Economics allows you to make reasonable predictions about supply, demand, and value, and it is applicable to almost everything, even things not necessarily related to money
You mean like those predictions made by the top economists at Lehman Brothers etc? La creme de la creme?
Now seriously. Value is dealt with by some individuals called actuaries not economists. Supply & demand is bogus as is most of any Econ101 based on "free market" theories. There's a nice, well documented book "Debunking Economics" by Steve Keen that makes this point more eloquently that I could ever try.
As for psychology, I would rather compare economics as a science with psychiatry, especially at the level where it was some 50 years ago. They didn't have any understanding of how the human brain works, but they kept prescribing electric shocks, cold showers and lobotomies. Is the patient apathetic? Let's apply some "stimulus" (high voltage preferred). Is he too agitated now? Let's "tapper off" (cold shower) and give him some "austerity" (lobotomy). Wow, see, now he's not banging his head into the walls anymore, we CURED him! Rinse and repeat! What a great science we have here!
You force the old to pay for their retirements by making them buy private pensions. You force them to sell their houses to pay for aged care, and soak them through taxes.
This looks like a modern form of the ancient art of lapidation practiced against the older, weaker or ill members of the tribe. Look in a mirror, do you see the neanderthal there?
If the climate scientists' models are not validated (i.e. they fail to predict real world evolution) then you have a good case for not teaching them in school at all or just mentioning them as (invalidated) hypotheses. Also, for consistency, thou shalt also remove the dismal science (economics) from academic curricula, as it never came up with any working model, not even remotely close to a coarse "engineering" 10% accuracy.
[...] they may not be so happy to hear that their savings bonds and Social Security Trust Fund (cf. the SDR bonds that constitute almost the entire the Trust Fund) are risky investments that are subject to being debased and paid out with worthless scrip.
I think they already know. They're just trying to beat inflation without taking extra risks. Government savings bonds are about as safe as the money they're denominated in, while their interest rate helps with reducing the effect of inflation.
[...] indoctrinate their children through forced public education.
Proper science (like in a science that has a validated, reasonable precise model of reality) is not indoctrination. The dismal science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... on the other hand...
Actually the fast food industry is the most efficient one at utilizing resources. In their parlance "100% beef" means that they ground the whole cow, horns to tail. Nothing is wasted.
You're confusing the Linux kernel with a Linux distro. Linus got the award for his work on the kernel. Up to cca year 2000, the crushing dominance of DOS over Linux as a kernel in the desktop world cannot be explained by any technical merits of the former vs. the later. Even with the advent of XP and the "NT" kernel, there's still no technical reason why the "NT" kernel would technically be more adept to desktop use. If you want a good explanation on why Windows is the no 1 desktop system, the kernel is definitely not the place to look for answers.
The problem lies with how the "software industry" evolved over time, and the complete lack of user/consumer protection legislation regarding software products.
If the physical products manufacturers have a design fault, they will have to fix those products, during warranty period, at their own expense. If on top of it the defect is safety related, they'll have to fix it even beyond the standard warranty period. Whether the product is a car or a coffee grinder, they'll have to recall it period.
Now contrast this with software, where there's no liability and no recalls. All they would do is to provide some patches, when they want and if they want, that you would obtain and apply at your own expense. If MS for example would had been required to pay for the labor needed to apply all their patches to all the systems in use, they would had been bankrupt for a long time now.
The software "culture" will not change a bit unless there would be some legislation introduced to force it to happen. However this probably won't happen any time soon. "Lobbying" will take care.
Let's remember the good old bug that plagued (and probably still does) many libraries that read graphic files such as TIFF. The classic scenario was that the programmer was reading the expected image size from the TIFF file header, allocated memory for this size, then read the reminder of the file into said buffer, until end of file. Instead of reading as many bytes as he has allocated. Now for a correct file this would work, however if the file is maliciously crafted to indicate one size in the header while having a much larger real size, you would do a classic buffer overrun. This is pretty much similar to what the SSL programmer did. And no tools were ever able to predict this type of errors, whether TIFF or SSL.
BTW the last famous one with TIFF files was pretty recent: http://threatpost.com/microsoft-to-patch-tiff-zero-day-wait-til-next-year-for-xp-zero-day-fix/103117
The answer whether Steve Jobs was "more worthy" or not than you is simple to give. It's the answer to this simple question - would I want to live his life instead of mine?
So, instead of having a full time employee to fix the issue when it occurs, you're proposing a full time manager to watch when the issue occurs, and temporarily hire an employee to fix it at that time?
$50K a year can be a bargain compared to development and maintenance in-house.
Don't forget that what is "outsourced" for you is "in-house" for the outsourcer. If you can't beat him on price and assuming similar labor costs, it means you have poor/too much management overhead.
The problem is once you make something open source you also automatically make it free (as in zero selling price). How can you charge me money for something if I can get the source and build my own copy for free?
Don't confuse licensing terms with the availability of the source.
Sure thing? Even when you split it in both output/input lines, with one or two analog (ADC) inputs thrown in the mix? If this is implemented as an 8-bit wide IN followed by an 8-bit OUT, do you know the effect of the OUT on an input line (think enabling/disabling digital buffer and pull up resistor)?
Wirth acknowledged the modularity failings of Pascal in his Modula language family, but by that time he had missed the bus.
Interesting that it "missed the bus" on "modularity" issues against two languages that didn't even have the behavior of the modulo (%) operator properly defined and standardized until late in 1999 (C) and 2011 (C++) respectively.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like those predictions made by the top economists at Lehman Brothers etc? La creme de la creme?
Now seriously. Value is dealt with by some individuals called actuaries not economists. Supply & demand is bogus as is most of any Econ101 based on "free market" theories. There's a nice, well documented book "Debunking Economics" by Steve Keen that makes this point more eloquently that I could ever try.
As for psychology, I would rather compare economics as a science with psychiatry, especially at the level where it was some 50 years ago. They didn't have any understanding of how the human brain works, but they kept prescribing electric shocks, cold showers and lobotomies. Is the patient apathetic? Let's apply some "stimulus" (high voltage preferred). Is he too agitated now? Let's "tapper off" (cold shower) and give him some "austerity" (lobotomy). Wow, see, now he's not banging his head into the walls anymore, we CURED him! Rinse and repeat! What a great science we have here!
This looks like a modern form of the ancient art of lapidation practiced against the older, weaker or ill members of the tribe. Look in a mirror, do you see the neanderthal there?
If the climate scientists' models are not validated (i.e. they fail to predict real world evolution) then you have a good case for not teaching them in school at all or just mentioning them as (invalidated) hypotheses. Also, for consistency, thou shalt also remove the dismal science (economics) from academic curricula, as it never came up with any working model, not even remotely close to a coarse "engineering" 10% accuracy.
I think they already know. They're just trying to beat inflation without taking extra risks. Government savings bonds are about as safe as the money they're denominated in, while their interest rate helps with reducing the effect of inflation.
Proper science (like in a science that has a validated, reasonable precise model of reality) is not indoctrination. The dismal science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... on the other hand...
Screwed because MS abandoned it without offering any sensible upgrade path. Try to migrate an XP machine to Windows 8 and let us know how it went.
... but they're also taking care of the citizens screwed by the XP-end-of-life:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/...
.
It would had been so much more interesting to hear "Intel open sources Atom".
Next Google investment you'll hear about is mice.
https://plus.google.com/+Larry...
.
Actually the fast food industry is the most efficient one at utilizing resources. In their parlance "100% beef" means that they ground the whole cow, horns to tail. Nothing is wasted.
How's this different or better than adblock / ghostery / flashblock / noscript / do not accept third party cookies ?
You're confusing the Linux kernel with a Linux distro. Linus got the award for his work on the kernel. Up to cca year 2000, the crushing dominance of DOS over Linux as a kernel in the desktop world cannot be explained by any technical merits of the former vs. the later. Even with the advent of XP and the "NT" kernel, there's still no technical reason why the "NT" kernel would technically be more adept to desktop use. If you want a good explanation on why Windows is the no 1 desktop system, the kernel is definitely not the place to look for answers.
The problem lies with how the "software industry" evolved over time, and the complete lack of user/consumer protection legislation regarding software products.
If the physical products manufacturers have a design fault, they will have to fix those products, during warranty period, at their own expense. If on top of it the defect is safety related, they'll have to fix it even beyond the standard warranty period. Whether the product is a car or a coffee grinder, they'll have to recall it period.
Now contrast this with software, where there's no liability and no recalls. All they would do is to provide some patches, when they want and if they want, that you would obtain and apply at your own expense. If MS for example would had been required to pay for the labor needed to apply all their patches to all the systems in use, they would had been bankrupt for a long time now.
The software "culture" will not change a bit unless there would be some legislation introduced to force it to happen. However this probably won't happen any time soon. "Lobbying" will take care.
Let's remember the good old bug that plagued (and probably still does) many libraries that read graphic files such as TIFF. The classic scenario was that the programmer was reading the expected image size from the TIFF file header, allocated memory for this size, then read the reminder of the file into said buffer, until end of file. Instead of reading as many bytes as he has allocated. Now for a correct file this would work, however if the file is maliciously crafted to indicate one size in the header while having a much larger real size, you would do a classic buffer overrun. This is pretty much similar to what the SSL programmer did. And no tools were ever able to predict this type of errors, whether TIFF or SSL.
BTW the last famous one with TIFF files was pretty recent:
http://threatpost.com/microsoft-to-patch-tiff-zero-day-wait-til-next-year-for-xp-zero-day-fix/103117
The answer whether Steve Jobs was "more worthy" or not than you is simple to give. It's the answer to this simple question - would I want to live his life instead of mine?
... Bill Gates is busy getting out of the software business altogether:
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
.
So, instead of having a full time employee to fix the issue when it occurs, you're proposing a full time manager to watch when the issue occurs, and temporarily hire an employee to fix it at that time?
Let's reformulate: 2 developers are doing the work of perhaps thousands of managers, HR, legal, PM, accounting etc. employing 2 developers.
Don't forget that what is "outsourced" for you is "in-house" for the outsourcer. If you can't beat him on price and assuming similar labor costs, it means you have poor/too much management overhead.
Don't confuse licensing terms with the availability of the source.
Sure thing? Even when you split it in both output/input lines, with one or two analog (ADC) inputs thrown in the mix? If this is implemented as an 8-bit wide IN followed by an 8-bit OUT, do you know the effect of the OUT on an input line (think enabling/disabling digital buffer and pull up resistor)?
How many programmers does Microsoft have? Are their products bug free as a result?
http://artlung.com/smorgasborg...
Java++
.
Interesting that it "missed the bus" on "modularity" issues against two languages that didn't even have the behavior of the modulo (%) operator properly defined and standardized until late in 1999 (C) and 2011 (C++) respectively.