Libertarianism is autism on the macro scale. If we were monads, no windows (except a sort of B2B interface), it might make sense. But a polity based on such a narrow view of what makes us human is as unworkable as the moribund Soviet model.
America used to live in that Libertarian golden age with respect to property. Luckily we got over it. Where I grew up, CC&R's (Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions) for property sales regularly included provisions forbidding sales to Mexicans or African-Americans in perpetuity. And y'know something? Anti-discrimination law is a good thing, and yes, it infringes on someone's property rights. Tough shit.
And as for people saying things that make you uncomfortable on your property: totalitarian repression isn't any better when it comes from the boss or the landlord than it was when it came from the state. You're deriving your income from the community: you don't own us. They used to revoke corporate charters when the corp's failed to operate in the public interest. We'll go back to that model one day, I hope. Your business is not your home. When you open the doors to the public, you are obligated to cut people some slack. It's not your opportunity to become the anus-clenching Pinochet of Main Street.
And let me declare an interest: I own property that's worth a significant amount. I make what you might consider to be a lot of money. And despite all this, I support progressive taxation and do not hold simplistic, absolutist views of property rights. Part of the reason the place I live has such high property velues and such wonderful quality of life is precisely because of restrictions on what people can do with their property. And if someone set up a smelting plant or tannery nextdoor to you, you'd see it that way too.
Maybe they were born that way, maybe they were exposed to hormones at an early age that affected their devellopment, we don't know.
This is a position I agree with. Nobody fully understands why some people are gay, some straight, and some bi. IANAG, so this is not of immediate selfish concern to me, but it seems to me that what matters most is how an idea changes behavior or policy. From a rights point of view, I don't accept that it makes any difference whether attraction to the same gender is innate or a choice. The principle that applies is: loving relationships don't harm society. Anyway it's a strange view that, if it's in the genes, it's OK, but if it's caused by the environment, it's somehow less real. Would we convert left-handers to right-handers if we found out it's an enviromental factor that determined their chiral preference?
Oh, and even if religious bigotry turns out to be genetically determined, I'm still going to resist.
Now, as to which Star Wars character shot first, I personally don't give a good goddamn. But some of this revisionism has political content and that is more disturbing.
For isntance, Disney's "Song of the South" was hard to find for quite a while. I guess the jolly racial stereotyping just didn't age well. No matter that such idiocy was endemic in the culture at the time.
As disturbing as the continual tinkering with film is the constant attempt in history texts to anachronistically push notions of diversity and equality that might make sense in a 21st-century person onto other times when such a viewpoint was scarce or nonexistent. All of this is a sign of a deep neurosis that we have to virtually go back in time to fix all the things we got wrong back then. Doing so hides some ugly truths that need to be known to understand where we've come from.
I second that. On one of my first performance appraisals, I was rated very highly for getting everything done well and on time, but I was told that I should learn how and when to work around the system and be more willing to do so when necessary. This came from one of our VP's, a great guy. One of the best bits of mentoring advice I ever got.
Put more theoretically: Bagehot, long ago, when writing on the British political system, distinguished the "efficient" from the "dignified" parts of the polity. On a smaller scale, the same is true in organizations. There's the org chart and the officially-sanctioned roles and bodies, then there are the social networks by which work really gets done. I've done some analysis of social networks while developing collaboration solutions for my clients, and it's interesting how seldom they correspond with the formal organization.
Incidentally, this is why Sarbanes-Oxley is profound, destructive idiocy, despite its good intentions. If most organizations only operated in accordance with their documented roles and responsibilities, they would be out of business.
As for the voodoo arts of bureaucracy, here are a few highlights:
1. Learn to run a meeting. Know what you want from the meeting and grease it with the key participants beforehand. Come with an agenda, document decisions and (especially) actions. With dates. Then, hold follow-ups to status the actions, and escalate as soon as the actions aren't delivered on. This is critical: document commitments, and document when those commitments aren't being met. And be sure to supply need dates that allow you to go to Plan B if Plan A goes wrong. That also means that it's up to you to know what Plan B is.
2. Expect insane delays from any external organization you depend on. Escalate the schedule risk of these delays to your management and have them negotiate service-level agreements with them ASAP.
3. Identify well-protected non-performers early, and give them highly visible, non-critical tasks with clearly-defined completion criteria. They'll either come through, or they'll screw up in front of an audience. If they're seen to fail, you can push them aside into boring, non-critical roles or get rid of them.
4. If you're doing project management, be sure that you don't have anyone on your team unless you write their performance appraisal or (if they're contractors) decide whether to pay their firm. Matrixed organizations are set up specifically to prevent accountability. If you don't own their ass, they don't work for you, they're just getting in the way.
5. Get high-level allies. If you're on an IT project, make it clear to your business sponsors where the bottlenecks are. They're usually far more capable of solving those problems than you are on your own. And always state the problem in objective terms of "This is what we have to have and this is what we're getting" rather than "This guy's a moron." Even if he's a moron. Even better if you have suggestions on how the solution should look.
6. If your external dependency is on a non-performer and you can't convince them to do the job right, suck it up and have one of your resources do it for them. And make sure that it's clear to everyone that this is what you've done. Then, if they refuse to accept the work, make them explain why it's going to take them three weeks to solve a problem that you have already solved.
7. If you're in a corner and the only way out is to violate the procedures, consider the consequences of complying, and of not complying. Then decide. Most businesses won't fire you for getting the job done unless somebody's put in danger of incarceration by your bending the rules. More typically, you're a hero if you deliver on budget and on schedule. If you don't, nobody gives you credit for failing even if you did it by the book.
When it comes down to it, this is a way of interpretting a psuedeo random series of dots in a grid. Saying it's a "new kind of music" is a bit misleading - There's no flow, no beginning, no middle, no end. It's a new way of randomly generating midi note events within certain constraints.
I agree that it's uninteresting.
I've been using constrained random processes to compose music since 1978, and even then I wasn't the first: Iannis Xenakis was doing it before I was even born. The lack of "beginning, middle and end" is irrelevant to whether it's music or not, that's just your idea of what music should be. Resolution doesn't need to be part of it. There are a number of traditional forms of music that don't resolve either. Anyway, with appropriate constraints it's possible to do algorithmic composition that does give a feeling of resolution. And from my own point of view, I'm not doing constrained stochastic composition to pass a Turing test. I'm using it as one compositional technique among many. It can yield emergent patterns that are nearly as interesting as, but different from, live performance or human composition.
Wolfram's music is similar to his work with cellular automata: obliviousness to prior, better work in the field, combined with a peculiar belief that his rather limited noodling is the Theory of Everything rather than a modeling technique that, like any good modeling technique, can be refined to approximate many interesting things.
The problem with some clever people is that they think everyone else are idiots.
and they were getting them by penetrating secure computer networks at the country's most sensitive military bases, defense contractors and aerospace companies."
Secure networks, if you mean classified networks, are not connected to the Internet.
What the Chinese are probably doing is snarfing up all the data they can from government sources on the Internet, and using that to infer information that is classified. And maybe if they're lucky they'll find something that was incorrectly made public, though the processes are heavily biased to over-classify material rather than vice-versa.
So what's the motive for the scaremongering tone of the article? What are they trying to get out of it? Either allowing prosecution of people who are accessing publicly-available materials, or a further clampdown on freedom of information. I've heard Republican congressmen ranting about infosec lately, so my guess is the latter. That would also serve to delay and obstruct subsequent corruption (war crimes? Maybe but less likely) investigations.
The Chinese are a convenient scapegoat, but if I'm going after corrupt hypocritical authoritarian warmongers, I can find plenty of those closer to home. After all, it's not the Chinese who are fishing through my library's records.
And the funniest part is that actually I am quite conservative, except I stay away from Limbaugh and Orielly and do my best to think for myself.
I'm far from conservative, though some friends and family are. I've observed three paths that lead to conservatism: one is through respect for tradition; another is through reasoning based on certain principles; and another is due to a psychological deficit that leads to anger, scapegoating, the desire for punishment, and the need to identify with abusive authority figures.
I've found it possible to talk to those who became conservative by the first two paths, though we have some fundamental differences.
Sadly, Rush and O'Reilly appeal to the last of these groups. And the behavior of the school authorities in this case seem to fit that profile: fearful, arbitrary, disproportionate. Why are they coming down like a ton of bricks on these kids? Because they can, and because administering punishment turns them on.
You know why Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden, right? They ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
The back story was "don't get too curious of God will punish you." Just do what the priests tell you. By interesting coincidence this appears in a book written by priests.
Authority has always arbitrarily controlled information and rewarded ignorant compliance while punishing initiative. Real life is administratively inconvenient. That's why petty abuses of authority such as this need to be met with a shitstorm of scathing publicity. The lifeless drones who repress schoolkids need a good thumb in the eye once in a while to keep them in their place.
Any yeah, maybe the kids should have a reprimand lodged in their Permanent Records That Will Determine the Future Course of Their Lives. But I doubt if the severity of their wrongdoing was anywhere near even that level. But when you get bizarre decisions like this, it shows a rot that has started at the top: an organization that lodges ANY criminal charges for behavior like this needs to be gutted from the Supervisor down and all of those involved should never be allowed to come near kids again.
Incidentally, I have kids in high school and know from direct experience that the idiocy of administrators is widespread. Parents and the wider community should never accept universal excuses such as "we had to do it because otherwise we'd be sued" or "because otherwise pedophiles might stalk our children." When basic fairness and proportion are lost, careers should be on the line. They're paid as much as judges, let's see some judgment.
Get online and see how much a high-school principal earns these days, and how many administrators there are in a school district relative to the number of teachers. You'll cut the bastards a lot less slack after that.
Me: Writing logic in your presentation layer (your web pages) is a bad idea no matter what language you use.
While I agree with this, I think that, for trivial apps, it's not such a big deal to mix the presentation layer and the logic. The problem I have with PHP is that some over-enthusiastic developers have tried to extend its use to writing enterprise applications. That's not what it was designed for, though feature-creep has moved it a little in that direction. There's not much wrong with it for small-scale throwaway web apps, but beyond a certain point, it just isn't the right tool anymore.
I saw some earlier posts that were sneering at language features that "95% of us don't use." Well, that might become what keeps you from being one of the 5% who will still be programming five years from now. Though I've met a few diehards who were writing spaghetti ten years ago and still are.
And, just to be very clear, I'm not a language zealot. I have coded in, and led teams who coded in, C, C++, Java, Smalltalk, Lisp (various flavors), Perl, Python, Ruby and various app development frameworks. Despite my having used other languages, and the likelihood I will continue to do so, I understand what drove the additional features in Python and Ruby and enjoy the added productivity that they enable. PHP was meant more to "get the job done, screw the fancy stuff" and the simplistic feature set has become a limitation as its usage has grown.
A lot of companies treat their customer service as a "bag on the side" rather than as an integral part of the business. As a consequence, the reps aren't empowered to do anything to improve the customer relationship (for example, fixing accounting errors or offering complimentary goodies). Instead, they're held accountable for keeping the costs down by ending calls as soon as possible, by any means necessary.
Worse, I've been at a lot of clients where customer satisfaction is not systematically measured, where there's no incentive for reps to do the right thing, and where there's no awareness that future sales depend on the company's reputation for service as much as on the product itself. This includes some well-known companies where you'd think they'd know better.
The FPP anecdote about Apple is a great example of how great products aren't the end of the experience for customers. The other side of the coin is the somewhat pricey ISP I use. If cost and connectivity were the only drivers, I'd dump them in a heartbeat since broadband is a commodity product. But their tech support and customer service are much better than the (admittedly lousy) average, so I keep on paying the premium.
Using the word "piracy" is implicitly accepting the copyright monopolists' interpretation of events. "Sharing without our permission" would be a less slanted way of describing what's happening.
And, you might ask, if I bought it, why do I need your permission to do anything I like with it that doesn't change its content? The only reason is that it's a vestige of an ancient system of royally-granted monopolies, and in earlier days when there were high barriers to entry for publishing, it encouraged authors.
But this is not the 1600s anymore. So where are the unbiased studies of how much impact copying-without-permission actually has on the motivation of content creators? Or is it all propaganda paid for by MPAA and RIAA?
I'm not taking a position either way on whether P2P sharing of copyrighted material is harmful or immoral. But however much free-riders might be scroungers, they are not pirates and they are not thieves. Saying they are is accepting the terms of debate as defined by a self-interested and unethical lobbying group that has resorted to lying and purchasing legislation to enrich themselves. Any sensible discussion should not be framed by them.
Are sites IE only because IE has features that firefox does not, or because developers are lazy and don't check in multiple browsers.
I see a lot of things. A lot of sites use non-compliant Javascript (that is, the extensions that are not ECMAscript) for tabs and menus. Quite a few also use ActiveX controls.
The main reasons are: the developers are ignorant, the coding and testing effort is greater with multiple browsers (as you mentioned), and some people (particularly certain businesses and government agencies) have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Like utility companies: we don't care-- we don't have to. This is even more flagrant in intranet applications, where IT departments seem to think that a locked-down environment means that they don't have to be standards-compliant. Then along comes a new desktop standard, or a new platform such as handhelds, and the IT department end up looking like morons because the enterprise apps don't play nicely with non-IE browsers.
If the non-standard features in IE were delivering critical functionality, I could understand it. But more often they're just little bells and whistles or shortcuts that don't really matter to anyone all that much (besides those low-skill developers who have never ventured outside the MS cocoon).
These bozos are nearly as bad as the corporate idiots who regard the Internet as nothing but a giant file system to upload their shitty PDFs to.
we're doomed to live a nightmare where everyone is guilty.
More opportunities for bribery and blackmail in a situation where there's a high rate of false positives and ambiguous or secret regulations that anyone could potentially be found guilty of. Then they can cultivate a huge population of informers, with even more shakedown possibilities as a result.
Then all that will be left is futile, self-destructive petty rebellion.
So they're going to get Osama for downloading a Vin Diesel DVD, kind of like stitching up Al Capone for tax evasion? Damn that Gonzalez guy is clever, never mind the torture memo. Of course they'll still need to find him first, won't they?
If CSUSA takes Reigelman to court and successfully proves that the parents were falsely defaming CSUSA on that website, then it is an open and shut case of libel, which is against the law.
This argument might make some degree of sense in those cases where there is no connection between the government and corporations. The reality is that "charter school" firms exist solely due to government fiat.
The whole reason there is freedom of speech is to make it possible to criticize government policy. If my local school board and teachers are not doing their job to my satisfaction, I have the right to criticize them. I'm sure that even you will agree with this.
Now the governor decides to privatize the provision of my kids' education. That's what a "charter school" is in case you didn't realize. So suddenly that same criticism of the same public service is no longer criticism of the government, it's defaming a company? The rule should be that speech regarding the performance of companies funded by the government is the same as speech regarding the government itself. Otherwise your fundamental right is being abridged solely because some bureaucrat decided to contract out. That's nothing but a slimy way for them to duck accountability.
You see, it's called capitalism and it works both ways. If you can't stand the heat...
That's because what we're seeing is not so much capitalism as a religion of compulsory monetization of every social relation. There's this pervasive idea among some highly vocal individuals that you are obligated to squeeze a profit out of each and every human encounter, and that there's something wrong with those of us who don't. Perhaps it's to compensate for their inability to relate on any other level.
If they didn't want you to view their ads - they would not have put it there.
Implicit in that comment is the assumption that someone has the moral right to determine what content you see, or at least that the content creator has some magic power to control how the content they're putting in public view is experienced.
Now I think that at the site level, it's agreed that you can navigate wherever you like-- it's the Web after all. But now there are gatekeepers who say that, oh no, you're somehow immoral if you filter content from within that site. Remember cease and desist letters for deep linking? Same mentality. And I suppose I'm even more immoral if I disable ActiveX controls, or screw some web designer's cool layout by changing the text size?
My understanding of the social contract is different: we're all contributing content and nobody's got the right to tell me the granularity at which I exercise my faculty of critical discrimination or filtering. I owe nothing to any advertiser, or to anyone who decides to support themselves by advertising. Or to anyone who doesn't. I'm not a consumer. I'm a peer. Despite the wet dreams of a certain degraded form of humanity, the Web is still more than a virtual shopping mall. This is a conversation, not a sales pitch.
Advertising's symbiosis with publishing is very ancient. So is the practice of vending adulterated food. On some level these practices are analogous. Another way of looking at it is that advertising is a parasitic disease of "push" media. But one reason I use the Web is that it's NOT television: I get to talk back to the talking heads. And ignore them. And when I can't anymore, I'll move to the a new venue where I still can.
(Yeah, I know I should have hung this reply on the grandparent but it's late and I'm too lazy to change it. I essentially agree with the parent: I didn't opt in, there is no exchange, it's not a contract, and just because I walked through the door of your store doesn't obligate me to buy anything, even if it's just a teensy-weensy little micropayment. Get a real job and quit trying to get your revenue by subterfuge.)
Naw, I've used Ruby. My whining about the "@" is just a nit. My main reason for not having adopted Ruby is my pre-existing knowledge of Python. I haven't yet run across a project where Ruby gives me a big advantage over Python. Since Ruby has a few nicer features, I'm sure that I'll eventually find a project where Ruby gains me something. But the projects I've done lately have been in the zone where the two languages are equally useful, so I've stuck to the devil I know.
Likewise. I've used Python on and off for about six years now, and have written LOTS of code in it. I also do quite a bit of prototyping in Zope. The whitespace issue is largely a red herring. I personally think it helps maintainability a little, but much of the debate about it is just disproportionate.
Used in its proper context, Python is just wonderful. The performance issues everyone keeps posting about are seldom observed in the wild. I'd like one of the posters who talks about how slow Python is to cite a real-life example of a Python implementation that they have used that has response-time problems that are caused by Python. I wouldn't make it my first choice for implementing a kernel scheduler, but there's very little coding in most IT shops that is speed-critical.
Anyway, most of what I've read in these posts is nothing but rules of thumb remembered, but not fully understood, from CompSci lectures. But here's the more important principle. If you're optimizing, you need to look at the impact on the whole development lifecycle, not just at code execution. You also need to consider how much complexity a good programming team can effectively manage, and consider the impact on maintainability of various arcane tweaks, keeping in mind the fact that the literature abounds with evidence that programmers are quite bad at knowing in advance which parts of their code to optimize.
And in my experience, when you do have to optimize, there's more payoff in fixing the algorithm than there is in low-level tuning.
By the way, little things sometimes annoy me too. While there's a lot to appreciate in Ruby (love them continuations), the "@" prefix on instance variables really gets up my nose. But I don't let my irrational response get in the way of choosing an appropriate language for a particular problem set.
hile it sucks for the CS people in the Pentagon, it just makes sense right now to divert money to things that will benefit the troops in Afganistan and Iraq.
You are of course referring to one-way tickets home, right?
This is more akin to a vulnerability to hostile traffic analysis than to flat-out identity theft.
If you have anything on you that can be used remotely to identify you as a USian, your personal security has been compromised, even if the specific details aren't available. In that case, the mere presence of the chip provides a hostile party with information that can be used to make you a victim.
Even if the information on the RFID chip is encrypted, it will respond to a query by returning the encrypted block of information. Now here's a scenario. You are Johnny Terrorist. You go to a crowded bar and scan the crowd. Ah! A lot of Yankee warmongering devils in there! Target-rich environment! Mayhem ensues.
Sounds like another intrusive plan that enables repression and has negative side-effects without doing much to address the problem it purports to solve. So who's selling the chips and how much did they donate to the Republicans?
Haha, I assure you I was not appealing for pity, but only stating the facts for the sake of honesty.
Hey, where's the pleasure in life when you can't take a cheap shot anymore? Merely an ironic assertion of my own frequent frustration with the language. The sad, troubled life of a programming minimalist.
A few years back MS made a lot of fuss about Java while developing an alternative (.NET).
.NET is an alternative to J2EE, which is a couple layers further up in abstraction than Java. The lower-level correspondences are C# to Java and the CLR to JRE. Still, I think we should look at Microsoft's behavior. They didn't want to make themselves hostage to Sun's proprietary language. Neither should the free software community.
I'll tell you all now, I'm a Winodws developer and I write C# code.
The US government has always tried to subvert the Constitution and particularly the Bill of Rights, all the way back to the Sedition Act. Posting on/. saying "Waah, itz UNCONSTITUTIONAL!!" is all well and good, but the only thing that makes them stop is when we don't let the bastards get away with it. The idea that citing the Constitution will somehow magically make it all better is delusional. They will do as much as they can get away with. When they can't make us comply, and when we fight back, THEN they listen. The rest is just empty talk.
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Libertarianism is autism on the macro scale. If we were monads, no windows (except a sort of B2B interface), it might make sense. But a polity based on such a narrow view of what makes us human is as unworkable as the moribund Soviet model.
America used to live in that Libertarian golden age with respect to property. Luckily we got over it. Where I grew up, CC&R's (Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions) for property sales regularly included provisions forbidding sales to Mexicans or African-Americans in perpetuity. And y'know something? Anti-discrimination law is a good thing, and yes, it infringes on someone's property rights. Tough shit.
And as for people saying things that make you uncomfortable on your property: totalitarian repression isn't any better when it comes from the boss or the landlord than it was when it came from the state. You're deriving your income from the community: you don't own us. They used to revoke corporate charters when the corp's failed to operate in the public interest. We'll go back to that model one day, I hope. Your business is not your home. When you open the doors to the public, you are obligated to cut people some slack. It's not your opportunity to become the anus-clenching Pinochet of Main Street.
And let me declare an interest: I own property that's worth a significant amount. I make what you might consider to be a lot of money. And despite all this, I support progressive taxation and do not hold simplistic, absolutist views of property rights. Part of the reason the place I live has such high property velues and such wonderful quality of life is precisely because of restrictions on what people can do with their property. And if someone set up a smelting plant or tannery nextdoor to you, you'd see it that way too.
Oh, and even if religious bigotry turns out to be genetically determined, I'm still going to resist.
Now, as to which Star Wars character shot first, I personally don't give a good goddamn. But some of this revisionism has political content and that is more disturbing.
For isntance, Disney's "Song of the South" was hard to find for quite a while. I guess the jolly racial stereotyping just didn't age well. No matter that such idiocy was endemic in the culture at the time.
As disturbing as the continual tinkering with film is the constant attempt in history texts to anachronistically push notions of diversity and equality that might make sense in a 21st-century person onto other times when such a viewpoint was scarce or nonexistent. All of this is a sign of a deep neurosis that we have to virtually go back in time to fix all the things we got wrong back then. Doing so hides some ugly truths that need to be known to understand where we've come from.
I second that. On one of my first performance appraisals, I was rated very highly for getting everything done well and on time, but I was told that I should learn how and when to work around the system and be more willing to do so when necessary. This came from one of our VP's, a great guy. One of the best bits of mentoring advice I ever got.
Put more theoretically: Bagehot, long ago, when writing on the British political system, distinguished the "efficient" from the "dignified" parts of the polity. On a smaller scale, the same is true in organizations. There's the org chart and the officially-sanctioned roles and bodies, then there are the social networks by which work really gets done. I've done some analysis of social networks while developing collaboration solutions for my clients, and it's interesting how seldom they correspond with the formal organization.
Incidentally, this is why Sarbanes-Oxley is profound, destructive idiocy, despite its good intentions. If most organizations only operated in accordance with their documented roles and responsibilities, they would be out of business.
As for the voodoo arts of bureaucracy, here are a few highlights:
1. Learn to run a meeting. Know what you want from the meeting and grease it with the key participants beforehand. Come with an agenda, document decisions and (especially) actions. With dates. Then, hold follow-ups to status the actions, and escalate as soon as the actions aren't delivered on. This is critical: document commitments, and document when those commitments aren't being met. And be sure to supply need dates that allow you to go to Plan B if Plan A goes wrong. That also means that it's up to you to know what Plan B is.
2. Expect insane delays from any external organization you depend on. Escalate the schedule risk of these delays to your management and have them negotiate service-level agreements with them ASAP.
3. Identify well-protected non-performers early, and give them highly visible, non-critical tasks with clearly-defined completion criteria. They'll either come through, or they'll screw up in front of an audience. If they're seen to fail, you can push them aside into boring, non-critical roles or get rid of them.
4. If you're doing project management, be sure that you don't have anyone on your team unless you write their performance appraisal or (if they're contractors) decide whether to pay their firm. Matrixed organizations are set up specifically to prevent accountability. If you don't own their ass, they don't work for you, they're just getting in the way.
5. Get high-level allies. If you're on an IT project, make it clear to your business sponsors where the bottlenecks are. They're usually far more capable of solving those problems than you are on your own. And always state the problem in objective terms of "This is what we have to have and this is what we're getting" rather than "This guy's a moron." Even if he's a moron. Even better if you have suggestions on how the solution should look.
6. If your external dependency is on a non-performer and you can't convince them to do the job right, suck it up and have one of your resources do it for them. And make sure that it's clear to everyone that this is what you've done. Then, if they refuse to accept the work, make them explain why it's going to take them three weeks to solve a problem that you have already solved.
7. If you're in a corner and the only way out is to violate the procedures, consider the consequences of complying, and of not complying. Then decide. Most businesses won't fire you for getting the job done unless somebody's put in danger of incarceration by your bending the rules. More typically, you're a hero if you deliver on budget and on schedule. If you don't, nobody gives you credit for failing even if you did it by the book.
I've been using constrained random processes to compose music since 1978, and even then I wasn't the first: Iannis Xenakis was doing it before I was even born. The lack of "beginning, middle and end" is irrelevant to whether it's music or not, that's just your idea of what music should be. Resolution doesn't need to be part of it. There are a number of traditional forms of music that don't resolve either. Anyway, with appropriate constraints it's possible to do algorithmic composition that does give a feeling of resolution. And from my own point of view, I'm not doing constrained stochastic composition to pass a Turing test. I'm using it as one compositional technique among many. It can yield emergent patterns that are nearly as interesting as, but different from, live performance or human composition.
Wolfram's music is similar to his work with cellular automata: obliviousness to prior, better work in the field, combined with a peculiar belief that his rather limited noodling is the Theory of Everything rather than a modeling technique that, like any good modeling technique, can be refined to approximate many interesting things.
The problem with some clever people is that they think everyone else are idiots.
What the Chinese are probably doing is snarfing up all the data they can from government sources on the Internet, and using that to infer information that is classified. And maybe if they're lucky they'll find something that was incorrectly made public, though the processes are heavily biased to over-classify material rather than vice-versa.
So what's the motive for the scaremongering tone of the article? What are they trying to get out of it? Either allowing prosecution of people who are accessing publicly-available materials, or a further clampdown on freedom of information. I've heard Republican congressmen ranting about infosec lately, so my guess is the latter. That would also serve to delay and obstruct subsequent corruption (war crimes? Maybe but less likely) investigations.
The Chinese are a convenient scapegoat, but if I'm going after corrupt hypocritical authoritarian warmongers, I can find plenty of those closer to home. After all, it's not the Chinese who are fishing through my library's records.
I've found it possible to talk to those who became conservative by the first two paths, though we have some fundamental differences.
Sadly, Rush and O'Reilly appeal to the last of these groups. And the behavior of the school authorities in this case seem to fit that profile: fearful, arbitrary, disproportionate. Why are they coming down like a ton of bricks on these kids? Because they can, and because administering punishment turns them on.
You know why Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden, right? They ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
The back story was "don't get too curious of God will punish you." Just do what the priests tell you. By interesting coincidence this appears in a book written by priests.
Authority has always arbitrarily controlled information and rewarded ignorant compliance while punishing initiative. Real life is administratively inconvenient. That's why petty abuses of authority such as this need to be met with a shitstorm of scathing publicity. The lifeless drones who repress schoolkids need a good thumb in the eye once in a while to keep them in their place.
Any yeah, maybe the kids should have a reprimand lodged in their Permanent Records That Will Determine the Future Course of Their Lives. But I doubt if the severity of their wrongdoing was anywhere near even that level. But when you get bizarre decisions like this, it shows a rot that has started at the top: an organization that lodges ANY criminal charges for behavior like this needs to be gutted from the Supervisor down and all of those involved should never be allowed to come near kids again.
Incidentally, I have kids in high school and know from direct experience that the idiocy of administrators is widespread. Parents and the wider community should never accept universal excuses such as "we had to do it because otherwise we'd be sued" or "because otherwise pedophiles might stalk our children." When basic fairness and proportion are lost, careers should be on the line. They're paid as much as judges, let's see some judgment.
Get online and see how much a high-school principal earns these days, and how many administrators there are in a school district relative to the number of teachers. You'll cut the bastards a lot less slack after that.
I saw some earlier posts that were sneering at language features that "95% of us don't use." Well, that might become what keeps you from being one of the 5% who will still be programming five years from now. Though I've met a few diehards who were writing spaghetti ten years ago and still are.
And, just to be very clear, I'm not a language zealot. I have coded in, and led teams who coded in, C, C++, Java, Smalltalk, Lisp (various flavors), Perl, Python, Ruby and various app development frameworks. Despite my having used other languages, and the likelihood I will continue to do so, I understand what drove the additional features in Python and Ruby and enjoy the added productivity that they enable. PHP was meant more to "get the job done, screw the fancy stuff" and the simplistic feature set has become a limitation as its usage has grown.
A lot of companies treat their customer service as a "bag on the side" rather than as an integral part of the business. As a consequence, the reps aren't empowered to do anything to improve the customer relationship (for example, fixing accounting errors or offering complimentary goodies). Instead, they're held accountable for keeping the costs down by ending calls as soon as possible, by any means necessary.
Worse, I've been at a lot of clients where customer satisfaction is not systematically measured, where there's no incentive for reps to do the right thing, and where there's no awareness that future sales depend on the company's reputation for service as much as on the product itself. This includes some well-known companies where you'd think they'd know better.
The FPP anecdote about Apple is a great example of how great products aren't the end of the experience for customers. The other side of the coin is the somewhat pricey ISP I use. If cost and connectivity were the only drivers, I'd dump them in a heartbeat since broadband is a commodity product. But their tech support and customer service are much better than the (admittedly lousy) average, so I keep on paying the premium.
Using the word "piracy" is implicitly accepting the copyright monopolists' interpretation of events. "Sharing without our permission" would be a less slanted way of describing what's happening.
And, you might ask, if I bought it, why do I need your permission to do anything I like with it that doesn't change its content? The only reason is that it's a vestige of an ancient system of royally-granted monopolies, and in earlier days when there were high barriers to entry for publishing, it encouraged authors.
But this is not the 1600s anymore. So where are the unbiased studies of how much impact copying-without-permission actually has on the motivation of content creators? Or is it all propaganda paid for by MPAA and RIAA?
I'm not taking a position either way on whether P2P sharing of copyrighted material is harmful or immoral. But however much free-riders might be scroungers, they are not pirates and they are not thieves. Saying they are is accepting the terms of debate as defined by a self-interested and unethical lobbying group that has resorted to lying and purchasing legislation to enrich themselves. Any sensible discussion should not be framed by them.
The main reasons are: the developers are ignorant, the coding and testing effort is greater with multiple browsers (as you mentioned), and some people (particularly certain businesses and government agencies) have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Like utility companies: we don't care-- we don't have to. This is even more flagrant in intranet applications, where IT departments seem to think that a locked-down environment means that they don't have to be standards-compliant. Then along comes a new desktop standard, or a new platform such as handhelds, and the IT department end up looking like morons because the enterprise apps don't play nicely with non-IE browsers.
If the non-standard features in IE were delivering critical functionality, I could understand it. But more often they're just little bells and whistles or shortcuts that don't really matter to anyone all that much (besides those low-skill developers who have never ventured outside the MS cocoon).
These bozos are nearly as bad as the corporate idiots who regard the Internet as nothing but a giant file system to upload their shitty PDFs to.
Then all that will be left is futile, self-destructive petty rebellion.
So they're going to get Osama for downloading a Vin Diesel DVD, kind of like stitching up Al Capone for tax evasion? Damn that Gonzalez guy is clever, never mind the torture memo. Of course they'll still need to find him first, won't they?
The whole reason there is freedom of speech is to make it possible to criticize government policy. If my local school board and teachers are not doing their job to my satisfaction, I have the right to criticize them. I'm sure that even you will agree with this.
Now the governor decides to privatize the provision of my kids' education. That's what a "charter school" is in case you didn't realize. So suddenly that same criticism of the same public service is no longer criticism of the government, it's defaming a company? The rule should be that speech regarding the performance of companies funded by the government is the same as speech regarding the government itself. Otherwise your fundamental right is being abridged solely because some bureaucrat decided to contract out. That's nothing but a slimy way for them to duck accountability.
Now I think that at the site level, it's agreed that you can navigate wherever you like-- it's the Web after all. But now there are gatekeepers who say that, oh no, you're somehow immoral if you filter content from within that site. Remember cease and desist letters for deep linking? Same mentality. And I suppose I'm even more immoral if I disable ActiveX controls, or screw some web designer's cool layout by changing the text size?
My understanding of the social contract is different: we're all contributing content and nobody's got the right to tell me the granularity at which I exercise my faculty of critical discrimination or filtering. I owe nothing to any advertiser, or to anyone who decides to support themselves by advertising. Or to anyone who doesn't. I'm not a consumer. I'm a peer. Despite the wet dreams of a certain degraded form of humanity, the Web is still more than a virtual shopping mall. This is a conversation, not a sales pitch.
Advertising's symbiosis with publishing is very ancient. So is the practice of vending adulterated food. On some level these practices are analogous. Another way of looking at it is that advertising is a parasitic disease of "push" media. But one reason I use the Web is that it's NOT television: I get to talk back to the talking heads. And ignore them. And when I can't anymore, I'll move to the a new venue where I still can.
(Yeah, I know I should have hung this reply on the grandparent but it's late and I'm too lazy to change it. I essentially agree with the parent: I didn't opt in, there is no exchange, it's not a contract, and just because I walked through the door of your store doesn't obligate me to buy anything, even if it's just a teensy-weensy little micropayment. Get a real job and quit trying to get your revenue by subterfuge.)
Naw, I've used Ruby. My whining about the "@" is just a nit. My main reason for not having adopted Ruby is my pre-existing knowledge of Python. I haven't yet run across a project where Ruby gives me a big advantage over Python. Since Ruby has a few nicer features, I'm sure that I'll eventually find a project where Ruby gains me something. But the projects I've done lately have been in the zone where the two languages are equally useful, so I've stuck to the devil I know.
And what is the reputation of someone who sells opinions, and how is it connected with the soundness of their reasoning?
Whiners. "If you can't stand the heat..."
Used in its proper context, Python is just wonderful. The performance issues everyone keeps posting about are seldom observed in the wild. I'd like one of the posters who talks about how slow Python is to cite a real-life example of a Python implementation that they have used that has response-time problems that are caused by Python. I wouldn't make it my first choice for implementing a kernel scheduler, but there's very little coding in most IT shops that is speed-critical.
Anyway, most of what I've read in these posts is nothing but rules of thumb remembered, but not fully understood, from CompSci lectures. But here's the more important principle. If you're optimizing, you need to look at the impact on the whole development lifecycle, not just at code execution. You also need to consider how much complexity a good programming team can effectively manage, and consider the impact on maintainability of various arcane tweaks, keeping in mind the fact that the literature abounds with evidence that programmers are quite bad at knowing in advance which parts of their code to optimize.
And in my experience, when you do have to optimize, there's more payoff in fixing the algorithm than there is in low-level tuning.
By the way, little things sometimes annoy me too. While there's a lot to appreciate in Ruby (love them continuations), the "@" prefix on instance variables really gets up my nose. But I don't let my irrational response get in the way of choosing an appropriate language for a particular problem set.
This is more akin to a vulnerability to hostile traffic analysis than to flat-out identity theft.
If you have anything on you that can be used remotely to identify you as a USian, your personal security has been compromised, even if the specific details aren't available. In that case, the mere presence of the chip provides a hostile party with information that can be used to make you a victim.
Even if the information on the RFID chip is encrypted, it will respond to a query by returning the encrypted block of information. Now here's a scenario. You are Johnny Terrorist. You go to a crowded bar and scan the crowd. Ah! A lot of Yankee warmongering devils in there! Target-rich environment! Mayhem ensues.
Sounds like another intrusive plan that enables repression and has negative side-effects without doing much to address the problem it purports to solve. So who's selling the chips and how much did they donate to the Republicans?
The US government has always tried to subvert the Constitution and particularly the Bill of Rights, all the way back to the Sedition Act. Posting on /. saying "Waah, itz UNCONSTITUTIONAL!!" is all well and good, but the only thing that makes them stop is when we don't let the bastards get away with it. The idea that citing the Constitution will somehow magically make it all better is delusional. They will do as much as they can get away with. When they can't make us comply, and when we fight back, THEN they listen. The rest is just empty talk.