in all areas, we're just focused on SOPA and Protect-IP because they are closer to our hearts.
That is actually the part that scares me the most. If things are this bad in areas that I actually have some knowledge about, how much badness am I not seeing because I am too ignorant? How many horrible ideas have we silently let be implemented, just because we didn't know?
They are targeting cell phone users because when something bad happens constituents expect a government response. While it is impossible to legislate (or enact regulations) to "be a good driver", it is possible to legislate or regulate cell phone usage. Just another regulation that will be arbitrarily enforced...
I think you are completely right.
Having said that, there is a lot we can do to improve drivers' skills, at least in the USA. A lot of drivers follow too closely. A lot of drivers get into huge trouble when something out of the ordinary happens. Accidents ahead, snow, sometimes even something seemingly simple like rain. A lot of people don't blink before turning or changing lanes. A lot of people don't look for traffic in all the places it could be. Some people even forget to turn on their lights when it's dark.
I feel all of this comes from a combination of not being aware of the serious dangers that driving poses, and lack of training and practice. In this day and age, why don't we have everybody learn to drive in simulators, including everyday situations but also especially dangerous situations like dense fog, rain, snow, mistakes by other drivers, etc. before we let them drive on real roads?
So if about 10% of accidents are from distracted driving (actually sounds pretty low).
That does sound pretty low. I think, under most circumstances, you can avoid accidents if you're paying attention. Anyway, I did some searching the web, and here are some numbers that came up:
http://seriousaccidents.com/legal-advice/top-causes-of-car-accidents/driver-distractions/: According to a study released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI), 80 percent of automobile accidents and 65 percent of near-accidents involve at least some form of driver distraction within three seconds of the crash or near-miss.
Sheesh, sometimes I feel bad about not maintaining my own software projects, as I never have enough time and don't make any money from them; and then I read comments like yours and suddenly I don't mind as much. Some people feel way too over-entitled.
The flip side of this is that a lot of people giving away software for free wrote that software for themselves. Presumably there is a reward in there that offsets the time and energy required to write the software. Personally, I make software that I wrote for my own use available to others to make the world a better place, and not because I expect to be financially rewarded for it.
I see your point that some people feel entitled to more when they should be grateful with what they already got, but nobody likes having the rug pulled from under them, and I think being suddenly annoyed with ads for software that used to be free and unobtrusive does feel that way. I think the entitlement argument cuts both ways: just because you got the software for free once doesn't mean you are entitled to eternal support and updates, and just because you wrote the software and people use it doesn't mean you are entitled to financial compensation. In both cases, this is something you can agree on with the other party. Changing the deal without consent from the other party understandably makes the other party feel bad.
hip hop has been open source for quite a while. At least a year.
Yes. But this is not about the ahead of time compiler and the interpreter that were released back then, but rather about the new hhvm interpreter, which was released recently.
Why? Because as long as patents can be enforced like this even against big names, no one small or new will ever be able to even try to enter the same business to compete.
While this makes a lot of sense in theory, what about Apple and Google entering the phone market pretty successfully, without having been active there before?
What concerns me most is that there are enough of these rulings being made at the moment to suggest that all the large technology houses are simply stealing each other's technology on the basis of saying 'prove that I stole it'.
I feel that the way a lot of businesses operate is that they just go ahead and do things, and not worry too much about whether something is legal or just. Also, the validation of those steps is not whether or not they eventually lose lawsuits, money in settlements, or goodwill, but rather if the business succeeds in generating a lot of profit.
There are good and bad things to this. On the one hand, it is good that some people have the guts to just go ahead and do stuff. It brings progress, innovation, new insights, etc. On the other hand, some businesses arguably take things too far - e.g. making millions of people sick so you can grow your business is not something I like to see, and this does happen.
Looking at the history of computing, it seems to me that the tech that survives is the open tech. So that is one thing to consider.
On the other hand, you must consider not only what it takes for the tech to survive, but also what it takes for your company to survive. You will need to make money somehow. I will be upfront here and say that I don't have a special trick here that is guaranteed to make you money. I also think most other people don't, either.
Having said that, there are various ways to approach the issue. I have a hunch that what matters more than anything else is building the right connections. Contrary to what is often assumed, you don't need to be better than your competition to survive as a company. But you will probably want to build lasting relationships with customers, make them happy to do business with you, so that they will keep coming back and refer their connections.
One way to boost customer happiness is to have a better product. This may speak in favor of keeping things closed, or patenting the tech that sets you apart from your competition, or any other measure that bars your competitors from getting their product on par with yours. Or it may speak in favor of opening things up, if you expect that the world at large will do a better job at building great things than you as a company can. Specifically, software can work either way - you may get the greatest advantage over your competitors by having software that nobody else has, or you may get the greatest advantage over your competitors because _your_ software is open source and has a great community around it and gets into places it would never otherwise have gone.
Another way to increase customer happiness is to give them the feeling that you really value them. This can speak in favor of opening things up to your customers, which is never to their disadvantage and may actually be a reason for them to prefer your offering. At any rate, delivering a product that your customers can tailor to their needs always sends a better message that you value their business than a long laundry list of legalese that promises dire consequences should the customer even dare to look at how your product works.
Yet another way to success is to set a standard for your class of product. I don't know your market, but some markets are a twisted maze of incompatible offerings, all crappy. In that case, you may come out ahead by pushing, for example, a standardized interface (API, hardware) that others can interoperate with, and build a whole ecosystem of solutions around the standard that has your company's name associated with it.
You could also consider a hybrid approach. For example, keeping your advantages in hardware secret, but completely open sourcing your software. This will give you many of the advantages of being open, while still allowing you to keep some things out of the hands of your competitors. Also keep in mind that the barrier to developing software is lower than the barrier to developing hardware, so there are many more players who could disrupt the industry by writing better software than there are who could do that by building better hardware. If you are the only one offering your software as open source, you may get these disruptors working for you instead of against you.
Long story short: keeping your secret sauce to yourself seems an obvious way to get an advantage over the competition, and is a road often taken, but it is not the only route to success. In the end, it is about keeping the customers coming, and there are various ways to achieve that. You are probably in a better position than me to judge which way would work best in your industry.
And funnily enough - it's way more easier for Linksys/D-Link/Netgear to fix a bug or implement a feature on a SOHO device than it is for Cisco - not only they don't have to care about the installed base, but their customer base is used to sub-par firmware - so were they to implement an IPv6 feature in a buggy or less-than-optimal way . . . not that much of backslash.
That is exactly why this story is news. If it had been SOHO routers being buggy - well, that's sad, but it's not likely to surprise the/. readership. If it had been "professional equipment" not supporting IPv6, I don't think that would have surprised a whole lot of us, either.
The news here is that vendors who you might expect to deliver quality product shipped appliances that they claimed would support IPv6, and that the IPv6 support is shoddy. Now, some people will not be surprised by this, either (I'm not, for one), but some people will be - as you neatly illustrated by pointing out that people hold Cisco to higher standards than SOHO gear.
"'We should not expect something to work just because it is declared supported,' the paper accompanying the presentation concluded."
I think that if something is declared "supported", it is perfectly reasonable to expect it to work. If it turns out it doesn't work, I think the problem is more that the vendor hasn't done as good a job as they should have than that your expectations were too high.
I think there are two forces that improve programming languages, much like any other field: evolution and revolution. By which I mean: existing languages evolve by having incremental changes applied to them, and, every once in a while, a new language disrupts the field in a more radical way.
All of this is accomplished by a process where new concepts and new implementations of existing concepts are constantly being tried in new languages, and, although most of these attempts wither, some concepts eventually make it into day-to-day programming. It isn't always the language that first introduces a concept that succeeds or becomes the champion for that concept, but this constant experimentation is what moves the field forward.
The way I see it, we need new programming languages for two reasons. First of all, existing languages have well known deficiencies, that are hard to fix because they are fundamental to the language. You need a new language to get rid of them. The other reason is that we need to keep experimenting. Perhaps this does not technically require new languages, but creating a new language is often how new concepts are explored - and the knowledge gained here will eventually make the language you use better.
Even if they had trained operators trying to cause serious damage it would be very hard to achieve anything major.
That pretty much describes what happened at Chernobyl, perhaps minus the "trained" part. The reactor design is often referred to as unsafe, but if you read up on what actually happened it's like they put pretty much every safety measure in the most dangerous configuration possible before the thing exploded.
Which is all well and good until you decide you want to watch a DVD or play a DRMed file for which the gardener didn't feel support was acceptable. Granted these days DVDs wouldn't likely be a problem, but in the past it definitely was an issue.
There aren't really technical issues so much as legal ones. For example, we have known how to decrypt CSSed DVDs for a long time - it's just that it is illegal to do this with unapproved software because you would be circumventing a "technological measure that effectively controls access to a work".
Whether or not they will actually go after you for watching the DVD that you bought and paid for is another question.
I think the trick here is that people who think zsh is a better shell than bash are using this campaign to raise awareness of zsh.
By the way, I do think zsh is the better shell. Just to name one of the things I love about it: writing custom command completion for it is pretty easy (certainly compared to bash). I and other people have used this to provide tab completion for mostly anything you can think of, including things like command options and filenames on remote machines. Go check it out if you haven't already.
Hell, it might even rival emacs for complexity. I know, I didn't think it was possible either...
It's not so strange if you think about it. Both are operating systems cleverly disguised as applications, complete with their own programming languages.
The major difference is that zsh is disguised as a shell, and Emacs is disguised as a text editor.
I, for one, look forward to the arrival of our minor-mode-wielding zsh overlords.
I, for one, welcome our 360-degrees-at-once-seeing overlords.
I mean, yes, I keep my eyes open and pay attention to what's happening, too. I very rarely get surprised in traffic. But it does happen. I just can't look ahead of me and to both sides, at cars in multiple lanes, bicycles, and pedestrians, in the presence of obstacles on the corners, figure out there is a threat, and at the same time check my mirrors to know if I can step on the brakes or should get out of my lane to avoid being rear-ended.
Yes, that's probably a worst case - but technology may be able to help here, because it _can_ look all directions at once. It's sort of like in aviation, where we have pilots watching for traffic, _and_ air traffic controllers to keep planes separated, _and_ TCAS. And yes, TCAS has saved lives, and would have saved more lives had it been installed more widely and always obeyed.
Does anyone care to take this source code and produce a largely "stock" OS but add in the sorely lacking ability to be able to natively read the EPUB format of ebooks?
I'm sure thousands of Kindle owners would be eternally grateful.
While that is a good suggestion and I expect that somebody will implement EPUB support for Kindle (if it hasn't already been done), I really think that people who would be eternally grateful for EPUB support really should have bought... well, pretty much any e-book reader that isn't the Kindle. Why give your money to support the one player who wants to lock you in by refusing to support standards?
Personally, I find the fact that some people like to hate on George Soros particularly telling. As you already pointed out, he is one of the most successful capitalists in the world, and spends a lot of his wealth on various causes, chief among them promoting self-determination, less government influence, and more independent media. Makes you wonder what people opposing him are in favor of...
Looking at the American political landscape, I would think that Republicans would be cheering for Soros. Weren't they for small government and self-determination, too? It appears to me that some of the more vocal Republicans actually support the opposite now: more government (to protect us against the terrorists), and more government meddling in your personal affairs (enforce Christian restrictions).
Unfortunately the article glosses over the fact that far more of those expensive and [s]potential[/s] actually hazardous materials are required to make carbon and nuclear based power generating stations.
Unfortunate but not surprising in an article published by the Bulletin Of the Atomic Scientists.
Still, it's one of the better reasoned and more sensible objections to renewable energy I've ever seen.
This seems like a sensible move. It also seems like a major endorsement for OpenVPN. I've always had better experience with OpenVPN than with other VPN solutions, but I have the feeling it hasn't gained much traction. This may be a step in the right direction.
Also, I hadn't heard of PolarSSL, but it sounds worth checking out. OpenSSL has always worked for me, but it is true that the interfaces and documentation aren't the best I've ever seen.
If they know their productivity is being measured, it becomes a contest to see who can cook the books the best anyway.
Yes. And this would be a Good Thing if the metrics actually measured the right thing. The problem is, the metrics represent something that isn't actually what you want, so developers are motivated to do something that isn't actually what you want.
So if you are going to be using a metric at all, the first questions you should ask yourself is what the metric measures, and if that is actually what you care about. For example, you could measure how many lines of code people produce, and reward people based on that, but is more lines of code actually better for your business?
Personally, I don't have a great solution for comparing performance that matters, and motivating developers to increase it. I've seen some bad metrics. I've also worked with people who identified key performance indicators for their work and evaluated everything by them (when asked if they can do something, if it doesn't help them towards their KPIs, they'll say no), and it has been a very pleasant experience.
I think that if you _can_ find a good metric and motivate people to score better on it, this is a Good Thing. The difficulty is that the things you are interested in are often either fuzzy and hard to quantify, or black and white and only known at the end. In many cases, no metric is better than a bad metric, and your best guide may be your own judgment: make sure you know what people are doing and how they work, interact with them, and you will probably see which ones are great and which ones aren't so great.
Slashdot Mirror
in all areas, we're just focused on SOPA and Protect-IP because they are closer to our hearts.
That is actually the part that scares me the most. If things are this bad in areas that I actually have some knowledge about, how much badness am I not seeing because I am too ignorant? How many horrible ideas have we silently let be implemented, just because we didn't know?
They are targeting cell phone users because when something bad happens constituents expect a government response. While it is impossible to legislate (or enact regulations) to "be a good driver", it is possible to legislate or regulate cell phone usage. Just another regulation that will be arbitrarily enforced...
I think you are completely right.
Having said that, there is a lot we can do to improve drivers' skills, at least in the USA. A lot of drivers follow too closely. A lot of drivers get into huge trouble when something out of the ordinary happens. Accidents ahead, snow, sometimes even something seemingly simple like rain. A lot of people don't blink before turning or changing lanes. A lot of people don't look for traffic in all the places it could be. Some people even forget to turn on their lights when it's dark.
I feel all of this comes from a combination of not being aware of the serious dangers that driving poses, and lack of training and practice. In this day and age, why don't we have everybody learn to drive in simulators, including everyday situations but also especially dangerous situations like dense fog, rain, snow, mistakes by other drivers, etc. before we let them drive on real roads?
So if about 10% of accidents are from distracted driving (actually sounds pretty low).
That does sound pretty low. I think, under most circumstances, you can avoid accidents if you're paying attention. Anyway, I did some searching the web, and here are some numbers that came up:
http://www.nationwide.com/newsroom/dwd-facts-figures.jsp: Driving while distracted is a factor in 25 percent of police reported crashes.
http://www.safetyresource.org/car/distracted_driving_statistics.html: Car safety experts recently announced that after a study of thousands of car accidents, it was determined that 40 percent, or almost half, are caused by distracted drivers.
http://seriousaccidents.com/legal-advice/top-causes-of-car-accidents/driver-distractions/: According to a study released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI), 80 percent of automobile accidents and 65 percent of near-accidents involve at least some form of driver distraction within three seconds of the crash or near-miss.
Funny how the numbers are all over the map.
Sheesh, sometimes I feel bad about not maintaining my own software projects, as I never have enough time and don't make any money from them; and then I read comments like yours and suddenly I don't mind as much. Some people feel way too over-entitled.
The flip side of this is that a lot of people giving away software for free wrote that software for themselves. Presumably there is a reward in there that offsets the time and energy required to write the software. Personally, I make software that I wrote for my own use available to others to make the world a better place, and not because I expect to be financially rewarded for it.
I see your point that some people feel entitled to more when they should be grateful with what they already got, but nobody likes having the rug pulled from under them, and I think being suddenly annoyed with ads for software that used to be free and unobtrusive does feel that way. I think the entitlement argument cuts both ways: just because you got the software for free once doesn't mean you are entitled to eternal support and updates, and just because you wrote the software and people use it doesn't mean you are entitled to financial compensation. In both cases, this is something you can agree on with the other party. Changing the deal without consent from the other party understandably makes the other party feel bad.
hip hop has been open source for quite a while. At least a year.
Yes. But this is not about the ahead of time compiler and the interpreter that were released back then, but rather about the new hhvm interpreter, which was released recently.
Why? Because as long as patents can be enforced like this even against big names, no one small or new will ever be able to even try to enter the same business to compete.
While this makes a lot of sense in theory, what about Apple and Google entering the phone market pretty successfully, without having been active there before?
What concerns me most is that there are enough of these rulings being made at the moment to suggest that all the large technology houses are simply stealing each other's technology on the basis of saying 'prove that I stole it'.
I feel that the way a lot of businesses operate is that they just go ahead and do things, and not worry too much about whether something is legal or just. Also, the validation of those steps is not whether or not they eventually lose lawsuits, money in settlements, or goodwill, but rather if the business succeeds in generating a lot of profit.
There are good and bad things to this. On the one hand, it is good that some people have the guts to just go ahead and do stuff. It brings progress, innovation, new insights, etc. On the other hand, some businesses arguably take things too far - e.g. making millions of people sick so you can grow your business is not something I like to see, and this does happen.
At some point, this stupidity has to stop, right?
I'm with you in hoping it will, but in terms of what would have been sensible, it should have stopped a looooong time ago.
Looking at the history of computing, it seems to me that the tech that survives is the open tech. So that is one thing to consider.
On the other hand, you must consider not only what it takes for the tech to survive, but also what it takes for your company to survive. You will need to make money somehow. I will be upfront here and say that I don't have a special trick here that is guaranteed to make you money. I also think most other people don't, either.
Having said that, there are various ways to approach the issue. I have a hunch that what matters more than anything else is building the right connections. Contrary to what is often assumed, you don't need to be better than your competition to survive as a company. But you will probably want to build lasting relationships with customers, make them happy to do business with you, so that they will keep coming back and refer their connections.
One way to boost customer happiness is to have a better product. This may speak in favor of keeping things closed, or patenting the tech that sets you apart from your competition, or any other measure that bars your competitors from getting their product on par with yours. Or it may speak in favor of opening things up, if you expect that the world at large will do a better job at building great things than you as a company can. Specifically, software can work either way - you may get the greatest advantage over your competitors by having software that nobody else has, or you may get the greatest advantage over your competitors because _your_ software is open source and has a great community around it and gets into places it would never otherwise have gone.
Another way to increase customer happiness is to give them the feeling that you really value them. This can speak in favor of opening things up to your customers, which is never to their disadvantage and may actually be a reason for them to prefer your offering. At any rate, delivering a product that your customers can tailor to their needs always sends a better message that you value their business than a long laundry list of legalese that promises dire consequences should the customer even dare to look at how your product works.
Yet another way to success is to set a standard for your class of product. I don't know your market, but some markets are a twisted maze of incompatible offerings, all crappy. In that case, you may come out ahead by pushing, for example, a standardized interface (API, hardware) that others can interoperate with, and build a whole ecosystem of solutions around the standard that has your company's name associated with it.
You could also consider a hybrid approach. For example, keeping your advantages in hardware secret, but completely open sourcing your software. This will give you many of the advantages of being open, while still allowing you to keep some things out of the hands of your competitors. Also keep in mind that the barrier to developing software is lower than the barrier to developing hardware, so there are many more players who could disrupt the industry by writing better software than there are who could do that by building better hardware. If you are the only one offering your software as open source, you may get these disruptors working for you instead of against you.
Long story short: keeping your secret sauce to yourself seems an obvious way to get an advantage over the competition, and is a road often taken, but it is not the only route to success. In the end, it is about keeping the customers coming, and there are various ways to achieve that. You are probably in a better position than me to judge which way would work best in your industry.
And funnily enough - it's way more easier for Linksys/D-Link/Netgear to fix a bug or implement a feature on a SOHO device than it is for Cisco - not only they don't have to care about the installed base, but their customer base is used to sub-par firmware - so were they to implement an IPv6 feature in a buggy or less-than-optimal way . . . not that much of backslash.
That is exactly why this story is news. If it had been SOHO routers being buggy - well, that's sad, but it's not likely to surprise the /. readership. If it had been "professional equipment" not supporting IPv6, I don't think that would have surprised a whole lot of us, either.
The news here is that vendors who you might expect to deliver quality product shipped appliances that they claimed would support IPv6, and that the IPv6 support is shoddy. Now, some people will not be surprised by this, either (I'm not, for one), but some people will be - as you neatly illustrated by pointing out that people hold Cisco to higher standards than SOHO gear.
"'We should not expect something to work just because it is declared supported,' the paper accompanying the presentation concluded."
I think that if something is declared "supported", it is perfectly reasonable to expect it to work. If it turns out it doesn't work, I think the problem is more that the vendor hasn't done as good a job as they should have than that your expectations were too high.
I think there are two forces that improve programming languages, much like any other field: evolution and revolution. By which I mean: existing languages evolve by having incremental changes applied to them, and, every once in a while, a new language disrupts the field in a more radical way.
All of this is accomplished by a process where new concepts and new implementations of existing concepts are constantly being tried in new languages, and, although most of these attempts wither, some concepts eventually make it into day-to-day programming. It isn't always the language that first introduces a concept that succeeds or becomes the champion for that concept, but this constant experimentation is what moves the field forward.
The way I see it, we need new programming languages for two reasons. First of all, existing languages have well known deficiencies, that are hard to fix because they are fundamental to the language. You need a new language to get rid of them. The other reason is that we need to keep experimenting. Perhaps this does not technically require new languages, but creating a new language is often how new concepts are explored - and the knowledge gained here will eventually make the language you use better.
Slashdot users with RL friends? Who go to parties with them? Resulting in interesting pictures?
You must be new here. ;-)
Even if they had trained operators trying to cause serious damage it would be very hard to achieve anything major.
That pretty much describes what happened at Chernobyl, perhaps minus the "trained" part. The reactor design is often referred to as unsafe, but if you read up on what actually happened it's like they put pretty much every safety measure in the most dangerous configuration possible before the thing exploded.
Which is all well and good until you decide you want to watch a DVD or play a DRMed file for which the gardener didn't feel support was acceptable. Granted these days DVDs wouldn't likely be a problem, but in the past it definitely was an issue.
There aren't really technical issues so much as legal ones. For example, we have known how to decrypt CSSed DVDs for a long time - it's just that it is illegal to do this with unapproved software because you would be circumventing a "technological measure that effectively controls access to a work".
Whether or not they will actually go after you for watching the DVD that you bought and paid for is another question.
I think the trick here is that people who think zsh is a better shell than bash are using this campaign to raise awareness of zsh.
By the way, I do think zsh is the better shell. Just to name one of the things I love about it: writing custom command completion for it is pretty easy (certainly compared to bash). I and other people have used this to provide tab completion for mostly anything you can think of, including things like command options and filenames on remote machines. Go check it out if you haven't already.
Hell, it might even rival emacs for complexity. I know, I didn't think it was possible either...
It's not so strange if you think about it. Both are operating systems cleverly disguised as applications, complete with their own programming languages.
The major difference is that zsh is disguised as a shell, and Emacs is disguised as a text editor.
I, for one, look forward to the arrival of our minor-mode-wielding zsh overlords.
I, for one, welcome our 360-degrees-at-once-seeing overlords.
I mean, yes, I keep my eyes open and pay attention to what's happening, too. I very rarely get surprised in traffic. But it does happen. I just can't look ahead of me and to both sides, at cars in multiple lanes, bicycles, and pedestrians, in the presence of obstacles on the corners, figure out there is a threat, and at the same time check my mirrors to know if I can step on the brakes or should get out of my lane to avoid being rear-ended.
Yes, that's probably a worst case - but technology may be able to help here, because it _can_ look all directions at once. It's sort of like in aviation, where we have pilots watching for traffic, _and_ air traffic controllers to keep planes separated, _and_ TCAS. And yes, TCAS has saved lives, and would have saved more lives had it been installed more widely and always obeyed.
Does anyone care to take this source code and produce a largely "stock" OS but add in the sorely lacking ability to be able to natively read the EPUB format of ebooks?
I'm sure thousands of Kindle owners would be eternally grateful.
While that is a good suggestion and I expect that somebody will implement EPUB support for Kindle (if it hasn't already been done), I really think that people who would be eternally grateful for EPUB support really should have bought ... well, pretty much any e-book reader that isn't the Kindle. Why give your money to support the one player who wants to lock you in by refusing to support standards?
Personally, I find the fact that some people like to hate on George Soros particularly telling. As you already pointed out, he is one of the most successful capitalists in the world, and spends a lot of his wealth on various causes, chief among them promoting self-determination, less government influence, and more independent media. Makes you wonder what people opposing him are in favor of ...
Looking at the American political landscape, I would think that Republicans would be cheering for Soros. Weren't they for small government and self-determination, too? It appears to me that some of the more vocal Republicans actually support the opposite now: more government (to protect us against the terrorists), and more government meddling in your personal affairs (enforce Christian restrictions).
Unfortunately the article glosses over the fact that far more of those expensive and [s]potential[/s] actually hazardous materials are required to make carbon and nuclear based power generating stations.
Unfortunate but not surprising in an article published by the Bulletin Of the Atomic Scientists.
Still, it's one of the better reasoned and more sensible objections to renewable energy I've ever seen.
Contrary to what the article believes, we can support 7B people at the US's level of consumption without any major problems.
[citation needed]
This seems like a sensible move. It also seems like a major endorsement for OpenVPN. I've always had better experience with OpenVPN than with other VPN solutions, but I have the feeling it hasn't gained much traction. This may be a step in the right direction.
Also, I hadn't heard of PolarSSL, but it sounds worth checking out. OpenSSL has always worked for me, but it is true that the interfaces and documentation aren't the best I've ever seen.
Maybe they just wanted to get the money from the Europeans while it's still worth something. ;-)
If they know their productivity is being measured, it becomes a contest to see who can cook the books the best anyway.
Yes. And this would be a Good Thing if the metrics actually measured the right thing. The problem is, the metrics represent something that isn't actually what you want, so developers are motivated to do something that isn't actually what you want.
So if you are going to be using a metric at all, the first questions you should ask yourself is what the metric measures, and if that is actually what you care about. For example, you could measure how many lines of code people produce, and reward people based on that, but is more lines of code actually better for your business?
Personally, I don't have a great solution for comparing performance that matters, and motivating developers to increase it. I've seen some bad metrics. I've also worked with people who identified key performance indicators for their work and evaluated everything by them (when asked if they can do something, if it doesn't help them towards their KPIs, they'll say no), and it has been a very pleasant experience.
I think that if you _can_ find a good metric and motivate people to score better on it, this is a Good Thing. The difficulty is that the things you are interested in are often either fuzzy and hard to quantify, or black and white and only known at the end. In many cases, no metric is better than a bad metric, and your best guide may be your own judgment: make sure you know what people are doing and how they work, interact with them, and you will probably see which ones are great and which ones aren't so great.