Slavery failed and ended not because slaves rebelled (they tried and failed). Slavery ended because it was not efficient (as in profitable) any more. Many slaves accepted their fate with no struggle, exactly as modern people give away their rights and information as something normal.
First, as far as the United States and the British Empire is concerned, slavery ended because it was abolished by law, not because it was unprofitable.
Second, in one sentence you note that slaves rebelled and in the next sentence you say many accepted their fate without a struggle. In fact, no slave owners counted on the cooperation of their slaves. They counted on force and the Fugitive Slave Act.
Third, modern people do not give away their rights. They trade them for something. We may question if it is a fair and reasonable trade but it is an option slaves did not have.
Modern life may have its trials and constraints but it bears no resemblance to slavery.
This is one of the things I find most reprehensible about licenses and contracts in general, and the thing that our constitution was specifically designed against: The concept that your rights are inaliable. Nobody can take them away...
It was the Declaration of Independence, not the U.S. Constitution, that speaks of inalienable rights. The Declaration speaks of three: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The Constitution deals a lot with securing life and liberty but says little about the pursuit of happiness. In fact, all the rights are alienable under certain common circumstances, primarily for criminals.
In addition, poverty has always been a practical constraint on the three inalienable rights. The reasonable fear of poverty also typically compromises liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
So, in practice and in law none of the 3 rights are ever literally inalienable. If they were, there would be no prisons or poverty.
Given the limitations of your premise, I suspect there are similar limits on the conclusions you've base on it.
...five thousand years of warfare have demonstrated that war is often an extremely effective course of action.
Those same five thousand years also demonstrate that war is more often an extremely ineffective course of action.
Taking one of the largest examples of futility, the kingdoms and countries of Europe fought each other for nearly two thousand years and in the end, decided to put national differences aside and form the European Union.
Decisive outcomes are pretty rare. The evidence is simply that wars continue in the same places one after the other, century after century. The history of empires is one of decline and fall.
War is probably the most expensive way of acquiring property even excluding the cost in lives. (The main exception is conquering territories sparsely population by technologically primitive aboriginals.) The Japanese, for example, have acquired far more U.S. property peacefully than they ever could by war.
The fact is that in a free market such labels would already exist, because consumers would demand them!
With equal logic you could argue that companies didn't provide informative nutritional labels because consumers were demanding to have the information concealed from them.
In fact, such labels now exist because consumers did demand them through their democratically elected representatives. The free market is not the only way for consumers to make their wishes known.
A truly free market requires a free flow of information. Many companies, perhaps most, know that the best way to thwart the free market is to conceal and distort information. Government has a role to play to guaranteeing people have the information they need to make a decision.
Vi is very very powerful, but it does have a steep learning curve.
I think you mean it has a long learning curve, not a steep learning curve. Most learning curves measure learning over time. The longer the time it takes to learn something, the longer -- and shallower -- the learning curve.
A steep learning curve would be a short learning curve, which is desireable.
There is a point on the learning curve called the operational threshhold, which is the point at which you know enough to do useful work. This point comes reasonably early on the VI learning curve. After that point, the more you learn, the more efficiently you can use the program. Since productivity increases roughly in proportion to learning, the long learning curve is tolerable.
If the operational threshhold were further along the learning curve, that is, you needed to learn a lot to do a little, the trade-off would not be so worthwhile.
Also, the implication of "steep" seems to be that learning VI is hard. I suspect the main impediment to learning VI is that the operations don't resemble the operations of other programs in common use. Almost nothing you already know applies to VI.
To my mind, learning VI resembles learning touch typing except the operational threshhold arrives much earlier.
Re:hmmm what? Re:Picture of bills with US bill
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1
Shouldn't Europeans be free to listen or watch whatever they please?
As one example, I read that when Jurassic Park was released, it was playing in one-quarter of all the movie theatres in Paris. How many French films are playing in your town?
Re:One simple reason why it won't work:
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
Not only do Europeans seem to have these xenophobic and parochial attitudes, but they also seem to feel compelled to display them at every opportunity...
Is there a major irony deficiency here? The story is about Europeans dropping their national differences, adopting a common currency, moving freely within the EU, learning each other's languages. In addition, the penetration of American culture in Europe is legendary.
If some Europeans find parts of the American culture distasteful, it probably isn't because they're xenophobic. It's probably because they tried it and didn't like it.
Hooray for the Europeans putting aside centuries of war and national rivalry. It is an example to the world.
Re:Picture of bills with US bill
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
They pegged their currency to the U.S. dollar - in all practical terms that means they adopted the U.S. dollar. But the U.S. dollar kept gaining value as the American economy grew, so that Argentinian exports became too expensive and the economy suffered.
Ecuador adopted the U.S. dollar as its national currency in March, 2000, and now, according to the Economist, "Ecuador is now Latin America's fastest-growing economy, its GDP set to expand by over 5% this year. Much of the social unrest of recent years has died down."
When a country can't control its own monetary policy, it is more likely a symptom of a serious problem, not a cause.
I left my stack of planned purchases and walked out.
My point was that crime is so endemic in North American society that an honest person can get caught up in it in the most casual of transactions. Even in the example you gave, you didn't report what you saw to the police. If you saw someone breaking into a house, you probably would have.
If law enforcement is able to crack down on pawn shops dealing in stolen goods, then in one fell swoop they've cut most of the profitability out from under bike theft, car breakins, home invasions, baggage theft (at airports, etc)...
Many police department have a pawn shop squad that regularly checks for stolen goods, primarily those with serial numbers.
There are many ways besides pawnshops to convert stolen goods: family, friends, neighbors, flee markets, black markets. There is a vast underground economy in stolen goods. It indicates that a high crime rate means there has to be a large number of otherwise honest people willing to break the law to get a good price on something.
My neighborhood computer store sells RAM at half the advertised discount retail price. It's probably stolen but I don't know for sure. The owner is a nice guy who works long hours, makes a modest living and makes minor repairs on my computer for free so why would I want to report him to the cops? He probably doesn't consider himself any more a criminal than the people he sells to.
The main reason for redevelopment is when the underlying data structures change and the legacy code won't work with the new data base product or schema.
Typical reasons for changing the data base are:
the platform is obsolete, e.g, the vendor abandoned the product or went out of business; it doesn't run on a new operating system.
some critical feature is only available on a new platform
the original data schema is inadquate or poorly designed
In general, if the underlying data design remains the same, then you don't need to do a massive redevelopment.
Complete redevelopment to make maintenance easier, that is, for consistency and reducing redundancy, is rarely cost-effective. It's better to begin adding new features in a more robust or easier-to-maintain platform and convert legacy systems as time permits according to some set of priorities.
If you do redevelop, make note of why and make sure you don't make the same mistake again. Often a poorly designed system is the result of some business requirement or limited resources. If those pressures remain, the new system will have the same problems as the old one.
The hurting eyeballs factor only comes in when that quick hack gets progressively promoted to a full mission-critical program with little or no planning.
The trick then is to pick a platform that is suitable for quick hack but can be promoted to mission critical with little of no planning.
Perl is a suitable candidate because
it's reasonably fast in execution
there are a reasonable number of Perl programmers around for future maintenance
it has some cross-platform capablility and scalability
Most people have seen more of the ugly ones.
There is a trade-off between speed of development and maintainability. In the current business environment, speed of development is ascendant. The people who say you should've planned better and used Java or C++ usually come along later and try to score some political points. Where were they when there was work to be done?
The first electro-chemical fax machine was patented in 1843. It used "damp electrolytic paper as a recording medium and relied for transmission on a scanning stylus being in physical contact with the text of the message, the text being in relief form with raised lettering."
Verne didn't begin writing science fiction until after 1863.
Your system would have no efficient way to group certain elements by date.
Using Raven's data scheme and appropriate indexes, why wouldn't a query like this one solve the problem:
SELECT d1.PatientID FROM data d1, data d2 WHERE d1.DataTypeID='DateOfVisit' AND d1.Value>=20010911 AND d1.Value<=20011119 and d2.DataTypeID='Diagnosis' AND d2.Value='Anthrax' AND d1.PatientID=d2.PatientID
XML may be hierarchical but the data it is used to markup is not necessarily hierarchical. For instance, XML can be used to markup conventional fielded (flat file) data to serve as an interchange format.
More importantly, XML is used to impose some structure on inherently unstructured text. The structure it provides is based on some assumptions of how the data will be used or how it will be presented. If the data is used in some otherway, the markup can be useless.
An example is a book. For XML purposes, it can be described as structured by chapter, section, subsection, and paragraph. For information purposes, tags are assigned to represent the ideas, terminology, names and other index-like content. There is virtually no structure in these index type of tags but they convey the most important information in the book.
Or not. These tags are assigned based on assumptions about what readers are interested in. A different set of assumptions would produce a different set of tags even thought the structure of the document would stay the same. If the sentences and paragraphs are shuffled and exerpted for some other publication, even the structure becomes irrelevant.
How this inherently unstructured information is stored is relevant to how it is managed, that is, how it is backed up, how access is controled, how changes are tracked. However, when it comes to putting the information to some useful purpose, it is the retrieval mechanisms that are important. The issues here are how easily the user can specify the type of information he wants and how accurately the mechanism can find it. This process is usually independent of the underlying structure and uses some higher level concepts of relevance and context.
The question of whether to use a hierarchical, relational or object-oriented data structures misses the point for textual data, for which XML is commonly used, because none of these structures capture meaning.
Topic maps make a heroic stab at capturing meaning in XML markup but still only within a set of assumption. I suspect a true meaning markup language is theoretically impossible, or at least theoretically very far in the future.
Could a key factor in success be in the phrase We've done six major projects like this since March? Six projects in 8 months suggests short projects. Short projects are easier to estimate accurately because there is less time for unexpected things to occur. They also have a smaller and thus more well-defined set of specs.
He also says: The most important part of this process is not to start coding and testing until the business requirements are clearly defined.
It's excellent advice but the implication is that the longer you spend in the analysis phase, the more accurately you can estimate the size of the project. Somehow you've got to recover the cost of this analysis, which can be a large part of the project, particularly a short one.
Presumably this cost is recovered in the fixed price, which will be more accurate as a result of the detailed analysis.
Another question is: if he was on time and on budget did he still make a profit? Many projects "finished within budget and on-schedule" because the margin of error is the profit margin.
You say: Though, it is very likely the reason you have gained extra business as the client is assured of the price and if you do go over budget, they get a bargain.
There is a rought correlation between being able to estimate a project accurately and being able to turn out a quality product. If his estimates are accurate it is because his analysis was thorough, which would result in better design and therefore probably a good product.
Perhaps, I misunderstood your point. I understood you to mean that the difference between an act of war and a crime was whether a military target was hit. I pointed out that the Pentagon was hit on 9/11 to show by your logic, as I understood it, that an act of war was committed by the terrorists, not a crime.
However, I don't think the target is relevant. If the attack is by a foreign power, the attack is an act of war. If it is simply by residents, it is a crime.
The original post by jmv said "for me terrorism has nothing to do with the actions and everything to do with the intent." I thought this distinction missed the point, which was that the terrorist acts of 9/11 were an act of war and the intent of the terrorists themselves was not important.
The U.S. is pursuing the terrorists domestically as if they were criminals or as if terrorism were a particular category of criminal act. However, as I said, the events of 9/11 were fundamentally different from domestic terrorism even if there is some similarity in intent.
The methods of dealing with the 9/11 terrorists have to be different from dealing with ordinary criminals or domestic terrorists whatever their intent is.
If my original post was confusing, I hope the foregoing is clearer.
I could point out that the Pentagon is, in fact, a military target but it isn't relevant. An act of war is different from a crime, regardless of the target.
You idea of "special courts" gives me the creeps...
It's not a recommendation by any means. It was to illustrate how far a strategy for fighting terrorism can be from the provisions in the anti-terrorism bill.
The anti-terrorism bill is an attempt to preserve as many rights as it can while mounting an effective response to terrorism. If it were purely an effort to fight terrorism or to deprive citizens of civil rights, it would look completely different.
An even more effective approach to catching terrorists, would be to immediately execute anyone who looks suspicious, without a trial.
That approach would be less effective than interogating them under torture and keeping them alive as hostages. But, as I said, we not simply talking about being effective here but preserving civilized behavior.
...at least the guy had the guts to stand up for what he believed in.
So did the people who voted for the bill. The presumption that all the other members of Congress were tyrants and sworn enemies of freedom is not borne out by their public statements or previous voting record. For example, Feingold says: Our process in the Senate, as truncated as it was, did lead to the elimination or significant rewriting of a number of audacious proposals that I and many other members found objectionable. A similar concern was shown in the House of Representatives to add a sunset clause to the bill.
Feingold said in his speech: We must grant law enforcement the tools that it needs to stop this terrible threat. But we must give them only those extraordinary tools that they need and that relate specifically to the task at hand.
The test he proposes is whether the tools will help stop the terrorist threat, not whether they impinge civil liberties. If he disagrees with his colleagues about how useful the tools are, then he is no longer talking about rights. He is claiming to have a better grasp of the terrorist threat.
Given that no one understand the terrorist threat except that it is large, Congress may understandably disagree with is assessment without being labeled gutless.
It seems like Russ Feingold is the only one that is really for america as it is meant to be, as it was founded.
How likely is that? The Congress just spent months investigating Clinton on the grounds that just his statements, not his acts, threatened the Constitution. How likely is it that all those defenders of freedom have now abandoned their principles for no other reason than to deprive law-abiding Americans of their rights?
How likely is that some members of Congress that normally disagree on everything suddenly conspire to deprive law-abiding Americans of their rights?
How likely is that members of Congress who have been outspoken on defending the Bill of Rights in the past would suddenly drop that pose as if they never really believed in those rights at all?
How likely is that at this point in American history, Congress would be composed entirely of would-be despots and traitors with the sole exception of Russ Feingold?
Feingold makes some good points but I doubt he would claim to have a monopoly on patriotism or to be the only member of Congress to love freedom or to understand the threat of terrorism better than anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Slavery failed and ended not because slaves rebelled (they tried and failed). Slavery ended because it was not efficient (as in profitable) any more. Many slaves accepted their fate with no struggle, exactly as modern people give away their rights and information as something normal.
First, as far as the United States and the British Empire is concerned, slavery ended because it was abolished by law, not because it was unprofitable.
Second, in one sentence you note that slaves rebelled and in the next sentence you say many accepted their fate without a struggle. In fact, no slave owners counted on the cooperation of their slaves. They counted on force and the Fugitive Slave Act.
Third, modern people do not give away their rights. They trade them for something. We may question if it is a fair and reasonable trade but it is an option slaves did not have.
Modern life may have its trials and constraints but it bears no resemblance to slavery.
This is one of the things I find most reprehensible about licenses and contracts in general, and the thing that our constitution was specifically designed against: The concept that your rights are inaliable. Nobody can take them away...
It was the Declaration of Independence, not the U.S. Constitution, that speaks of inalienable rights. The Declaration speaks of three: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The Constitution deals a lot with securing life and liberty but says little about the pursuit of happiness. In fact, all the rights are alienable under certain common circumstances, primarily for criminals.
In addition, poverty has always been a practical constraint on the three inalienable rights. The reasonable fear of poverty also typically compromises liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
So, in practice and in law none of the 3 rights are ever literally inalienable. If they were, there would be no prisons or poverty.
Given the limitations of your premise, I suspect there are similar limits on the conclusions you've base on it.
Those same five thousand years also demonstrate that war is more often an extremely ineffective course of action.
Taking one of the largest examples of futility, the kingdoms and countries of Europe fought each other for nearly two thousand years and in the end, decided to put national differences aside and form the European Union.
Decisive outcomes are pretty rare. The evidence is simply that wars continue in the same places one after the other, century after century. The history of empires is one of decline and fall.
War is probably the most expensive way of acquiring property even excluding the cost in lives. (The main exception is conquering territories sparsely population by technologically primitive aboriginals.) The Japanese, for example, have acquired far more U.S. property peacefully than they ever could by war.
The fact is that in a free market such labels would already exist, because consumers would demand them!
With equal logic you could argue that companies didn't provide informative nutritional labels because consumers were demanding to have the information concealed from them.
In fact, such labels now exist because consumers did demand them through their democratically elected representatives. The free market is not the only way for consumers to make their wishes known.
A truly free market requires a free flow of information. Many companies, perhaps most, know that the best way to thwart the free market is to conceal and distort information. Government has a role to play to guaranteeing people have the information they need to make a decision.
Vi is very very powerful, but it does have a steep learning curve.
I think you mean it has a long learning curve, not a steep learning curve. Most learning curves measure learning over time. The longer the time it takes to learn something, the longer -- and shallower -- the learning curve.
A steep learning curve would be a short learning curve, which is desireable.
There is a point on the learning curve called the operational threshhold, which is the point at which you know enough to do useful work. This point comes reasonably early on the VI learning curve. After that point, the more you learn, the more efficiently you can use the program. Since productivity increases roughly in proportion to learning, the long learning curve is tolerable.
If the operational threshhold were further along the learning curve, that is, you needed to learn a lot to do a little, the trade-off would not be so worthwhile.
Also, the implication of "steep" seems to be that learning VI is hard. I suspect the main impediment to learning VI is that the operations don't resemble the operations of other programs in common use. Almost nothing you already know applies to VI.
To my mind, learning VI resembles learning touch typing except the operational threshhold arrives much earlier.
I thought everything happened because of a cause.
Perhaps a reference to the post hoc fallacy would clarify my point.
The deficiency is about Europeans carping about American ignorance while they still manage to elect governments with strong Neo-Nazi elements.
No, the deficiency is about Americans carping about European ignorance while still electing governments with strong racist elements. [1], [2].
Perhaps, but we are still talking about a Europe intent on ignoring a European government bent on genocide a mere two years ago.
No, we're talking about an America that supported brutal dictatorships all over Latin America and still deprives its aboriginal population of their treaty rights.
Shouldn't Europeans be free to listen or watch whatever they please?
As one example, I read that when Jurassic Park was released, it was playing in one-quarter of all the movie theatres in Paris. How many French films are playing in your town?
Not only do Europeans seem to have these xenophobic and parochial attitudes, but they also seem to feel compelled to display them at every opportunity...
Is there a major irony deficiency here? The story is about Europeans dropping their national differences, adopting a common currency, moving freely within the EU, learning each other's languages. In addition, the penetration of American culture in Europe is legendary.
If some Europeans find parts of the American culture distasteful, it probably isn't because they're xenophobic. It's probably because they tried it and didn't like it.
Hooray for the Europeans putting aside centuries of war and national rivalry. It is an example to the world.
They pegged their currency to the U.S. dollar - in all practical terms that means they adopted the U.S. dollar. But the U.S. dollar kept gaining value as the American economy grew, so that Argentinian exports became too expensive and the economy suffered.
Ecuador adopted the U.S. dollar as its national currency in March, 2000, and now, according to the Economist, "Ecuador is now Latin America's fastest-growing economy, its GDP set to expand by over 5% this year. Much of the social unrest of recent years has died down."
When a country can't control its own monetary policy, it is more likely a symptom of a serious problem, not a cause.
I left my stack of planned purchases and walked out.
My point was that crime is so endemic in North American society that an honest person can get caught up in it in the most casual of transactions. Even in the example you gave, you didn't report what you saw to the police. If you saw someone breaking into a house, you probably would have.
If law enforcement is able to crack down on pawn shops dealing in stolen goods, then in one fell swoop they've cut most of the profitability out from under bike theft, car breakins, home invasions, baggage theft (at airports, etc)...
Many police department have a pawn shop squad that regularly checks for stolen goods, primarily those with serial numbers.
There are many ways besides pawnshops to convert stolen goods: family, friends, neighbors, flee markets, black markets. There is a vast underground economy in stolen goods. It indicates that a high crime rate means there has to be a large number of otherwise honest people willing to break the law to get a good price on something.
My neighborhood computer store sells RAM at half the advertised discount retail price. It's probably stolen but I don't know for sure. The owner is a nice guy who works long hours, makes a modest living and makes minor repairs on my computer for free so why would I want to report him to the cops? He probably doesn't consider himself any more a criminal than the people he sells to.
Secondarily, if Christ wanted us to celebrate his birthday, *why* isn't it mentioned at ALL in the New Testament?
The well-known words from Luke, chapter 2 seem to indicate some celebration was called for:
The main reason for redevelopment is when the underlying data structures change and the legacy code won't work with the new data base product or schema.
Typical reasons for changing the data base are:
the platform is obsolete, e.g, the vendor abandoned the product or went out of business; it doesn't run on a new operating system.
some critical feature is only available on a new platform
the original data schema is inadquate or poorly designed
In general, if the underlying data design remains the same, then you don't need to do a massive redevelopment.
Complete redevelopment to make maintenance easier, that is, for consistency and reducing redundancy, is rarely cost-effective. It's better to begin adding new features in a more robust or easier-to-maintain platform and convert legacy systems as time permits according to some set of priorities.
If you do redevelop, make note of why and make sure you don't make the same mistake again. Often a poorly designed system is the result of some business requirement or limited resources. If those pressures remain, the new system will have the same problems as the old one.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder:
Isle of Beauty, fare thee well!
Isle of Beauty. , Thomas Haynes Bayly. (1797-1839)
Also the first line in an anonymous poem in Davidson' Poetical Rhapsody (1602) but probably popularized by Bayly.
See also:
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.
Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder
Maintenance makes the heart grow fonder
Obsolesence makes the heart grow fonder
Absynth Makes the Heart Grow Fonder
etc.
The hurting eyeballs factor only comes in when that quick hack gets progressively promoted to a full mission-critical program with little or no planning.
The trick then is to pick a platform that is suitable for quick hack but can be promoted to mission critical with little of no planning.
Perl is a suitable candidate because
it's reasonably fast in execution
there are a reasonable number of Perl programmers around for future maintenance
it has some cross-platform capablility and scalability
Most people have seen more of the ugly ones.
There is a trade-off between speed of development and maintainability. In the current business environment, speed of development is ascendant. The people who say you should've planned better and used Java or C++ usually come along later and try to score some political points. Where were they when there was work to be done?
Verne also predicted the telefax machine...
The first electro-chemical fax machine was patented in 1843. It used "damp electrolytic paper as a recording medium and relied for transmission on a scanning stylus being in physical contact with the text of the message, the text being in relief form with raised lettering."
Verne didn't begin writing science fiction until after 1863.
Your system would have no efficient way to group certain elements by date.
Using Raven's data scheme and appropriate indexes, why wouldn't a query like this one solve the problem:
SELECT d1.PatientID FROM data d1, data d2 WHERE d1.DataTypeID='DateOfVisit' AND d1.Value>=20010911 AND d1.Value<=20011119 and d2.DataTypeID='Diagnosis' AND d2.Value='Anthrax' AND d1.PatientID=d2.PatientID
For examples of how use relational architecture for hierarchical data see Trees in SQL by the irrepressable Joe Celko.
Briefly summarized, his approach is: "tree structure can be kept in one table and all the information about a node can be put in a second table."
XML may be hierarchical but the data it is used to markup is not necessarily hierarchical. For instance, XML can be used to markup conventional fielded (flat file) data to serve as an interchange format.
More importantly, XML is used to impose some structure on inherently unstructured text. The structure it provides is based on some assumptions of how the data will be used or how it will be presented. If the data is used in some otherway, the markup can be useless.
An example is a book. For XML purposes, it can be described as structured by chapter, section, subsection, and paragraph. For information purposes, tags are assigned to represent the ideas, terminology, names and other index-like content. There is virtually no structure in these index type of tags but they convey the most important information in the book.
Or not. These tags are assigned based on assumptions about what readers are interested in. A different set of assumptions would produce a different set of tags even thought the structure of the document would stay the same. If the sentences and paragraphs are shuffled and exerpted for some other publication, even the structure becomes irrelevant.
How this inherently unstructured information is stored is relevant to how it is managed, that is, how it is backed up, how access is controled, how changes are tracked. However, when it comes to putting the information to some useful purpose, it is the retrieval mechanisms that are important. The issues here are how easily the user can specify the type of information he wants and how accurately the mechanism can find it. This process is usually independent of the underlying structure and uses some higher level concepts of relevance and context.
The question of whether to use a hierarchical, relational or object-oriented data structures misses the point for textual data, for which XML is commonly used, because none of these structures capture meaning.
Topic maps make a heroic stab at capturing meaning in XML markup but still only within a set of assumption. I suspect a true meaning markup language is theoretically impossible, or at least theoretically very far in the future.
Could a key factor in success be in the phrase We've done six major projects like this since March? Six projects in 8 months suggests short projects. Short projects are easier to estimate accurately because there is less time for unexpected things to occur. They also have a smaller and thus more well-defined set of specs.
He also says: The most important part of this process is not to start coding and testing until the business requirements are clearly defined.
It's excellent advice but the implication is that the longer you spend in the analysis phase, the more accurately you can estimate the size of the project. Somehow you've got to recover the cost of this analysis, which can be a large part of the project, particularly a short one.
Presumably this cost is recovered in the fixed price, which will be more accurate as a result of the detailed analysis.
Another question is: if he was on time and on budget did he still make a profit? Many projects "finished within budget and on-schedule" because the margin of error is the profit margin.
You say: Though, it is very likely the reason you have gained extra business as the client is assured of the price and if you do go over budget, they get a bargain.
There is a rought correlation between being able to estimate a project accurately and being able to turn out a quality product. If his estimates are accurate it is because his analysis was thorough, which would result in better design and therefore probably a good product.
Perhaps, I misunderstood your point. I understood you to mean that the difference between an act of war and a crime was whether a military target was hit. I pointed out that the Pentagon was hit on 9/11 to show by your logic, as I understood it, that an act of war was committed by the terrorists, not a crime.
However, I don't think the target is relevant. If the attack is by a foreign power, the attack is an act of war. If it is simply by residents, it is a crime.
The original post by jmv said "for me terrorism has nothing to do with the actions and everything to do with the intent." I thought this distinction missed the point, which was that the terrorist acts of 9/11 were an act of war and the intent of the terrorists themselves was not important.
The U.S. is pursuing the terrorists domestically as if they were criminals or as if terrorism were a particular category of criminal act. However, as I said, the events of 9/11 were fundamentally different from domestic terrorism even if there is some similarity in intent.
The methods of dealing with the 9/11 terrorists have to be different from dealing with ordinary criminals or domestic terrorists whatever their intent is.
If my original post was confusing, I hope the foregoing is clearer.
Because Pearl Harbor was a military target.
I could point out that the Pentagon is, in fact, a military target but it isn't relevant. An act of war is different from a crime, regardless of the target.
You idea of "special courts" gives me the creeps...
It's not a recommendation by any means. It was to illustrate how far a strategy for fighting terrorism can be from the provisions in the anti-terrorism bill.
The anti-terrorism bill is an attempt to preserve as many rights as it can while mounting an effective response to terrorism. If it were purely an effort to fight terrorism or to deprive citizens of civil rights, it would look completely different.
An even more effective approach to catching terrorists, would be to immediately execute anyone who looks suspicious, without a trial.
That approach would be less effective than interogating them under torture and keeping them alive as hostages. But, as I said, we not simply talking about being effective here but preserving civilized behavior.
So did the people who voted for the bill. The presumption that all the other members of Congress were tyrants and sworn enemies of freedom is not borne out by their public statements or previous voting record. For example, Feingold says: Our process in the Senate, as truncated as it was, did lead to the elimination or significant rewriting of a number of audacious proposals that I and many other members found objectionable. A similar concern was shown in the House of Representatives to add a sunset clause to the bill.
Feingold said in his speech:
We must grant law enforcement the tools that it needs to stop this terrible threat. But we must give them only those extraordinary tools that they need and that relate specifically to the task at hand.
The test he proposes is whether the tools will help stop the terrorist threat, not whether they impinge civil liberties. If he disagrees with his colleagues about how useful the tools are, then he is no longer talking about rights. He is claiming to have a better grasp of the terrorist threat.
Given that no one understand the terrorist threat except that it is large, Congress may understandably disagree with is assessment without being labeled gutless.
It seems like Russ Feingold is the only one that is really for america as it is meant to be, as it was founded.
How likely is that? The Congress just spent months investigating Clinton on the grounds that just his statements, not his acts, threatened the Constitution. How likely is it that all those defenders of freedom have now abandoned their principles for no other reason than to deprive law-abiding Americans of their rights?
How likely is that some members of Congress that normally disagree on everything suddenly conspire to deprive law-abiding Americans of their rights?
How likely is that members of Congress who have been outspoken on defending the Bill of Rights in the past would suddenly drop that pose as if they never really believed in those rights at all?
How likely is that at this point in American history, Congress would be composed entirely of would-be despots and traitors with the sole exception of Russ Feingold?
Feingold makes some good points but I doubt he would claim to have a monopoly on patriotism or to be the only member of Congress to love freedom or to understand the threat of terrorism better than anyone else.