You forget that we granted them easements to *our* land, granted license to *our* frequency ranges, and gave them significant and material subsidies for roll-out. The idea that we should be thankful for what the private sector has given *us* is absolutely preposterous.
Being able to subversively nickel and dime the public monopolistically is a serious problem. Doing it oligopalistically (remember SMS rate hikes in lock step?) leaves us with no recourse but neutrality legislation (hard for people to understand and lambasted by corrupt politicians) and anti-trust litigation (very slow to respond). We've already seen that, left free to roam, ISPs will abuse the public trust and severely damage the openness of the internet (comcast, for example).
Our dough (DARPA) made the friggin internet. Don't let AT&T et al fool you into believing that they had any great skin in the game in either forming or promulgating the internet. They took a gravy train cut that profits *heavily* on *OUR* internet.
But the key difference here is that goods produced in the United States and obtained overseas are still subject to the First Sale Doctrine.
If those goods are produced overseas and obtained overseas, they are suddenly treated very differently if resold in the US.
This will essentially screw up grey market sales of things like cameras, computers, etc, and it will hand eternal pricing and resale control over to the copyright holder (Omega used a logo to invoke this protection).
This will allow for dumping without natural market correction, and it naturally eliminates used CD, DVD, BD, and book sales, provided that those media were produced overseas.
This could conceivably be construed to impair libraries and rental, even things such as hardware rental (Hilti on a drill, Caterpillar on a backhoe).
This is a perilously stupid decision, so basically par for this court.
I've always thought that having a door at the back of the plane that just lets the entire passenger compartment slide out the back, with a couple of enormous parachutes, would do the trick.
Threaten the plane, deal with 150-400 angry passengers that just got dropped off a third of the way to their destination. Blowing it up is your best bet at that point.
Refer to my original link, to Orson Scott Card's "How Software Companies Die."
The way to get good coders to do their thing is to let their haphazard misanthropy produce beautiful code, somewhat probabilistically. It's why new software companies regularly tromp on old ones. Old ones start looking at the bottom line and the economy of each dollar, of each hour, of the parts that they can understand. Eventually, this desire to look at the parts that they can understand manifests itself as discarding the parts that they don't. They lose sight of the whole, and the good people leave.
Sure, it takes a huge deal of trust, but, if you've hired someone to dev software for you, you either need to trust them to some extent or go back to the drawing board. Success for technical people lies in knowing how to tell the difference between good and mediocre business people. Success for business people lies in being able to do the same with technical people. That's much more easily said than done, but, if you fail, the truly innovative people will be somewhere else.
What most business people don't get about good coders is that good coders will code because they want to, because they have to. It's just in their blood, like needing to solve a puzzle, compulsively clean, or (for the managers here) get good at golf. It's not nearly as adversarial a position as people make it out to be. Give good coders a playground and the goodness of what they make is the reward.
Sorry man, but Agile is a methodology (look here). I get what you're saying, but Agile attempts to codify quickness and minimal planning into a process.
That process includes measurable goals and the breaking of work into understandable small tasks (often at the expense of the whole). That reeks of managerial BS.
That said, yes, take the tools and use them lightly to give managers a window into how things are going and it doesn't need to be too much of a boat anchor (especially compared to other processes). It can also be a big plus for detecting when brillant moments are coming. If it sounds like I'm advocating a form of cowboy coding, it may be because I can't for the life of me understand why software devs would want to give up creative and directional control of the software that they craft.
To throw in a manager-friendly sports analogy, the people who don't want the ball are the ones who shouldn't have it in the first place. If your developers are comfortable surrendering control, they're either too mediocre or too worn down to bother fighting with you.
But, yeah, I get it. I think that we have encountered, and dislike, the same people with regards to Agile. I'm just not confident that any such process can be imposed without these unpleasant "mistakes" surfacing. If there's power to be grabbed and misused, it will be.
Possibly, but real Agile has, in my experience, been a bit of a unicorn. It's what Agile people always trot out to try to rescue Agile from a flogging that it's deserved for a few years now.
I'd also be wary of using the phrase "the most efficient" with regards to anything that isn't a provable truth unless you add "that I've seen" or "currently known."
The problem with more deeply controlling approaches is their motivation for imposition. Things like Six Sigma and Agile exist precisely because managers want deeper control and inspection. They naturally don't want responsibility for things outside of their control, and the solution they see to that disparity is deeper control. That deeper control and inspection, combined with codification of process and approach, creates an environment that essentially inhibits innovation and motivates the skilled to leave. Good coding can be like good painting, gestating thoughts over weeks exploding furiously into nights of brilliant slinging. There is no place for truly inspired code in post-it notes with point counters on them.
Maybe it fits with everybody's favorite commoditized-code whipping-boy, bank software, but it certainly hasn't done my corner of the industry any favors.
Agile has over-promised and under-delivered. I have yet to encounter any evidence to the contrary.
Any discussion of Agile and its value calls for a mention of Orson Scott Card's How Software Companies Die. Card makes the very valid point that good software developers abhor deep and thorough control of the "process" by which they make software. Typically, the developers I've known to like Agile are the mediocre ones.
Agile won't make a bad team good, and it will make a good team a bit slower, with sprint synchronization, a meeting-heavy culture, and commoditization of development resources. The only big win that I see for Agile is the ability to more quickly call the failure shot. There's value to this, but every single Agile group that I've encountered, worked in, and heard of has eventually moved to valuing the process over the practice of developing software.
Believe that being able to measure the process is critical to producing good software? You're a manager who has read too many crappy management books and spent too little time in software development. Believe that being able to measure the process is more important than what comes out of it? You should take a look at Agile.
You must have missed the extruded aluminum chassis, two-piece magnesium chassis, and carbon chassis that have be bumping around in the not-quite-a-notebook arena for friggin' ever (in technology terms).
Yes, milled one-piece construction is sexy, and slightly different, but it's a continuum. There is little-to-nothing that the Air does that a netbook wouldn't do slightly worse, or the defunct Vaio T wouldn't do slightly better ('cept run OS X).
When "but this one runs OS X" is the only thing that's ground-breakingly unique about your device, your device is not ground-breakingly unique.
That doesn't strike me as particularly controversial. It's legal to vote if you're here legally? Madness!
Presumably we're talking about being a legal citizen, not just a vacationer on a six-week visa. Though... Voting tourism. November would become a high-season.
It's not a requirement for non-naturalized citizens (people born here), because that would be ridiculous. It harkens back to Jim Crow laws. More importantly, the United States does not have a formal official language.
There are sections of Texas with roadsigns (and they used to do decrees and other official documents) in German, but I'd bet that Spanish is more common a tongue there than Texas German. Why should we buck the trend?
If you're good enough to get a better job somewhere else, just leave. The best people aren't going to get laid off unless they make it quite clear that they aren't doing any work.
Besides, this is about making a statement, making a stand on principle. In early 2009 I quit a job I'd had for 10 years, on principle. It was a tough move to make, but absolutely the right one.
Sometimes, when you are pushed into making a move, you realize it's the move you should have made years before.
You can't build a heavily community-driven business model around things like OO, Java, and, to some extent, Oracle, and then just cut it off and let things fester. At least, not if you intend to actually be in those markets in 5-10 years.
The trick is that, given what we've seen from Oracle in the past few months, they're pretty much doing their best to monetize (read: ruin for short-term gain) Sun in the dumbest ways possible. They're going around and crapping in everyone's corn-flakes. Of course people think that they're up to no good.
I think that netbooks have been, essentially, atom-powered versions of this (at a lower price-point).
Think of this more like a Vaio TZ without the optical drive... And Sony killed the T-line of tinybooks a year ago...
Acting like non-drive SSD is something special also forgets that Sony has been doing this in the Z-series for about a year. Honestly, I'd consider the new 13" Air... If it had 1394.
Don't take away my 1394 until you come back with USB 3.0 (and throw in WiDi while you're at it).
It's worth mentioning that, while I think CO2 released from fossil fuels has a warming effect, I don't think we can say that it's as drastic as most of the climate research purports to indicate, nor do I think that natural forms of sequestration (e.g. plants) are incapable of accounting for such variances.
Pump CO2 into a greenhouse and you greatly accelerate plant growth. And, yes, methane has much more dramatic greenhouse warming effects.
All I'm saying is that it's disingenuous to say "the science is in" in just about any genuinely scientific discussion, and the likely policies to deal with this "imminent threat" suggest ulterior motives.
So I get modded troll by people unwilling to think scientifically and exercise a bit of skepticism with regards to the motives of the very powerful. In some parts of the world, people still go without running water.
Factor-price equalization hints that standards of living will equalize over time, but it doesn't mean that everyone will go up. That said, I'm not going to go all Malthus and suggest that we're on the brink of running out of stuff.
As supplies dwindle and speculators push prices up on a ramp up to running dry, previously impractical approaches will become economically viable.
The whole fossil-fuel anthropogenic-warming movement allows developed nations to generate artificial demand for techniques and IP held primarily in developed nations. Undeveloped nations that are industrializing now don't get to drink from the same accelerative well of no-concern-for-externalities industrialization that the world's developed nations did, still having to funnel money (read: power, resources) to developed nations in order to keep trade open.
Undeveloped nations that choose to disregard UN formulated rules on carbon emissions may find themselves free-trade pariahs, left out of the global economy. Only nations already in positions of power, like China, could play outside of the intellectual-property-tax-for-mandatory-technologies treaty minefield if things go the UN's way.
Sure I'm aware that it would be hard to enact carbon-production limiting rules on a non-global scale, but the effects on international markets shouldn't be disregarded as likely (and obvious) motivations for policy decisions. Add in the pleasant regulatory generation of artificial demand to continue pulling on the leash of the economies of now-faltering western nations, and it's a win-win all around.
Poor people in poor countries stay relatively poor, and middle-class people in rich countries stay relatively poor.
Of course, I believe that anthropogenic CO2 has a warming effect. You'd have to be an idiot not to. Just as you'd have to be an idiot to take the wildly speculative high-end-of-the-margin-of-error conclusions of UN funded climate researchers at face value, or think that the planet's climate has been balancing on the head of a pin instead of sitting in a self-correcting trough. That the UN pushes so hard for their solution and so hard against honest research into techniques that would give us such fine-grained control over our climate reveals a great deal about their probable motivations.
In short, these guys* are crooks.
(These guys*: United States, France, the UK, and other developed UN member nations)
Yes, this was obvious to me 20 years ago, and I was 11 years old. User interface was statefully responsive to pixel-accurate pointers since nearly as long as they've been around.
It was obvious as soon as there was a pointer, and it's such a general idea that it strains the mind to imagine a situation in which someone so disconnected from the state of the art might be charged with determining the validity of such a patent.
I never said that anyone said that this was a terrorist program. I said that the argument that this might be used by terrorists, and that that constitutes a significant increase in the marginal risk of an attack, is ridiculous. Whether this is the way of thinking of DHS or otherwise is immaterial. It's the way of thinking of far too many in the general populous and the government. We had plenty of evidence of this sort of thinking well before we read this article.
I get this argument from idiot alarmists all the time:
"We can't allow for the last link of dissemination of information to the public at large to exist, but it's okay for the information to be available. We just need to make it *less* available."
This sort of argument appears to stem from one or many of a few beliefs:
1) Terrorists are too stupid to get this sort of information from less casual sources. 2) Of all of the speedbumps to becoming a terrorist, figuring out where the flights are was the thing that was holding people back. 3) They had no idea that we had this information available (this is a variant of 1), 4) It's okay to leave information we consider dangerous out in the open, as long as you can't get it without knowing the right URL (or, in this case, the right frequencies). This isn't quite what crypto nerds mean when they say "security through obscurity isn't security at all," but it's pretty relatable.
And to think, US Cyber command is under the impression that they don't need geeks. If this is what passes for an understanding of safety and security in our government, we're just doomed.
Slashdot Mirror
You forget that we granted them easements to *our* land, granted license to *our* frequency ranges, and gave them significant and material subsidies for roll-out. The idea that we should be thankful for what the private sector has given *us* is absolutely preposterous.
Being able to subversively nickel and dime the public monopolistically is a serious problem. Doing it oligopalistically (remember SMS rate hikes in lock step?) leaves us with no recourse but neutrality legislation (hard for people to understand and lambasted by corrupt politicians) and anti-trust litigation (very slow to respond). We've already seen that, left free to roam, ISPs will abuse the public trust and severely damage the openness of the internet (comcast, for example).
Our dough (DARPA) made the friggin internet. Don't let AT&T et al fool you into believing that they had any great skin in the game in either forming or promulgating the internet. They took a gravy train cut that profits *heavily* on *OUR* internet.
But the key difference here is that goods produced in the United States and obtained overseas are still subject to the First Sale Doctrine.
If those goods are produced overseas and obtained overseas, they are suddenly treated very differently if resold in the US.
This will essentially screw up grey market sales of things like cameras, computers, etc, and it will hand eternal pricing and resale control over to the copyright holder (Omega used a logo to invoke this protection).
This will allow for dumping without natural market correction, and it naturally eliminates used CD, DVD, BD, and book sales, provided that those media were produced overseas.
This could conceivably be construed to impair libraries and rental, even things such as hardware rental (Hilti on a drill, Caterpillar on a backhoe).
This is a perilously stupid decision, so basically par for this court.
You'd just screw it up anyway. Better that nobody tells you.
Just carry some of whatever makes you happy and have massive wood before going through the check. Opt out and get a fondle.
Enough people do that, no fondle (except in San Francisco, where I live, but... hey, those are the breaks.).
I've always thought that having a door at the back of the plane that just lets the entire passenger compartment slide out the back, with a couple of enormous parachutes, would do the trick.
Threaten the plane, deal with 150-400 angry passengers that just got dropped off a third of the way to their destination. Blowing it up is your best bet at that point.
Refer to my original link, to Orson Scott Card's "How Software Companies Die."
The way to get good coders to do their thing is to let their haphazard misanthropy produce beautiful code, somewhat probabilistically. It's why new software companies regularly tromp on old ones. Old ones start looking at the bottom line and the economy of each dollar, of each hour, of the parts that they can understand. Eventually, this desire to look at the parts that they can understand manifests itself as discarding the parts that they don't. They lose sight of the whole, and the good people leave.
Sure, it takes a huge deal of trust, but, if you've hired someone to dev software for you, you either need to trust them to some extent or go back to the drawing board. Success for technical people lies in knowing how to tell the difference between good and mediocre business people. Success for business people lies in being able to do the same with technical people. That's much more easily said than done, but, if you fail, the truly innovative people will be somewhere else.
What most business people don't get about good coders is that good coders will code because they want to, because they have to. It's just in their blood, like needing to solve a puzzle, compulsively clean, or (for the managers here) get good at golf. It's not nearly as adversarial a position as people make it out to be. Give good coders a playground and the goodness of what they make is the reward.
Sorry man, but Agile is a methodology (look here). I get what you're saying, but Agile attempts to codify quickness and minimal planning into a process.
That process includes measurable goals and the breaking of work into understandable small tasks (often at the expense of the whole). That reeks of managerial BS.
That said, yes, take the tools and use them lightly to give managers a window into how things are going and it doesn't need to be too much of a boat anchor (especially compared to other processes). It can also be a big plus for detecting when brillant moments are coming. If it sounds like I'm advocating a form of cowboy coding, it may be because I can't for the life of me understand why software devs would want to give up creative and directional control of the software that they craft.
To throw in a manager-friendly sports analogy, the people who don't want the ball are the ones who shouldn't have it in the first place. If your developers are comfortable surrendering control, they're either too mediocre or too worn down to bother fighting with you.
But, yeah, I get it. I think that we have encountered, and dislike, the same people with regards to Agile. I'm just not confident that any such process can be imposed without these unpleasant "mistakes" surfacing. If there's power to be grabbed and misused, it will be.
Possibly, but real Agile has, in my experience, been a bit of a unicorn. It's what Agile people always trot out to try to rescue Agile from a flogging that it's deserved for a few years now.
I'd also be wary of using the phrase "the most efficient" with regards to anything that isn't a provable truth unless you add "that I've seen" or "currently known."
The problem with more deeply controlling approaches is their motivation for imposition. Things like Six Sigma and Agile exist precisely because managers want deeper control and inspection. They naturally don't want responsibility for things outside of their control, and the solution they see to that disparity is deeper control. That deeper control and inspection, combined with codification of process and approach, creates an environment that essentially inhibits innovation and motivates the skilled to leave. Good coding can be like good painting, gestating thoughts over weeks exploding furiously into nights of brilliant slinging. There is no place for truly inspired code in post-it notes with point counters on them.
Maybe it fits with everybody's favorite commoditized-code whipping-boy, bank software, but it certainly hasn't done my corner of the industry any favors.
Agile has over-promised and under-delivered. I have yet to encounter any evidence to the contrary.
Any discussion of Agile and its value calls for a mention of Orson Scott Card's How Software Companies Die. Card makes the very valid point that good software developers abhor deep and thorough control of the "process" by which they make software. Typically, the developers I've known to like Agile are the mediocre ones.
Agile won't make a bad team good, and it will make a good team a bit slower, with sprint synchronization, a meeting-heavy culture, and commoditization of development resources. The only big win that I see for Agile is the ability to more quickly call the failure shot. There's value to this, but every single Agile group that I've encountered, worked in, and heard of has eventually moved to valuing the process over the practice of developing software.
Believe that being able to measure the process is critical to producing good software? You're a manager who has read too many crappy management books and spent too little time in software development. Believe that being able to measure the process is more important than what comes out of it? You should take a look at Agile.
You must have missed the extruded aluminum chassis, two-piece magnesium chassis, and carbon chassis that have be bumping around in the not-quite-a-notebook arena for friggin' ever (in technology terms).
Yes, milled one-piece construction is sexy, and slightly different, but it's a continuum. There is little-to-nothing that the Air does that a netbook wouldn't do slightly worse, or the defunct Vaio T wouldn't do slightly better ('cept run OS X).
When "but this one runs OS X" is the only thing that's ground-breakingly unique about your device, your device is not ground-breakingly unique.
And you could turn around and teach your natively-born kids only Klingon...
if they are here legally
Um... Did I miss the joke?
That doesn't strike me as particularly controversial. It's legal to vote if you're here legally? Madness!
Presumably we're talking about being a legal citizen, not just a vacationer on a six-week visa. Though... Voting tourism. November would become a high-season.
It's not a requirement for non-naturalized citizens (people born here), because that would be ridiculous. It harkens back to Jim Crow laws. More importantly, the United States does not have a formal official language.
There are sections of Texas with roadsigns (and they used to do decrees and other official documents) in German, but I'd bet that Spanish is more common a tongue there than Texas German. Why should we buck the trend?
Oh, right, because you're a racist troll.
You're really drawing a false parallel here. The motivations behind Apple's deprecation of 3rd party platforms are pretty transparent.
Just because people are unhappy with Apple doesn't mean they can't also be unhappy with Oracle.
Oversimplification is always bad.
If you're good enough to get a better job somewhere else, just leave. The best people aren't going to get laid off unless they make it quite clear that they aren't doing any work.
Besides, this is about making a statement, making a stand on principle. In early 2009 I quit a job I'd had for 10 years, on principle. It was a tough move to make, but absolutely the right one.
Sometimes, when you are pushed into making a move, you realize it's the move you should have made years before.
You can't build a heavily community-driven business model around things like OO, Java, and, to some extent, Oracle, and then just cut it off and let things fester. At least, not if you intend to actually be in those markets in 5-10 years.
The trick is that, given what we've seen from Oracle in the past few months, they're pretty much doing their best to monetize (read: ruin for short-term gain) Sun in the dumbest ways possible. They're going around and crapping in everyone's corn-flakes. Of course people think that they're up to no good.
I think that netbooks have been, essentially, atom-powered versions of this (at a lower price-point).
Think of this more like a Vaio TZ without the optical drive... And Sony killed the T-line of tinybooks a year ago...
Acting like non-drive SSD is something special also forgets that Sony has been doing this in the Z-series for about a year. Honestly, I'd consider the new 13" Air... If it had 1394.
Don't take away my 1394 until you come back with USB 3.0 (and throw in WiDi while you're at it).
I actually like the Swiss alps, personally.
It's worth mentioning that, while I think CO2 released from fossil fuels has a warming effect, I don't think we can say that it's as drastic as most of the climate research purports to indicate, nor do I think that natural forms of sequestration (e.g. plants) are incapable of accounting for such variances.
Pump CO2 into a greenhouse and you greatly accelerate plant growth. And, yes, methane has much more dramatic greenhouse warming effects.
All I'm saying is that it's disingenuous to say "the science is in" in just about any genuinely scientific discussion, and the likely policies to deal with this "imminent threat" suggest ulterior motives.
So I get modded troll by people unwilling to think scientifically and exercise a bit of skepticism with regards to the motives of the very powerful. In some parts of the world, people still go without running water.
Getting modded troll is small potatoes.
Factor-price equalization hints that standards of living will equalize over time, but it doesn't mean that everyone will go up. That said, I'm not going to go all Malthus and suggest that we're on the brink of running out of stuff.
As supplies dwindle and speculators push prices up on a ramp up to running dry, previously impractical approaches will become economically viable.
And I'm a liberal...
The whole fossil-fuel anthropogenic-warming movement allows developed nations to generate artificial demand for techniques and IP held primarily in developed nations. Undeveloped nations that are industrializing now don't get to drink from the same accelerative well of no-concern-for-externalities industrialization that the world's developed nations did, still having to funnel money (read: power, resources) to developed nations in order to keep trade open.
Undeveloped nations that choose to disregard UN formulated rules on carbon emissions may find themselves free-trade pariahs, left out of the global economy. Only nations already in positions of power, like China, could play outside of the intellectual-property-tax-for-mandatory-technologies treaty minefield if things go the UN's way.
Sure I'm aware that it would be hard to enact carbon-production limiting rules on a non-global scale, but the effects on international markets shouldn't be disregarded as likely (and obvious) motivations for policy decisions. Add in the pleasant regulatory generation of artificial demand to continue pulling on the leash of the economies of now-faltering western nations, and it's a win-win all around.
Poor people in poor countries stay relatively poor, and middle-class people in rich countries stay relatively poor.
Of course, I believe that anthropogenic CO2 has a warming effect. You'd have to be an idiot not to. Just as you'd have to be an idiot to take the wildly speculative high-end-of-the-margin-of-error conclusions of UN funded climate researchers at face value, or think that the planet's climate has been balancing on the head of a pin instead of sitting in a self-correcting trough. That the UN pushes so hard for their solution and so hard against honest research into techniques that would give us such fine-grained control over our climate reveals a great deal about their probable motivations.
In short, these guys* are crooks.
(These guys*: United States, France, the UK, and other developed UN member nations)
Yes, this was obvious to me 20 years ago, and I was 11 years old. User interface was statefully responsive to pixel-accurate pointers since nearly as long as they've been around.
It was obvious as soon as there was a pointer, and it's such a general idea that it strains the mind to imagine a situation in which someone so disconnected from the state of the art might be charged with determining the validity of such a patent.
I think that changing underlying content with hover mouse events is pretty obvious. I mean, what else would it be there for?
Laptops.
Keep in mind that I said "if this is what passes," which is a conditional statement.
You also have to remember that the FBI instructed wikipedia to remove a publicly available image, and the Obama administration is pushing a bill requiring backdoors in internet communication systems.
I never said that anyone said that this was a terrorist program. I said that the argument that this might be used by terrorists, and that that constitutes a significant increase in the marginal risk of an attack, is ridiculous. Whether this is the way of thinking of DHS or otherwise is immaterial. It's the way of thinking of far too many in the general populous and the government. We had plenty of evidence of this sort of thinking well before we read this article.
I get this argument from idiot alarmists all the time:
"We can't allow for the last link of dissemination of information to the public at large to exist, but it's okay for the information to be available. We just need to make it *less* available."
This sort of argument appears to stem from one or many of a few beliefs:
1) Terrorists are too stupid to get this sort of information from less casual sources.
2) Of all of the speedbumps to becoming a terrorist, figuring out where the flights are was the thing that was holding people back.
3) They had no idea that we had this information available (this is a variant of 1),
4) It's okay to leave information we consider dangerous out in the open, as long as you can't get it without knowing the right URL (or, in this case, the right frequencies). This isn't quite what crypto nerds mean when they say "security through obscurity isn't security at all," but it's pretty relatable.
And to think, US Cyber command is under the impression that they don't need geeks. If this is what passes for an understanding of safety and security in our government, we're just doomed.