Oughtred invented the slide rule in 1621, based on an earlier but less convenient gadget called Napier's Bones. Napier was the same clever fellow who figured out much of how logarithms work.
There were a number of analog computers (both electronic and mechanical) in use prior to digital computers. But they weren't general-purpose programmable machines. They were built to embody one or a small set of algorithms, and that's what they did. Examples include astrolabes, artillery calculators, bomb sights, etc. Most seemed to be connected with surveying, navigation and blowing things up...
Of course, much of the US legal system is also built up from case law. It's just that depth of the geological strata is less than in the UK.
I had the pleasure of living in London for many years, and was quite entertained by by learning the differences between legal systems that are designed and those that are grown. There are a number of features of the English system (and even more the Scottish) that are excellent. But I recall a lot of concern that the senior judges were out of touch with people's lives, and this sometimes led to bizarre judgements. Also, prior to the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, some judges were quite prone to authoriarian rulings. That might still be so. But the English courts seem less accessible to "money wars" than the US courts. And there are more disincentives to frivolous lawsuits and excessive jury awards of damages. I'd certainly like to see some of the excesses of our system brought under control, and it wouldn't be the first time we've borrowed from the British system.
I withdraw the "half-baked" part. I myself was not baked but steamed when I wrote that. Please accept my apology for having personalized this discussion.
My point applied to libraries and other public places as well as to the home. It's equally applicable to private-sector venues such as movie theaters and video arcades. That point was: Don't assume that parental responsibilities can be replaced by a piece of code, or by delegating that responsibility to a third party. Most willing third parties offer a cure that can be as bad as, or even worse than, the disease, since their agendas are very likely based on a different view of children's welfare than your own. And often, their agenda has nothing to do with what's good for your kids at all.
I would agree with the essentially conservative position that federal funds should not be used as a means of micromanaging local institutions. I recall Dubya advocating the cutting of red tape when it comes to how schools educate kids, favoring block grants instead. A similar policy on libraries would let local communities decide how much censorware is appropriate, rather than imposing a uniform standard on, say, Alabama and New York.
In MY community, I would not oppose libraries providing some computers configured with censorware, as long as unrestricted Internet access were also available. I find Internet pr0n an inconvenience, but have often run afoul of censorware in the workplace in the course of non-pornographic research.
I've got three kids, two old enough to use the Web. I want to be sure that they don't see porn when they're browsing. I am also concerned that they are not exposed to rightwing fundamentalist hatemongering crap that would stunt their mental and emotional development as much as porn.
Any parent that wants to keep an eye on what their kids are seeing, whether in the print media, on TV, in games or on the Web, will be involved in their kids' lives and will monitor what they're up to. Rating systems, incompetent bureaucrats or snake-oil-vending censorware companies cannot do that for me. The correct response is to take responsibility for being a parent. Mindless passive measures don't work, they're just a way of giving the illusion of action without actually doing anything. And I'll be the judge of what my kids see, thank you very much. YOUR halfbaked opinions will be given all the attention they deserve (nada), and if you try to impose then on me, expect strong resistance. Censorware is just another excuse for petty interference by those who have too much time on their hands and think that they know better. A healthy society marginalizes such people. Any law that empowers individuals of that sort is a bad law that should be struck down.
Take your moral crusades to Iran or Saudi Arabia. I prefer living in a country where the system protects me from fanatics.
Advertisers and two-year-olds know that bad attention is better than being ignored. If the objective is to build name recognition, then intrusive, obnoxious ads stick in the reader's mind, and they've achieved their goal.
Think of any jingle you've heard on the radio that you can't clear from your mind later.
Which legislator would they ask, anyway? All of them?
The reason the law is so vague is that the lawmakers had no single intent as to its meaning. Therefore they negotiated some ambiguous weasel words that could mean different things to different factions. This is the fallacy of the whole "original intent" argument. The result of this is that the courts end up making the law after the fact, based on their own prejudices. Of course, in these situations, the party with the deepest pockets -> slickest lawyers usually wins.
It's certainly not hard to do crap design or ignorant implementation: plenty of that around. But even when you do those things right, you live or die by how well you meet end-user needs.
It seems that a lot of coders enjoy commenting on how ignorant the users are, but complex systems that are developed without user involvement just fail. And it's possible to produce technically sophisticated (and even logically provable) solutions that don't actually solve the user's problems. Effective requirements gathering and user validation are critical to software success. I know it's a "soft skill" that we look down on, but it still needs to be done right.
One of the reasons I like RAD (and Extreme) is that it makes it easier to give the users a look into the system early in the proceedings, and to respond to user-mandated changes. I'm still unconvinced about how well the RAD methodologies scale up, though, and how effectively you can control "scope creep" when doing iterative development.
For the whole "provably correct" approach to give you meaningful assurance of product quality, the whole system must be proven to be correct: right down to the bare metal. Not to mention comm interfaces, peripherals, etc. Otherwise the best you can do is to have some "islands" that are algoritmically proven, within a system that must still be assumed to be inconsistent. That might be good to know, but it's far from sufficient. And, again, it tells you nothing about whether you've correctly identified the requirements in the first place.
That leaves us with the sad conclusion that massive testing (and I mean end-to-end system testing, not just unit test and out the door), and a flexible system architecture, are as important as good code in making useful software.
Back to the topic: I don't know if Jaron is a flake or the journalist is an ignoramus. I'd guess the latter. But the article conveyed little worthwhile information. Or maybe Jaron's so used to BS-ing pothead musicians with Carl Sagainsms that he's lost his techie rigor?
The central feature of both our schemes is that works should be put in a kind of "escrow" to protect the public's fair-use interest, and to ensure that the work becomes publicly available when it goes out of copyright.
I think that you have proposed a much more feasible approach.
Internment of Japanese and Italian Americans was during WW2, not after. They interned some Americans of German origin during WWI too.
And Abraham Lincoln suspended parts of the constitution during the Civil War. I recall habeas corpus was one part.
There's a lot of danger in assuming that the Constitution is some kind of sacred text with magical powers. It only protects you as long as there are competing power centers within government, with uncorrelated interests. When they all agree (for instance, in a time of wartime panic or other mass hysteria), your rights are very likely to be trampled for the "greater good." And getting things back to normal later is not easy: look at how long it took for the government to give even a half-assed apology for what they did to Japanese-Americans. Incidentally, when the "enemy aliens" were interned, their property was sold off. Much of it was farmland that wound up being owned by commercial rivals. Look closely enough at bizarre government actions, and you'll find someone making a buck.
Now consider scenarios in our time in which the government enforces the law to support the "rights" of large corporate interests against individuals. Laws forbidding circumvention of copy protection spring to mind. Bureaucracies can only grow by expanding their role. The FBI is a bureaucracy. This is an instance where it could be argued that there is a high level of criminal activity, therefore, more agents are needed and more intrusive enforcement techniques are called for.
Think they won't do it just because it's unenforceable and a bad idea? Remember, this is the same system that brought you prohibition. Which, incidentally, also helped the FBI grow, notwithstanding the side-effect of massively increasing organized crime.
from Tkinter import Label, mainloop
Label(text='Hello World\n').pack()
mainloop()
This throws up a little platform-native window with a text label. I left out the exit button because there's already the close box. I'm sure that a highly-motivated Perl programmer could come up with something just as tight. After all, both Perl and Python are just hooking into Tk.
I don't want to get into Perl/Python holy wars: both are wonderful in their own ways, and each has its own irritating idiosyncrasies. Either Perl or Py are far more useful, and can be made more platform-independent, than the Microsoft languages. I would guess that the same is true of tcl, but I don't use that language. I get the feeling that Microsoft doesn't want to make it too easy to write code on their platforms, so VB and VC++ are constrained in arbitrary and irritating ways.
It reinforces a paranoid notion I've had for a long time that organizations optimize for efficiency only when they have no other choice, and then only to the least extent that they can get away with. The higher-priority optimization is to maximize (to steal your term) their bozo carrying capacity. This is entirely consistent with my experience: they need competent people. But they'd much rather hire someone's son-in-law, and if you can bring Junior on by making everyone else bust their butts a little more, that'll do. This is why results-based promotion policies are so often touted and so seldom implemented.
Reminds me of something I read long ago, sorry I can't cite the source: "Blessed are those who praise peace, for they shall bury the peacemakers."
The goal of such a phony policy isn't to make the organization work better: it's to induce you to work better so there will be more opportunities for free-riding.
We do have higher productivity and work more hours per year.
Also higher rates of obesity, lack of access to primary health care, and homicide (though the last of these has a minimal effect on the mortality rates... at least, so far). At least in "Brave New World" they had free drugs to kill them off before retirement age, not just occupational stress...
This leads to an idea about a fallback position on DECSS: as a copyright owner, you are allowed to encrypt copyrighted material, but only if you deposit the keys with (say) the Library of Congress. When copyright expires, the keys become publicly available. If this provision is not followed, the work reverts to the public domain, and it's fair game for any decryption strategy that can be applied.
This doesn't address the fair-use issues, nor does it deal with the current draconian anti-circumvention provisions, but at least it prevents the locked-up-with-thrown-away-key situation, and restates the traditional position that copyright is a time-limited protection from a work going into the public domain.
Something to keep in mind about management training seminars is that they are sold to managers . So there's a tendency to tell them what they want to hear.
One thing they really want to hear is that they can motivate and keep employees without compensating them and without fundamentally changing the way the company is run. This is the origin of window-dressing such as free pizza for unpaid overtime, ping-pong tables in the work area, casual dress policies, etc. Some of these are nice to have, but none address the real, hard problems of compensation and incentives. Mostly, they're the equivalent of the third-grade classroom poster with gold stars by the pupils' names for good conduct.
At the margins, these little things matter. But there are employers out there who offer good pay, good opportunities, tolerable management, AND who still manage to get the little things right. I, for one, would trade $20k worth of better pay or benefits for a ping-pong table and the freedom to wear my T-shirt to work.
You need to look back to a book from the late 40's (approx) called "The Human Use of Human Beings" by Norbert Weiner. It actually attempted to apply scientific rigor to management. Weiner was one of the best of the early systems theorists, in at the foundations of information theory, systems analysis and operations research. He coined the term "cybernetics." A lot of post-WW2 management theorists borrowed keywords from Weiner, but I think the rigor was lost. Now the field is dominated by Tom Peters-style marketspeak and empty cheerleading. This has the advantage of being more easily absorbed into MBA programs. Keep in mind that it takes four or five years to learn engineering, but any pinhead can complete an MBA in at most two years. So ideas can't be allowed to get in the way of the much more important objectives of schmoozing and golf practice.
By the way, I think engineers are partially to blame for the sad state of management. Most of us look down their noses at it so much that we leave it to the tasseled-loafer slimeballs by default. And the few who do go into management seem to think that they don't need to learn anything new in order to do it.
You're right about exit interviews being a crock. I was a longterm employee at a firm, but felt that the senior management were arrogant and incompetent, so I left. They had already heard from me and from others a long list of needed changes, but they were more interested in protecting their own positions than making changes. So the firm went down the crapper. In these circumstances, you can be sure that I wasn't going to give them any free consulting services on the way out the door. For my main reason for leaving, I cited "Color of office furniture clashed with my shirts." I also refused to sign any of the exit paperwork about non-competition, not headhunting employees after I left, etc.
I recall reading medieval English commentaries on what a disaster it was that the serfs weren't staying on the land anymore.
Having lived in small towns, I don't share Kotkin's sentimental view of how wonderful life is there. More likely he had a "recovered memory" of Leave It to Beaver.
The more correct conclusion is that, as more people have the freedom to live where they choose, they'll move there, and it'll be disruptive, as all change is. That has had some negative effects (the real-estate feeding frenzy in SF, for one), and some positive (greater mobility, financial rewards going to intelligent people for once).
Kotkin reminds me a bit of Mike Davis: trying much too hard to fit into the nonfiction Cassandra niche, and lacking the sense of proportion needed to draw insightful conclusions. What's left is a caricature that is sure to be made required reading in thousands of community-college sociology classes for years to come. Pity the poor students.
Napster's strategy seems to be to hold out for as long as possible, then settle with the big record companies. They've already started. The Napster folks can get rich and avoid getting sued or jailed, the RIAA can hide behind the Napster brand, and maybe there are some bucks to be made from the inertia of all the Metallica downloaders who stretched their brains to get on the site at all.
Aren't the criteria for granting a patent something like:
Originality (i.e., no prior art)
Non-obviousness
It works
The obviousness restriction was put in to prevent people from patenting things like "all inventions that use the principle that heavy things usually fall down."
The problems seems to be that patent examiners are chosen because (a) Nothing is obvious to them, and (b) They wouldn't know prior art if it bit them on the ass. I recall that perpetual motion machines have occasionally been granted patents, so they're not always that diligent about seeing the invention work either.
I've experienced the Canadian and British systems, and those in some better-off Third World countries. All provide a better level of service than American HMOs. Sometimes there are delays for non-essential services, but I have never seen the outright denial of essential care that happens so often here in the U.S.
I can't think of a single developed country that would choose to adopt the U.S. health care model. We pay triple the percentage of our (larger) GDP for health care that the UK does, and the outcomes are worse by every accepted measure of public health, from life expectancy to infant mortality.
It seems that many of those who post absolutist views on this subject have never actually seen any of the alternatives at work. They're just repeating dogma.
Based on that, I wouldn't rule out "socialized broadband" before seeing how well it works in practice. I live in the U.S. because I like the weather and because I was born here, not because our system is vastly superior to all others in every way. Are we really so arrogant and pig-ignorant that we refuse to learn from other countries' experiences?
I'm a frequent visitor to London, and lived there for many years. Levels of service on both the trains and buses have declined substantially since privatization. This just goes to show that private monopolies can be as lousy as public ones. Depends on how they're run.
Something I haven't seen in these highly polarized posts is the fairly obvious observation that monopolistic firms collude with the government to regulate the market. Regulation creates barriers to entry that protect their monopolies. This isn't something that the mean old government does to poor little mega-corporations. Quite the opposite.
Then there is price-fixing and collusion by oligopolies. Again, this anticompetitive practice is initiated by the companies themselves, with no help from the government. So I don't buy your argument that it's all the government's fault.
One of the most compelling arguments for regulation is the fact that firms, left to themselves, will do everything in their power to avoid competition and abuse market power. In the economic areas where the US has done best, the markets are well-regulated, not unregulated. For example, only a moron would trade on a stockmarket without uniform and well-enforced disclosure standards. Consider the desirability of trading on the Moscow exchange versus NYSE or Nasdaq. Rule of law helps economies, and improves quality of life too.
"Regulation: BAD, Business: GOOD" is an overly simplistic slogan left over from the Reagan/Thatcher years. I find it especially comical to see it advocated by people who were still in diapers when those disasters occurred, and who uncritically accept that what Ronnie and Maggie said had any connection with what they actually did. Reagan's fiscal policies, for instance, were closer to FDR's than to Friedman's.
In the US, the interests of business and government sometimes coincide and sometimes conflict. There are many opportunities for mutual backscratching, and it's naive to assume that, if we trust businesses, that this will somehow lead us to a golden age. We were there in the late 19th century, it didn't work. Given the chance, corporations can be as brutal and idiotic as our government. Remember the land grabs by the railroads? It's lack of accountability that causes this, not whether the players are in the public or private sectors.
Learn some economic history. Not everything you read in Ayn Rand has a basis in fact.
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Oughtred invented the slide rule in 1621, based on an earlier but less convenient gadget called Napier's Bones. Napier was the same clever fellow who figured out much of how logarithms work.
There were a number of analog computers (both electronic and mechanical) in use prior to digital computers. But they weren't general-purpose programmable machines. They were built to embody one or a small set of algorithms, and that's what they did. Examples include astrolabes, artillery calculators, bomb sights, etc. Most seemed to be connected with surveying, navigation and blowing things up...
No, there were bytes before ICs came into common use. Mid-60s IBM and Burroughs machines were byte-based, and I don't think that they were the first.
My guess is that the adoption of transistor technology (rather than ICs) was the turning point.
Of course, much of the US legal system is also built up from case law. It's just that depth of the geological strata is less than in the UK.
I had the pleasure of living in London for many years, and was quite entertained by by learning the differences between legal systems that are designed and those that are grown. There are a number of features of the English system (and even more the Scottish) that are excellent. But I recall a lot of concern that the senior judges were out of touch with people's lives, and this sometimes led to bizarre judgements. Also, prior to the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, some judges were quite prone to authoriarian rulings. That might still be so. But the English courts seem less accessible to "money wars" than the US courts. And there are more disincentives to frivolous lawsuits and excessive jury awards of damages. I'd certainly like to see some of the excesses of our system brought under control, and it wouldn't be the first time we've borrowed from the British system.
I withdraw the "half-baked" part. I myself was not baked but steamed when I wrote that. Please accept my apology for having personalized this discussion.
My point applied to libraries and other public places as well as to the home. It's equally applicable to private-sector venues such as movie theaters and video arcades. That point was: Don't assume that parental responsibilities can be replaced by a piece of code, or by delegating that responsibility to a third party. Most willing third parties offer a cure that can be as bad as, or even worse than, the disease, since their agendas are very likely based on a different view of children's welfare than your own. And often, their agenda has nothing to do with what's good for your kids at all.
I would agree with the essentially conservative position that federal funds should not be used as a means of micromanaging local institutions. I recall Dubya advocating the cutting of red tape when it comes to how schools educate kids, favoring block grants instead. A similar policy on libraries would let local communities decide how much censorware is appropriate, rather than imposing a uniform standard on, say, Alabama and New York.
In MY community, I would not oppose libraries providing some computers configured with censorware, as long as unrestricted Internet access were also available. I find Internet pr0n an inconvenience, but have often run afoul of censorware in the workplace in the course of non-pornographic research.
I've got three kids, two old enough to use the Web. I want to be sure that they don't see porn when they're browsing. I am also concerned that they are not exposed to rightwing fundamentalist hatemongering crap that would stunt their mental and emotional development as much as porn.
Any parent that wants to keep an eye on what their kids are seeing, whether in the print media, on TV, in games or on the Web, will be involved in their kids' lives and will monitor what they're up to. Rating systems, incompetent bureaucrats or snake-oil-vending censorware companies cannot do that for me. The correct response is to take responsibility for being a parent. Mindless passive measures don't work, they're just a way of giving the illusion of action without actually doing anything. And I'll be the judge of what my kids see, thank you very much. YOUR halfbaked opinions will be given all the attention they deserve (nada), and if you try to impose then on me, expect strong resistance. Censorware is just another excuse for petty interference by those who have too much time on their hands and think that they know better. A healthy society marginalizes such people. Any law that empowers individuals of that sort is a bad law that should be struck down.
Take your moral crusades to Iran or Saudi Arabia. I prefer living in a country where the system protects me from fanatics.
Advertisers and two-year-olds know that bad attention is better than being ignored. If the objective is to build name recognition, then intrusive, obnoxious ads stick in the reader's mind, and they've achieved their goal.
Think of any jingle you've heard on the radio that you can't clear from your mind later.
Agreed. But lying != coercion.
Mind you, I'll be looking a lot more closely at ad-blocking strategies as worthwhile content becomes increasingly diluted by spam.
Which legislator would they ask, anyway? All of them?
The reason the law is so vague is that the lawmakers had no single intent as to its meaning. Therefore they negotiated some ambiguous weasel words that could mean different things to different factions. This is the fallacy of the whole "original intent" argument. The result of this is that the courts end up making the law after the fact, based on their own prejudices. Of course, in these situations, the party with the deepest pockets -> slickest lawyers usually wins.
I couldn't agree more.
It's certainly not hard to do crap design or ignorant implementation: plenty of that around. But even when you do those things right, you live or die by how well you meet end-user needs.
It seems that a lot of coders enjoy commenting on how ignorant the users are, but complex systems that are developed without user involvement just fail. And it's possible to produce technically sophisticated (and even logically provable) solutions that don't actually solve the user's problems. Effective requirements gathering and user validation are critical to software success. I know it's a "soft skill" that we look down on, but it still needs to be done right.
One of the reasons I like RAD (and Extreme) is that it makes it easier to give the users a look into the system early in the proceedings, and to respond to user-mandated changes. I'm still unconvinced about how well the RAD methodologies scale up, though, and how effectively you can control "scope creep" when doing iterative development.
For the whole "provably correct" approach to give you meaningful assurance of product quality, the whole system must be proven to be correct: right down to the bare metal. Not to mention comm interfaces, peripherals, etc. Otherwise the best you can do is to have some "islands" that are algoritmically proven, within a system that must still be assumed to be inconsistent. That might be good to know, but it's far from sufficient. And, again, it tells you nothing about whether you've correctly identified the requirements in the first place.
That leaves us with the sad conclusion that massive testing (and I mean end-to-end system testing, not just unit test and out the door), and a flexible system architecture, are as important as good code in making useful software.
Back to the topic: I don't know if Jaron is a flake or the journalist is an ignoramus. I'd guess the latter. But the article conveyed little worthwhile information. Or maybe Jaron's so used to BS-ing pothead musicians with Carl Sagainsms that he's lost his techie rigor?
The central feature of both our schemes is that works should be put in a kind of "escrow" to protect the public's fair-use interest, and to ensure that the work becomes publicly available when it goes out of copyright.
I think that you have proposed a much more feasible approach.
Internment of Japanese and Italian Americans was during WW2, not after. They interned some Americans of German origin during WWI too.
And Abraham Lincoln suspended parts of the constitution during the Civil War. I recall habeas corpus was one part.
There's a lot of danger in assuming that the Constitution is some kind of sacred text with magical powers. It only protects you as long as there are competing power centers within government, with uncorrelated interests. When they all agree (for instance, in a time of wartime panic or other mass hysteria), your rights are very likely to be trampled for the "greater good." And getting things back to normal later is not easy: look at how long it took for the government to give even a half-assed apology for what they did to Japanese-Americans. Incidentally, when the "enemy aliens" were interned, their property was sold off. Much of it was farmland that wound up being owned by commercial rivals. Look closely enough at bizarre government actions, and you'll find someone making a buck.
Now consider scenarios in our time in which the government enforces the law to support the "rights" of large corporate interests against individuals. Laws forbidding circumvention of copy protection spring to mind. Bureaucracies can only grow by expanding their role. The FBI is a bureaucracy. This is an instance where it could be argued that there is a high level of criminal activity, therefore, more agents are needed and more intrusive enforcement techniques are called for.
Think they won't do it just because it's unenforceable and a bad idea? Remember, this is the same system that brought you prohibition. Which, incidentally, also helped the FBI grow, notwithstanding the side-effect of massively increasing organized crime.
Python with tkinter comes out pretty terse too:
from Tkinter import Label, mainloop Label(text='Hello World\n').pack() mainloop()
This throws up a little platform-native window with a text label. I left out the exit button because there's already the close box. I'm sure that a highly-motivated Perl programmer could come up with something just as tight. After all, both Perl and Python are just hooking into Tk.
I don't want to get into Perl/Python holy wars: both are wonderful in their own ways, and each has its own irritating idiosyncrasies. Either Perl or Py are far more useful, and can be made more platform-independent, than the Microsoft languages. I would guess that the same is true of tcl, but I don't use that language. I get the feeling that Microsoft doesn't want to make it too easy to write code on their platforms, so VB and VC++ are constrained in arbitrary and irritating ways.
That was a thought-provoking follow-up.
It reinforces a paranoid notion I've had for a long time that organizations optimize for efficiency only when they have no other choice, and then only to the least extent that they can get away with. The higher-priority optimization is to maximize (to steal your term) their bozo carrying capacity. This is entirely consistent with my experience: they need competent people. But they'd much rather hire someone's son-in-law, and if you can bring Junior on by making everyone else bust their butts a little more, that'll do. This is why results-based promotion policies are so often touted and so seldom implemented.
Reminds me of something I read long ago, sorry I can't cite the source: "Blessed are those who praise peace, for they shall bury the peacemakers."
The goal of such a phony policy isn't to make the organization work better: it's to induce you to work better so there will be more opportunities for free-riding.
We do have higher productivity and work more hours per year.
Also higher rates of obesity, lack of access to primary health care, and homicide (though the last of these has a minimal effect on the mortality rates... at least, so far). At least in "Brave New World" they had free drugs to kill them off before retirement age, not just occupational stress...
This leads to an idea about a fallback position on DECSS: as a copyright owner, you are allowed to encrypt copyrighted material, but only if you deposit the keys with (say) the Library of Congress. When copyright expires, the keys become publicly available. If this provision is not followed, the work reverts to the public domain, and it's fair game for any decryption strategy that can be applied.
This doesn't address the fair-use issues, nor does it deal with the current draconian anti-circumvention provisions, but at least it prevents the locked-up-with-thrown-away-key situation, and restates the traditional position that copyright is a time-limited protection from a work going into the public domain.
Something to keep in mind about management training seminars is that they are sold to managers . So there's a tendency to tell them what they want to hear.
One thing they really want to hear is that they can motivate and keep employees without compensating them and without fundamentally changing the way the company is run. This is the origin of window-dressing such as free pizza for unpaid overtime, ping-pong tables in the work area, casual dress policies, etc. Some of these are nice to have, but none address the real, hard problems of compensation and incentives. Mostly, they're the equivalent of the third-grade classroom poster with gold stars by the pupils' names for good conduct.
At the margins, these little things matter. But there are employers out there who offer good pay, good opportunities, tolerable management, AND who still manage to get the little things right. I, for one, would trade $20k worth of better pay or benefits for a ping-pong table and the freedom to wear my T-shirt to work.
You need to look back to a book from the late 40's (approx) called "The Human Use of Human Beings" by Norbert Weiner. It actually attempted to apply scientific rigor to management. Weiner was one of the best of the early systems theorists, in at the foundations of information theory, systems analysis and operations research. He coined the term "cybernetics." A lot of post-WW2 management theorists borrowed keywords from Weiner, but I think the rigor was lost. Now the field is dominated by Tom Peters-style marketspeak and empty cheerleading. This has the advantage of being more easily absorbed into MBA programs. Keep in mind that it takes four or five years to learn engineering, but any pinhead can complete an MBA in at most two years. So ideas can't be allowed to get in the way of the much more important objectives of schmoozing and golf practice.
By the way, I think engineers are partially to blame for the sad state of management. Most of us look down their noses at it so much that we leave it to the tasseled-loafer slimeballs by default. And the few who do go into management seem to think that they don't need to learn anything new in order to do it.
You're right about exit interviews being a crock. I was a longterm employee at a firm, but felt that the senior management were arrogant and incompetent, so I left. They had already heard from me and from others a long list of needed changes, but they were more interested in protecting their own positions than making changes. So the firm went down the crapper. In these circumstances, you can be sure that I wasn't going to give them any free consulting services on the way out the door. For my main reason for leaving, I cited "Color of office furniture clashed with my shirts." I also refused to sign any of the exit paperwork about non-competition, not headhunting employees after I left, etc.
I recall reading medieval English commentaries on what a disaster it was that the serfs weren't staying on the land anymore.
Having lived in small towns, I don't share Kotkin's sentimental view of how wonderful life is there. More likely he had a "recovered memory" of Leave It to Beaver.
The more correct conclusion is that, as more people have the freedom to live where they choose, they'll move there, and it'll be disruptive, as all change is. That has had some negative effects (the real-estate feeding frenzy in SF, for one), and some positive (greater mobility, financial rewards going to intelligent people for once).
Kotkin reminds me a bit of Mike Davis: trying much too hard to fit into the nonfiction Cassandra niche, and lacking the sense of proportion needed to draw insightful conclusions. What's left is a caricature that is sure to be made required reading in thousands of community-college sociology classes for years to come. Pity the poor students.
Why should this make Napster "dead meat"?
Napster's strategy seems to be to hold out for as long as possible, then settle with the big record companies. They've already started. The Napster folks can get rich and avoid getting sued or jailed, the RIAA can hide behind the Napster brand, and maybe there are some bucks to be made from the inertia of all the Metallica downloaders who stretched their brains to get on the site at all.
Oh, I geddit. That would be the "pi in the sky," right?
Dang, I forgot that part. I withdraw my comment.
Aren't the criteria for granting a patent something like:
Originality (i.e., no prior art)
Non-obviousness
It works
The obviousness restriction was put in to prevent people from patenting things like "all inventions that use the principle that heavy things usually fall down."
The problems seems to be that patent examiners are chosen because (a) Nothing is obvious to them, and (b) They wouldn't know prior art if it bit them on the ass. I recall that perpetual motion machines have occasionally been granted patents, so they're not always that diligent about seeing the invention work either.
I've experienced the Canadian and British systems, and those in some better-off Third World countries. All provide a better level of service than American HMOs. Sometimes there are delays for non-essential services, but I have never seen the outright denial of essential care that happens so often here in the U.S.
I can't think of a single developed country that would choose to adopt the U.S. health care model. We pay triple the percentage of our (larger) GDP for health care that the UK does, and the outcomes are worse by every accepted measure of public health, from life expectancy to infant mortality.
It seems that many of those who post absolutist views on this subject have never actually seen any of the alternatives at work. They're just repeating dogma.
Based on that, I wouldn't rule out "socialized broadband" before seeing how well it works in practice. I live in the U.S. because I like the weather and because I was born here, not because our system is vastly superior to all others in every way. Are we really so arrogant and pig-ignorant that we refuse to learn from other countries' experiences?
I'm a frequent visitor to London, and lived there for many years. Levels of service on both the trains and buses have declined substantially since privatization. This just goes to show that private monopolies can be as lousy as public ones. Depends on how they're run.
Something I haven't seen in these highly polarized posts is the fairly obvious observation that monopolistic firms collude with the government to regulate the market. Regulation creates barriers to entry that protect their monopolies. This isn't something that the mean old government does to poor little mega-corporations. Quite the opposite.
Then there is price-fixing and collusion by oligopolies. Again, this anticompetitive practice is initiated by the companies themselves, with no help from the government. So I don't buy your argument that it's all the government's fault.
One of the most compelling arguments for regulation is the fact that firms, left to themselves, will do everything in their power to avoid competition and abuse market power. In the economic areas where the US has done best, the markets are well-regulated, not unregulated. For example, only a moron would trade on a stockmarket without uniform and well-enforced disclosure standards. Consider the desirability of trading on the Moscow exchange versus NYSE or Nasdaq. Rule of law helps economies, and improves quality of life too.
"Regulation: BAD, Business: GOOD" is an overly simplistic slogan left over from the Reagan/Thatcher years. I find it especially comical to see it advocated by people who were still in diapers when those disasters occurred, and who uncritically accept that what Ronnie and Maggie said had any connection with what they actually did. Reagan's fiscal policies, for instance, were closer to FDR's than to Friedman's.
In the US, the interests of business and government sometimes coincide and sometimes conflict. There are many opportunities for mutual backscratching, and it's naive to assume that, if we trust businesses, that this will somehow lead us to a golden age. We were there in the late 19th century, it didn't work. Given the chance, corporations can be as brutal and idiotic as our government. Remember the land grabs by the railroads? It's lack of accountability that causes this, not whether the players are in the public or private sectors.
Learn some economic history. Not everything you read in Ayn Rand has a basis in fact.