MUC is extremely inefficient though. There is no multicast notion in XMPP, so MUC works around this by sending duplicate messages to each user directly.
That's also pretty much how IRC works (though the message formatting is rather different). For real efficient multicast, you need to implement it at the network level so that messages are sent directly to the other listening parties by the hardware, but IP multicasting is complex and full of all sorts of "interesting" problems when you use it at larger scales than the LAN. Re-transmitting messages (even with updated IDs and other such info) is far simpler in practice. Really.
I don't understand all the mechanisms at work in the Greek crisis (maybe they just didn't anticipate the effects of the 2008 meltdown) but again, very different circumstances than the US.
The principal mechanism at work in the Greek crisis is the total moral bankruptcy of the relevant political class. The Greek economy was mismanaged for decades, with entrenched corrupt practices. The problems caused by that were usually dealt with through devaluation and other fiddles, but that ceased to be possible with the Euro. (I remember that they did an accounting fiddle just before joining; a lot of people at the time were surprised that they qualified for membership.) The crisis in 2008 was just the trigger for another round of problems in Greece; the real problem is that the economy there hasn't been properly healthy for as long as I can remember (as a result of bad politics). Fixing it is going to make a large number of people exceptionally upset.
More widely, the problems were a general lack of competitiveness for various reasons (e.g., in Spain it was the labor market sclerosis that was the core problem) though time and again it is the politics that is at the core of the difficulties. Overall within Europe, the big problem is that the necessary fixes are always utter anathema to some group or other: countries which have excessive bad debts have to pay things off and put their economies on a sounder footing, and countries which made excessive bad loans (directly or via their banks) need to take a hit and remember that lending is never ever risk-free.
The distributors can have a large part in this, only including apps that follow the HIG. That's always been the problem; there's guidelines, but no real teeth to back them up. Also, the important megapackages tend to not follow the HIG anyway, reasoning — correctly as it happens — that they'll be included even if they ignore the rules and that keeping their existing users happy is more important.
Fixing this mess will take work, and it will make a good number of people upset.
So you want clear but short laws. That isn't possible, to make things clear legally so laws are not open to interpretation they need to be detailed and takes a lot of text.
Of you can simply say that you are OK with leaving things open to interpretation. Then you've either got a lot of arbitrary decisions, or you need a system (such as common law) to constrain courts to be both self-consistent and consistent with the decisions of superior courts. At which point the effective law balloons...
Versus a ton of Xenon doing no environmental damage at all.
There's a potential hazard as all that gas will probably slump straight down (being really heavy by comparison with nitrogen and oxygen molecules) and present a risk of anoxia for every living thing in the immediate area. Yes, it would dissipate fairly quickly but the immediate vicinity would be temporarily quite hazardous. Compare with what happens when a crater lake belches carbon dioxide (admittedly in much larger quantities) that can kill substantial numbers of people. CO2 isn't as dense as Xe (which would be cold even after an explosion due to the cooling of gas expansion) so we can expect similar effects, though with even less warning as Xe is completely inert in a biological setting.
Mind you, the best risk mitigation strategy would be to just keep everyone away from the rocket launch site which we already do. By the time you get to a kilometer away, the zone of oxygen depletion would be pretty thin; any real hazard would be mainly in any low-lying areas (e.g. watercourses) towards the site's edge where pooling could override the general dissipation due to diffusion and spreading. A sea launch, or a launch from a suitable coastal site, would probably be a good mitigation.
The differences would be nearly nonexistent. A voting system is not a panacea, it's a popularity contest, and youtube comments already have this.
The problem is not the structure of youtube comments, but the people making the comments.
The problem is that there's nothing in place to encourage people to make worthwhile comments; the scoring is just for the message itself and doesn't have any consequences other than that. With a karma-driven system, things get better over time. Sure, not every great comment you make will get voted up, but over time it tells. If you consistently write comments that other people think it is worthwhile reading, your reputation will rise and others will more easily see what you do. Of course, it also means that if you then abuse that system-wide trust to post messages which others really dislike then your rep will go down. That's the down-side of increased visibility.
What you don't get a free break on is being stupid. Especially not here. We like reasoned arguments. We like references so that we can check things ourselves. We don't like unfounded assertions (uh oh! unfounded assertion!) and we don't like robotic repetition of a mendacious position. Put effort in to making things worthy of others' time and you'll probably be rewarded with respect.
Wouldn't a simple fix for the countries involved just be to impose a tarrif on the importation of the "IP Rights"?
The problem is that companies are being permitted to set the charge for "IP Rights" (and possibly other things) to a level to consume exactly the amount that would otherwise be the part on which taxation is assessed. It's that practice which is morally corrupt, not the fact that they are "IP Rights".
In UK terminology, while it isn't "tax evasion" because it is currently legal, it is "tax avoidance" rather than "tax mitigation" because it is taking actions against the general intention of the related taxing authorities. (Contrast with making a contribution to charity to reduce tax, which is morally a lot cleaner and thus gets the term "tax mitigation".)
Over time it is obvious that we can have all three.
No, that just violates "Faster" (the "over time" part implies that you're not getting it immediately). Which is OK; things should improve over time.
The real thing to be aware of though is that the real phrase should be "Better, sooner, cheaper: pick up to two". It's quite possible to miss out on more than one objective; sometimes even all three. (Also, I prefer "sooner" to "faster" as it is less ambiguous. The intended meaning is the same though.)
I've never had real problems getting an umbrella past security, but I've got a triple-folding one that goes into a volume not much larger than a soda can. It was queried once (in Paris, as it happens) but once I showed that it was an umbrella then it was no problem.
But Kerberos management is itself a PITA. I suppose it's not too bad within the context of a single organization, but it can't scale larger than that because of cross-domain trust problems. (Large organizations often internally organize themselves into multiple smaller organizations that are usually at loggerheads with each other over something stupid. Or the budget allocation.)
It's important to remember that the main problem with SSH is that it allows authentication via password by default. That's by far the most vulnerable way of doing it, as that login method is subject to frequent attacks in the wild, and it isn't actually significantly easier for users in the first place (local key management software is really rather easy these days). Getting authorized key management across all your servers absolutely right is a much lesser concern in practice.
Your argument that open source means faster patch turnaround is becoming somewhat of a straw man as time progresses.
The shortest OSS turnaround that I'm aware of personally for a security fix was on the order of 20 minutes (and the limiting factor there is probably the time it takes people to understand problems, so I don't expect a huge drop below that when people are involved at all).
That said, it was traditionally the case that OSS was better at security and commercial development was better at user experience. There seems to have been more cross-fertilization of approaches over the past 5–10 years though; commercial is improving the security practices (with most of the remaining turnaround time probably now due to different testing regimes) and OSS is improving the usability side. That's Good.
When any government involvement with societal life other than national defense is arbitrarily off the table, you have an impossible situation and a recipe for an agrarian society.
You actually have a situation where even the ability to do national defense will decline, as a large part of that is having the industrial capacity and transport capacity to be able to sustain a substantive military.
What would a Train Wreck at 186 MPH in a densely populated area look like?
Bad. Real bad. What would an airplane crash in a densely populated area look like? Also bad. Large amounts of momentum and kinetic energy can do bad things to people and buildings. Obvious, yes?
Of course, with a proper high-speed rail system you keep both slower trains and non-train objects well out of the way so as to avoid problems, through the use of separated lines and avoiding level crossings (which are hellishly dangerous); single-track sections are right out, as they cannot be run efficiently. This makes high-speed tracks considerably more expensive (along with the fact that you need much better signaling systems), but the lines do tend to be more effective in use precisely because of the reduced rate of accidents.
Am assuming here, but I'd think Swiss Re would also be able to raise there rates and why would then also????
You're obviously not a proper capitalist! Think, for once!
If everyone is raising their rates because of something that isn't going to happen, there's a massive opportunity in the market for someone to undercut the rates offered by everyone else and make a total killing. In order for this to not happen, you've got to get everyone in the market to agree to keep prices elevated despite a very strong financial incentive to do otherwise; that's pretty rare in practice as someone breaks ranks and tries to grab a larger market share. The only sane reason for insurance rates going up the way they have is if the whole market believes that they are not increasing their long-term profit margins and that instead some external factor is changing which is altering the nature of the risks. If there is global warming, rising prices for certain types of insurance are where you'd be likely to see it feeding through into the market first (insurers, like pension funds, tend to take a longer term view of risk than most companies because their risk exposure profile is longer term). The insurers will keep a very careful tab on this sort of thing too, as they'd be right where the financial chickens come home to roost if things go wrong.
But hey, if you think they're wrong then you should put your money where your mouth is. Start your own insurance firm, offer rates based on a no-global-warming assumption, and make out like a bandit from all the customers attracted from your rivals. Just don't ask me to personally reinsure your firm right now, or to bail it out if it goes bankrupt, OK?
Oh for crying out loud. Europe has this problem solved. Every car has an owner, that owner is a person, even if it is a company. Thus if there is any ticket, any accident, anything else, the OWNER is responsible. Case closed!
The only catch is that if the owner can get somebody else to take a "fall" then that person will get the ticket, etc.
The other related case is if the owner successfully argues that it was someone who took the vehicle without permission (theft, joyriding, etc.) That's theoretically onerous on car owners, but usually practically less so. (The other minor niggle, at least in England, is that there's a "registered keeper" of the vehicle, which simplifies things a little bit when someone is owning a vehicle on behalf of someone else.)
We are about ten years overdue for someone to lead the FSF. All the successes in open source and free software have been despite RMS, not because of him.
You might be more fair and qualify that with the word "recent". RMS has been on his crusade for free software for far longer than 10 years, and some of the key enabling things early on were tools he and the FSF created. GCC was a crucial part of this, as it broke the specter of vendor lock in at the tool chain (a real threat at one point).
HIs refusal to make GCC into a library is his strategy for making sure commits keep coming into GCC. And in OSS, he who receives the commits has the power.
The problem with that strategy is that it keeps you as king of a shrinking castle; many potential community members decide they don't want to put up with the attitude and go elsewhere. Sure, there are faster ways to become irrelevant, such as taking everything private and selling out to Ora... err... EvilSoft, inc., but the trend is still down if you don't try to properly maintain the community.
I've seen it said that the internet sees censorship as damage and tries to route around it. It's true for other types of over-strict control too. It doesn't matter whether the control freak has good reasons for doing it either; the internet doesn't care for the moral strength of the reasons, it just sees the outcome. RMS's opposition to the things that some wanted to do with GCC has prompted the creation of an open competitor that is sapping much of the potential strength they might've otherwise had. This long-term threat to GCC is largely of their own making.
Oh well, I'll probably use GCC for a few years more at least; old habits die hard (and I never wanted to write a C compiler in the first place, so the internal complexity was an issue far off my radar).
That's true for virtually all languages; without a runtime, all they can do is spin on the spot and do pointless things like simple calculations that they can never tell anyone else about.
These academic examples are small and trivial. They don't have to adapt or integrate with other systems.
The academic examples have to integrate with the rest of the course within which they are taught, and they must show exactly the principle being taught and as little else as possible. The aim is to get the... "less able" students to understand what is going on with as little extra effort on the part of the tutor as possible (because there will always be more than enough to be done teaching them anyway). Yes, the best students could learn from a more complex example with more different things going on, but the reality of teaching is that it isn't just for the best students.
Not to speak for the GP, but I don't think he changed his tune at all. The very best code IS self documenting, through the use of naming, structure, and semantics. Even the very best programmers can't be perfect 100% of the time (who has time for that?), so a well placed comment describing the intent of a code block is at least better than nothing, and would be a valid use of a comment. A comment is simply an apology for not writing the very best code.
Or an indication of what's going on so that the next person to touch the code knows that the code quality is good. Some of the best comments I've seen were references to academic papers that explained the algorithm used in the code in depth. You wouldn't get that from other readily-available sources (let's face it, URLs make crappy program identifiers) and some of those algorithms are deeply non-obvious without very specific mathematical background. Another very good comment that I remember reading explained why the code didn't use "industry standard" hashing algorithms (they turned out to suck on application-relevant input data) which, again, isn't something that is at all obvious from just reading the code.
Theoretically, the comments can also go in the SCM system's commit logs. The problem there is that projects can get detached from their SCM (it's rare, but happens) and then you've got no information at all. Good comments tell you what you don't learn from reading the executable bits of the code.
There are lots of business creators, but many of them fail or never grow that business beyond mom-and-pop store size. It's still a business. They're still business creators.
The stupid [business owners] don't last long
That's not necessarily so. Mind you, the truly stupid probably don't last. It's the ones who happen to get lucky finding a profitable thing to do (even if that's "raiding the trust fund every year") who can endure for quite a long while.
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MUC is extremely inefficient though. There is no multicast notion in XMPP, so MUC works around this by sending duplicate messages to each user directly.
That's also pretty much how IRC works (though the message formatting is rather different). For real efficient multicast, you need to implement it at the network level so that messages are sent directly to the other listening parties by the hardware, but IP multicasting is complex and full of all sorts of "interesting" problems when you use it at larger scales than the LAN. Re-transmitting messages (even with updated IDs and other such info) is far simpler in practice. Really.
I don't understand all the mechanisms at work in the Greek crisis (maybe they just didn't anticipate the effects of the 2008 meltdown) but again, very different circumstances than the US.
The principal mechanism at work in the Greek crisis is the total moral bankruptcy of the relevant political class. The Greek economy was mismanaged for decades, with entrenched corrupt practices. The problems caused by that were usually dealt with through devaluation and other fiddles, but that ceased to be possible with the Euro. (I remember that they did an accounting fiddle just before joining; a lot of people at the time were surprised that they qualified for membership.) The crisis in 2008 was just the trigger for another round of problems in Greece; the real problem is that the economy there hasn't been properly healthy for as long as I can remember (as a result of bad politics). Fixing it is going to make a large number of people exceptionally upset.
More widely, the problems were a general lack of competitiveness for various reasons (e.g., in Spain it was the labor market sclerosis that was the core problem) though time and again it is the politics that is at the core of the difficulties. Overall within Europe, the big problem is that the necessary fixes are always utter anathema to some group or other: countries which have excessive bad debts have to pay things off and put their economies on a sounder footing, and countries which made excessive bad loans (directly or via their banks) need to take a hit and remember that lending is never ever risk-free.
The distributors can have a large part in this, only including apps that follow the HIG. That's always been the problem; there's guidelines, but no real teeth to back them up. Also, the important megapackages tend to not follow the HIG anyway, reasoning — correctly as it happens — that they'll be included even if they ignore the rules and that keeping their existing users happy is more important.
Fixing this mess will take work, and it will make a good number of people upset.
Go live in a cave!
Does the basement count?
So you want clear but short laws. That isn't possible, to make things clear legally so laws are not open to interpretation they need to be detailed and takes a lot of text.
Of you can simply say that you are OK with leaving things open to interpretation. Then you've either got a lot of arbitrary decisions, or you need a system (such as common law) to constrain courts to be both self-consistent and consistent with the decisions of superior courts. At which point the effective law balloons...
Winning a case is not the same as proving anything, or settling the matter in everyones mind.
You don't have to settle the matter in everyone's mind, just the minds of the members of the jury.
Versus a ton of Xenon doing no environmental damage at all.
There's a potential hazard as all that gas will probably slump straight down (being really heavy by comparison with nitrogen and oxygen molecules) and present a risk of anoxia for every living thing in the immediate area. Yes, it would dissipate fairly quickly but the immediate vicinity would be temporarily quite hazardous. Compare with what happens when a crater lake belches carbon dioxide (admittedly in much larger quantities) that can kill substantial numbers of people. CO2 isn't as dense as Xe (which would be cold even after an explosion due to the cooling of gas expansion) so we can expect similar effects, though with even less warning as Xe is completely inert in a biological setting.
Mind you, the best risk mitigation strategy would be to just keep everyone away from the rocket launch site which we already do. By the time you get to a kilometer away, the zone of oxygen depletion would be pretty thin; any real hazard would be mainly in any low-lying areas (e.g. watercourses) towards the site's edge where pooling could override the general dissipation due to diffusion and spreading. A sea launch, or a launch from a suitable coastal site, would probably be a good mitigation.
The differences would be nearly nonexistent. A voting system is not a panacea, it's a popularity contest, and youtube comments already have this.
The problem is not the structure of youtube comments, but the people making the comments.
The problem is that there's nothing in place to encourage people to make worthwhile comments; the scoring is just for the message itself and doesn't have any consequences other than that. With a karma-driven system, things get better over time. Sure, not every great comment you make will get voted up, but over time it tells. If you consistently write comments that other people think it is worthwhile reading, your reputation will rise and others will more easily see what you do. Of course, it also means that if you then abuse that system-wide trust to post messages which others really dislike then your rep will go down. That's the down-side of increased visibility.
What you don't get a free break on is being stupid. Especially not here. We like reasoned arguments. We like references so that we can check things ourselves. We don't like unfounded assertions (uh oh! unfounded assertion!) and we don't like robotic repetition of a mendacious position. Put effort in to making things worthy of others' time and you'll probably be rewarded with respect.
Wouldn't a simple fix for the countries involved just be to impose a tarrif on the importation of the "IP Rights"?
The problem is that companies are being permitted to set the charge for "IP Rights" (and possibly other things) to a level to consume exactly the amount that would otherwise be the part on which taxation is assessed. It's that practice which is morally corrupt, not the fact that they are "IP Rights".
In UK terminology, while it isn't "tax evasion" because it is currently legal, it is "tax avoidance" rather than "tax mitigation" because it is taking actions against the general intention of the related taxing authorities. (Contrast with making a contribution to charity to reduce tax, which is morally a lot cleaner and thus gets the term "tax mitigation".)
Over time it is obvious that we can have all three.
No, that just violates "Faster" (the "over time" part implies that you're not getting it immediately). Which is OK; things should improve over time.
The real thing to be aware of though is that the real phrase should be "Better, sooner, cheaper: pick up to two". It's quite possible to miss out on more than one objective; sometimes even all three. (Also, I prefer "sooner" to "faster" as it is less ambiguous. The intended meaning is the same though.)
Umbrella? Won't get past security.
I've never had real problems getting an umbrella past security, but I've got a triple-folding one that goes into a volume not much larger than a soda can. It was queried once (in Paris, as it happens) but once I showed that it was an umbrella then it was no problem.
Kerberos does it (somewhat) better.
But Kerberos management is itself a PITA. I suppose it's not too bad within the context of a single organization, but it can't scale larger than that because of cross-domain trust problems. (Large organizations often internally organize themselves into multiple smaller organizations that are usually at loggerheads with each other over something stupid. Or the budget allocation.)
It's important to remember that the main problem with SSH is that it allows authentication via password by default. That's by far the most vulnerable way of doing it, as that login method is subject to frequent attacks in the wild, and it isn't actually significantly easier for users in the first place (local key management software is really rather easy these days). Getting authorized key management across all your servers absolutely right is a much lesser concern in practice.
Your argument that open source means faster patch turnaround is becoming somewhat of a straw man as time progresses.
The shortest OSS turnaround that I'm aware of personally for a security fix was on the order of 20 minutes (and the limiting factor there is probably the time it takes people to understand problems, so I don't expect a huge drop below that when people are involved at all).
That said, it was traditionally the case that OSS was better at security and commercial development was better at user experience. There seems to have been more cross-fertilization of approaches over the past 5–10 years though; commercial is improving the security practices (with most of the remaining turnaround time probably now due to different testing regimes) and OSS is improving the usability side. That's Good.
When any government involvement with societal life other than national defense is arbitrarily off the table, you have an impossible situation and a recipe for an agrarian society.
You actually have a situation where even the ability to do national defense will decline, as a large part of that is having the industrial capacity and transport capacity to be able to sustain a substantive military.
What would a Train Wreck at 186 MPH in a densely populated area look like?
Bad. Real bad. What would an airplane crash in a densely populated area look like? Also bad. Large amounts of momentum and kinetic energy can do bad things to people and buildings. Obvious, yes?
Of course, with a proper high-speed rail system you keep both slower trains and non-train objects well out of the way so as to avoid problems, through the use of separated lines and avoiding level crossings (which are hellishly dangerous); single-track sections are right out, as they cannot be run efficiently. This makes high-speed tracks considerably more expensive (along with the fact that you need much better signaling systems), but the lines do tend to be more effective in use precisely because of the reduced rate of accidents.
Am assuming here, but I'd think Swiss Re would also be able to raise there rates and why would then also????
You're obviously not a proper capitalist! Think, for once!
If everyone is raising their rates because of something that isn't going to happen, there's a massive opportunity in the market for someone to undercut the rates offered by everyone else and make a total killing. In order for this to not happen, you've got to get everyone in the market to agree to keep prices elevated despite a very strong financial incentive to do otherwise; that's pretty rare in practice as someone breaks ranks and tries to grab a larger market share. The only sane reason for insurance rates going up the way they have is if the whole market believes that they are not increasing their long-term profit margins and that instead some external factor is changing which is altering the nature of the risks. If there is global warming, rising prices for certain types of insurance are where you'd be likely to see it feeding through into the market first (insurers, like pension funds, tend to take a longer term view of risk than most companies because their risk exposure profile is longer term). The insurers will keep a very careful tab on this sort of thing too, as they'd be right where the financial chickens come home to roost if things go wrong.
But hey, if you think they're wrong then you should put your money where your mouth is. Start your own insurance firm, offer rates based on a no-global-warming assumption, and make out like a bandit from all the customers attracted from your rivals. Just don't ask me to personally reinsure your firm right now, or to bail it out if it goes bankrupt, OK?
what about roads there 85%+ traffic is over the limit and going the limit can be unsafe???
Sounds like an opportunity for traffic enforcement to make a very tidy profit indeed.
Oh for crying out loud. Europe has this problem solved. Every car has an owner, that owner is a person, even if it is a company. Thus if there is any ticket, any accident, anything else, the OWNER is responsible. Case closed!
The only catch is that if the owner can get somebody else to take a "fall" then that person will get the ticket, etc.
The other related case is if the owner successfully argues that it was someone who took the vehicle without permission (theft, joyriding, etc.) That's theoretically onerous on car owners, but usually practically less so. (The other minor niggle, at least in England, is that there's a "registered keeper" of the vehicle, which simplifies things a little bit when someone is owning a vehicle on behalf of someone else.)
We are about ten years overdue for someone to lead the FSF. All the successes in open source and free software have been despite RMS, not because of him.
You might be more fair and qualify that with the word "recent". RMS has been on his crusade for free software for far longer than 10 years, and some of the key enabling things early on were tools he and the FSF created. GCC was a crucial part of this, as it broke the specter of vendor lock in at the tool chain (a real threat at one point).
But the world has moved on.
HIs refusal to make GCC into a library is his strategy for making sure commits keep coming into GCC. And in OSS, he who receives the commits has the power.
The problem with that strategy is that it keeps you as king of a shrinking castle; many potential community members decide they don't want to put up with the attitude and go elsewhere. Sure, there are faster ways to become irrelevant, such as taking everything private and selling out to Ora... err... EvilSoft, inc., but the trend is still down if you don't try to properly maintain the community.
I've seen it said that the internet sees censorship as damage and tries to route around it. It's true for other types of over-strict control too. It doesn't matter whether the control freak has good reasons for doing it either; the internet doesn't care for the moral strength of the reasons, it just sees the outcome. RMS's opposition to the things that some wanted to do with GCC has prompted the creation of an open competitor that is sapping much of the potential strength they might've otherwise had. This long-term threat to GCC is largely of their own making.
Oh well, I'll probably use GCC for a few years more at least; old habits die hard (and I never wanted to write a C compiler in the first place, so the internal complexity was an issue far off my radar).
Ada is worthless without the runtime.
That's true for virtually all languages; without a runtime, all they can do is spin on the spot and do pointless things like simple calculations that they can never tell anyone else about.
These academic examples are small and trivial. They don't have to adapt or integrate with other systems.
The academic examples have to integrate with the rest of the course within which they are taught, and they must show exactly the principle being taught and as little else as possible. The aim is to get the... "less able" students to understand what is going on with as little extra effort on the part of the tutor as possible (because there will always be more than enough to be done teaching them anyway). Yes, the best students could learn from a more complex example with more different things going on, but the reality of teaching is that it isn't just for the best students.
Writing code is much easier than teaching!
Not to speak for the GP, but I don't think he changed his tune at all. The very best code IS self documenting, through the use of naming, structure, and semantics. Even the very best programmers can't be perfect 100% of the time (who has time for that?), so a well placed comment describing the intent of a code block is at least better than nothing, and would be a valid use of a comment. A comment is simply an apology for not writing the very best code.
Or an indication of what's going on so that the next person to touch the code knows that the code quality is good. Some of the best comments I've seen were references to academic papers that explained the algorithm used in the code in depth. You wouldn't get that from other readily-available sources (let's face it, URLs make crappy program identifiers) and some of those algorithms are deeply non-obvious without very specific mathematical background. Another very good comment that I remember reading explained why the code didn't use "industry standard" hashing algorithms (they turned out to suck on application-relevant input data) which, again, isn't something that is at all obvious from just reading the code.
Theoretically, the comments can also go in the SCM system's commit logs. The problem there is that projects can get detached from their SCM (it's rare, but happens) and then you've got no information at all. Good comments tell you what you don't learn from reading the executable bits of the code.
I don't email.
I show up with a large stick.
With a nail in it.
Too bad. The original coder (from 10 years ago) has died of something else. Now you've got no clue what's going on, and nobody to take it out on.
There are very few business creators.
There are lots of business creators, but many of them fail or never grow that business beyond mom-and-pop store size. It's still a business. They're still business creators.
The stupid [business owners] don't last long
That's not necessarily so. Mind you, the truly stupid probably don't last. It's the ones who happen to get lucky finding a profitable thing to do (even if that's "raiding the trust fund every year") who can endure for quite a long while.