The first time I did this, I transitioned from an FTE to an independent contractor. There were some resentments about this, and I was seen as disloyal by some. Politics being what it is, I was soon released.
Next time I did it right. Working at a small consultancy in a pretty independent way to start with, I started volunteering to take small projects that didn't pay until delivery, on a fixed bid basis. Then I was able to hire some guys to help me and turn around and justify being paid for these projects as a 1099 because I had deductable business expenses. Soon I was a sole proprietor.
(I've always maintained my own health insurance, for years before this, because of experiencing the problems caused by a layoff. It's not for everyone, but in this case it helped me transition easily.)
Benefits: control of my own schedule, able to work for more than one shop, hire my own guys and delegate as needed. Downside: higher risk, times with no income, people wanting to push project risk downhill
An example of that last one would be, shop accepts a project on a fixed bid, promptly fucks it up spending half the money. Asks me can I complete it for what's left. When I'm done the client of course has some changes to make before acceptance. If I have 6-12 man months in it, I can't afford to say no and walk away. Fun fun. You just have to make sure to leave a cushion for contingencies in your bids, and when you are doing someone a favor, make sure you tell them that. Don't rub it in, but also don't just say "sure!" Make sure they know you are taking a hit. Because these things add up in the relationship.
This is just like writing Lisp. You have an s-expression like (+ 2 3) or (make-hash-table blah blah) that use functions from the language proper, and you have s-exprs like (render-cube blah blah) that are calling your own functions.
The funny thing is that McCarthy originally was going to use s-exprs just like the above, as an internal representation, with the actual programming done in another form. But guess what? s-exprs are really convenient and easy to use, and easy to parse and to generate from other code because they have a regular form - no operator precedence issues, column indenting issues like fortran or python, distinctions between builtin function and user function like almost every other language.
So this idea is redundant and obsolete at the same time.
In fact, the WSJ article explictly makes the same point - that in one case, governement funds were used (although there is a mention that the funds may have been used for media buys and not as direct compensation.)
So that's a big difference in the conduct of the payers: one used tax money and the other used political contributions. But it makes little or no difference in the ethical lapse of the payees - people who represent themselves as presenting their honest opinion and who are taking money from one of the parties about whom they opine.
We wouldn't think a stock analyst could be unbiased if he was on the payroll of one of the companies he reviewed, even if he'd been favorable before he got on the payroll and continued to be so afterwards. Why is Markos any different? A political opinion writer secretly on the payroll of a campaign is an ethical problem, slice it however you want.
Was this Gemstone III through GEnie? Because I was one of the poor students who ended up spending like $300/month on that addictive bastard. Thank god I got that out of my system before grad school...
(If you did work on that, good job btw, thanks for all the extraordinarily expensive fun.)
I develop in a range of languages, but mostly Java for its cross-platform-ness and GUIs, and Python for its clear syntax.
If i had a combination of the two - python's pureness and cleanliness and Java's x-platform libraries - i would be pretty happy. However, i would still be stuck with Swing for GUI work.
This isn't my problem, but it sounds like Jython would be a perfect fit for you.
I prefer Common Lisp, and for those pesky apps that have to run on a Java runtime I've had good luck with Armed Bear Common Lisp
Lisp isn't generally an interpreted language. Of the major free Lisps, CMUCL and SBCL are compiled and CLISP compiles to byte code. All of the major commercial implementations compile as well.
Generally Lisp compilers can produce code that runs in the same ballpark, timewise, as C. Here's a perfectly good 3D app written in Lisp: Mirai.
Personally it's a lot more important to me to be able to write software quickly, with as few bugs as possible, and with pretty good performance. But of course with Lisp once you've written your code you can still annotate it with compiler directives and even use compiler macros to speed up critical parts even more.
I appreciate your opinion but I would appreciate it even more if you would take the trouble to learn more about things before you disparage them.
The story is such a joke, where do they get these reporters? They don't do the most elementary fact checking, just take whatever the one source tells them, put it in pyramid form and make sure they have a couple of money lines. It's such piss-poor work.
This thing is obviously a scam of some kind. It's not going to be an OS in a browser, they didn't correct MS design flaws while reverse-engineering the whole windows API, etc. IOW most of the article is wrong or insane. This may as well be about orgone boxes.
Except that the money has to come from somewhere. It's either from a payroll tax, in which case the employee is still expensive, or from a corporate tax. Both of these amount to passing it on to consumers of the good in question, but if you choose to use a corporate tax not tied to headcount, you'll have some interesting subsidies going on. For example, Intel and Microsoft would be paying the health care costs of all the break-even businesses. Because the consumer of the good has to cover this cost, it would mean profitable industries would find themselves with more costly goods than before, which hurts their global competitiveness.
The US spends more per capita on health care than anyone else. When it's out of pocket, it's a consumption choice. When it's mandated by the government and paid for in tax, then it becomes public policy. No one will survive voting for cuts to health care. So US companies will have more costly products that sell poorly elsewhere in the world, and we would need high tariffs to keep the rest of the world's goods expensive here if we wanted any domestic sales. Less sales = fewer employees.
The problem we have can't be solved by protectionism. It's a dislocation that we will have to endure. The barriers to entry in markets whose goods are susceptible to internet delivery just shrank a lot recently, and we see a higher level of competitiveness in the labor market.
Re:A Few Quick Bits of Wisdom for Mr. Spolsky
on
Joel Rants About Resumes
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Why is it a racist remark?
Indians aren't a race. They are a nationality. There are a wide variety of ethnicities in India.
To point out that a large number have in common a particular grammatical mistake isn't racist. It's just observation.
"Stupid Indians" might be getting closer - at least it's prejudice of some sort.
There are a lot of problems that could be solved more easily if there wasn't always someone jumping out to call "racist" anytime someone points out a statistical truth about a demographic. Hey, is it racist to say that American Jews are better educated than the general population? No? Then how can it be racist to say that American blacks are less well-educated than the general population? If we can't even say it out loud, how can we solve it?
If Joel can't tell his Indian candidates (albeit in a somewhat snotty way), hey, I pay attention to grammar and punctuation, so don't give me a resume that looks like you pasted it from AIM, than how are they going to learn that his standards, and those of American employers generally, may differ from the standards to which they are accustomed?
Sorry this is late in the discussion, but can anyone knowledgable say whether or not Integration Server runs on Solaris x86? I see Directory does and they plan to bring over App. I am trying to put together a dev server for a small team and the client is all Sun (except weblogic). I don't need enterprise features a la Sparc and I thought I would need to dig up a copy of NT4/SP6 or Win2k/SP1 (with associated admin headaches) to support Integration Server.
"Unilateral" means acting by oneself. Just because we didn't have France and Germany on board doesn't mean we acted alone. Over 30 nations were represented in the "Coalition of the Willing."
Acting multilaterally doesn't guarantee that a good end is pursued, or by good means, either. See WWI.
I've spent enough time in the corporate world to agree that many people have exactly that view - make it shine while I'm here and apres moi, le deluge. That's basically my point - people are enough alike that we can't reasonably expect spontaneous good behavior to break out simple because we "reject private property" or something. What will actually happen is the kind of bureaucratic warlordism we saw in the warsaw pact.
As far as your public/private discussion, I can only reiterate that I'd expect workers, managers, etc. to react the same in either case to similar incentives and punishments. The one problem with public utilities and other subsidized interests is the distortion in allocation they cause, but perhaps sometimes it's a desirable distortion. So there are plenty of good examples of privatization, and horror stories too.
Maybe you'd like to go into a bit more detail about what you mean. It's very well to say what you have, but it's quite unclear. You mean that the socialist revolution is already over? Or, you mean that capitalists continue to tread the inevitable cycle that Marx predicted? (The latter theory will have to explain things like free public schools and libraries, progressive income tax, etc. - things which Marx claims capitalism will not produce, and things he calls for in the Communist Manifesto).
And my example isn't a straw man at all. It's a simple fact. People complain about CEOs doing this and that terrible thing. Well, they don't have the power of the State behind them. I'd just as soon keep all this power spread out to as many hands as possible. Because history reveals human nature to have certain common traits, and it's a rare person who comes to power with a self-mastery that exceeds the power of our nature.
So, are you really willing to defend your assertion?
Yes, I'm sorry I was unclear. I jumped ahead to write all the China stuff. What that meant to say was that, that list of countries is cheaper than India, not that India is outsourcing to them. I've only read about India->China outsourcing.
As far as Mexicans earning more than Indians, that Computerworld I mentioned above says, India avg programmer salary $6400, Mexico $5150. Source, NeoIT Inc of San Ramon, CA. Maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong, I'm no expert. Just reporting what I read.
Thanks again for the view from the Marxist camp. Before you get carried away with these predictions, remember that Marx himself made similar ones about upheaval and worker's revolution in Europe that have conspicuously failed to materialize.
Ever played with the economic sim sugarscape? That will give you some real insight into how economic concentration occurs. But the reason why people don't just vote themselves everyone else's property is because we can now see exactly what happened in places where they tried that. People in the US want Bill Gates' property to be secure to him because they want their own property to be secure to themselves, and of course also because the high financial and social mobility suggests to them that they may soon be wealthy too.
Democracy, when restricted in it's "tyranny of the majority" by a social compact like the US Constitution, is a freedom- and human-dignity-enhancing system of governance. It happily coexists with capitalism.
I see that you are one of the last surviving pure Marxists. Marx makes a good read, I'll grant you. But he's no more persuasive as an economic scientist that an old John Campbell editorial. Why? Because his theory makes assumptions and predictions, and the predictions haven't come true. Even if the reasoning looks very good, something is wrong. That something is the assumptions.
In particular Marx makes assumptions about human nature, both under capitalism and under his projected new order, that have been demonstrated to be false. And since economics is the study of human behavior in the aggregate, that pretty well sinks the ship.
As far as your notion that "this is a conflict that cannot be resolved under capitalism," well, of course, because for it to be "resolved" in the sense you appear to mean, at least one of the two sides would need to act against their own interests. As in, I want the bread for free and he wants all my money. The resolution we have is called a supply-demand curve, which is how a free market in anything sets prices.
But your notion that all thiese things can be fixed under socialism still lacks a working example anywhere in the world. Why? Because the same human nature that makes the owner of a factory act like he does, make the leader of the state factory council act like he does. One of them tries to increase production to make more money. The other tries to increase production to satisfy his superiors and to get a promotion. Once you put a human with human motives in charge, they act the same. At least the factory owner won't run without maintenance and ruin all his machine tools 20 years early, like the socialist will. By then, it'll be someone else problem, right? Tragedy of the commons.
India looks a lot like the U.S. 2-3 years ago; tomorrow China might look cheaper
FYI, Indian companies already outsource to China, today. China, Eastern Europe/Russia, Vietnam, Mexico, etc. In fact, so called "daisy-chaining," where an Indian company gets a US contract due to its relationships and reputation, and promptly outsources it elsewhere, is the new buzzword. Computerworld calls this "a trend to watch."
You want to talk about China? The Sept 15 Computerworld had an article about outsourcing that profiled a number of different countries. Here's some fun quotes and facts about China:
400,000 IT professionals, growing 50,000 per year
"China's universities could soon churn out a staggering 200,000 computer science graduates annually."
"China is building no fewer than 10 universities right now to increase its supply of IT professionals."
Chinese must pass a written English proficiency test to graduate college
Average salary $5850/year, for programmers, $9000/year. For a 40-hour week, 50-week year, that's $4.50/hour folks.
There's a nice anecdote about a Java/Apache/Linux project going to a Chinese outsourcing company because the cost savings was 40%... compared to India. This in a business where Gartner is saying that outsourcing can provide cost savings "that run as high as 40%."
I'm in the middle of a similar joe-job now. Over 10k bounce messages already. What a PITA.
So besides the endless sea of spam I get I also have this nonsense.
Things like this are going to happen to enough people that extreme measures will be taken. I applaud the designers of this new idea for having a proposal that maintains most of the freedoms we've had with internet email, but eventually if we don't get a handle on this problem, email as we know it will die.
Saying over and over again that "security through obscurity" is bad is missing the point. That phrase means that simply not telling people how you protect yourself is not much of a defense, because a clever attacker can figure it out. To be safe, you need to be able to tell the potential attacker exactly what you have done (if not the exact key, etc.) and still have reason to believe that he can't compromise your security.
But none of that applies here.
First of all, you are actually not trying to protect the server. The client is actually allowed to send all the data that a hacked/aimbot/etc client sends. The limitation is supposed to be that the client is operated by human skill instead of a program. So what you are really trying to protect is the client. (Yes, some things like looking one way and firing another, too rapid/accurate turns and shots can be detected server side, but for the purpose of detecting a hacked client. Again, it's about securing the client.)
Now the problem with this is, that it's impossible. The client is in the hands of the enemy. By definition all your security is through obscurity, since the client can be disassembled, its memory can be watched as it runs, etc. There is no other kind of security on the client besides obscurity, short of some Palladium-like thing.
If you have a better idea, don't waste it on a game, because it's worth around a billion dollars to the right people these days.
So I wish all the knee-jerk posters would lay off smugly saying that there's no security through obscurity so they get what they deserve. You need to put down the pipe and think it through.
Most of it comes in the form of sales taxes, but this unfairly taxes consumers over business
I'm really interested to know where you think all this money comes from.
To a business, taxes are like any other kind of overhead costs, like leases or salaries. All of the money to pay these costs comes from customers. If a business can't meet these costs, it has to change its pricing structure, change its overhead, or stop doing business. It's hard for a business to change the way it's taxed.
I just want to be clear - all taxes are taxes on consumers. The only reason a business would even consider selling a product below cost is if that sale drives other profitable sales. This is why the whole idea of a corporate income tax is such a gigantic scam - first I withhold money from your paycheck, then I hit you with sales taxes at the register (sometimes city, county, and state) and then finally I jack up the price of the goods with a second, hidden sales tax called the corporate income tax.
The only reason a business would prefer the CIT to a sales tax is that it allows them to decide on which products and to which customers they want to direct the burden of higher costs. This makes it more strategically fluid than a sales tax. But for most businesses that's a non-issue.
The worst thing of all about a corporate income tax is that it encourages corporations, who have the time and resources to lobby (either on their own or through trade associations) for exemptions, breaks, discounts, and other distortions of the tax code. If we just counted up all the money raised by this tax, abolished it, and raised sales taxes enough to cover the same amount, we would remove a tremendous amount of cruft and truly byzantine provisions from our tax code. We would also remove most of the reasons that most businesses have to lobby congress, and thus reduce the importance of the busines lobby. Finally, our legislators would have more time to occasionally read a bill before they vote on it since they aren't having to listen to the North Valley Rubber Mill Association ask for new tax credits for three hours.
Slashdot Mirror
The first time I did this, I transitioned from an FTE to an independent contractor. There were some resentments about this, and I was seen as disloyal by some. Politics being what it is, I was soon released.
Next time I did it right. Working at a small consultancy in a pretty independent way to start with, I started volunteering to take small projects that didn't pay until delivery, on a fixed bid basis. Then I was able to hire some guys to help me and turn around and justify being paid for these projects as a 1099 because I had deductable business expenses. Soon I was a sole proprietor.
(I've always maintained my own health insurance, for years before this, because of experiencing the problems caused by a layoff. It's not for everyone, but in this case it helped me transition easily.)
Benefits: control of my own schedule, able to work for more than one shop, hire my own guys and delegate as needed.
Downside: higher risk, times with no income, people wanting to push project risk downhill
An example of that last one would be, shop accepts a project on a fixed bid, promptly fucks it up spending half the money. Asks me can I complete it for what's left. When I'm done the client of course has some changes to make before acceptance. If I have 6-12 man months in it, I can't afford to say no and walk away. Fun fun. You just have to make sure to leave a cushion for contingencies in your bids, and when you are doing someone a favor, make sure you tell them that. Don't rub it in, but also don't just say "sure!" Make sure they know you are taking a hit. Because these things add up in the relationship.
This is just like writing Lisp. You have an s-expression like (+ 2 3) or (make-hash-table blah blah) that use functions from the language proper, and you have s-exprs like (render-cube blah blah) that are calling your own functions.
The funny thing is that McCarthy originally was going to use s-exprs just like the above, as an internal representation, with the actual programming done in another form. But guess what? s-exprs are really convenient and easy to use, and easy to parse and to generate from other code because they have a regular form - no operator precedence issues, column indenting issues like fortran or python, distinctions between builtin function and user function like almost every other language.
So this idea is redundant and obsolete at the same time.
In fact, the WSJ article explictly makes the same point - that in one case, governement funds were used (although there is a mention that the funds may have been used for media buys and not as direct compensation.)
So that's a big difference in the conduct of the payers: one used tax money and the other used political contributions. But it makes little or no difference in the ethical lapse of the payees - people who represent themselves as presenting their honest opinion and who are taking money from one of the parties about whom they opine.
We wouldn't think a stock analyst could be unbiased if he was on the payroll of one of the companies he reviewed, even if he'd been favorable before he got on the payroll and continued to be so afterwards. Why is Markos any different? A political opinion writer secretly on the payroll of a campaign is an ethical problem, slice it however you want.
Was this Gemstone III through GEnie? Because I was one of the poor students who ended up spending like $300/month on that addictive bastard. Thank god I got that out of my system before grad school...
(If you did work on that, good job btw, thanks for all the extraordinarily expensive fun.)
This isn't my problem, but it sounds like Jython would be a perfect fit for you.
I prefer Common Lisp, and for those pesky apps that have to run on a Java runtime I've had good luck with Armed Bear Common Lisp
No harm, no foul. :)
Lisp isn't generally an interpreted language. Of the major free Lisps, CMUCL and SBCL are compiled and CLISP compiles to byte code. All of the major commercial implementations compile as well.
Generally Lisp compilers can produce code that runs in the same ballpark, timewise, as C. Here's a perfectly good 3D app written in Lisp: Mirai.
Personally it's a lot more important to me to be able to write software quickly, with as few bugs as possible, and with pretty good performance. But of course with Lisp once you've written your code you can still annotate it with compiler directives and even use compiler macros to speed up critical parts even more.
I appreciate your opinion but I would appreciate it even more if you would take the trouble to learn more about things before you disparage them.
The story is such a joke, where do they get these reporters? They don't do the most elementary fact checking, just take whatever the one source tells them, put it in pyramid form and make sure they have a couple of money lines. It's such piss-poor work.
This thing is obviously a scam of some kind. It's not going to be an OS in a browser, they didn't correct MS design flaws while reverse-engineering the whole windows API, etc. IOW most of the article is wrong or insane. This may as well be about orgone boxes.
Except that the money has to come from somewhere. It's either from a payroll tax, in which case the employee is still expensive, or from a corporate tax. Both of these amount to passing it on to consumers of the good in question, but if you choose to use a corporate tax not tied to headcount, you'll have some interesting subsidies going on. For example, Intel and Microsoft would be paying the health care costs of all the break-even businesses. Because the consumer of the good has to cover this cost, it would mean profitable industries would find themselves with more costly goods than before, which hurts their global competitiveness.
The US spends more per capita on health care than anyone else. When it's out of pocket, it's a consumption choice. When it's mandated by the government and paid for in tax, then it becomes public policy. No one will survive voting for cuts to health care. So US companies will have more costly products that sell poorly elsewhere in the world, and we would need high tariffs to keep the rest of the world's goods expensive here if we wanted any domestic sales. Less sales = fewer employees.
The problem we have can't be solved by protectionism. It's a dislocation that we will have to endure. The barriers to entry in markets whose goods are susceptible to internet delivery just shrank a lot recently, and we see a higher level of competitiveness in the labor market.
Why is it a racist remark?
Indians aren't a race. They are a nationality. There are a wide variety of ethnicities in India.
To point out that a large number have in common a particular grammatical mistake isn't racist. It's just observation.
"Stupid Indians" might be getting closer - at least it's prejudice of some sort.
There are a lot of problems that could be solved more easily if there wasn't always someone jumping out to call "racist" anytime someone points out a statistical truth about a demographic. Hey, is it racist to say that American Jews are better educated than the general population? No? Then how can it be racist to say that American blacks are less well-educated than the general population? If we can't even say it out loud, how can we solve it?
If Joel can't tell his Indian candidates (albeit in a somewhat snotty way), hey, I pay attention to grammar and punctuation, so don't give me a resume that looks like you pasted it from AIM, than how are they going to learn that his standards, and those of American employers generally, may differ from the standards to which they are accustomed?
Sorry this is late in the discussion, but can anyone knowledgable say whether or not Integration Server runs on Solaris x86? I see Directory does and they plan to bring over App. I am trying to put together a dev server for a small team and the client is all Sun (except weblogic). I don't need enterprise features a la Sparc and I thought I would need to dig up a copy of NT4/SP6 or Win2k/SP1 (with associated admin headaches) to support Integration Server.
Thanks for any news on this.
"Unilateral" means acting by oneself. Just because we didn't have France and Germany on board doesn't mean we acted alone. Over 30 nations were represented in the "Coalition of the Willing."
Acting multilaterally doesn't guarantee that a good end is pursued, or by good means, either. See WWI.
Not only was it in 1960, but it's still correct English now. As Margaret Thatcher said, "In English as in life, man embraces woman."
The fact that you bother to cavil about stuff like this makes you look like a bigger fool than you probably are.
I've spent enough time in the corporate world to agree that many people have exactly that view - make it shine while I'm here and apres moi, le deluge. That's basically my point - people are enough alike that we can't reasonably expect spontaneous good behavior to break out simple because we "reject private property" or something. What will actually happen is the kind of bureaucratic warlordism we saw in the warsaw pact.
As far as your public/private discussion, I can only reiterate that I'd expect workers, managers, etc. to react the same in either case to similar incentives and punishments. The one problem with public utilities and other subsidized interests is the distortion in allocation they cause, but perhaps sometimes it's a desirable distortion. So there are plenty of good examples of privatization, and horror stories too.
Maybe you'd like to go into a bit more detail about what you mean. It's very well to say what you have, but it's quite unclear. You mean that the socialist revolution is already over? Or, you mean that capitalists continue to tread the inevitable cycle that Marx predicted? (The latter theory will have to explain things like free public schools and libraries, progressive income tax, etc. - things which Marx claims capitalism will not produce, and things he calls for in the Communist Manifesto).
And my example isn't a straw man at all. It's a simple fact. People complain about CEOs doing this and that terrible thing. Well, they don't have the power of the State behind them. I'd just as soon keep all this power spread out to as many hands as possible. Because history reveals human nature to have certain common traits, and it's a rare person who comes to power with a self-mastery that exceeds the power of our nature.
So, are you really willing to defend your assertion?
Yes, I'm sorry I was unclear. I jumped ahead to write all the China stuff. What that meant to say was that, that list of countries is cheaper than India, not that India is outsourcing to them. I've only read about India->China outsourcing.
As far as Mexicans earning more than Indians, that Computerworld I mentioned above says, India avg programmer salary $6400, Mexico $5150. Source, NeoIT Inc of San Ramon, CA. Maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong, I'm no expert. Just reporting what I read.
Thanks again for the view from the Marxist camp. Before you get carried away with these predictions, remember that Marx himself made similar ones about upheaval and worker's revolution in Europe that have conspicuously failed to materialize.
Ever played with the economic sim sugarscape? That will give you some real insight into how economic concentration occurs. But the reason why people don't just vote themselves everyone else's property is because we can now see exactly what happened in places where they tried that. People in the US want Bill Gates' property to be secure to him because they want their own property to be secure to themselves, and of course also because the high financial and social mobility suggests to them that they may soon be wealthy too.
Democracy, when restricted in it's "tyranny of the majority" by a social compact like the US Constitution, is a freedom- and human-dignity-enhancing system of governance. It happily coexists with capitalism.
I see that you are one of the last surviving pure Marxists. Marx makes a good read, I'll grant you. But he's no more persuasive as an economic scientist that an old John Campbell editorial. Why? Because his theory makes assumptions and predictions, and the predictions haven't come true. Even if the reasoning looks very good, something is wrong. That something is the assumptions.
In particular Marx makes assumptions about human nature, both under capitalism and under his projected new order, that have been demonstrated to be false. And since economics is the study of human behavior in the aggregate, that pretty well sinks the ship.
As far as your notion that "this is a conflict that cannot be resolved under capitalism," well, of course, because for it to be "resolved" in the sense you appear to mean, at least one of the two sides would need to act against their own interests. As in, I want the bread for free and he wants all my money. The resolution we have is called a supply-demand curve, which is how a free market in anything sets prices.
But your notion that all thiese things can be fixed under socialism still lacks a working example anywhere in the world. Why? Because the same human nature that makes the owner of a factory act like he does, make the leader of the state factory council act like he does. One of them tries to increase production to make more money. The other tries to increase production to satisfy his superiors and to get a promotion. Once you put a human with human motives in charge, they act the same. At least the factory owner won't run without maintenance and ruin all his machine tools 20 years early, like the socialist will. By then, it'll be someone else problem, right? Tragedy of the commons.
FYI, Indian companies already outsource to China, today. China, Eastern Europe/Russia, Vietnam, Mexico, etc. In fact, so called "daisy-chaining," where an Indian company gets a US contract due to its relationships and reputation, and promptly outsources it elsewhere, is the new buzzword. Computerworld calls this "a trend to watch."
You want to talk about China? The Sept 15 Computerworld had an article about outsourcing that profiled a number of different countries. Here's some fun quotes and facts about China:
Get your raincoats, storm's coming.
I'm in the middle of a similar joe-job now. Over 10k bounce messages already. What a PITA.
So besides the endless sea of spam I get I also have this nonsense.
Things like this are going to happen to enough people that extreme measures will be taken. I applaud the designers of this new idea for having a proposal that maintains most of the freedoms we've had with internet email, but eventually if we don't get a handle on this problem, email as we know it will die.
Saying over and over again that "security through obscurity" is bad is missing the point. That phrase means that simply not telling people how you protect yourself is not much of a defense, because a clever attacker can figure it out. To be safe, you need to be able to tell the potential attacker exactly what you have done (if not the exact key, etc.) and still have reason to believe that he can't compromise your security.
But none of that applies here.
First of all, you are actually not trying to protect the server. The client is actually allowed to send all the data that a hacked/aimbot/etc client sends. The limitation is supposed to be that the client is operated by human skill instead of a program. So what you are really trying to protect is the client. (Yes, some things like looking one way and firing another, too rapid/accurate turns and shots can be detected server side, but for the purpose of detecting a hacked client. Again, it's about securing the client.)
Now the problem with this is, that it's impossible. The client is in the hands of the enemy. By definition all your security is through obscurity, since the client can be disassembled, its memory can be watched as it runs, etc. There is no other kind of security on the client besides obscurity, short of some Palladium-like thing.
If you have a better idea, don't waste it on a game, because it's worth around a billion dollars to the right people these days.
So I wish all the knee-jerk posters would lay off smugly saying that there's no security through obscurity so they get what they deserve. You need to put down the pipe and think it through.
Yeah, yeah, let me know when a European country has actually implemented the things in the Kyoto Accord and then we can talk.
I'm really interested to know where you think all this money comes from.
To a business, taxes are like any other kind of overhead costs, like leases or salaries. All of the money to pay these costs comes from customers. If a business can't meet these costs, it has to change its pricing structure, change its overhead, or stop doing business. It's hard for a business to change the way it's taxed.
I just want to be clear - all taxes are taxes on consumers. The only reason a business would even consider selling a product below cost is if that sale drives other profitable sales. This is why the whole idea of a corporate income tax is such a gigantic scam - first I withhold money from your paycheck, then I hit you with sales taxes at the register (sometimes city, county, and state) and then finally I jack up the price of the goods with a second, hidden sales tax called the corporate income tax.
The only reason a business would prefer the CIT to a sales tax is that it allows them to decide on which products and to which customers they want to direct the burden of higher costs. This makes it more strategically fluid than a sales tax. But for most businesses that's a non-issue.
The worst thing of all about a corporate income tax is that it encourages corporations, who have the time and resources to lobby (either on their own or through trade associations) for exemptions, breaks, discounts, and other distortions of the tax code. If we just counted up all the money raised by this tax, abolished it, and raised sales taxes enough to cover the same amount, we would remove a tremendous amount of cruft and truly byzantine provisions from our tax code. We would also remove most of the reasons that most businesses have to lobby congress, and thus reduce the importance of the busines lobby. Finally, our legislators would have more time to occasionally read a bill before they vote on it since they aren't having to listen to the North Valley Rubber Mill Association ask for new tax credits for three hours.
Here's a link to a story about the case in English. HTH.