I was being a bit sarcastic with my title, obviously I am a valuable employee, my point is simply that losing 50% of IT jobs seems like a low estimate, in my experience, with good automation you can get 75-80% reduction in staff. Anyway, obviously my company is more profitable and easier to manage because of my work, its not only the number of engineers, but you get up to around 15 and you need managers now.. and they aren't cheap.. as it is, our core group of 5 engineers doesn't need a manager per se, they can self manage just fine because there are few enough of them they can get everything organized themselves.
Well, this trend is well under way. I work for a FTTH provider, we initially estimated that we would need between 5 and 10 engineers for every 1000 customers we add to our network to perform adds moves changes for customers. I replaced those 35-70 engineers with a perl program and 5 engineers (our network has 7000 customers). All of our provisioning is completely automated, adding a new customer takes less than 2 minutes of engineer time as opposed to 30-45 minutes previously. changing or adding services generally requires no engineer time, as our customers can self provision over the web.
Why in this whole thread has no one threatened boycotting google and ebay? Sure they put on a decent face as companies go... But come one guys why do these guys get a free pass? They have signed on the dotted line with Satan (aka microsoft), so they are out in my book.. I'm moving to a different search engine as of today. I've never bought anything on ebay and its certainly not happening now... Hey Sun is better than these guys now. At least they have contributed back to linux...
Sure google uses linux to make billions of dollars, have they given back a single line of code? They've gotta have the most sophisticated cluster software, did they open source that? It probably touches the kernel in a million places, I wouldn't be suprised at all if they are violating the GPL in about a thousand places. Anyway, they are evil despite their "goals" and "mission statement".
I think this has alot more to do with Kerry not being able to get people excited than anything else. I'm a republican, and voted as such, however I seriously wanted someone else to vote for.
I was ready a year ago to replace Bush, but the offering from the Democrats was so uninspiring to me that I couldn't do it. I don't want a guy who changes with the wind, votes for 30 years consistently saying one thing, and then the next day tries to pretend he never said that.
If Kerry had come out and said "Yes I voted against all of those weapons systems because I think there are better ways to spend money (examples follow)", I would have respected that. As it is though he's just an empty cup that fills up with whatever rain water happens to be falling that day... and I can't get excited about that.
It is something I like about Bush, politicians need to stop being afraid to piss people off, like the saying goes "If you're not on someone's shit list you're not doing anything important.."
Kerry's constant pandering to whichever group of people he happened to be talking to at the moment was so fake and off-putting to me I couldn't bear the idea of him in office for 4 years.
My wife who is a Democrat voted against Kerry, because like me she couldn't get excited about anything he said or did. We watched speeches from Bush, Edwards, and Kerry.. we would always be engaged and interested while Bush and Edwards were speaking, but as soon as Kerry would come on, we'd suddenly find that the lint between our toes was more interesting and find something else to do/watch/talk about.
In short democrats, give us a decent, engaging, exciting and dynamic person who knows what he's talking about and can express it in a way that doesn't make me think I'm in history 101 and the professor is in a wheelchair explaining manifest destiny for the 18th time to the blonde morons in the front row.
I didn't read any responses so this is probably a dup... but obviously you aren't very well versed in US history. Japanese Americans had their rights severly infringed upon after Pearl Harbor. This was done by.. oh wait a democratic president, and they suffered a whole lot more than the gays who have *NEVER* had the right to get married. Bush has simply continued what already was, not implimented something new.
I didn't used to "understand" wikis either.. but then we set one up in my dev group just to try to have some sort of collaborative place where we could all go and change/update/add and such to features, what is/isn't done yet... It is a pretty powerful tool for us that has helped us a ton organize and express our thoughts/ideas for the project we are working on.
I'd never use one as a FAQ, or anything else like that, but as a collaboration tool they absolutely rock.
I think they already deployed it and the HDTV streams are taking up all the bandwidth on their network... err maybe slashdot just blew up their DNS servers... who knows, I can't get to any site on SBC's domain, (and yes the rest of the internet is working for me)
And, this is why we in the US don't care what the Europeans think...
Consistently overtaxing your people, perpetually high (15%+) unemployment, and poor health care are all reasons not to be socialist. a 18 euro a month tax because your computer has a NIC or modem in it???!!! WTF?! My uncle lived for 3 years in Europe, and although in monetary terms he got a 300% raise, in real terms he made less than he did in the US after all of the taxes, and fees, and he had a lower standard of living.
Yeah, this post is probably flamebait, but it seems to me that Europe is much worse at taking from the common person and giving to lazy people who refuse to work, or to huge gov't run programs that provide crappy service.
if apple released OS X for x86, at anywhere below $200/copy, I'd buy 4 copies the next day. My 2 laptops, and 2 desktops would be running os X from that day forward, and I'd leave linux on my servers...
the people on here saying this would kill apple's hardware division I don't think are right... I'd buy 4 copies of OS X for x86, but the next machine I buy is still going to be a g5 imac, and the next laptop I buy is still going to be a 12" powerbook (I'm waiting til they fit the g5 into one though)
Apple's hardware is sexy and stylish, that is why I would still buy it (I already own a g4 powerbook), it might be a little expensive, but the g5 imac is very reasonably priced for such a nice looking piece of engineering. This fact alone is why releasing OS X for x86 is not the end of the world for their hardware division. They will pick up a bunch of OS market share, and the die hard mac fans (those 1-2% that have always bought their stuff) will still spend the extra ~$500 for the real apple hardware.
First off I haven't read the patents so I don't really know, but from everything I've read about this case, apparently these patents cover the idea of "one program asking another program to do something"... Um, So any program that includes a library, and makes calls against that library, as well as any program that makes system/OS/Windowing environment calls illegal... So, that pretty much covers everything.
I've never written a program that didn't at least include some basic system libraries, or language libraries. Every program must by necessity "ask for help" from other programs, whether that be the OS or a library. If this is really what this patent covers, they have successfully patented programming.
Even today, after thousands of man-years of effort, GNU/Linux hasn't achieved the level of driver support that Windows has.
Um, I haven't installed linux on a machine in almost 3 years that linux didn't recognize and automatically configure all of the hardware for (including sound cards, and wireless NICs). I installed windows twice last week where it didn't recognize the video card, and I had to download drivers... (in 16color mode)... Yes the drivers are available, but windows doesn't have them all built in... Linux generally does, and hardware support gets better and better every day.
The didn't circumvent anything. The simply didn't implement it. So the game would send the cd check stuff, but *because* they didn't want to violate DMCA, and the cd check stuff was encrypted, they didn't implement it, there server just dropped the cd check stuff.
Ok, so adding and multiplying is going to be patented.. I thought you couldn't patent mathmatical processes.
I guess this licensing scheme is a little "new" but I've been doing it with customer service for 5 years (I started a business, and did per seat customer service), IE 15/mo/employee.
Anyway, adding up employees and multiplying by $100 if this patent is accepted, is the most bizarre patent of all time.
First off, this is an argument that no user cares about
This statement from the rebuttal is the most moronic thing I've ever read. The fact that I couldn't use my hardware properly for nearly 4 months when I upgraded to the 2.6 kernel BUGGED THE HELL OUT OF ME! (nVidia graphics card), further, just this week I could finally use cisco's vpn client again (yes its been "working" for longer, but only officially supported on 2.6 in a release 2 weeks ago). This is a huge issue, that ALL USERS care about.
To say that no users care about driver compatibility is just insane. It would be nice if there was some sort of API that binary device drivers could write against that never changed... but who knows thats probably really hard (I don't know anything about kernel devel) His argument for why the linux kernel can't and won't do binary compatibility is good, not having crap code sitting around just because it was the best we could do in 1982 and someone touched the api with some scsi card driver and now we're stuck thats good.
I'm mostly just pissed that he's decided to write off what "all users" think, and that "no one" cares that they can't use their nvidia card for 4-6 months after every kernel release.
he didn't lose his camera, just his mem card, and how would you know you lost it in the cab? My wife recently lost her keys, and it was 4 hours between when she knows she had them and when she realized they were missing. She was at the mall, she doesn't know what store she left them in, maybe in the bathroom, maybe in the restaurant... She called all the stores she remembered being in, but who knows, and they could be anywhere, story short, they are gone. If I were in New york on vacation and lost my mem card on the way to the airport, geeze, it could be in the plane, in the airport, maybe in the cab, maybe I left it in the hotel... and maybe I lost it the day before at the statue of liberty. "knowing" where you lost it is a difficult problem.
First off I found the site very funny. Now reading the posts here, I'm very disappointed that I live in a country where everyone's first reaction to this seems to be "I'd sue the bastard" or "put him in jail".
Yes the guy who found the card should attempt to find the real owner, what better way? If he posted a few pics on the net, it would never get enough notoriaty to be found. Its a memory card, its not like there is an address and phone number on it. The cabby wouldn't be able to find the person, the person I'm sure doesn't know where exactly they lost it, and wouldn't be able to remember the cab companies name either. The cops would just junk it. This is the only way the real owner can get his pictures back.
Yes, in a way this is copyright infringment, but geeze, for a place that is sooo against musicians being able to keep people from copying things they actually make money off of, this guys pics seem like a bizarre hypocrisy to try to protect. It's not like he's a pro, or that he was gonna sell these pictures for money.
People here posting that this guy should be put in jail, or fined, or sued... well just chill out. He's having fun, I had a good laugh, and its actually possible that the real owner will get his pictures back, whereas if the poster didn't post them in this manner there is basically 0% chance that would happen.
Why a word doc needs functionality in the first place is questionable to me. Integrating data and code is a seriously poor design choice. No one in our company (5000+ employees) uses any of the VB scripting, and I wouldn't care if MS turned it off all together, I think its a stupid idea. Maybe alot of people use it, but I haven't met any of them.
Outlook XP, and 2000 by default disable access to all.doc,.xls, and.exe files, and you have to go into the options and specifically loosen the security settings to allow access to them. The attachments appear greyed out, and you can't click on them.
Except that it amounts almost to unplugging the machine from the net (which I've heard is the only way to secure a windows box...) But anyway, I'm not saying that I can write a completely secure OS, nor that that is an attainable goal. MS has made many decisions where the design of their system creates security problems, and then after the fact their fix is to disable functions instead of fixing them so that the design and implimentation are secure. And I'm not talking about esoteric things no one uses.
Its bizarre that the helpdesk I manage gets 10 calls a week at least from people complaining that they can't open the word doc someone just sent them in email, and we have to walk them through opening up Outlook so that it will let them read the doc, which then opens them up to all the vb scripting worms again, cause MS never fixed the DAMN PROBLEM! They just put a stupid default in the system that everyone overrides, because email without attachments in a law firm is like a car without a steering wheel or pedals.
I've attempted to install SP2 on three machines now and I'm not trying any more. After the 1st install, the system blue screened, and could not be recovered, had to reinstall from scratch.
The second attempted install got about 2/3rds of the way done and then crashed resulting in an unstable system. The partial install could not be completely removed, and the machine would crash often, another reinstall from scratch.
the third attempted install died in the early stages repeatedly (about 15 seconds after starting the install) and never got past that point.
These were three completely different systems with different software installed, but all ended up with the same result, no SP2 without a complete clean installation of XP first. I'm so disgusted with MSs QA right now, I never plan to install SP2 again, because my time is too valuable to spend entire days rebuilding systems just because they can't write updates to their software.
Hell in Gentoo and Debian I update the entire system with a single command and download hundreds of software packages equalling hundreds of MBs and it all goes smooth as silk, can't MS figure out how to copy files from an update package into the system without blowing it all to hell?
I would say the proper way to slow the spread of worms and ddos attacks is to have a secure os, not limit the system's ability to connect... But that is MS way with security... "Oh, executable attachments and word/excel spreadsheets might carry viruses... hmm easy fix, don't let our mail clients receive those attachments anymore, no one sends word docs as attachments anyway"... "Oh, worms and viruses are using our system for ddos attacks.. hmmm ok don't let the computer make more than 5 simultaneous connections, no one needs more than that anyway" The boys in Redmond really have crappy assumptions about what people use computers for most of the time it seems.
Microsoft in the name of security has done alot more silly things... like the fact that you can't send word/excel docs as attachments using outlook anymore. Instead of fixing their security holes they just disable whatever might cause viruses to spread...
Pretty soon MS will disable double clicking.exe files because that is the only way they can stop people from getting viruses.
My point was that more politicians will get less done, not more. more politicians necessarily means more bureaucrats, and, it means more points of view, smaller coalitions, and therefore, getting a majority is much more difficult, in fact I'd argue it is exponentially more difficult as the number of politicians increase, the ability to get a majority is exponentially more difficult.
This also creates the problem that exists in almost all of south america. Namely, every 5 people is another political party, and absolutely (and I mean ABSOLUTELY) NOTHING is ever accomplished, because you can never get a majority to vote on any 1 issue ever.
You think the bureaucratic morass in Washington is bad, try Venezuela, or Columbia, or Chile. Because there are so many representatives, and so many differing points of view, about the only thing that will get passed is legislation saying the sky is blue... and even that would be met with substantial opposition and would maybe pass by a 55%-45% majority.
More fine grained representation means less is done, not more.. and Government ends up representing less of what most people think it should because nothing at all gets done.
Slashdot Mirror
I was being a bit sarcastic with my title, obviously I am a valuable employee, my point is simply that losing 50% of IT jobs seems like a low estimate, in my experience, with good automation you can get 75-80% reduction in staff. Anyway, obviously my company is more profitable and easier to manage because of my work, its not only the number of engineers, but you get up to around 15 and you need managers now.. and they aren't cheap.. as it is, our core group of 5 engineers doesn't need a manager per se, they can self manage just fine because there are few enough of them they can get everything organized themselves.
Well, this trend is well under way. I work for a FTTH provider, we initially estimated that we would need between 5 and 10 engineers for every 1000 customers we add to our network to perform adds moves changes for customers. I replaced those 35-70 engineers with a perl program and 5 engineers (our network has 7000 customers). All of our provisioning is completely automated, adding a new customer takes less than 2 minutes of engineer time as opposed to 30-45 minutes previously. changing or adding services generally requires no engineer time, as our customers can self provision over the web.
Why in this whole thread has no one threatened boycotting google and ebay? Sure they put on a decent face as companies go... But come one guys why do these guys get a free pass? They have signed on the dotted line with Satan (aka microsoft), so they are out in my book.. I'm moving to a different search engine as of today. I've never bought anything on ebay and its certainly not happening now. .. Hey Sun is better than these guys now. At least they have contributed back to linux...
Sure google uses linux to make billions of dollars, have they given back a single line of code? They've gotta have the most sophisticated cluster software, did they open source that? It probably touches the kernel in a million places, I wouldn't be suprised at all if they are violating the GPL in about a thousand places. Anyway, they are evil despite their "goals" and "mission statement".
I think this has alot more to do with Kerry not being able to get people excited than anything else. I'm a republican, and voted as such, however I seriously wanted someone else to vote for.
I was ready a year ago to replace Bush, but the offering from the Democrats was so uninspiring to me that I couldn't do it. I don't want a guy who changes with the wind, votes for 30 years consistently saying one thing, and then the next day tries to pretend he never said that.
If Kerry had come out and said "Yes I voted against all of those weapons systems because I think there are better ways to spend money (examples follow)", I would have respected that. As it is though he's just an empty cup that fills up with whatever rain water happens to be falling that day... and I can't get excited about that.
It is something I like about Bush, politicians need to stop being afraid to piss people off, like the saying goes "If you're not on someone's shit list you're not doing anything important.."
Kerry's constant pandering to whichever group of people he happened to be talking to at the moment was so fake and off-putting to me I couldn't bear the idea of him in office for 4 years.
My wife who is a Democrat voted against Kerry, because like me she couldn't get excited about anything he said or did. We watched speeches from Bush, Edwards, and Kerry.. we would always be engaged and interested while Bush and Edwards were speaking, but as soon as Kerry would come on, we'd suddenly find that the lint between our toes was more interesting and find something else to do/watch/talk about.
In short democrats, give us a decent, engaging, exciting and dynamic person who knows what he's talking about and can express it in a way that doesn't make me think I'm in history 101 and the professor is in a wheelchair explaining manifest destiny for the 18th time to the blonde morons in the front row.
I didn't read any responses so this is probably a dup... but obviously you aren't very well versed in US history. Japanese Americans had their rights severly infringed upon after Pearl Harbor. This was done by.. oh wait a democratic president, and they suffered a whole lot more than the gays who have *NEVER* had the right to get married. Bush has simply continued what already was, not implimented something new.
I didn't used to "understand" wikis either.. but then we set one up in my dev group just to try to have some sort of collaborative place where we could all go and change/update/add and such to features, what is/isn't done yet... It is a pretty powerful tool for us that has helped us a ton organize and express our thoughts/ideas for the project we are working on.
I'd never use one as a FAQ, or anything else like that, but as a collaboration tool they absolutely rock.
I think they already deployed it and the HDTV streams are taking up all the bandwidth on their network... err maybe slashdot just blew up their DNS servers... who knows, I can't get to any site on SBC's domain, (and yes the rest of the internet is working for me)
And, this is why we in the US don't care what the Europeans think...
Consistently overtaxing your people, perpetually high (15%+) unemployment, and poor health care are all reasons not to be socialist. a 18 euro a month tax because your computer has a NIC or modem in it???!!! WTF?! My uncle lived for 3 years in Europe, and although in monetary terms he got a 300% raise, in real terms he made less than he did in the US after all of the taxes, and fees, and he had a lower standard of living.
Yeah, this post is probably flamebait, but it seems to me that Europe is much worse at taking from the common person and giving to lazy people who refuse to work, or to huge gov't run programs that provide crappy service.
if apple released OS X for x86, at anywhere below $200/copy, I'd buy 4 copies the next day. My 2 laptops, and 2 desktops would be running os X from that day forward, and I'd leave linux on my servers...
the people on here saying this would kill apple's hardware division I don't think are right... I'd buy 4 copies of OS X for x86, but the next machine I buy is still going to be a g5 imac, and the next laptop I buy is still going to be a 12" powerbook (I'm waiting til they fit the g5 into one though)
Apple's hardware is sexy and stylish, that is why I would still buy it (I already own a g4 powerbook), it might be a little expensive, but the g5 imac is very reasonably priced for such a nice looking piece of engineering. This fact alone is why releasing OS X for x86 is not the end of the world for their hardware division. They will pick up a bunch of OS market share, and the die hard mac fans (those 1-2% that have always bought their stuff) will still spend the extra ~$500 for the real apple hardware.
First off I haven't read the patents so I don't really know, but from everything I've read about this case, apparently these patents cover the idea of "one program asking another program to do something"... Um, So any program that includes a library, and makes calls against that library, as well as any program that makes system/OS/Windowing environment calls illegal... So, that pretty much covers everything.
I've never written a program that didn't at least include some basic system libraries, or language libraries. Every program must by necessity "ask for help" from other programs, whether that be the OS or a library. If this is really what this patent covers, they have successfully patented programming.
Even today, after thousands of man-years of effort, GNU/Linux hasn't achieved the level of driver support that Windows has.
Um, I haven't installed linux on a machine in almost 3 years that linux didn't recognize and automatically configure all of the hardware for (including sound cards, and wireless NICs). I installed windows twice last week where it didn't recognize the video card, and I had to download drivers... (in 16color mode)... Yes the drivers are available, but windows doesn't have them all built in... Linux generally does, and hardware support gets better and better every day.
The didn't circumvent anything.
The simply didn't implement it. So the game would send the cd check stuff, but *because* they didn't want to violate DMCA, and the cd check stuff was encrypted, they didn't implement it, there server just dropped the cd check stuff.
Ok, so adding and multiplying is going to be patented.. I thought you couldn't patent mathmatical processes.
I guess this licensing scheme is a little "new" but I've been doing it with customer service for 5 years (I started a business, and did per seat customer service), IE 15/mo/employee.
Anyway, adding up employees and multiplying by $100 if this patent is accepted, is the most bizarre patent of all time.
First off, this is an argument that no user cares about
This statement from the rebuttal is the most moronic thing I've ever read. The fact that I couldn't use my hardware properly for nearly 4 months when I upgraded to the 2.6 kernel BUGGED THE HELL OUT OF ME! (nVidia graphics card), further, just this week I could finally use cisco's vpn client again (yes its been "working" for longer, but only officially supported on 2.6 in a release 2 weeks ago). This is a huge issue, that ALL USERS care about.
To say that no users care about driver compatibility is just insane. It would be nice if there was some sort of API that binary device drivers could write against that never changed... but who knows thats probably really hard (I don't know anything about kernel devel) His argument for why the linux kernel can't and won't do binary compatibility is good, not having crap code sitting around just because it was the best we could do in 1982 and someone touched the api with some scsi card driver and now we're stuck thats good.
I'm mostly just pissed that he's decided to write off what "all users" think, and that "no one" cares that they can't use their nvidia card for 4-6 months after every kernel release.
he didn't lose his camera, just his mem card, and how would you know you lost it in the cab? My wife recently lost her keys, and it was 4 hours between when she knows she had them and when she realized they were missing. She was at the mall, she doesn't know what store she left them in, maybe in the bathroom, maybe in the restaurant... She called all the stores she remembered being in, but who knows, and they could be anywhere, story short, they are gone. If I were in New york on vacation and lost my mem card on the way to the airport, geeze, it could be in the plane, in the airport, maybe in the cab, maybe I left it in the hotel... and maybe I lost it the day before at the statue of liberty. "knowing" where you lost it is a difficult problem.
First off I found the site very funny. Now reading the posts here, I'm very disappointed that I live in a country where everyone's first reaction to this seems to be "I'd sue the bastard" or "put him in jail".
Yes the guy who found the card should attempt to find the real owner, what better way? If he posted a few pics on the net, it would never get enough notoriaty to be found. Its a memory card, its not like there is an address and phone number on it. The cabby wouldn't be able to find the person, the person I'm sure doesn't know where exactly they lost it, and wouldn't be able to remember the cab companies name either. The cops would just junk it. This is the only way the real owner can get his pictures back.
Yes, in a way this is copyright infringment, but geeze, for a place that is sooo against musicians being able to keep people from copying things they actually make money off of, this guys pics seem like a bizarre hypocrisy to try to protect. It's not like he's a pro, or that he was gonna sell these pictures for money.
People here posting that this guy should be put in jail, or fined, or sued... well just chill out. He's having fun, I had a good laugh, and its actually possible that the real owner will get his pictures back, whereas if the poster didn't post them in this manner there is basically 0% chance that would happen.
you didn't read the next post
there was general unrest on the site, and he reinstated the previous format
Why a word doc needs functionality in the first place is questionable to me. Integrating data and code is a seriously poor design choice. No one in our company (5000+ employees) uses any of the VB scripting, and I wouldn't care if MS turned it off all together, I think its a stupid idea. Maybe alot of people use it, but I haven't met any of them.
.doc, .xls, and .exe files, and you have to go into the options and specifically loosen the security settings to allow access to them. The attachments appear greyed out, and you can't click on them.
Outlook XP, and 2000 by default disable access to all
I'm just double clicking like all the other monkeys...
but whatever
Except that it amounts almost to unplugging the machine from the net (which I've heard is the only way to secure a windows box...) But anyway, I'm not saying that I can write a completely secure OS, nor that that is an attainable goal. MS has made many decisions where the design of their system creates security problems, and then after the fact their fix is to disable functions instead of fixing them so that the design and implimentation are secure. And I'm not talking about esoteric things no one uses.
Its bizarre that the helpdesk I manage gets 10 calls a week at least from people complaining that they can't open the word doc someone just sent them in email, and we have to walk them through opening up Outlook so that it will let them read the doc, which then opens them up to all the vb scripting worms again, cause MS never fixed the DAMN PROBLEM! They just put a stupid default in the system that everyone overrides, because email without attachments in a law firm is like a car without a steering wheel or pedals.
I've attempted to install SP2 on three machines now and I'm not trying any more. After the 1st install, the system blue screened, and could not be recovered, had to reinstall from scratch.
The second attempted install got about 2/3rds of the way done and then crashed resulting in an unstable system. The partial install could not be completely removed, and the machine would crash often, another reinstall from scratch.
the third attempted install died in the early stages repeatedly (about 15 seconds after starting the install) and never got past that point.
These were three completely different systems with different software installed, but all ended up with the same result, no SP2 without a complete clean installation of XP first. I'm so disgusted with MSs QA right now, I never plan to install SP2 again, because my time is too valuable to spend entire days rebuilding systems just because they can't write updates to their software.
Hell in Gentoo and Debian I update the entire system with a single command and download hundreds of software packages equalling hundreds of MBs and it all goes smooth as silk, can't MS figure out how to copy files from an update package into the system without blowing it all to hell?
I would say the proper way to slow the spread of worms and ddos attacks is to have a secure os, not limit the system's ability to connect... But that is MS way with security... "Oh, executable attachments and word/excel spreadsheets might carry viruses... hmm easy fix, don't let our mail clients receive those attachments anymore, no one sends word docs as attachments anyway"... "Oh, worms and viruses are using our system for ddos attacks.. hmmm ok don't let the computer make more than 5 simultaneous connections, no one needs more than that anyway" The boys in Redmond really have crappy assumptions about what people use computers for most of the time it seems.
Microsoft in the name of security has done alot more silly things... like the fact that you can't send word/excel docs as attachments using outlook anymore. Instead of fixing their security holes they just disable whatever might cause viruses to spread...
.exe files because that is the only way they can stop people from getting viruses.
Pretty soon MS will disable double clicking
My point was that more politicians will get less done, not more. more politicians necessarily means more bureaucrats, and, it means more points of view, smaller coalitions, and therefore, getting a majority is much more difficult, in fact I'd argue it is exponentially more difficult as the number of politicians increase, the ability to get a majority is exponentially more difficult.
This also creates the problem that exists in almost all of south america. Namely, every 5 people is another political party, and absolutely (and I mean ABSOLUTELY) NOTHING is ever accomplished, because you can never get a majority to vote on any 1 issue ever.
You think the bureaucratic morass in Washington is bad, try Venezuela, or Columbia, or Chile. Because there are so many representatives, and so many differing points of view, about the only thing that will get passed is legislation saying the sky is blue... and even that would be met with substantial opposition and would maybe pass by a 55%-45% majority.
More fine grained representation means less is done, not more.. and Government ends up representing less of what most people think it should because nothing at all gets done.