World War II massively increased the deficit. It also created full employment. That full employment doubled the size of the economy. By the end of World War II the deficit had grown immensely; but the economy had grown so much faster than the deficit, that as a proportion of the whole, the deficit was smaller than when the US entered the war.
So yeah, the stimulus will increase the deficit. But if it is a large enough stimulus to put everyone to work, in a few years the economy will be so much larger that as a proportion of it, the deficit will be smaller than it is now.
There's a lot of counterintuitive stuff in economics. That's part of what makes it so easy for a the whole economy to go over a cliff occasionally - that it just seems intuitive that tulips or housing prices or internet stocks or whatever will go up forever; or that brilliant people, the shackles removed from their brilliance, can produce infinite profits by shuffling new forms of paper around.
That the economy would be better off without government spending at times like this is intuitive - and wrong.
Judicial corruption should get zero tolerance. For each of the 5000 kids sent to these private prisons for the profit of the judges, the judges should have an equal number of months to the kids' sentences removed from their lives. The punishment must fit the crime. Clearly, for the aggregate theft of life from children, these judges deserve death.
What these judges have done, in terms of total injury to others, is far worse than a single murder. They have also undermined the faith of the public in the justice system. This faith can only be restored by reforms to the justice system so that punishments truly fit the harms caused by the crimes.
Until we have a justice system in which men such as this face a sentence of death, we really don't have justice. Similarly, why is Bernie Madoff still walking around free? Steal $50 from a liquor store, go to jail. Steal $50 billion, and you're treated far better. And what about Dick Cheney? Our system is about punishing the poor and minorities in order to enforce a class system, not about really going after the psychopaths who are pushing our civilization over the edge.
I've seen plenty of liberals defend him as saying that he wanted to "protect them", which is just as sensible as saying Hitler wanted to protect the Jews.
Okay, I've never seen this defense. But it can work. The only Japanese in America put into camps were on the West Coast. The Japanese Navy had active plans to invade there. They'd already successfully attacked Hawaii. If Japanese marines had come aground, we can be sure that national guard and civilian militias would be firing on anyone who looked Japanese.
Now, for your Hitler parallel: The Israeli Navy was poised to land Jewish marines on the beaches of Germany! Oh wait, Israel didn't have a navy, didn't even have Israel.
What defines viewing "documents he shouldn't have"? Is that just post facto rationalization from Microsoft? The firm lists as one of its assets a superior knowledge of and huge investment in computer security. Its internal network, on which its documents are maintained, is entirely on software of its own creation and administration. By clear implication, any document which is made available for viewing by any staff member is authorized for viewing by that staff member.
Does Microsoft really want to argue to the court that they are not competent to secure their own LAN?
Yeah, common. I know a couple of "juvenile" book authors who pitched a series concept to Aaron Spelling which they called "Beverly Hills High." It was precisely the plot that Spelling subsequently used for the first season of "90210." But he never credited them nor paid them a thing. It was total theft. Nor were they able to find a lawyer who would give them good odds going up against Spelling about it.
That's what's so curious about the studios claiming their creative works should be protected from theft. The studios are in large part run by thieves like Aaron Spelling. Their complaint is akin to that of mobsters bothered by any competition with their rackets.
And in software, Microsoft operates largely on their model. It's not that theft is not in some instances unethical. But theft from someone whose own fortune derives largely from theft? Robin Hood was a good guy.
The "requirements of relativity" also say that it's impossible to send any info via quantum entanglement. No less that Einstein himself insisted on this. Too bad. It's been demonstrated.
You do know that quantum physics and relativity physics have fundamental disagreements, right? Yes, they agree on much. But once you get into the places where they don't, it is not a good argument to say "You can't get this quantum result because relativity says so." There are reverse examples too. There are aspects of reality which prove both of these systems flawed. Fortunately, they're mostly not the same aspects. So where you can't use the one system the other often will do nicely.
To be truly fair, compare industries with high barriers of entry, like medicine and law. YMMV, but I've worked with plenty of clueless hacks from both those professions. Or take public school teachers, in most states requiring special degrees and certification, yet by-and-large clueless hacks. Private schools, without special degree and certification requirements, and often with lower pay, get far better teachers. Why is that? Could it be because the social environment is far more important to satisfaction than pay or certification? Might that extend to the present question?
As for the "most of our colleagues suck" among software developers, part of the problem is it's such a vast field that most any of us is ignorant of important stuff that most any other of us is familiar with. It's a strange case where the grass looks greener in our own yards.
How about we use the government resources directly against the spammers?
1. Set up false fronts to buy the products.
2. Trace the transactions.
3. Establish a swift death penalty for whoever receives the funds.
Yes, this would need safeguards - for instance when spammers start threatening to send out spam for products from businesses other than their own, to blackmail those businesses with threat of government response. But for instance when the payment can be traced directly to a Canadian "pharmacy," simply extradite and execute the pharmacists - or jail for life if the extradition treaty doesn't allow for execution.
Who would miss these people? Who would be sorry this had been done?
He's not saying, "Look in Area 51 and all will be revealed." He's saying, "Haul these CEO's in to testify." Now, there are real questions of whether the technology is even plausible for interstellar travel - there's pretty good physics that says you can't get from one star to another in reasonable time with reasonable energy expenditure. But the technology for spying on us? Come on, there's enough technical expertise even within the community reading this thread to build, link, and mine the databases as it's suggested the NSA, phone and credit companies have done. And I'm sure some of us have pitched such designs to the government - direct knowledge, I know at least one guy who has, and got a contract from the pitch, pre-9/11. There had to have been hundreds, even thousands of pitches to and within the government to set up more of this stuff after 9/11. Now, on what reasonable basis do you believe the Bush administration wouldn't have bought some of these pitches? Our confidence that such programs are in place should approach unity. Talking to the CEOs whose cooperation would be required to pull this stuff off is a good place to start uncovering them.
Risks can be good. But the risks from playing high school football? Unacceptable. There's absolutely no reason to raise a generation of brain-damaged kids with no decent work alternative other than going into the army - were further concussions are currently the most prevalent combat injury. Okay, might as well get them partly brain-dead before sending them into combat... except, this being/., we need to consider that we're not too many years short of having an all-robot army. Anticipating that, we should shut football down, now.
As Richard Florida's research shows, public investment in sports arenas negatively correlates with economic growth. So it's time to go for zero tolerance for activities which demonstrably produce brain-damaged kids, and in their professional forms are bad for our civic economies. Let's make football illegal by 2010!
To excuse the.08 limit for driving you have to believe that there is no social value in drinking in public places, and the social ties that flourish there. That is, it is a profoundly anti-social law. Would there be risks if the limit were raised to, say,.12? Sure, but those risks need to be assessed against the social harms caused both by arresting people who are over the current limit, yet driving safely, and the great harms caused by suppressing the people's freedom of assembly - namely, by saying you can assemble for something like church, but not for something like spending the afternoon socializing at the bar.
Keeping pot illegal similarly is a suppression of the right of assembly, and the specific positive social values that come from entering into mildly altered states in the company of others. Also, if pot were legal, but establishments for public use were segregated from bars, the streets would be safer, since pot smokers are statistically very safe drivers, and the availability of pot cafes would divert some of us from the taverns.
Now, if you consistently believe that safe roads trump all other values, the statistics for cell-phone use show it to be as dangerous - even hands-free - as driving with.08 blood alcohol. The statistics for driving without enough sleep are similar. Driving without enough sleep and talking on the cell phone - not sure that study's been done, but I'd predict it's at least as dangerous as driving with.12 blood alcohol. Any of these are worse than driving after a smoke.
The only design philosophy that should matter is pragmatism. The desktop environment that allows the user to take the best ideas, no matter where they come from, or what their philosophical base, and combine them easily to create a successful environment for the user's own work is what all of the projects should work towards.
And they are. Xfce for instance can integrate quite a bit of stuff originating from both KDE and Gnome. So parts are already fairly interchangeable between environments (at least if you've got the required support libraries). They should become more so.
This may not be an obvious flaw. Text not fitting in a widget can happen if the user's font settings are outside the default range. So unless this is a case were the widget is in trouble on a virgin install - where there are no settings inherited from a prior KDE instance - or on a system were the user never altered any of the default settings - then how are the developers supposed to have seen the problem as "obvious"? What may be more obvious is that if you allow the user to tune his system some proportion of users will get theirs tuned so stuff like this appears.
Most taxpayers do create jobs. They are the demand side of the economy. When demand is strong, people with the means to satisfy it will do so. (See: drug trade.) By choosing to buy an endless stream of mostly crap made in China, normal American taxpayers have created tens of millions of jobs in China just in the last decade.
Putting taxpayer money directly into the economy worked well in the 50's and 60's in building the Interstate Highway System, in building out educational infrastructure, even in setting NASA and DARPA - from all of which the downstream economic benefits have been immense (despite instances of spending idiocy).
This doesn't point directly to an answer. It may not be what we do, but how we do it, that determines success or failure. An IT build out though makes a lot of sense, and Obama has spoken strongly in favor of, for instance, the "smart grid." So wait a few weeks, and we'll see it beginning to happen.
If your ideas are so good... then surely you will have even better ones later on
Einstein hoped that would be the case. But after expanding Special Relativity into General Relativity while still a young man, and despite the best possible work environment in Princeton, that never happened.
It would be trivial to list all the musicians who did their only significant compositional work by their mid-twenties, then continued in long careers in which the best they could do was perform covers from their youth. It happens otherwise too. But can you really be sure, if you truly have a solidly novel idea at around 20, that they will just keep coming like that, as good or better, your whole life?
Or go to the visual arts, where for every endlessly reinventing Picasso there are a thousand excellent artists who never in their lives get beyond a narrow set of themes - but do those themes exquisitely. That would describe at least 95% of the contemporary artists who sell through the best galleries in the world. A single good idea can be enough for a lifetime. Nature being economical, don't be too sure she'll provide you with any more, once one comes to you.
Have on order a transfer switch from here - a reputable brand with an installation scheme that's doable by anyone comfortable working in a breaker box - doesn't need the main power turned off to do it, just the circuits you want to transfer to.
If you're running sensitive electronics (I have a couple of servers running here that are vital to business) you want something with an inverter - not the sort of Chinese-made generators that your local hardware store is likely to carry. If your needs are modest, Honda and Yamaha make quiet, efficient, very portable models (that can be run in tandem, too, if your needs grow). The best deal I found for something that has an inverter, is light enough to lift, and can fill very modest demands (since I can heat with wood when required, and refrigerate by putting stuff in a cold room if it's winter) is this.
Ah, that explains it. From the Herald article there was no hint that "third-party portal" was a term of art, not a reference to what in common English would be a "third-party" - that is, any party beyond the first party (the customer) and the second party (Fairpoint) - which maintains a "portal" (in the common Internet sense).
So in your interpretation, "third-party portal" is not a third party's portal, but the portal of the second party to third parties, while not restricting access to what in common English would be the "third-party portals" in the sense of being portals provided by the third parties.
Why then would this be qualified by "you'll still have access to Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN content"? The portals of Yahoo!, AOL and MSN provide other content, plus e-mail. Can I be forgiven for reading this also as plain English, saying that while Yahoo! etc. content will not be blocked, the e-mail portals of these third parties will be?
Okay, maybe I should have called Fairpoint (on a Saturday) for clarification. But the newspaper's writeup being this muddled was beyond my humble reader's imagination. It's not generally a bad or sloppy paper, as small-town rags go. Its publisher is even on the AP board.
Good analysis. However, unlike Social Security, corporate pensions are, by law, supposed to be covered as they are earned by contributions to the corporate pension funds, which are to be invested so as to assure the ability to pay the pensions when due. Many corporations cheat on this, and the federal government most often looks the other way. But the cheating is still illegal and morally wrong. GM's current pension costs should be totally covered by GM's past contributions to its pension plans, which were to have been made when the workers now in retirement were still working.
Yes, pension funds have seen losses from their own stock market investments lately. But the core of the problem is the result of GM (and Ford and Chrysler) cheating on their pension-fund contributions back while profits were flush. Money that should have been invested to cover future pension costs got diverted to executive bonuses and to the stockholders. There's a word for that: theft.
Several small manufacturers have recently moved from New England to the Deep South, hoping to save on labor costs, and then after a year or two moved back. Why? Because Southern workers are largely illiterate, while in New England you can't get beyond grade school without gaining basic literacy. The manufacturers found it cost them far more to train Southerners, and to cover the cost of their production mistakes, than to employ New Englanders with somewhat higher wage expectations.
It's not, however, public education that's the problem. Oh, there are plenty of problems with public education, even in New England. But public education is good enough to turn out a solid factory workforce, just as long as the families sending their children to it have an expectation that their children can and should learn. In the Deep South, where learning is viewed as a threat to a religion and culture of ignorance, there's a great premium placed on the kids learning sports, but not much else.
Could it just be possible that it isn't whether it's "government" or "a corporation" or a "public-private partnership" that makes the difference between well-done and corrupt, but the vision and integrity of the people carrying out the project? If Obama's people have the integrity to go with their vision, and if their vision is better than the crippled mess that private industry has largely made of the Internet - which after all started as a government project - then let them have it. Yet Obama himself has stated that in the longer term he thinks private industry can provide better management of most enterprises than government can. That may be true, if we first jail many of the crooks who have controlled private industry over the last decade, confiscate their ill-gotten fortunes, and bring in a fresh, ethically-educated generation to run our businesses.
It's the quality of the people who make the quality of the world. Whether they organize themselves into "governments" or "corporations" or "anarcho-syndicates" to pursue their goals is totally secondary to the essential matter of who's doing it. It's like arguing whether four-piece rock bands or small jazz orchestras make the better music. It's not the size or shape of the organization that determines quality, but who the people are, whether they share the right feeling, and have drive and competence.
Please point out where the Constitution restricts the ability of the federal government to spend money. Where it speaks of "powers," such as those reserved for the states, that's not generally understood as spending power, but as the power to, for instance, arrest you for growing pot to deal with your migraines. Clearly the founders did not intend for the federal government to have vast powers over what people could legally do, except when they entered into interstate commerce, in which case a federal role is necessary since states don't have power in each other's territory.
But to say that the Constitution requires the federal government to avoid spending money on Internets, or interstates, or elaborate embassies on the Moon... what's your basis for that?
Thank you. Do you have other excellent creative conceptual contributions? Because as we know, box cutters are WMDs - when used with the right brilliant scheme. There must be ten thousand glorious ways to harness ten million zombie computers in unison for nefariousness.
If only the botnets had been employed against Wall Street before Wall Street's computer-enabled credit swaps crippled the economy of the West! Surely the West will rise again. But that it had never fallen. If only the botnet lords had saved us!
Must be in YMMV territory here. I've been running MySQL behind production Web servers for years, through many iterations of MySQL. I've not once had it "blow a table." No doubt that's been your experience. But I have to wonder if it was MySQL that was the weak point in your configuration.
I've found, and reported, bugs in years past. Those were all in peripheral capabilities though, not in basic data handling. MySQL was always good about addressing them. Haven't hit any since Sun took over.
Whether to bill by the hour or the job depends largely on context. I do both, and both have their place. It depends on the nature of the project. Projects are wildly different. Some can be tightly defined upfront, both in scope and final delivery target. Some are better framed not as a single clear goal but an ongoing direction. The first, I bid as a project. The second is best approached hourly, breaking it into small stages, and always prioritizing delivery of the aspects that the client can see immediate benefit from.
But none of this is one-size-fits-all. It very much depends on what kind of product, for what personality of client, in what industry. There are many, many different business ecosystems out there in which niches exist for independent developers and designers.
Nor is it one-size-fits-all for what skills you should bring. The skills you need are whatever your client doesn't have in-house. That's entirely client-specific. The more you are in fact a jack-of-all-trades, the better the chance that you'll at least know where to find the answers to give them what their own staff can't - or the competing consultant who has over-specialized in one particular methodology can't.
You're kidding, right? You realize that the critical exposure time is while you're in the womb? So if your mother bathed in PCBs, and you don't like to play with tea sets, you've got something.
After that, too much exposure over long enough time and you might be able to grow breasts, but a vagina and a shift to a more female wiring in the brain - not gonna happen.
Slashdot Mirror
World War II massively increased the deficit. It also created full employment. That full employment doubled the size of the economy. By the end of World War II the deficit had grown immensely; but the economy had grown so much faster than the deficit, that as a proportion of the whole, the deficit was smaller than when the US entered the war.
So yeah, the stimulus will increase the deficit. But if it is a large enough stimulus to put everyone to work, in a few years the economy will be so much larger that as a proportion of it, the deficit will be smaller than it is now.
There's a lot of counterintuitive stuff in economics. That's part of what makes it so easy for a the whole economy to go over a cliff occasionally - that it just seems intuitive that tulips or housing prices or internet stocks or whatever will go up forever; or that brilliant people, the shackles removed from their brilliance, can produce infinite profits by shuffling new forms of paper around.
That the economy would be better off without government spending at times like this is intuitive - and wrong.
Judicial corruption should get zero tolerance. For each of the 5000 kids sent to these private prisons for the profit of the judges, the judges should have an equal number of months to the kids' sentences removed from their lives. The punishment must fit the crime. Clearly, for the aggregate theft of life from children, these judges deserve death.
What these judges have done, in terms of total injury to others, is far worse than a single murder. They have also undermined the faith of the public in the justice system. This faith can only be restored by reforms to the justice system so that punishments truly fit the harms caused by the crimes.
Until we have a justice system in which men such as this face a sentence of death, we really don't have justice. Similarly, why is Bernie Madoff still walking around free? Steal $50 from a liquor store, go to jail. Steal $50 billion, and you're treated far better. And what about Dick Cheney? Our system is about punishing the poor and minorities in order to enforce a class system, not about really going after the psychopaths who are pushing our civilization over the edge.
Okay, I've never seen this defense. But it can work. The only Japanese in America put into camps were on the West Coast. The Japanese Navy had active plans to invade there. They'd already successfully attacked Hawaii. If Japanese marines had come aground, we can be sure that national guard and civilian militias would be firing on anyone who looked Japanese.
Now, for your Hitler parallel: The Israeli Navy was poised to land Jewish marines on the beaches of Germany! Oh wait, Israel didn't have a navy, didn't even have Israel.
What defines viewing "documents he shouldn't have"? Is that just post facto rationalization from Microsoft? The firm lists as one of its assets a superior knowledge of and huge investment in computer security. Its internal network, on which its documents are maintained, is entirely on software of its own creation and administration. By clear implication, any document which is made available for viewing by any staff member is authorized for viewing by that staff member.
Does Microsoft really want to argue to the court that they are not competent to secure their own LAN?
Yeah, common. I know a couple of "juvenile" book authors who pitched a series concept to Aaron Spelling which they called "Beverly Hills High." It was precisely the plot that Spelling subsequently used for the first season of "90210." But he never credited them nor paid them a thing. It was total theft. Nor were they able to find a lawyer who would give them good odds going up against Spelling about it.
That's what's so curious about the studios claiming their creative works should be protected from theft. The studios are in large part run by thieves like Aaron Spelling. Their complaint is akin to that of mobsters bothered by any competition with their rackets.
And in software, Microsoft operates largely on their model. It's not that theft is not in some instances unethical. But theft from someone whose own fortune derives largely from theft? Robin Hood was a good guy.
The "requirements of relativity" also say that it's impossible to send any info via quantum entanglement. No less that Einstein himself insisted on this. Too bad. It's been demonstrated.
You do know that quantum physics and relativity physics have fundamental disagreements, right? Yes, they agree on much. But once you get into the places where they don't, it is not a good argument to say "You can't get this quantum result because relativity says so." There are reverse examples too. There are aspects of reality which prove both of these systems flawed. Fortunately, they're mostly not the same aspects. So where you can't use the one system the other often will do nicely.
To be truly fair, compare industries with high barriers of entry, like medicine and law. YMMV, but I've worked with plenty of clueless hacks from both those professions. Or take public school teachers, in most states requiring special degrees and certification, yet by-and-large clueless hacks. Private schools, without special degree and certification requirements, and often with lower pay, get far better teachers. Why is that? Could it be because the social environment is far more important to satisfaction than pay or certification? Might that extend to the present question?
As for the "most of our colleagues suck" among software developers, part of the problem is it's such a vast field that most any of us is ignorant of important stuff that most any other of us is familiar with. It's a strange case where the grass looks greener in our own yards.
How about we use the government resources directly against the spammers?
1. Set up false fronts to buy the products.
2. Trace the transactions.
3. Establish a swift death penalty for whoever receives the funds.
Yes, this would need safeguards - for instance when spammers start threatening to send out spam for products from businesses other than their own, to blackmail those businesses with threat of government response. But for instance when the payment can be traced directly to a Canadian "pharmacy," simply extradite and execute the pharmacists - or jail for life if the extradition treaty doesn't allow for execution.
Who would miss these people? Who would be sorry this had been done?
He's not saying, "Look in Area 51 and all will be revealed." He's saying, "Haul these CEO's in to testify." Now, there are real questions of whether the technology is even plausible for interstellar travel - there's pretty good physics that says you can't get from one star to another in reasonable time with reasonable energy expenditure. But the technology for spying on us? Come on, there's enough technical expertise even within the community reading this thread to build, link, and mine the databases as it's suggested the NSA, phone and credit companies have done. And I'm sure some of us have pitched such designs to the government - direct knowledge, I know at least one guy who has, and got a contract from the pitch, pre-9/11. There had to have been hundreds, even thousands of pitches to and within the government to set up more of this stuff after 9/11. Now, on what reasonable basis do you believe the Bush administration wouldn't have bought some of these pitches? Our confidence that such programs are in place should approach unity. Talking to the CEOs whose cooperation would be required to pull this stuff off is a good place to start uncovering them.
Risks can be good. But the risks from playing high school football? Unacceptable. There's absolutely no reason to raise a generation of brain-damaged kids with no decent work alternative other than going into the army - were further concussions are currently the most prevalent combat injury. Okay, might as well get them partly brain-dead before sending them into combat ... except, this being /., we need to consider that we're not too many years short of having an all-robot army. Anticipating that, we should shut football down, now.
As Richard Florida's research shows, public investment in sports arenas negatively correlates with economic growth. So it's time to go for zero tolerance for activities which demonstrably produce brain-damaged kids, and in their professional forms are bad for our civic economies. Let's make football illegal by 2010!
To excuse the .08 limit for driving you have to believe that there is no social value in drinking in public places, and the social ties that flourish there. That is, it is a profoundly anti-social law. Would there be risks if the limit were raised to, say, .12? Sure, but those risks need to be assessed against the social harms caused both by arresting people who are over the current limit, yet driving safely, and the great harms caused by suppressing the people's freedom of assembly - namely, by saying you can assemble for something like church, but not for something like spending the afternoon socializing at the bar.
Keeping pot illegal similarly is a suppression of the right of assembly, and the specific positive social values that come from entering into mildly altered states in the company of others. Also, if pot were legal, but establishments for public use were segregated from bars, the streets would be safer, since pot smokers are statistically very safe drivers, and the availability of pot cafes would divert some of us from the taverns.
Now, if you consistently believe that safe roads trump all other values, the statistics for cell-phone use show it to be as dangerous - even hands-free - as driving with .08 blood alcohol. The statistics for driving without enough sleep are similar. Driving without enough sleep and talking on the cell phone - not sure that study's been done, but I'd predict it's at least as dangerous as driving with .12 blood alcohol. Any of these are worse than driving after a smoke.
The only design philosophy that should matter is pragmatism. The desktop environment that allows the user to take the best ideas, no matter where they come from, or what their philosophical base, and combine them easily to create a successful environment for the user's own work is what all of the projects should work towards.
And they are. Xfce for instance can integrate quite a bit of stuff originating from both KDE and Gnome. So parts are already fairly interchangeable between environments (at least if you've got the required support libraries). They should become more so.
This may not be an obvious flaw. Text not fitting in a widget can happen if the user's font settings are outside the default range. So unless this is a case were the widget is in trouble on a virgin install - where there are no settings inherited from a prior KDE instance - or on a system were the user never altered any of the default settings - then how are the developers supposed to have seen the problem as "obvious"? What may be more obvious is that if you allow the user to tune his system some proportion of users will get theirs tuned so stuff like this appears.
Most taxpayers do create jobs. They are the demand side of the economy. When demand is strong, people with the means to satisfy it will do so. (See: drug trade.) By choosing to buy an endless stream of mostly crap made in China, normal American taxpayers have created tens of millions of jobs in China just in the last decade.
Putting taxpayer money directly into the economy worked well in the 50's and 60's in building the Interstate Highway System, in building out educational infrastructure, even in setting NASA and DARPA - from all of which the downstream economic benefits have been immense (despite instances of spending idiocy).
This doesn't point directly to an answer. It may not be what we do, but how we do it, that determines success or failure. An IT build out though makes a lot of sense, and Obama has spoken strongly in favor of, for instance, the "smart grid." So wait a few weeks, and we'll see it beginning to happen.
Einstein hoped that would be the case. But after expanding Special Relativity into General Relativity while still a young man, and despite the best possible work environment in Princeton, that never happened.
It would be trivial to list all the musicians who did their only significant compositional work by their mid-twenties, then continued in long careers in which the best they could do was perform covers from their youth. It happens otherwise too. But can you really be sure, if you truly have a solidly novel idea at around 20, that they will just keep coming like that, as good or better, your whole life?
Or go to the visual arts, where for every endlessly reinventing Picasso there are a thousand excellent artists who never in their lives get beyond a narrow set of themes - but do those themes exquisitely. That would describe at least 95% of the contemporary artists who sell through the best galleries in the world. A single good idea can be enough for a lifetime. Nature being economical, don't be too sure she'll provide you with any more, once one comes to you.
Have on order a transfer switch from here - a reputable brand with an installation scheme that's doable by anyone comfortable working in a breaker box - doesn't need the main power turned off to do it, just the circuits you want to transfer to.
If you're running sensitive electronics (I have a couple of servers running here that are vital to business) you want something with an inverter - not the sort of Chinese-made generators that your local hardware store is likely to carry. If your needs are modest, Honda and Yamaha make quiet, efficient, very portable models (that can be run in tandem, too, if your needs grow). The best deal I found for something that has an inverter, is light enough to lift, and can fill very modest demands (since I can heat with wood when required, and refrigerate by putting stuff in a cold room if it's winter) is this.
Still awaiting delivery, though.
Ah, that explains it. From the Herald article there was no hint that "third-party portal" was a term of art, not a reference to what in common English would be a "third-party" - that is, any party beyond the first party (the customer) and the second party (Fairpoint) - which maintains a "portal" (in the common Internet sense).
So in your interpretation, "third-party portal" is not a third party's portal, but the portal of the second party to third parties, while not restricting access to what in common English would be the "third-party portals" in the sense of being portals provided by the third parties.
Why then would this be qualified by "you'll still have access to Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN content"? The portals of Yahoo!, AOL and MSN provide other content, plus e-mail. Can I be forgiven for reading this also as plain English, saying that while Yahoo! etc. content will not be blocked, the e-mail portals of these third parties will be?
Okay, maybe I should have called Fairpoint (on a Saturday) for clarification. But the newspaper's writeup being this muddled was beyond my humble reader's imagination. It's not generally a bad or sloppy paper, as small-town rags go. Its publisher is even on the AP board.
Good analysis. However, unlike Social Security, corporate pensions are, by law, supposed to be covered as they are earned by contributions to the corporate pension funds, which are to be invested so as to assure the ability to pay the pensions when due. Many corporations cheat on this, and the federal government most often looks the other way. But the cheating is still illegal and morally wrong. GM's current pension costs should be totally covered by GM's past contributions to its pension plans, which were to have been made when the workers now in retirement were still working.
Yes, pension funds have seen losses from their own stock market investments lately. But the core of the problem is the result of GM (and Ford and Chrysler) cheating on their pension-fund contributions back while profits were flush. Money that should have been invested to cover future pension costs got diverted to executive bonuses and to the stockholders. There's a word for that: theft.
Several small manufacturers have recently moved from New England to the Deep South, hoping to save on labor costs, and then after a year or two moved back. Why? Because Southern workers are largely illiterate, while in New England you can't get beyond grade school without gaining basic literacy. The manufacturers found it cost them far more to train Southerners, and to cover the cost of their production mistakes, than to employ New Englanders with somewhat higher wage expectations.
It's not, however, public education that's the problem. Oh, there are plenty of problems with public education, even in New England. But public education is good enough to turn out a solid factory workforce, just as long as the families sending their children to it have an expectation that their children can and should learn. In the Deep South, where learning is viewed as a threat to a religion and culture of ignorance, there's a great premium placed on the kids learning sports, but not much else.
Could it just be possible that it isn't whether it's "government" or "a corporation" or a "public-private partnership" that makes the difference between well-done and corrupt, but the vision and integrity of the people carrying out the project? If Obama's people have the integrity to go with their vision, and if their vision is better than the crippled mess that private industry has largely made of the Internet - which after all started as a government project - then let them have it. Yet Obama himself has stated that in the longer term he thinks private industry can provide better management of most enterprises than government can. That may be true, if we first jail many of the crooks who have controlled private industry over the last decade, confiscate their ill-gotten fortunes, and bring in a fresh, ethically-educated generation to run our businesses.
It's the quality of the people who make the quality of the world. Whether they organize themselves into "governments" or "corporations" or "anarcho-syndicates" to pursue their goals is totally secondary to the essential matter of who's doing it. It's like arguing whether four-piece rock bands or small jazz orchestras make the better music. It's not the size or shape of the organization that determines quality, but who the people are, whether they share the right feeling, and have drive and competence.
Please point out where the Constitution restricts the ability of the federal government to spend money. Where it speaks of "powers," such as those reserved for the states, that's not generally understood as spending power, but as the power to, for instance, arrest you for growing pot to deal with your migraines. Clearly the founders did not intend for the federal government to have vast powers over what people could legally do, except when they entered into interstate commerce, in which case a federal role is necessary since states don't have power in each other's territory.
But to say that the Constitution requires the federal government to avoid spending money on Internets, or interstates, or elaborate embassies on the Moon ... what's your basis for that?
Thank you. Do you have other excellent creative conceptual contributions? Because as we know, box cutters are WMDs - when used with the right brilliant scheme. There must be ten thousand glorious ways to harness ten million zombie computers in unison for nefariousness.
If only the botnets had been employed against Wall Street before Wall Street's computer-enabled credit swaps crippled the economy of the West! Surely the West will rise again. But that it had never fallen. If only the botnet lords had saved us!
Must be in YMMV territory here. I've been running MySQL behind production Web servers for years, through many iterations of MySQL. I've not once had it "blow a table." No doubt that's been your experience. But I have to wonder if it was MySQL that was the weak point in your configuration.
I've found, and reported, bugs in years past. Those were all in peripheral capabilities though, not in basic data handling. MySQL was always good about addressing them. Haven't hit any since Sun took over.
Whether to bill by the hour or the job depends largely on context. I do both, and both have their place. It depends on the nature of the project. Projects are wildly different. Some can be tightly defined upfront, both in scope and final delivery target. Some are better framed not as a single clear goal but an ongoing direction. The first, I bid as a project. The second is best approached hourly, breaking it into small stages, and always prioritizing delivery of the aspects that the client can see immediate benefit from.
But none of this is one-size-fits-all. It very much depends on what kind of product, for what personality of client, in what industry. There are many, many different business ecosystems out there in which niches exist for independent developers and designers.
Nor is it one-size-fits-all for what skills you should bring. The skills you need are whatever your client doesn't have in-house. That's entirely client-specific. The more you are in fact a jack-of-all-trades, the better the chance that you'll at least know where to find the answers to give them what their own staff can't - or the competing consultant who has over-specialized in one particular methodology can't.
You're kidding, right? You realize that the critical exposure time is while you're in the womb? So if your mother bathed in PCBs, and you don't like to play with tea sets, you've got something.
After that, too much exposure over long enough time and you might be able to grow breasts, but a vagina and a shift to a more female wiring in the brain - not gonna happen.