Proper variable names aren't "unnecessary trivialities". My opinion is, if you can't come up with a meaningful and intuitive name for a variable or a function, it's usually because you don't have a clear grasp of what it is you're trying to get the code to accomplish.
Now, camel case versus underscores... that's trivial. So long as your code is consistent about it (lately I've been using underscores for variables and camel notation for function and class names) do it whichever way you like.
Here's the way Microsoft's "independent studies" work.
Step 1: Microsoft gives a large amount of money to some organization, in exchange for conducting an "independent study".
Step 2: The organization performs the study.
Step 3: The organization hands back the results of the study to Microsoft.
Step 4: Microsoft analyzes the results of the study.
Step 5: If Microsoft determines the results cast their products in a bad light, it gets forwarded to whoever is in charge of that particular product, with a stickum note on it saying, "Fix this or you're fired! Love, BillG."
However, if the result makes their product look good, they trumpet it everywhere they can, maybe putting on a multimillion dollar "Get the Facts" campaign about it.
Step 6: Linux fanboys (such as myself) go ballistic and start throwing chairs around.
Now, since these "independent organizations" that conduct the studies are very much in favor of receiving more money for more studies in the future, and love publicity, they want the studies to go well, so that they'll see the light of day.
I don't know if IBM or Red Hat pulls the same sort of shenanigans, and I'd love to hear of examples. But the pro-Linux studies come from a wide variety of sources. These pro-MS ones seem invariably to be paid for by Microsoft.
Now, I'm generally predisposed to like these agile practices (even though they can get buzzwordy at times). But what if the main selling point for Microsoft was, "Have a new product to ship every two years?" For them, a "new product" is "anything we can sell for money, instead of releasing as a service pack."
The page you link to doesn't even mention the Chrystler project, so far as I can tell. What the linked page is talking about is ending a project relatively early in the planned development cycle, for one of various reasons.
A few examples suggested: The prototype is good enough. The project doesn't seem to be headed anywhere. We've learned enough that a different approach seems more promising.
In short, they're talking about knowing when you've reached the point where putting more resources into a project will be counterproductive. The White House aside, I can't think of any organization where this philosophy isn't considered a good idea.
While your misreading of that page may or may not be intentional, it's clear you have strong biases against the entire family of "agile" practices. Why? Were you involved in a project where XP really was hyped as "the messiah?" Did you read an article about it and decide that there was no way you would have your code improved by having some n00b coder sitting next to you? Did Scrum beat you as a child? Dude, what happened?
You've given us a rocking-horse analogy, and you've given us a purported example of a failed project that used it. But software projects go massively over budget all the time, and they get cancelled all the time. Given that people often learn the wrong lessons from failures, the negative opinions of the methodologies by GM executives may not be a compelling indictment of the methodologies themselves.
Or, to put it in a more Slashdot-friendly way: Who cares what a bunch of incompetent blowhards in suits think?
Seriously, though. What specific problems have you had using these methodologies?
I've tried XP, though in an academic setting on a small project (about two months), and I thought it was the most fun I'd ever had programming.
Really? Have you seen the films coming out of Bollywood? The singing, the dancing, the jabbering on in languages not even remotely English? They make no sense! If this is our competition, the U.S. will always have the advantage in movie making. And high speed pizza delivery.
Every attempt to actually track social mobility in the U.S. says that the poor stay poor, and the rich stay rich. What little apparent social mobility exists is mostly attributable to college students, who give the appearance of poverty while at college (no job, no apparent income, ergo poor), then go on to get good jobs.
The reasons for our current state of "social immobility" are clear. There are systematic forces arrayed against poor people who want to improve their lot in life.
- Weak, half-assed social services. - Employers who won't pay a living wage for unskilled labor. - Crappy mass transit that basically forces people to incur the huge expenses of a car. - Predatory lenders granting easy credit to those who won't be able to pay (and revamped bankruptcy laws that subsidize risky lending policies). - Sub-standard public education. Public Ed. is mostly paid for by local tax dollars, which means that people in rich neighborhoods get well-funded education systems, while people in poor neighborhoods get shafted. - Crime-ridden neighborhoods with no jobs and limited transportation linking them to areas that do have jobs.
My challenge to you: Drop whatever job you have right now, turn your back on whatever savings accounts or other means of support you currently have. Then, get yourself a family with two kids under the age of five. Your challenge: You have fifteen years to save enough money to give both your new kids a college education. You cannot use any post-high school education you've acquired so far in your life.
You and your wife both start out as as cashiers for Wal-Mart, but you can take a better job if you've acquired the skills for the job sometime after you started the project. How will you earn enough money to put yourself through the local community college while you and your wife have to support two kids? Will you have the drive needed to put yourself through college while holding down a full time job?
Maybe. It's a tall order, even in the best circumstances this society provides. Even if you succeed, can you credit your success to some illusory "self", without giving due credit to the genes that make you smarter, more resourceful, and more disciplined than many of those around you? After all, what did you do to "earn" the genes that gave you your intelligence? Did the genes that allow you to delay gratification come to you through hard work? What right do any of us have to judge anyone "worthy" of his or her station in life?
Some Slashdotters appear to have an idyllic view of poverty. Wake up, meander over to the Welfare office, pick up your check, buy booze, go home, beat the kids, fall asleep, wake up the next morning and repeat. So far, you strike me as one of those hopelessly naive sorts.
My mistake. That article (from the Heritage Foundation) was written just before the election in 2004. They're not claiming that ten straight quarters of "steady growth" is a feat. They're claiming SIX. Heritage must have been desperate to find anything at all to say about Bush's economic stewardship.
"The best growth in 60 years?" No, the best growth in 60 years is still the era immediately following WWII. What the article (which you linked to, but apparently didn't bother to read) says that the era between the second quarter of 2003 and today is the "most steady, non-volatile expansion in sixty years." Two and a half years of "steady growth" which only slightly exceeds the average growth since 1970, isn't a huge accomplishment. When you consider the vast national debt we're incurring, and the continued erosion of the middle class dividing the nation into haves and have-nots, and this feat of mediocrity begins to look like... well... the rest of the Bush Presidency.
You also make the unsubstantiated assertion that Congress plays games with SS benefits to "panic people who depend on SS for their retirement. You do realize that part of the problem with Social Security is that the elderly are the biggest, baddest voting block out there, and any attempt to reduce benefits is political suicide. Can you show me one single instance of a successful attempt by Congress to reduce benefits for current retirees, in the last fifty years?
I'll tell you exactly what they were thinking. They were thinking, "you know, if we can convince people that their tapwater is slowly killing them, then they'll pay a premium for our tapwater, because it comes in bottles!"
Bottled water is an excellent example of how FUD can run roughshod over common sense.
No, I really think it will be the same situation (from the "Joe User" perspective, at least). Joe wants to hook up to The Interweb, so he orders a connection from his DSL provider. The DSL modem comes with a pre-installed firewall that denies all incoming connections. The ISP gives him a big chunk of address space (rather than the single IP address of earlier days). Joe hooks up another box, and it magically works (DHCP works like it always did. The computers behind the firewall/router should all be able to communicate with each other. Unless Joe accidentally turns off the firewall on the router, in which case other computers can reach the ones on his network.
I don't see any new burdens on home users once the transition finally happens.
When I was eleven or twelve, my brother and I sat down with our rented copy of Zelda 1, and proceeded to draw out a completely accurate world map, one screen at a time. We were playing it on our grandma's ten inch, black and white screen. It got really hard in the northeast corner of the world, where all those sword-chucking centaurs lived.
You may not fully grasp the sheer volume of addresses implied by a 128-bit address space. After the conversion to IPv6, if my ISP doesn't give me four billion addresses to play with (the size of the entire IPv4 address space) I'll be looking for a new provider.
There is no need for much centralized control with the current IPv4 space. Once you have a block of addresses, you can do what you want with them. You don't need to register your server with a central organization. In fact, IPv6 will be liberating, because most end users today get an IP space with only one address in it.
Now, you say end users can set up complex networks with NAT, which is true. "Without impacting on anyone" is also true, but in my mind that carries nothing but downside. If I'm on the outside of a network, and I want to open communications with an arbitrary computer within the network, it can't be done. I might have the router forwarding port 22 to my Linux box, and VOIP traffic to my Windows box. But that's a rigid, predefined setup.
Dropping NAT doesn't mean jettisonning centralized firewalls. You can still have your network set up to deny all unrequested connections (that's what most consumer-grade routers default to today), but IPv6 gives you more flexibility in the sort of setups you can allow.
Couldn't the average computer firewall default to the average router firewall? You know, deny any inbound connections from computers you didn't specifically make outbound requests to. The defaults could be smart, and if you want to add services to your computer that will loosen those restrictions (say Bittorrent, or VOIP), the software can reconfigure the rules. There can also be automatically updating rulesets. For example, you run an SSH daemon on your box, and want to block traffic from computers that have been trying to brute force that port. If someone trustworthy is collecting that information, you could set up your box to download the list of blocked clients.
For most people, the preinstalled firewall will be set to allow them to do most everything they want to do, while denying most anything outsiders might want to do.
I find this world you want to create deeply disturbing, because nothing--nothing at all--protects the powerless from the powerful. Imagine, if you will, that I live in poverty in your world. If I'm looking for an apartment, and the only place I can actually afford has a stipulation in the contract saying the owner of the building can sleep with my wife on a weekly basis, our choice is to either sign the contract or live on the street. If I need a place to stay the night, and the owner of the most reasonable hotel stipulates that I be naked at all times while in their rooms (so they profit from broadcasting the feed over the 'Net), what are my choices? Or maybe the owner of the property just wishes to come in and eat my food. It doesn't matter. The question is, why should anyone providing living accomodations be allowed to write these sort of clauses into a contract? Because it's his property? That doesn't matter: my right to my free and unharassed life trumps his right to full use of his property. There is no reasonable justification for such requirements in a contract. Keeping them illegal protects the rights of non-owners, without harming the landlords in any meaningful way. I say we keep them.
Unless such "privacy clauses" are mandatory parts of every relevant contract, there are going to be situations where people who don't have wealth as leverage will be compelled to enter into exploitative contracts. It is human nature for those who have the advantage to try and maintain and extend that advantage, and your interpretation of natural law leaves very few lines that cannot be crossed in the quest for that advantage.
The world you propose is vicious and evil, and that evil comes with no benefits that I can see. I think John Locke would be rightly embarrassed to see where "his" philosophy has taken you.
You're misunderstanding. He's not claiming that the society he describes is the society we live in. He's claiming only that it's the society we should be living in. The fact that current laws forbid these behaviors just means that the government is "violating your natural right to property" (as he might say). It's a scary world he wants to live in, but you can't say he's "wrong", any more than I would be "wrong" for suggesting that a world with unicorns could be cool.
There has to be a "Right to Privacy" that is separate and distinct from a "Right to Private Property." Otherwise, what protects the privacy of someone who is renting his flat? Should the landlord be able to come in unannounced, at any time, for any reason? Should the landlord be able to write up a contract with the police, saying that they can come in unannounced, at any time, for any reason?
Should the police be able to search my car without cause, if I happen to be driving a rental car and the rental place has agreed to it?
If I'm staying at a hotel, do I give up all right to privacy while I do so? Can the owners put up hidden cameras in your hotel room, and put movies of your activities on the Internet?
Free Speech Statist, my ass. What you're effectively arguing here is that only those who own their own stuff should have any right to privacy.
"100% accurate" doesn't necessarily mean "not misleading as hell". Republicans have been using this tactic (and its kin, "forgetting" inflation) to erode social programs since at least the Gingrich era. Of course, now that we've veered so far off course that the Republicans can cut these programs without the sugar coating, they can be more honest about their intentions.
Despite your assertion, we do get massive savings by educating children "in volume". But the techniques required for "mass production" don't apply well to the manufacturing of educated adults. As class sizes grow, it's harder for teachers to answer everyone's questions, maintain classroom order, and take account of the needs of individual students. There is a certain amount of individualized attention that each student needs, and if the student/teacher ratio is too high, education cannot help but suffer.
I believe they've studied the class size issue in enough detail that they know where the inflection points are. It doesn't make much difference whether your class size is 15 or 20, but the difference between 30 and 35 is pretty remarkable. You'd think it would be the other way around, because the proportional change is larger going from 15 to 20. But going from 30 to 35 makes more difference, because the teacher already has more kids than he can effectively deal with.
Now, I never proposed the theory you claim I'm proposing: that higher per student spending leads to a better education. Read my earlier post again: all I proposed was that increasing the amount being spent on service X can result in an effective cut if the number of people requiring service X increases faster. Had my analogy used a birthday cake instead of dollars, would you say I was proposing that cake is healthy for you? No.
There is no easy way to relate dollars spent to educational outcomes. Too much depends on factors like parental involvement, social attitudes towards school, and the effectiveness of school administration in using those dollars to improve the education system. My home state of Utah is a wonderful example: Despite having about the lowest per-student spending in the country, we have generally good educational outcomes. I think it's because parents are unusually involved in the education of their children.
But within any given education district, we can assume that these factors will be relatively constant. If spending gets cut, it's unlikely that "parental involvement" is magically going to take up the slack. It's a very naive view of the world to think that there is always more that can be cut from a budget without ill effect. Some schools are already too poor to provide an acceptable educating environment: overcrowded classrooms, too few teachers, facilities in disrepair. Some schools need serious reforms to their administration, or simply to spend money more wisely. But there are schools that just need more farking money.
They're all sorts of crazy over at Sony, maybe even this crazy. All we know for sure is that they've patented the technology, which means less and less given the insanity of our patent system. Are they shooting themselves in the foot? Or just making sure that they can license FootBullet(TM) technology to their competitors?
As with most rumors like this, file it under "Unconscionable If True".
How long have you been searching for a way to drag your pet issues into this story?
Since you've veered totally off-topic anyhow: "limiting the amount of spending increases" is effectively cutting spending, if demand for those services are increasing faster than the spending limits can cope with.
For example, say you have a million kids in the school system, and you're paying three billion to educate them ($3000/head). Your "limits in spending increases" allow for no more than 2.5% increases every year in school spending. But next year there will be 1.1M kids in the school system. You're now paying $3.075B to educate 1.1M kids, which means per-pupil spending has been cut by $205/child.
If you're going to cite examples of FUD, don't go spreading misinformation yourself.
How about something a little different. Instead of producing software, it makes its taxation rules available using some open, programmer-friendly format, and a bunch of test cases and their results, so that software developers can know that their system is producing valid results. If they want to produce actual software as well, they can. But under this proposal, you can have lots of different software packages that produce the same results, but compete in ease of use, price, etc.
I don't know if leaving it entirely in the Feds' hands will produce simple, comprehensible programs.
Go to any business (fast food, retail, convenience stores) that rely on near-minimum wage unskilled labor. Ask them what their employee turnover is like.
None of those areas have unionized workers, and the employers don't seem to be getting the message.
The Katrina relief effort isn't what you'd expect from the government, per se. But it's exactly what you'd expect from a government being run by people who believe that government is nothing but a burden on the glorious free market.
The slow response? The appointment of officials based on cronyism and political ideology instead of qualifications? The constant foot-dragging to avoid devoting more resources to the response than absolutely necessary? It all seems to indicate a bureaucracy which doesn't believe in its own stated mission.
Katrina isn't proof that government involvement necessitates incompetence. Instead, it's ample evidence that neocons who want to minimize the role of government have drastically eroded our government's ability to help its citizens when they need it.
Now, we've had twenty years of Microsoft overseeing the development of important software. What do we have to show for it? Left to itself, Microsoft wrings competition out of the market, takes charge of previously open standards by extending them, releases file formats that only work well with other Microsoft software, and slurps a couple of billion dollars every month out of the economy for the privilege. Would government-sponsored software based on open source, open standards, and interoperability be any worse?
I doubt it. If anything, Microsoft would be able to make much better, more useful software by taking advantage of the new standards. But it would be much trickier for them to keep people locked into their software, hence depriving them of the near-monopoly position they enjoy right now.
Take a look at their website, and they do appear to have some left-of-center tendencies. They talk up the housing bubble, defend the economic effectiveness of Pres. Hugo Chavez, and reject the IMF's mantra of "privatization, deregulation, and free trade".
"Also how the hell is it good for an economy to save 200 billion in consumer spending?"
Interesting question, though I'm sure you meant it to be rhetorical. Let me see if I can reframe the debate.
Not all consumer spending is equally beneficial. For example, let's talk about the Beanie Baby craze of a few years. Hundreds of millions of people went out and bought cute, fluffy toys, and thousands of people and billions of dollars in resources were involved in the invention, manufacture, and distribution of those beanie babies.
In the end, what were we left with? Billions of toys. Cute toys, I'll admit. But you can't eat them. They don't cure cancer. They don't purify water or generate electricity or clean pollutants out of the atmosphere.* Once the "gotta catch 'em all" madness dispersed, people realized what they had spent their hard-earned cash on, and either gave them to their kids or donated them to Goodwill.
I recognize that there may have been some benefits to the BB madness, but had all that consumer spending never happened, would anyone but the stockholders of Ty Inc. (the makers of Beanie Babies) be significantly worse off? Quite the contrary, if the same amount of effort had gone into some humanitarian venture, like AIDS prevention in Africa, or developing renewable energy sources instead of BBs, we'd have been much better off.
To say that, because spending has occurred, value has been created is the misconception behind the Broken Window Fallacy, which itself is an intriguing look at the misapplication of economic theory.
Now, BBs were a fad, and it's hard to make a direct comparison to the software industry. But skimming over the paper, he seems to be arguing that software industry isn't creating value at all proportional to the amount we're paying the industry. He gives a few reasons: rent-seeking behavior, the tendency to create software that duplicates the function of existing proprietary software, etc. In the end, he's arguing that if software can be created more efficiently under his system, it would free up tens of billions of dollars that are currently being wasted, and put those dollars into sections of the economy where they would do more good.
Does his system actually succeed in this? You'll have to read the paper and see for yourself. All I'm suggesting is that your question isn't a rhetorical one.
* Note to Anonymous Coward: I'm sorry, I wasn't aware that your Beanie Babies actually did these things. A retraction will be forthcoming.
Slashdot Mirror
Proper variable names aren't "unnecessary trivialities". My opinion is, if you can't come up with a meaningful and intuitive name for a variable or a function, it's usually because you don't have a clear grasp of what it is you're trying to get the code to accomplish.
Now, camel case versus underscores... that's trivial. So long as your code is consistent about it (lately I've been using underscores for variables and camel notation for function and class names) do it whichever way you like.
Possibly.
Here's the way Microsoft's "independent studies" work.
Step 1: Microsoft gives a large amount of money to some organization, in exchange for conducting an "independent study".
Step 2: The organization performs the study.
Step 3: The organization hands back the results of the study to Microsoft.
Step 4: Microsoft analyzes the results of the study.
Step 5: If Microsoft determines the results cast their products in a bad light, it gets forwarded to whoever is in charge of that particular product, with a stickum note on it saying, "Fix this or you're fired! Love, BillG."
However, if the result makes their product look good, they trumpet it everywhere they can, maybe putting on a multimillion dollar "Get the Facts" campaign about it.
Step 6: Linux fanboys (such as myself) go ballistic and start throwing chairs around.
Now, since these "independent organizations" that conduct the studies are very much in favor of receiving more money for more studies in the future, and love publicity, they want the studies to go well, so that they'll see the light of day.
I don't know if IBM or Red Hat pulls the same sort of shenanigans, and I'd love to hear of examples. But the pro-Linux studies come from a wide variety of sources. These pro-MS ones seem invariably to be paid for by Microsoft.
That's brilliant.
Now, I'm generally predisposed to like these agile practices (even though they can get buzzwordy at times). But what if the main selling point for Microsoft was, "Have a new product to ship every two years?" For them, a "new product" is "anything we can sell for money, instead of releasing as a service pack."
It's friggin' brilliant!
The page you link to doesn't even mention the Chrystler project, so far as I can tell. What the linked page is talking about is ending a project relatively early in the planned development cycle, for one of various reasons.
A few examples suggested: The prototype is good enough. The project doesn't seem to be headed anywhere. We've learned enough that a different approach seems more promising.
In short, they're talking about knowing when you've reached the point where putting more resources into a project will be counterproductive. The White House aside, I can't think of any organization where this philosophy isn't considered a good idea.
While your misreading of that page may or may not be intentional, it's clear you have strong biases against the entire family of "agile" practices. Why? Were you involved in a project where XP really was hyped as "the messiah?" Did you read an article about it and decide that there was no way you would have your code improved by having some n00b coder sitting next to you? Did Scrum beat you as a child? Dude, what happened?
But what is wrong with it?
You've given us a rocking-horse analogy, and you've given us a purported example of a failed project that used it. But software projects go massively over budget all the time, and they get cancelled all the time. Given that people often learn the wrong lessons from failures, the negative opinions of the methodologies by GM executives may not be a compelling indictment of the methodologies themselves.
Or, to put it in a more Slashdot-friendly way: Who cares what a bunch of incompetent blowhards in suits think?
Seriously, though. What specific problems have you had using these methodologies?
I've tried XP, though in an academic setting on a small project (about two months), and I thought it was the most fun I'd ever had programming.
Really? Have you seen the films coming out of Bollywood? The singing, the dancing, the jabbering on in languages not even remotely English? They make no sense! If this is our competition, the U.S. will always have the advantage in movie making. And high speed pizza delivery.
Every attempt to actually track social mobility in the U.S. says that the poor stay poor, and the rich stay rich. What little apparent social mobility exists is mostly attributable to college students, who give the appearance of poverty while at college (no job, no apparent income, ergo poor), then go on to get good jobs.
The reasons for our current state of "social immobility" are clear. There are systematic forces arrayed against poor people who want to improve their lot in life.
- Weak, half-assed social services.
- Employers who won't pay a living wage for unskilled labor.
- Crappy mass transit that basically forces people to incur the huge expenses of a car.
- Predatory lenders granting easy credit to those who won't be able to pay (and revamped bankruptcy laws that subsidize risky lending policies).
- Sub-standard public education. Public Ed. is mostly paid for by local tax dollars, which means that people in rich neighborhoods get well-funded education systems, while people in poor neighborhoods get shafted.
- Crime-ridden neighborhoods with no jobs and limited transportation linking them to areas that do have jobs.
My challenge to you: Drop whatever job you have right now, turn your back on whatever savings accounts or other means of support you currently have. Then, get yourself a family with two kids under the age of five. Your challenge: You have fifteen years to save enough money to give both your new kids a college education. You cannot use any post-high school education you've acquired so far in your life.
You and your wife both start out as as cashiers for Wal-Mart, but you can take a better job if you've acquired the skills for the job sometime after you started the project. How will you earn enough money to put yourself through the local community college while you and your wife have to support two kids? Will you have the drive needed to put yourself through college while holding down a full time job?
Maybe. It's a tall order, even in the best circumstances this society provides. Even if you succeed, can you credit your success to some illusory "self", without giving due credit to the genes that make you smarter, more resourceful, and more disciplined than many of those around you? After all, what did you do to "earn" the genes that gave you your intelligence? Did the genes that allow you to delay gratification come to you through hard work? What right do any of us have to judge anyone "worthy" of his or her station in life?
Some Slashdotters appear to have an idyllic view of poverty. Wake up, meander over to the Welfare office, pick up your check, buy booze, go home, beat the kids, fall asleep, wake up the next morning and repeat. So far, you strike me as one of those hopelessly naive sorts.
My mistake. That article (from the Heritage Foundation) was written just before the election in 2004. They're not claiming that ten straight quarters of "steady growth" is a feat. They're claiming SIX. Heritage must have been desperate to find anything at all to say about Bush's economic stewardship.
"The best growth in 60 years?" No, the best growth in 60 years is still the era immediately following WWII. What the article (which you linked to, but apparently didn't bother to read) says that the era between the second quarter of 2003 and today is the "most steady, non-volatile expansion in sixty years." Two and a half years of "steady growth" which only slightly exceeds the average growth since 1970, isn't a huge accomplishment. When you consider the vast national debt we're incurring, and the continued erosion of the middle class dividing the nation into haves and have-nots, and this feat of mediocrity begins to look like... well... the rest of the Bush Presidency.
You also make the unsubstantiated assertion that Congress plays games with SS benefits to "panic people who depend on SS for their retirement. You do realize that part of the problem with Social Security is that the elderly are the biggest, baddest voting block out there, and any attempt to reduce benefits is political suicide. Can you show me one single instance of a successful attempt by Congress to reduce benefits for current retirees, in the last fifty years?
I'll tell you exactly what they were thinking. They were thinking, "you know, if we can convince people that their tapwater is slowly killing them, then they'll pay a premium for our tapwater, because it comes in bottles!"
Bottled water is an excellent example of how FUD can run roughshod over common sense.
No, I really think it will be the same situation (from the "Joe User" perspective, at least). Joe wants to hook up to The Interweb, so he orders a connection from his DSL provider. The DSL modem comes with a pre-installed firewall that denies all incoming connections. The ISP gives him a big chunk of address space (rather than the single IP address of earlier days). Joe hooks up another box, and it magically works (DHCP works like it always did. The computers behind the firewall/router should all be able to communicate with each other. Unless Joe accidentally turns off the firewall on the router, in which case other computers can reach the ones on his network.
I don't see any new burdens on home users once the transition finally happens.
When I was eleven or twelve, my brother and I sat down with our rented copy of Zelda 1, and proceeded to draw out a completely accurate world map, one screen at a time. We were playing it on our grandma's ten inch, black and white screen. It got really hard in the northeast corner of the world, where all those sword-chucking centaurs lived.
Man, but those were good times.
You may not fully grasp the sheer volume of addresses implied by a 128-bit address space. After the conversion to IPv6, if my ISP doesn't give me four billion addresses to play with (the size of the entire IPv4 address space) I'll be looking for a new provider.
There is no need for much centralized control with the current IPv4 space. Once you have a block of addresses, you can do what you want with them. You don't need to register your server with a central organization. In fact, IPv6 will be liberating, because most end users today get an IP space with only one address in it.
Now, you say end users can set up complex networks with NAT, which is true. "Without impacting on anyone" is also true, but in my mind that carries nothing but downside. If I'm on the outside of a network, and I want to open communications with an arbitrary computer within the network, it can't be done. I might have the router forwarding port 22 to my Linux box, and VOIP traffic to my Windows box. But that's a rigid, predefined setup.
Dropping NAT doesn't mean jettisonning centralized firewalls. You can still have your network set up to deny all unrequested connections (that's what most consumer-grade routers default to today), but IPv6 gives you more flexibility in the sort of setups you can allow.
Couldn't the average computer firewall default to the average router firewall? You know, deny any inbound connections from computers you didn't specifically make outbound requests to. The defaults could be smart, and if you want to add services to your computer that will loosen those restrictions (say Bittorrent, or VOIP), the software can reconfigure the rules. There can also be automatically updating rulesets. For example, you run an SSH daemon on your box, and want to block traffic from computers that have been trying to brute force that port. If someone trustworthy is collecting that information, you could set up your box to download the list of blocked clients.
For most people, the preinstalled firewall will be set to allow them to do most everything they want to do, while denying most anything outsiders might want to do.
I find this world you want to create deeply disturbing, because nothing--nothing at all--protects the powerless from the powerful. Imagine, if you will, that I live in poverty in your world. If I'm looking for an apartment, and the only place I can actually afford has a stipulation in the contract saying the owner of the building can sleep with my wife on a weekly basis, our choice is to either sign the contract or live on the street. If I need a place to stay the night, and the owner of the most reasonable hotel stipulates that I be naked at all times while in their rooms (so they profit from broadcasting the feed over the 'Net), what are my choices? Or maybe the owner of the property just wishes to come in and eat my food. It doesn't matter. The question is, why should anyone providing living accomodations be allowed to write these sort of clauses into a contract? Because it's his property? That doesn't matter: my right to my free and unharassed life trumps his right to full use of his property. There is no reasonable justification for such requirements in a contract. Keeping them illegal protects the rights of non-owners, without harming the landlords in any meaningful way. I say we keep them.
Unless such "privacy clauses" are mandatory parts of every relevant contract, there are going to be situations where people who don't have wealth as leverage will be compelled to enter into exploitative contracts. It is human nature for those who have the advantage to try and maintain and extend that advantage, and your interpretation of natural law leaves very few lines that cannot be crossed in the quest for that advantage.
The world you propose is vicious and evil, and that evil comes with no benefits that I can see. I think John Locke would be rightly embarrassed to see where "his" philosophy has taken you.
You're misunderstanding. He's not claiming that the society he describes is the society we live in. He's claiming only that it's the society we should be living in. The fact that current laws forbid these behaviors just means that the government is "violating your natural right to property" (as he might say). It's a scary world he wants to live in, but you can't say he's "wrong", any more than I would be "wrong" for suggesting that a world with unicorns could be cool.
There has to be a "Right to Privacy" that is separate and distinct from a "Right to Private Property." Otherwise, what protects the privacy of someone who is renting his flat? Should the landlord be able to come in unannounced, at any time, for any reason? Should the landlord be able to write up a contract with the police, saying that they can come in unannounced, at any time, for any reason?
Should the police be able to search my car without cause, if I happen to be driving a rental car and the rental place has agreed to it?
If I'm staying at a hotel, do I give up all right to privacy while I do so? Can the owners put up hidden cameras in your hotel room, and put movies of your activities on the Internet?
Free Speech Statist, my ass. What you're effectively arguing here is that only those who own their own stuff should have any right to privacy.
"100% accurate" doesn't necessarily mean "not misleading as hell". Republicans have been using this tactic (and its kin, "forgetting" inflation) to erode social programs since at least the Gingrich era. Of course, now that we've veered so far off course that the Republicans can cut these programs without the sugar coating, they can be more honest about their intentions.
Despite your assertion, we do get massive savings by educating children "in volume". But the techniques required for "mass production" don't apply well to the manufacturing of educated adults. As class sizes grow, it's harder for teachers to answer everyone's questions, maintain classroom order, and take account of the needs of individual students. There is a certain amount of individualized attention that each student needs, and if the student/teacher ratio is too high, education cannot help but suffer.
I believe they've studied the class size issue in enough detail that they know where the inflection points are. It doesn't make much difference whether your class size is 15 or 20, but the difference between 30 and 35 is pretty remarkable. You'd think it would be the other way around, because the proportional change is larger going from 15 to 20. But going from 30 to 35 makes more difference, because the teacher already has more kids than he can effectively deal with.
Now, I never proposed the theory you claim I'm proposing: that higher per student spending leads to a better education. Read my earlier post again: all I proposed was that increasing the amount being spent on service X can result in an effective cut if the number of people requiring service X increases faster. Had my analogy used a birthday cake instead of dollars, would you say I was proposing that cake is healthy for you? No.
There is no easy way to relate dollars spent to educational outcomes. Too much depends on factors like parental involvement, social attitudes towards school, and the effectiveness of school administration in using those dollars to improve the education system. My home state of Utah is a wonderful example: Despite having about the lowest per-student spending in the country, we have generally good educational outcomes. I think it's because parents are unusually involved in the education of their children.
But within any given education district, we can assume that these factors will be relatively constant. If spending gets cut, it's unlikely that "parental involvement" is magically going to take up the slack. It's a very naive view of the world to think that there is always more that can be cut from a budget without ill effect. Some schools are already too poor to provide an acceptable educating environment: overcrowded classrooms, too few teachers, facilities in disrepair. Some schools need serious reforms to their administration, or simply to spend money more wisely. But there are schools that just need more farking money.
They're all sorts of crazy over at Sony, maybe even this crazy. All we know for sure is that they've patented the technology, which means less and less given the insanity of our patent system. Are they shooting themselves in the foot? Or just making sure that they can license FootBullet(TM) technology to their competitors?
As with most rumors like this, file it under "Unconscionable If True".
How long have you been searching for a way to drag your pet issues into this story?
Since you've veered totally off-topic anyhow: "limiting the amount of spending increases" is effectively cutting spending, if demand for those services are increasing faster than the spending limits can cope with.
For example, say you have a million kids in the school system, and you're paying three billion to educate them ($3000/head). Your "limits in spending increases" allow for no more than 2.5% increases every year in school spending. But next year there will be 1.1M kids in the school system. You're now paying $3.075B to educate 1.1M kids, which means per-pupil spending has been cut by $205/child.
If you're going to cite examples of FUD, don't go spreading misinformation yourself.
How about something a little different. Instead of producing software, it makes its taxation rules available using some open, programmer-friendly format, and a bunch of test cases and their results, so that software developers can know that their system is producing valid results. If they want to produce actual software as well, they can. But under this proposal, you can have lots of different software packages that produce the same results, but compete in ease of use, price, etc.
I don't know if leaving it entirely in the Feds' hands will produce simple, comprehensible programs.
Go to any business (fast food, retail, convenience stores) that rely on near-minimum wage unskilled labor. Ask them what their employee turnover is like.
None of those areas have unionized workers, and the employers don't seem to be getting the message.
The Katrina relief effort isn't what you'd expect from the government, per se. But it's exactly what you'd expect from a government being run by people who believe that government is nothing but a burden on the glorious free market.
The slow response? The appointment of officials based on cronyism and political ideology instead of qualifications? The constant foot-dragging to avoid devoting more resources to the response than absolutely necessary? It all seems to indicate a bureaucracy which doesn't believe in its own stated mission.
Katrina isn't proof that government involvement necessitates incompetence. Instead, it's ample evidence that neocons who want to minimize the role of government have drastically eroded our government's ability to help its citizens when they need it.
Now, we've had twenty years of Microsoft overseeing the development of important software. What do we have to show for it? Left to itself, Microsoft wrings competition out of the market, takes charge of previously open standards by extending them, releases file formats that only work well with other Microsoft software, and slurps a couple of billion dollars every month out of the economy for the privilege. Would government-sponsored software based on open source, open standards, and interoperability be any worse?
I doubt it. If anything, Microsoft would be able to make much better, more useful software by taking advantage of the new standards. But it would be much trickier for them to keep people locked into their software, hence depriving them of the near-monopoly position they enjoy right now.
Take a look at their website, and they do appear to have some left-of-center tendencies. They talk up the housing bubble, defend the economic effectiveness of Pres. Hugo Chavez, and reject the IMF's mantra of "privatization, deregulation, and free trade".
I like them already.
Not all consumer spending is equally beneficial. For example, let's talk about the Beanie Baby craze of a few years. Hundreds of millions of people went out and bought cute, fluffy toys, and thousands of people and billions of dollars in resources were involved in the invention, manufacture, and distribution of those beanie babies.
In the end, what were we left with? Billions of toys. Cute toys, I'll admit. But you can't eat them. They don't cure cancer. They don't purify water or generate electricity or clean pollutants out of the atmosphere.* Once the "gotta catch 'em all" madness dispersed, people realized what they had spent their hard-earned cash on, and either gave them to their kids or donated them to Goodwill.
I recognize that there may have been some benefits to the BB madness, but had all that consumer spending never happened, would anyone but the stockholders of Ty Inc. (the makers of Beanie Babies) be significantly worse off? Quite the contrary, if the same amount of effort had gone into some humanitarian venture, like AIDS prevention in Africa, or developing renewable energy sources instead of BBs, we'd have been much better off.
To say that, because spending has occurred, value has been created is the misconception behind the Broken Window Fallacy, which itself is an intriguing look at the misapplication of economic theory.
Now, BBs were a fad, and it's hard to make a direct comparison to the software industry. But skimming over the paper, he seems to be arguing that software industry isn't creating value at all proportional to the amount we're paying the industry. He gives a few reasons: rent-seeking behavior, the tendency to create software that duplicates the function of existing proprietary software, etc. In the end, he's arguing that if software can be created more efficiently under his system, it would free up tens of billions of dollars that are currently being wasted, and put those dollars into sections of the economy where they would do more good.
Does his system actually succeed in this? You'll have to read the paper and see for yourself. All I'm suggesting is that your question isn't a rhetorical one.
* Note to Anonymous Coward: I'm sorry, I wasn't aware that your Beanie Babies actually did these things. A retraction will be forthcoming.