beer than it costs to make but less than he is charging. If everyone knows then that's not the case. In the first case the creation of that knowledge has increased everyone's welfare by less than the second, so the secret knowledge has less value to the economy than the public knowledge. (All under certain assumptions, of course, such as that everyone knows what's good for them and the rest of the economy is perfect....but it's a starting point and it might be expected to be approximately true).
And that's not to mention that bits of knowledge can interact. You need a lot of bits of knowledge just to build a better pencil, never mind a car. The more public it is the more easily it can be brought together.
You can't. Not unless you control the press, anyway:) What you/can/ do is have your case collapse because there's been so much negative press coverage that there's no hope of a jury being able to reach an unbiased conclusion - especially when evidence which is not admissible in court is being published. That's why there are legal limits on what can be published until the trial is over. The Sun is in trouble over that at the moment: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/05/joanna-yeates-contempt-case
Not just consumers - advertisers were pulling out. There may have been a risk of it spreading to other Murdoch media, too. Nor was it day one. News was coming out a bit at a time.
I think there's not just a laziness element, but a 'get out of my face and do what I say' element. People regard using computers (and sometimes even talking to IT support) somewhat like social interaction. Think of how it looks to a user. I've sat in front of the same computer frequently for several years and yet it is still too stupid and lazy to recognize that I'm me. To make up for its inadequacy, it - a tool which I own, is subordinate to me and is there to do my bidding - demands that I do it a favour by remembering some made up nonsense. Despite me helping to do its job for it, it only goes on to make more demands of me. It demands that the made up nonsense be difficult to remember. It demands that I make up new nonsense regularly. It requires me to remind it of this word many times a day because it forgets who I am whenever more than 15 minutes of my day is not spent on mollycoddling it...possibly it even forgets what I was doing and what I'd entered when this happens. It is, in short, an ungrateful, spiteful, lazy, rude, forgetful, incompetent, insubordinate and stupid little shit.
People don't just get lazy, they get frustrated and angry, come to hate the software as a whole and suffer stress. It's not surprising people subvert the process and feel good about it.
A better policy is to allow users to write down their passwords as long as they only write down part of it - and suggest a long a complicated random and unique bit written down and a memorable piece to go with it.
So what's the purpose of work? What's the purpose of an economy....how should we, as individuals, judge its success?
Its purpose is to produce the highest welfare possible for its citizens given the resources its got. An individual's welfare is mostly about how he spends his time - money and physical stuff gives you more options, but it's not the goal. If career achievements are fulfilling for you and you have a good working environment then that's great, but making your life miserable in order to be macho is not (and you won't work well, either). It's not a pissing contest to see who can make the most or lead the shittiest or most orderly life.
Western economies are very successful, historically and compared to many others. Why would you wish them to be less successful, like China?
So if this is not what's taught, why do so many companies do it?
That, obviously, really needs some proper data. But how about this hypothesis: because their employer, shareholders or typical market behaviour gives them an incentive to, and maybe even threatens their job if they don't. And, of course, people in that position are likely to be heavily career and money focused. It's not that my sympathy muscles are heavily exercised by this, these are people who can look after themselves all too well, but jumping to obviously silly anger-motivated conclusions won't fix anything. Besides, I'm sure that if your employer were to offer a typical developer more money for every line of code written then code quality would be sacrificed in exchange for doing the same thing with more lines. Some people will respond more strongly, some less, but provide stupid incentives and you'll get an increase in stupid behaviour.
but we could cirtainly distroy our economy through crap like the "carbon tax".
Do you have a particular mechanism in mind for that? Taxes have to be raised one way or another. Do you have any particular reason for believing that taxing CO2 production is worse than raising that revenue through the current mechanisms of taxes on labour, investments, goods and so on?
But what about people from poorer backgrounds, or who don't have access to free money from their parents? Unpaid internships (and especially ones organized through family connections) were a minor political issue here (the UK) for a little while because, it was argued, people from some backgrounds were being locked out of certain industries. Then, of course, various politicians had the criticism directed back at them because they were themselves using unpaid interns.
I wouldn't be surprised if VISA and Mastercard would much prefer to be able to (or be required to) allow their member banks to offer their services to whoever they think they can make money from. I doubt very much they enjoy dealing with political nonsense like this - there's nothing in it for them, it's a distraction and whatever they do is going to upset somebody. It'd be much easier to point to a law and say 'sorry, press/public/US government, but it would be illegal to do what you're asking' than be forced in to making a political decision.
Why is bidding pi billion more foolish than bidding 3.15 billion or 3.10 billion? The aim is to bid slightly more than the second highest bid but less than the value to you of the item. They can only estimate.
Auctions are quite tricky things. The expected winning bid if everyone is rational and everything is ideal is the second highest valuation of all of the bidders in the room. That's true not just for a standard auction (bids going up, winner is the last one standing), but, on average, for weird kinds of auctions like ones where the price creeps downwards (the winner is the first to accept) or where the winning bidder pays the amount of the second highest bid. (This last one is designed to give everyone bidding no incentive to bid anything other than their true valuation).
The really scary one is the winners curse. No doubt many an IT contract has lost money and been delivered late because of this - it's surprising how few people who's job it is to know don't know about it. Suppose you're bidding for a patent, the patent will give a certain income no matter who wins and that you don't know exactly what that income is. So you estimate. So do the other bidders. As the number of bidders you're competing with goes up should your maximum bid go up, down or stay the same?
The answer is that it should go down. If everyone's estimates are unbiased (and, say, normal) then 50% of the time you'll estimate too high and 50% of the time too low. If there are no other bidders (or no auction) then this is fine, on average you make money. But in an auction, if you win then it's because your estimate is the highest. This happens more often when you've overestimated than when you've underestimated. It happens more when your estimate is higher than three other unbiased estimates than when it's higher than two.
So if your job involves estimating IT projects for contracts your company (and its mathematically naive negotiators) is bidding for you're likely to find yourself perennially struggling to complete them on time, even if your estimates are correct on average (which is admittedly unlikely, given that it's IT we're talking about).
So the best protection against a very competent attack is to avoid angering people.
How? The world is full of angry people. There are religious nutters who hate atheists, religious nutters who hate the US, religious nutters who hate other religious nutters, governments who hate anyone in certain other countries, criminals who hate the police, anti-capitalists who hate everyone who won't give away all their money and teenagers who hate everyone. This is something which needs a combined legal and technical response, not a give up and hide response.
The questioner doesn't make himself look great from this point of view, more generally however:
Some people may already have one degree in something else, although this person appears not to.
In large parts of the world no-one would expect a degree in CS (or anything else) to contain anything other subject. Where I come from a University is quite distinct from a school and no-one would consider it a problem that your course was not an extension of high school. Actually, to me it seems rather patronising....like treating an adult like a child, unable to be trusted with deciding what learn.
Vocational teaching is aimed at teaching someone how to do a particular job at a practical level, education is theoretical and academic learning of the sort that would one day make you able to perform research (if you continue with it far enough). The distinction has nothing to do with whether or not you also study philosophy or history.
Someone interested in learning can learn about philosophy, history, economics, languages, etc. themselves - and easily, too, given the material available on the Internet that just wasn't there a decade or two ago. I certainly do these things. Especially if you're taking a career break as an otherwise educated adult, why involve a University in your learning unless you really need a University's help?
The last point applies to CS itself as well, of course. You don't really need any special equipment or difficult demonstrations. Presumably the questioner is worried more about (also) being accredited for career reasons, otherwise he could just get on with it. For that I'd suggest he find the best-reputed non-US University who'll let him in.
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There's no fundamental economic reason either for growth in the value of economic output to mean growth in energy use, or for growth to be required. But there's no reason why we must maximize growth, either. It's actually unemployment that's the big problem in recessions, not the reduction in output.
Our culture, especially within business, is, however, very hostile to the idea of using progress in production efficiency to produce a little more with fewer labour inputs rather than a lot more with constant labour inputs. Negotiating your salary with a potential employer is fine. Try negotiating your hours and it'll be considered unacceptable in most industries. For most people the one thing you're not allowed to buy with your increasing income is extra leisure time.
The purpose of an economy is to provide as much welfare for its citizens as it can given its resources. Having people work too much is just as much a failure to achieve this as leaving some people pointlessly idle, producing the wrong goods or producing them inefficiently.
How would newly issued US dollars be moved to Australia and lent at 5.7%? The investors would have to sell the US dollars to someone in exchange for AU dollars, meaning that those dollars are still circulating around the US economy.
If you print ANY amount of ADITIONAL money, UltraOne, it leads to inflation.
Not necessarily. Suppose that the economy ended up with too little money in it - meaning that the current price level was too high for the current money supply. This could happen in several ways - through increases in the money supply not keeping up with growth, through private sector destruction of broad money (loans repaid/written off and not re-made), through price increases made in the expectation of inflation which didn't come or through a fall in the velocity of money. You might think prices would fall, but that doesn't happen easily. Prices are written in to contracts and nominal falls have an important psychological impact, so it's heavily resisted. Creating money in these circumstances would increase output, not inflation.
The difficulty occurs if those circumstances reverse. Politicians and central bankers are not too good at taking the money away again when they ought to, although its quite possible for them to do it. THEN you get inflation. But it's not technically inevitable.
Current US M1 money supply is $1947bn (source) and M0 (notes and coins) about $1tn. Printing money causes more money to be created in the banking system, so expect M1 to go up by more than you increase M0 - probably in the same ratio, so by about double. (Double seems a very low ratio to me...a quick look at some statistics suggests it's unusually low internationally). So printing $15tn might increase the M1 money supply by $30tn, to fifteen times its current level. At current rates of increase, 13%pa, that wouldn't happen for a little over 20 years.
Although it wouldn't increase the current rate by a lot at the moment, from 13% to 18%, the current rate is unusually high and there's no getting away from it being huge additional increase in money supply beyond what's necessary to account for other changes in the economy over 20 years. If it all went in to inflation, so that US dollars fell in value by 30 times over 20 years, the inflation rate would be 14.5% higher. It'd have a large effect on the economy, even spread over many years. Plus, of course, other things would happen. The interest rate on new debt - public and private - would rocket as soon as anyone got wind of the idea. You wouldn't be able to just issue new bonds to pay for ones maturing in the wrong years because the US government would have to pay 16%+ on them. The same applies to any new borrowing due to new recessions, etc....so it's all too easy to end up printing even more new money to pay for that.
As for the GPL – yes, you need to get a lawyer there, that is indeed a violation. Of course – if you coded this GPL code on their time, it's their copyright anyway, and they're free to use it any way they see fit.
Probably but not necessarily; it depends on contracts and jurisdictions. In the UK copyright transfers and exclusive licences can normally only be made in writing and if your employer doesn't get their paperwork sorted out you might find yourself the owner of the code. There would almost certainly be an implied licence to your employer to allow them to use it - you can't happily allow or assists someone in using your code and then complain later you didn't want them to - but those are determined by courts and supposed to be as small as possible as to legitimise the behaviour you allowed. It may be possible to revoke that licence and tell them they can't use it from now on. If it's like that here then I imagine there will be other places in the world where it's true.
Contracts with employers seem to vary - some claim copyright on everything you do, technically including things like hobby projects or personal correspondence (no idea how enforceable that is, though). Others specify 'in the course of your employment' or somesuch.
Even if the copyright IS owned by his employer it doesn't mean the GPL licence doesn't exist. The employer wouldn't be breaking it, of course, but they couldn't stop others using it. Not anyone prepared to see a case through to the end, anyway (which is quite possibly nobody). Did his boss agree to licensing them? Did he himself have the power to issue licences on behalf of the company? I'm a director where I work, so any contract I sign on behalf of the company is (almost) automatically legally valid whatever anyone else in the company thinks. AIUI, where I live contracts can be valid if someone who you'd expect to have the power to enter in to them on behalf of their employer has signed them...but if that employee was exceeding his powers it's possible he could be sued by the company. I don't know how it works for licences.
Very very much lawyer territory. Certainly, at a minimum, do a lot of research on your local laws and how they're enforced territory.
The wise person looks objectively at the evidence, not merely following the herd. Scientific consensus has been proven both right and wrong many times throughout history and shouldn't be considered an effective measure of how true or not a theory is.
The wise person looks objectively at the evidence within and around his own field but has no time left to look objectively at the evidence in every other field, or to learn enough that he could possibly keep up. Instead you look to see if the evidence available is effective at convincing those qualified to assess it. Even within a single field I can't imagine many people being stupid enough to do everything from first principles themselves rather than use experts, and not just for time reasons (how many 'wise' programmers write their own cryptography?).
The simple answer to your question is: "The budget should be based on income". You don't come up with a budget and then demand an income to match it. Unless you're the US gov't, apparently.
Basing a government's budget on its income means cutting back heavily during recessions and increasing spending during booms. That's a stupid thing to do for several reasons. There are costs associated with running down or ramping up government services - like training and recruiting staff. Demands on governments - unemployment benefits, crime and suchlike - go up when your income goes down and vice versa. Finally, cutting spending in a recession and increasing it in booms makes economic cycles worse.
Balancing the budget over the cycle is much better. The problem is that governments don't prepare for recessions during booms. The public don't care about the deficit or paying back debt when everything is going well and so politicians do nothing about it. All your measures would all get reversed once the deficit was out of the headlines and people's minds and crime/poverty/terrorism/war/healthcare/whatever was back in.
Unfortunately, almost all governments of almost all parties in almost all countries gain political advantage by attempting to spend their successors' tax revenues. Almost no governments ever pay down their debts except at the very worst time, in a crisis (some do, though not usually for long, and only when they're politically popular enough that they don't need to buy votes). I doubt very much that changing the politicians for new ones would solve that because voters generally don't care much about deficits and debts when there isn't a crisis. How many votes were there in 'Slash public services and the army and increase taxes!' in 2005? Government debt is too long term a problem for 3-6 year political cycles.
Ideally governments would pay down their debt during benign economic conditions to leave space to borrow at times like now. It'd need a new mechanism to make that happen because all politicians will be under similar pressure. How about a variable income tax that goes up automatically with the size of the total debt? Or maybe a body like a central bank charged with maintaining a long term target percentage of GDP. Whatever it is, it has to be something that politicians can't fiddle with to exchange for short term political advantage for long term pain - just as they do with interest rates and inflation in countries without independent central banks.
As for opposing tax rises at all costs, that's just silly. Trying to balance current spending with current revenue is one thing, opposing additional taxes to pay for services already delivered five years ago is extreme.
You may have OS and OS version independence, but you may not have web browser indepedence. And you can get quite a degree of OS version independence at least, and some OS independence and ease of installation/auto-update, especially if you use something like Java (which admittedly has its own disadvantages).
Server side crashes or failures can lose data, especially if your develoeprs are stupid. Porbably that's much rarer, but you do lose all your data at once. Client side crashes (or just unexpected browser or server behaviour) can lose small amounts of data, too, as anyone who's made the mistake of typing a lot of text in to a box in a web form rather than pasting it from a text editor can tell you.
I don't see why a web application would be easier for another developer to pick up.
The downside is a bit bigger than just speed, although speed is important (hint: in an interactive application a delay of a second or two is a very long time). The UI is never going to be quite as satisfactory and always a lot more mouse-intensive and fiddly. You're pretty much forced in to a page-based idiom. It's difficult to get the keyboard to work properly in a web application (accelerator keys? shortcuts? tab order? what do return and escape do?). It hasn't escaped users that most of the advantages to web apps are to the supplier/sysadmin and not to them. Web apps are always going to seem like an on-the-cheap alternative to users.
Grr, and this web browser keeps pausing and briefly ignoring my input as I type, leaving out some letters. Firefox appears to keep briefly thinking the page isn't responding because it's too damn slow.
Java can be a useful sort of in-between option, and has Java WebStart. Pity the UI takes so much work to make it look acceptable, and a pity it's difficult to make your application fit in with the platform, but it's certainly a lot more capable client-side.
Economics is rather limited in how well it can predict and advise, but even when it can people don't necessarily take notice. Quite a few of the housing booms around the world were quite obvious once you looked at price/rent or price/income ratios but people still bought houses. And I don't think you'd have found many economists to approve of governments persistently attempting to spend their successors' tax revenue during good economic conditions, either. Almost all governments do that, all over the world, because it's good politics.
If only one person knew how to brew beer, that knowledge would be very valuable. If everyone knows how to brew beer, that knowledge is less valuable.
Not to the economy as a whole. If there is a beer monopolist then less beer is produced, and there are people who would be prepared to pay more for beer than it costs to make but less than he is charging. If everyone knows then that's not the case. In the first case the creation of that knowledge has increased everyone's welfare by less than the second, so the secret knowledge has less value to the economy than the public knowledge. (All under certain assumptions, of course, such as that everyone knows what's good for them and the rest of the economy is perfect....but it's a starting point and it might be expected to be approximately true).
And that's not to mention that bits of knowledge can interact. You need a lot of bits of knowledge just to build a better pencil, never mind a car. The more public it is the more easily it can be brought together.
You can't. Not unless you control the press, anyway :) What you /can/ do is have your case collapse because there's been so much negative press coverage that there's no hope of a jury being able to reach an unbiased conclusion - especially when evidence which is not admissible in court is being published. That's why there are legal limits on what can be published until the trial is over. The Sun is in trouble over that at the moment: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/05/joanna-yeates-contempt-case
Not just consumers - advertisers were pulling out. There may have been a risk of it spreading to other Murdoch media, too. Nor was it day one. News was coming out a bit at a time.
I think there's not just a laziness element, but a 'get out of my face and do what I say' element. People regard using computers (and sometimes even talking to IT support) somewhat like social interaction. Think of how it looks to a user. I've sat in front of the same computer frequently for several years and yet it is still too stupid and lazy to recognize that I'm me. To make up for its inadequacy, it - a tool which I own, is subordinate to me and is there to do my bidding - demands that I do it a favour by remembering some made up nonsense. Despite me helping to do its job for it, it only goes on to make more demands of me. It demands that the made up nonsense be difficult to remember. It demands that I make up new nonsense regularly. It requires me to remind it of this word many times a day because it forgets who I am whenever more than 15 minutes of my day is not spent on mollycoddling it...possibly it even forgets what I was doing and what I'd entered when this happens. It is, in short, an ungrateful, spiteful, lazy, rude, forgetful, incompetent, insubordinate and stupid little shit.
People don't just get lazy, they get frustrated and angry, come to hate the software as a whole and suffer stress. It's not surprising people subvert the process and feel good about it.
A better policy is to allow users to write down their passwords as long as they only write down part of it - and suggest a long a complicated random and unique bit written down and a memorable piece to go with it.
So what's the purpose of work? What's the purpose of an economy....how should we, as individuals, judge its success?
Its purpose is to produce the highest welfare possible for its citizens given the resources its got. An individual's welfare is mostly about how he spends his time - money and physical stuff gives you more options, but it's not the goal. If career achievements are fulfilling for you and you have a good working environment then that's great, but making your life miserable in order to be macho is not (and you won't work well, either). It's not a pissing contest to see who can make the most or lead the shittiest or most orderly life.
Western economies are very successful, historically and compared to many others. Why would you wish them to be less successful, like China?
So if this is not what's taught, why do so many companies do it?
That, obviously, really needs some proper data. But how about this hypothesis: because their employer, shareholders or typical market behaviour gives them an incentive to, and maybe even threatens their job if they don't. And, of course, people in that position are likely to be heavily career and money focused. It's not that my sympathy muscles are heavily exercised by this, these are people who can look after themselves all too well, but jumping to obviously silly anger-motivated conclusions won't fix anything. Besides, I'm sure that if your employer were to offer a typical developer more money for every line of code written then code quality would be sacrificed in exchange for doing the same thing with more lines. Some people will respond more strongly, some less, but provide stupid incentives and you'll get an increase in stupid behaviour.
Do you have a particular mechanism in mind for that? Taxes have to be raised one way or another. Do you have any particular reason for believing that taxing CO2 production is worse than raising that revenue through the current mechanisms of taxes on labour, investments, goods and so on?
But what about people from poorer backgrounds, or who don't have access to free money from their parents? Unpaid internships (and especially ones organized through family connections) were a minor political issue here (the UK) for a little while because, it was argued, people from some backgrounds were being locked out of certain industries. Then, of course, various politicians had the criticism directed back at them because they were themselves using unpaid interns.
I wouldn't be surprised if VISA and Mastercard would much prefer to be able to (or be required to) allow their member banks to offer their services to whoever they think they can make money from. I doubt very much they enjoy dealing with political nonsense like this - there's nothing in it for them, it's a distraction and whatever they do is going to upset somebody. It'd be much easier to point to a law and say 'sorry, press/public/US government, but it would be illegal to do what you're asking' than be forced in to making a political decision.
Why is bidding pi billion more foolish than bidding 3.15 billion or 3.10 billion? The aim is to bid slightly more than the second highest bid but less than the value to you of the item. They can only estimate.
Auctions are quite tricky things. The expected winning bid if everyone is rational and everything is ideal is the second highest valuation of all of the bidders in the room. That's true not just for a standard auction (bids going up, winner is the last one standing), but, on average, for weird kinds of auctions like ones where the price creeps downwards (the winner is the first to accept) or where the winning bidder pays the amount of the second highest bid. (This last one is designed to give everyone bidding no incentive to bid anything other than their true valuation).
The really scary one is the winners curse. No doubt many an IT contract has lost money and been delivered late because of this - it's surprising how few people who's job it is to know don't know about it. Suppose you're bidding for a patent, the patent will give a certain income no matter who wins and that you don't know exactly what that income is. So you estimate. So do the other bidders. As the number of bidders you're competing with goes up should your maximum bid go up, down or stay the same?
The answer is that it should go down. If everyone's estimates are unbiased (and, say, normal) then 50% of the time you'll estimate too high and 50% of the time too low. If there are no other bidders (or no auction) then this is fine, on average you make money. But in an auction, if you win then it's because your estimate is the highest. This happens more often when you've overestimated than when you've underestimated. It happens more when your estimate is higher than three other unbiased estimates than when it's higher than two.
So if your job involves estimating IT projects for contracts your company (and its mathematically naive negotiators) is bidding for you're likely to find yourself perennially struggling to complete them on time, even if your estimates are correct on average (which is admittedly unlikely, given that it's IT we're talking about).
So the best protection against a very competent attack is to avoid angering people.
How? The world is full of angry people. There are religious nutters who hate atheists, religious nutters who hate the US, religious nutters who hate other religious nutters, governments who hate anyone in certain other countries, criminals who hate the police, anti-capitalists who hate everyone who won't give away all their money and teenagers who hate everyone. This is something which needs a combined legal and technical response, not a give up and hide response.
The last point applies to CS itself as well, of course. You don't really need any special equipment or difficult demonstrations. Presumably the questioner is worried more about (also) being accredited for career reasons, otherwise he could just get on with it. For that I'd suggest he find the best-reputed non-US University who'll let him in.