I've worked in the non-profit world myself, and it's equally a death-knell not to be run like a business at all. For example no organization that fails to watch its cash flow can continue to operate. Believe me an irreversible negative cash flow is a financial fire, just as much in a non-profit as a for-profit. I've seen up front what happens to a non-profit that fails to attend to financial realities, and it is not pretty.
We used to sometimes say that the difference between for-profit and non-profit was that "owner's equity" on the balance sheet was re-labelled "retained earnings". Of course we *knew* that a non-profit has different priorities than a for-profit; and that non-profit and government budgets are run according to stricter principles (spending is *authorized* rather than *estimated*). But the point is that you still have to manage finite resources, coordinate people, set and achieve objectives, etc. So for many of us who were in support positions rather than line positions, being in a non-profit made very little difference in how we did our job, other than we took a lower salary for the privilege of doing good in the world.
In fact, business and non-profit management shares a very significant failure mode that you point out. You take an interesting organization and you give it a leader who is uses it primarily as a vehicle for ego-gratification. The difference is that in the non-profit world you have this co-dependency relationship with donors who equally see the organization as a vehicle for ego-gratification, which sometimes allows brain-dead organization to stumble forward for a few more years.
The difference between non-profit and for-profit management, aside from accounting technicalities, is *ethics*. In the non-profit world you have many more ethical duties, but as in for-profit enterprises, the only ethical issues that get *consistently* attended to are those that outsiders consistently check on. It is rare that anyone attempts to hold a non-profit to account -- there's no political glory for an attorney general to become known as the scourge of charities. So in the non-profit world you need the good fortune to have leaders of exceptional moral character. Unfortunately, a lot of what passes for that is sanctimonious hypocrisy.
One of the problems with these perpetual trusts is that long after the founder is dead they become sinecures for the people running them, making the occasional nominal grant while absorbing most of the trust income in salary.
That'll teach you to write system control code in archaic Fortran, a language which has both auto-declared variables and space intolerant keywords. That's the only language where you can write (do10i=1.100) (assigning new float variable "do10i" a value of 1.1) when you meant "do 10 i = 1,100" (repeat line 10 with i taking values from 1 to 10).
Can depend on what you grew up with. All time record high for town I grew up in is 30C, I start to melt once temp gets above 25C. On the other hand I have shoveled snow in -40C temps for more than 2 hoours with no ill effects - probably would kill a Texan...
What we do in New England for weather like this is prepare. On cold February nights we light fires in the fireplace. When it gets so cold the flames freeze solid, we break chunks off with a stonemason's hammer, wrap them in aluminium foil and put them in the freezer until Summer. Then when the heat goes above 80 F (inhumanly hot for a New Englander) we can simply take our frozen fire chips out of the ice box, unwrap them, and put them in a metal dish in front of an ordinary room fan. Since the phase transition occurs at a much lower temperature than the liquid water/ice transition, the flames do a great job of cooling the air as they sublimate.
Another argument is that corporations are not people, thus shouldn't have free speech. This shows a lack of understanding of corporations.
Oh, enlighten us, do.
A corporation is nothing but a convenient way to get together and be organized.
I would agree, if you would delete "nothing but". It in actuality a corporation considerably more than a voluntary association, otherwise there would be no need for corporations to exist as a legal institution. For example, corporations allow individuals to escape liability for debts incurred by businesses they own. This allows businesses to attract far more owner-investors than a straightforward partnership. For this reason corporations need governing structures that allow them to conduct businesses without having to submit every decision to potentially tens of thousands of individual partners.
And this, by the way, is why the idea of political free speech for corporations is a bad idea; it tends to reflect the interests of the management team rather than the stockholders, especially since much of the ownership can be indirect (i.e. through other corporations). This makes it impossible to keep track of the political activities of companies you own stock in and impractical to do anything about it if you don't like the position the management team is taking.
The idea that corporations have *political* rights is an ontological fallacy. Corporations have to be legally persons for purposes of entering into contracts and holding or incurring debt on behalf of their owners, but they are not legally persons for every purpose; for example they can't run for elected office. Arguing that they have free speech rights because they are "legally persons" is special pleading; nobody claims that corporations have the same fundamental rights as natural people *except* in the context of allowing their management teams to buy political influence with the stockholders' assets.
Arguing that corporations have the same rights as people because they're just associations of people is wrong, because the premise is wrong. The corporation is a distinct and artificial legal institution created for the *specific purpose* allowing a business to have a different relationship to its stockholders than an ordinary association would have to its membership.
For a legal entity other than a natural person to claim to act on behalf of some set of natural persons (be they owners or members), at the very least the management must be directly responsible to *all* those natural persons. If not, there is no reasonable basis for making that claim.
Back in the 1800s, people built stuff like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BostonMA_CalfPasturePumpingStationComplex.jpg. This is a *pump station* that was built in the 1880s, used for eighty years, and would still be usable today if the system hadn't been redesigned fifty years ago. Clearly, this was a building built to last forever.
Why build mere pump stations like a Romanesque castle or Italian palazzo? More to the point, why build such things to have a service life of centuries?
The answer is that it was because of an irrational emotion: civic pride. That is a form of patriotism that is all but extinct today, but it was once considered quintessentially American. In P. G. Wodehouse's 1917 story "Jeeves and the Hard Boiled Egg" he satirizes what was evidently a highly recognizable American stereotype, the small-town Midwestern American businessman who won't stop bending your ear about the wonderful infrastructure they've just built in his town.
So what happened? Civic pride is a pride of public accomplishment; the pride of building something that will make your home community, state or country a better place for future generations. It's been replaced by another kind of patriotism, pride of *pedigree*. We're like the decayed, increasingly impotent hereditary aristocracy of 18th C Europe. We're proud of our *heritage*, but we can't be bothered to do anything new if we have to share the benefits with other people. The idea of making a public project any better than it strictly needs to be to get it off our immediate plate would strike us as criminal.
The era of great, or even *adequate* public works in America is over; our last great public work was the Apollo program. When the generation that created that passed, so did American civic pride.
[disclaimer -- it's been years since I use either Objective C or C++.]
Objective-C doesn't have operator overloading.
Really? So you can't say both "float f = 2.0 * 3.14.159;" and "int i = 3 * 5;" ? Of course Objective C has operator overloading, because as you say it is a superset of C and *C* has operator overloading. What it doesn't have is *programmer defined* operator overloading. Whether that feature is a good thing depends on the application and the programmer involved.
If you think I'm just being pedantic, consider the example above. Floating point numbers and integers are very different animals. The binary representation is different. "float * float" has a completely different implementation than "int * int". But both ints and floats are algebraic rings, so it makes sense to have the operations "+" and "*" defined on them. Furthermore, int values (in the computer sense) are supposed to represent integer numbers (in the mathematical sense) and float values are meant to represent real numbers. Integer numbers are a proper subset of real numbers, but *int values* are completely distinct from any float value in its binary representation. Thus C (and presumably Objective C) not only has operator overloading, it has auto-magical type casting (e.g. "float f = 2 * 3.14"), just like in C++. Nobody doubts this feature is a *generally* a good thing (although it can cause bugs like zero testing floats to terminate loops). It's only when programmers are forced to learn about this when they learn C++ that they have conniptions about how loosey-goosey the whole thing is.
When *programmer defined* operator overloading is used in this way -- defining an operator for an application that is strictly analogous to its original meaning -- I don't see any problem whatsoever with it. Defining "*" and "+" on objects that form an algebraic ring would be a prime example. There's no reasonable argument to be made that programmer defined operator overloading is just what you want in that case. What's questionable to me is overloading an operator for a use which is not quite analogous to it's original purpose. For example using "string + string" for string concatenation and "int * string" for string repetition strikes me as practices that might be questionable were they not common idioms in other programming languages.
I think more cogent criticisms can be made of C++; particularly its lack of interfaces, and the use of multiple inheritance. The presence of some features (like the virtual/non-virtual function distinction), and the absences of others (threading) are a legacy of the era in which C++ was designed. I'd argue quite brilliant for the needs of the time given the state of experience with OOP at the time.
I have little doubt that for most programmers on most projects, Objective C is a simpler and probably better choice. But if I were asked to maintain an existing code base in some C derived OOP language, I'd be more concerned about who wrote the thing than whether it was in C++ or Objective-C.
Well, a user readable paper receipt which the voter drops in a locked box would do the trick.
Short of that, nothing you do to try to "secure* the machines can ever prove that the machines recorded votes correctly. The simplest demonstration of this is to ask yourself two questions. Who does a system require that you trust? And can you verify whether that trust has been violated?
(1) Who do you have to trust. When you record a vote on a purely electronic voting machine, you have no proof that your vote is recorded properly and no way of telling whether votes were tallied correctly. You have to trust everyone who's been involved with the machine: the hardware company, the programmers, the technicians maintaining the machine, anybody who might have access to the machine while it is in storage, the people who transport the machine to the polling place, everyone who has physical access to the machine while the polls are open, and the officials who gather the data from the machine. Any one of them could potentially tamper with the machine -- especially if two or more kinds of people on that list are in collusion. Oh, yes, and you have to trust that the software of the machine is bug free.
(2) How can you tell whether your trust has been violated. You can't. No matter how elaborate the attempts to "lock down" the machine is, you can't tell if the machine is telling the truth unless you can see what's happening inside the circuits of the machine, and do that from the time the machine is activated until the time it provides a result.
Suppose the officials who set up the machine, transport it to polling place, supervise its use, and get the results are completely trustworthy. They have no more assurance that the machine is responding to *them* correctly than the voter has assurance the machine is tallying their vote correctly.
Except for providing secret ballots to visually impaired voters, there's nothing these machines can do that can't be done just as quickly and more cheaply with a properly designed paper ballot and electronic tallying machines. Electronic voting machines are more complicated than they need to be -- the very *concept* is more complicated than it needs to be. Therefore they make the voting process less secure than it could be. With no independent physical verification of voter intent, there is simply no way to know whether the results in an election using these machines is correct.
People might go along with the the "buy American" line for a while, but if they can save money by buying cheaper products with the same or more \better features they will soon turn to doing just that.
Well, that's the question, isn't it? Does an American company building the products it designs nearby have any advantages in quality control or innovation that offsets the slightly higher (China's edge here is often exaggerated) costs?
In an area where innovation is gradual and nobody has a chance of a killer technological lead, I think that cost is likely to be king. I have friends who went to work in the auto industry and were amazed to find that managers would sell their soul for a $1 saving on a $30,000 car. In areas with rapid and radical innovation, there might be an advantage. I don't think you can answer this question generically. It depends on the character of the market, industry and the company.
Apple is an interesting case. Apple didn't start by offshoring manufacturing, and even after they'd gone that route they hung on to their last domestic plant because they thought there was value to keeping designers close to the manufacturing process. And it worked. Even in the pre-Second Coming years when their product line was complicated and supply chain messy, they manufactured very high quality stuff. It'll be interesting to see what happens when that know-how fades with time. People will automatically attribute any decline in quality or innovation to Jobs' death, but if those things happen they may be the result of changes in corporate culture introduced by Jobs.
Offshoring iPods definitely was a winner because of their relatively low cost and high volume, and the need to compete against low cost alternatives. It seems to me that the same factors would apply to the Nexus Q, which is just another streaming media box. But maybe Google knows something we don't. Or maybe Google needs to gain more experience before it can rely on overseas contractors.
Bottom line on the question of on-shoring vs. off-shoring: it depends.
What immigration policies that try to retain that talent? H-1B is a *technology transfer* program which makes it easier for companies to move jobs overseas.
If you wanted to retain that talent, you wouldn't bring them in on H-1B. You'd issue them a green card.
Well, supposing you weren't an engineer. How would you know whether IP is helping or stifling innovation? You'd probably go by what the people you talk to most think.
Now suppose you also happened to be a Congressman. Who do you listen most to?
And if you want to say that businesses are also hurt by stifling innovation, I cite the bird in the hand theory. You can either invent something, design, build, and market products based on it, and hope to make a killing. Or you can protect the products you have that are already successful by filing dubious patents, or even get a slice of other vendors' success by obtaining patents that may apply to their products. If the *only* thing you cared about was money, which way would you go?
They're not the only ones. Russia has also been making noises about creative interpretation of the international law rules about territorial waters. The UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (which the US has signed but not ratified) allows countries to measure their territorial waters and exclusive economic zone from the edge of the continental shelf rather than from land. Russia has claimed that a undersea mountain range crossing over the North Pole is part of the East Siberian Shelf, which if allowed gives them sovereignty over the North Pole and exclusive economic control over a vast swath of the Arctic Ocean running from Komsomolets Island to almost Greenland.
With about equal justification, Denmark has argued that the same range is an extension of Greenland, and Canada that it is an extension of North America. Russia has already sent a deep submersible to plant the Russian flag at the North Pole. If there are significant resources found in an ice-free region of what is now international waters, we could well see a serious conflict develop as each claimant seeks to control who gets to extract those resources.
This business of allowing territorial claims out to the continental shelf is insane, and very dangerous.
When I was a boy in the mid 60s, I sometimes accompanied my dad to Chinatown on business. The place was full of old, old men. No women, no children, almost no men under 60. The reason was that America had needed Chinese labor in the late 19th and earty 20th C., because the ingenuity and work ethic of Chinese workers were valued. But Americans didn't want Chinese people settling here, because they were afraid of being out-competed if those workers settled down here with their families and started businesses and farms. Until 1943 it was illegal to bring Chinese women into the country, and between '43 and '65 only a handful of Chinese immigrants were allowed in each year.
Through the 19th and early 20th C., successful Chinese businesses were frequently attacked, sometimes whole communities driven out of town. Although many Chinese men had agricultural experience, it was impossible to farm because of vandalism by Americans. It was rough making a living. These old men had spent the prime of their lives making money under adverse conditions and sending it back home to support the families they couldn't bring in here, and now they were too old to go back home.
So don't talk to me about the sanctity of American immigration law. It's nothing but a hypocritical crock of shit.
For years Mexicans have been coming here illegally, and we've turned a blind eye to them because we need them. They'll work harder for less money than all but the most industrious Americans. Our comfortable middle-class lives are underwritten by "illegals" providing cheap food and services, but we won't offer them the dignity of legal status because we want to pretend we're not letting in as many brown people as we actually are. We don't really go after the people hiring these immigrants because we want the benefits of more labor than we're willing to let in.
What do people do when faced with a stupid, hypocritical, unjust law? They break it. Speed limit on some stretch of road lower than is reasonable? I bet you go over it and never think of yourself as committing a *real* crime. But what about some poor bastard who just wants to feed his family and comes here *because we need and want him* to work like a dog to support our lifestyle? He's a criminal, right? What about the people setting immigration policies with the clear understanding that they could and should be broken? They have conspired to systematically undermine the rule of law, but we don't call *them* criminals. We re-elect them because they're tough on illegal immigration and pro-business, which means they cater to the needs of people who hire undocumented workers.
American immigration policy is sickening. It's disgraceful, racist, and hypocritical, because we elect politicians who pander to us and undermine the rule of law.
I'm not blaming the Mormons for having a position against homosexuals or atheists, or enforcing policies like that for Mormon sponsored troops. But I think that the Unitarian Church should be able to make their own statement of Unitarian ethics. If you put yourself in their position, you would not find the solution of individual Mormon scouts sponsoring a watered-down alternative as vindication of the national organization's not allowing the LDS Church its own emblem..
I agree that if people don't like that they should recruit more diverse scouts and sponsoring organizations. I don't see what I wrote as an accusation because it's perfectly natural for the largest bloc of participants to have the greatest influence, so I apologize if what I wrote stung you.
Scouts and regular education have become a lot more alike over the last several decades. In school kids go to "environment camps" and there's much more hands on education (e.g. designing and building bridges to learn about engineering)
Scouts have made rank advancement (something which didn't exist in Baden-Powell's method) ever more elaborate and challenging, and focused more on citizenship and explicit moral lessons. The original Eagle Scout requirements were twenty-one merit badges. Later requirements focused on woodcraft and personal self-sufficiency. Currently six of the twelve required merit badges for Eagle rank are focused on social adjustment: Citizenship in the Community, Citizenship in the Nation, Citizenship in the World, Communication, Personal Management, and Family Life. Since the 1970s scouts have to pass both a one on one review of personal morality with an adult leader and a community board of review,
So what happened? Well, it turns out a youth program like scouting fits well with the Mormon Church's missionary training. That's true of other churches, but the Mormons took to scouting in an organized way. Consequently scouting in the USA has evolved to meet the needs of it's largest and most organized bloc, and in some cases even serving the church's ideological ends (e.g. rejecting the Unitarian religious emblem badge on doctrinal grounds and barring Wiccans from membership entirely).
So in effect Scouting in the USA is a program geared toward developing leaders consistent with Mormon views of leadership. Non-Mormon sponsoring organizations and troops just live with this, quietly ignoring bans on homosexuals, agnostics, and pagans, and sucking up Mormon oriented advancement requirements. This has spawned a "Traditional Scouting" movement, which is much more focused on scoutcraft and self-sufficiency and less on indoctrination.
Give me fast enough, robust, easy to administer and standards compliant. Maybe a little less fast means you throw more hardware at a problem, but it doesn't matter if overall the overall cost and risk is inflated. A platform decision boils down to three things: (1) is it good enough; (2) is it economical; (3) if we decide later this doesn't work for us, are we totally screwed.
In any case, there's no meaningful way you can make a claim that a database management system is the fastest on the planet. All you have is benchmarks, and different benchmarks apply to different use-cases.
Well, there's a certain mentality prevalent in this country which causes people to respond to a difficult problem this way: we don't know what to do about this, but nonetheless something must be done!
Unfortunately that "something" never seems to start with considering approaches that might have a chance of actually doing some good.
the funny thing is that the assessment is that he would have been harassed relatively less in the US (he could have gotten a position there after his visit in Princeton). Apparently being gay was not considered as suspicious as being a communist back then
Well, the only thing you can conclude from the whole sad story is that bigots are idiots. They took away Turing's security clearance because they were afraid his sexual orientation made him vulnerable to blackmail, even though by this point he was a *known* homosexual. The biggest potential threat to national security would have been Turing going to work for a foreign power because he could no longer work in Britain.
America was no better.In 1949 rocket scientists Qian Xuesen applied to become a naturalized US citizen, when reviewing his application noticed, "hey, this guy is Chinese!" He was imprisoned for a year and deported to China because being Chinese he was considered a security risk. He also happened to be the most brilliant young rocket scientist of his generation; so his deportation resulted in the worst possible outcome. He didn't give US rocketry secrets to China, he gave China its own rocketry *program*. Quian became the father of the Chinese ballistic missile program and later space program. He was deeply involved with education, instrumental to training the engineers and scientists who are running China's space program today.
The problem with this is that people immediately bring up the slippery slope. The theory is that if you restrict unreasonable gun usage, then you must inevitably restrict reasonable gun use.
This notion represents a failure of civics education. We have freedom of speech in this country. We also have regulation of speech. You can stand on a sidewalk outside your neighbor's house and shout political slogans at him at 3 in the morning. We also have punishment of speech. If you defame somebody you can be punished in a civil trial; if you divulge state secrets you can be punished in a criminal trial.
This is all built around two strategies. The first is to limit any kind of regulation so that it can be used to address the legitimate public concern without being used for other things. You can outlaw the bullhorn at 3AM, but not depending on the opinions being spoken through it. The second is that freedom doesn't mean absolution from consequences. You can say what you please, but if you defame somebody you will have to pay.
It seems to me the same standard could be applied to gun ownership and use that is applied to speech. You shouldn't be able to shoot your firearms at 3am next to your neighbor's house. You shouldn't be allowed to shoot under conditions that present a hazard to others, at least not without taking reasonable precautions. If you harm somebody or cause damage as a result of your reckless use of firearms, you should be liable as you would be for recklessly driving a car.
The slippery slope argument is a threat to gunowners' rights in the long term. If you say, "you can't outlaw irresponsible gun use without outlawing responsible gun use," then when irresponsible gun users become an intolerable problem then people who aren't gun rights activists will take you at your word and outlaw responsible gun use.
Austria is being paved over with highways, strip malls, excessive parking, soulless suburbs and soviet style housing projects at breakneck speed. Our decadent and postmodernist elites plunck down atrocities like these (Kunsthaus Graz) into the middle of our beautiful town centers.
Wow, that's right out of the Howard Roarke school of architecture, the one that says "F You, I'm an artist!" to the people who have to live with the building.
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I've worked in the non-profit world myself, and it's equally a death-knell not to be run like a business at all. For example no organization that fails to watch its cash flow can continue to operate. Believe me an irreversible negative cash flow is a financial fire, just as much in a non-profit as a for-profit. I've seen up front what happens to a non-profit that fails to attend to financial realities, and it is not pretty.
We used to sometimes say that the difference between for-profit and non-profit was that "owner's equity" on the balance sheet was re-labelled "retained earnings". Of course we *knew* that a non-profit has different priorities than a for-profit; and that non-profit and government budgets are run according to stricter principles (spending is *authorized* rather than *estimated*). But the point is that you still have to manage finite resources, coordinate people, set and achieve objectives, etc. So for many of us who were in support positions rather than line positions, being in a non-profit made very little difference in how we did our job, other than we took a lower salary for the privilege of doing good in the world.
In fact, business and non-profit management shares a very significant failure mode that you point out. You take an interesting organization and you give it a leader who is uses it primarily as a vehicle for ego-gratification. The difference is that in the non-profit world you have this co-dependency relationship with donors who equally see the organization as a vehicle for ego-gratification, which sometimes allows brain-dead organization to stumble forward for a few more years.
The difference between non-profit and for-profit management, aside from accounting technicalities, is *ethics*. In the non-profit world you have many more ethical duties, but as in for-profit enterprises, the only ethical issues that get *consistently* attended to are those that outsiders consistently check on. It is rare that anyone attempts to hold a non-profit to account -- there's no political glory for an attorney general to become known as the scourge of charities. So in the non-profit world you need the good fortune to have leaders of exceptional moral character. Unfortunately, a lot of what passes for that is sanctimonious hypocrisy.
One of the problems with these perpetual trusts is that long after the founder is dead they become sinecures for the people running them, making the occasional nominal grant while absorbing most of the trust income in salary.
That'll teach you to write system control code in archaic Fortran, a language which has both auto-declared variables and space intolerant keywords. That's the only language where you can write (do10i=1.100) (assigning new float variable "do10i" a value of 1.1) when you meant "do 10 i = 1,100" (repeat line 10 with i taking values from 1 to 10).
Can depend on what you grew up with. All time record high for town I grew up in is 30C, I start to melt once temp gets above 25C. On the other hand I have shoveled snow in -40C temps for more than 2 hoours with no ill effects - probably would kill a Texan...
What we do in New England for weather like this is prepare. On cold February nights we light fires in the fireplace. When it gets so cold the flames freeze solid, we break chunks off with a stonemason's hammer, wrap them in aluminium foil and put them in the freezer until Summer. Then when the heat goes above 80 F (inhumanly hot for a New Englander) we can simply take our frozen fire chips out of the ice box, unwrap them, and put them in a metal dish in front of an ordinary room fan. Since the phase transition occurs at a much lower temperature than the liquid water/ice transition, the flames do a great job of cooling the air as they sublimate.
Another argument is that corporations are not people, thus shouldn't have free speech. This shows a lack of understanding of corporations.
Oh, enlighten us, do.
A corporation is nothing but a convenient way to get together and be organized.
I would agree, if you would delete "nothing but". It in actuality a corporation considerably more than a voluntary association, otherwise there would be no need for corporations to exist as a legal institution. For example, corporations allow individuals to escape liability for debts incurred by businesses they own. This allows businesses to attract far more owner-investors than a straightforward partnership. For this reason corporations need governing structures that allow them to conduct businesses without having to submit every decision to potentially tens of thousands of individual partners.
And this, by the way, is why the idea of political free speech for corporations is a bad idea; it tends to reflect the interests of the management team rather than the stockholders, especially since much of the ownership can be indirect (i.e. through other corporations). This makes it impossible to keep track of the political activities of companies you own stock in and impractical to do anything about it if you don't like the position the management team is taking.
The idea that corporations have *political* rights is an ontological fallacy. Corporations have to be legally persons for purposes of entering into contracts and holding or incurring debt on behalf of their owners, but they are not legally persons for every purpose; for example they can't run for elected office. Arguing that they have free speech rights because they are "legally persons" is special pleading; nobody claims that corporations have the same fundamental rights as natural people *except* in the context of allowing their management teams to buy political influence with the stockholders' assets.
Arguing that corporations have the same rights as people because they're just associations of people is wrong, because the premise is wrong. The corporation is a distinct and artificial legal institution created for the *specific purpose* allowing a business to have a different relationship to its stockholders than an ordinary association would have to its membership.
For a legal entity other than a natural person to claim to act on behalf of some set of natural persons (be they owners or members), at the very least the management must be directly responsible to *all* those natural persons. If not, there is no reasonable basis for making that claim.
Back in the 1800s, people built stuff like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BostonMA_CalfPasturePumpingStationComplex.jpg. This is a *pump station* that was built in the 1880s, used for eighty years, and would still be usable today if the system hadn't been redesigned fifty years ago. Clearly, this was a building built to last forever.
Or this:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:StonehamMA_MDCPumpingHouse.jpg, which was built in 1906 and has been in continuous use for 106 years.
Why build mere pump stations like a Romanesque castle or Italian palazzo? More to the point, why build such things to have a service life of centuries?
The answer is that it was because of an irrational emotion: civic pride. That is a form of patriotism that is all but extinct today, but it was once considered quintessentially American. In P. G. Wodehouse's 1917 story "Jeeves and the Hard Boiled Egg" he satirizes what was evidently a highly recognizable American stereotype, the small-town Midwestern American businessman who won't stop bending your ear about the wonderful infrastructure they've just built in his town.
So what happened? Civic pride is a pride of public accomplishment; the pride of building something that will make your home community, state or country a better place for future generations. It's been replaced by another kind of patriotism, pride of *pedigree*. We're like the decayed, increasingly impotent hereditary aristocracy of 18th C Europe. We're proud of our *heritage*, but we can't be bothered to do anything new if we have to share the benefits with other people. The idea of making a public project any better than it strictly needs to be to get it off our immediate plate would strike us as criminal.
The era of great, or even *adequate* public works in America is over; our last great public work was the Apollo program. When the generation that created that passed, so did American civic pride.
[disclaimer -- it's been years since I use either Objective C or C++.]
Objective-C doesn't have operator overloading.
Really? So you can't say both "float f = 2.0 * 3.14.159;" and "int i = 3 * 5;" ? Of course Objective C has operator overloading, because as you say it is a superset of C and *C* has operator overloading. What it doesn't have is *programmer defined* operator overloading. Whether that feature is a good thing depends on the application and the programmer involved.
If you think I'm just being pedantic, consider the example above. Floating point numbers and integers are very different animals. The binary representation is different. "float * float" has a completely different implementation than "int * int". But both ints and floats are algebraic rings, so it makes sense to have the operations "+" and "*" defined on them. Furthermore, int values (in the computer sense) are supposed to represent integer numbers (in the mathematical sense) and float values are meant to represent real numbers. Integer numbers are a proper subset of real numbers, but *int values* are completely distinct from any float value in its binary representation. Thus C (and presumably Objective C) not only has operator overloading, it has auto-magical type casting (e.g. "float f = 2 * 3.14"), just like in C++. Nobody doubts this feature is a *generally* a good thing (although it can cause bugs like zero testing floats to terminate loops). It's only when programmers are forced to learn about this when they learn C++ that they have conniptions about how loosey-goosey the whole thing is.
When *programmer defined* operator overloading is used in this way -- defining an operator for an application that is strictly analogous to its original meaning -- I don't see any problem whatsoever with it. Defining "*" and "+" on objects that form an algebraic ring would be a prime example. There's no reasonable argument to be made that programmer defined operator overloading is just what you want in that case. What's questionable to me is overloading an operator for a use which is not quite analogous to it's original purpose. For example using "string + string" for string concatenation and "int * string" for string repetition strikes me as practices that might be questionable were they not common idioms in other programming languages.
I think more cogent criticisms can be made of C++; particularly its lack of interfaces, and the use of multiple inheritance. The presence of some features (like the virtual/non-virtual function distinction), and the absences of others (threading) are a legacy of the era in which C++ was designed. I'd argue quite brilliant for the needs of the time given the state of experience with OOP at the time.
I have little doubt that for most programmers on most projects, Objective C is a simpler and probably better choice. But if I were asked to maintain an existing code base in some C derived OOP language, I'd be more concerned about who wrote the thing than whether it was in C++ or Objective-C.
Well, a user readable paper receipt which the voter drops in a locked box would do the trick.
Short of that, nothing you do to try to "secure* the machines can ever prove that the machines recorded votes correctly. The simplest demonstration of this is to ask yourself two questions. Who does a system require that you trust? And can you verify whether that trust has been violated?
(1) Who do you have to trust. When you record a vote on a purely electronic voting machine, you have no proof that your vote is recorded properly and no way of telling whether votes were tallied correctly. You have to trust everyone who's been involved with the machine: the hardware company, the programmers, the technicians maintaining the machine, anybody who might have access to the machine while it is in storage, the people who transport the machine to the polling place, everyone who has physical access to the machine while the polls are open, and the officials who gather the data from the machine. Any one of them could potentially tamper with the machine -- especially if two or more kinds of people on that list are in collusion. Oh, yes, and you have to trust that the software of the machine is bug free.
(2) How can you tell whether your trust has been violated. You can't. No matter how elaborate the attempts to "lock down" the machine is, you can't tell if the machine is telling the truth unless you can see what's happening inside the circuits of the machine, and do that from the time the machine is activated until the time it provides a result.
Suppose the officials who set up the machine, transport it to polling place, supervise its use, and get the results are completely trustworthy. They have no more assurance that the machine is responding to *them* correctly than the voter has assurance the machine is tallying their vote correctly.
Except for providing secret ballots to visually impaired voters, there's nothing these machines can do that can't be done just as quickly and more cheaply with a properly designed paper ballot and electronic tallying machines. Electronic voting machines are more complicated than they need to be -- the very *concept* is more complicated than it needs to be. Therefore they make the voting process less secure than it could be. With no independent physical verification of voter intent, there is simply no way to know whether the results in an election using these machines is correct.
People might go along with the the "buy American" line for a while, but if they can save money by buying cheaper products with the same or more \better features they will soon turn to doing just that.
Well, that's the question, isn't it? Does an American company building the products it designs nearby have any advantages in quality control or innovation that offsets the slightly higher (China's edge here is often exaggerated) costs?
In an area where innovation is gradual and nobody has a chance of a killer technological lead, I think that cost is likely to be king. I have friends who went to work in the auto industry and were amazed to find that managers would sell their soul for a $1 saving on a $30,000 car. In areas with rapid and radical innovation, there might be an advantage. I don't think you can answer this question generically. It depends on the character of the market, industry and the company.
Apple is an interesting case. Apple didn't start by offshoring manufacturing, and even after they'd gone that route they hung on to their last domestic plant because they thought there was value to keeping designers close to the manufacturing process. And it worked. Even in the pre-Second Coming years when their product line was complicated and supply chain messy, they manufactured very high quality stuff. It'll be interesting to see what happens when that know-how fades with time. People will automatically attribute any decline in quality or innovation to Jobs' death, but if those things happen they may be the result of changes in corporate culture introduced by Jobs.
Offshoring iPods definitely was a winner because of their relatively low cost and high volume, and the need to compete against low cost alternatives. It seems to me that the same factors would apply to the Nexus Q, which is just another streaming media box. But maybe Google knows something we don't. Or maybe Google needs to gain more experience before it can rely on overseas contractors.
Bottom line on the question of on-shoring vs. off-shoring: it depends.
Although we are a government of the people ...
... for some value of the word "person".
What immigration policies that try to retain that talent? H-1B is a *technology transfer* program which makes it easier for companies to move jobs overseas.
If you wanted to retain that talent, you wouldn't bring them in on H-1B. You'd issue them a green card.
Well, he *could* have made the announcement we were going to Mars *before* we invaded Iraq.
Well, supposing you weren't an engineer. How would you know whether IP is helping or stifling innovation? You'd probably go by what the people you talk to most think.
Now suppose you also happened to be a Congressman. Who do you listen most to?
And if you want to say that businesses are also hurt by stifling innovation, I cite the bird in the hand theory. You can either invent something, design, build, and market products based on it, and hope to make a killing. Or you can protect the products you have that are already successful by filing dubious patents, or even get a slice of other vendors' success by obtaining patents that may apply to their products. If the *only* thing you cared about was money, which way would you go?
They're not the only ones. Russia has also been making noises about creative interpretation of the international law rules about territorial waters. The UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (which the US has signed but not ratified) allows countries to measure their territorial waters and exclusive economic zone from the edge of the continental shelf rather than from land. Russia has claimed that a undersea mountain range crossing over the North Pole is part of the East Siberian Shelf, which if allowed gives them sovereignty over the North Pole and exclusive economic control over a vast swath of the Arctic Ocean running from Komsomolets Island to almost Greenland.
With about equal justification, Denmark has argued that the same range is an extension of Greenland, and Canada that it is an extension of North America. Russia has already sent a deep submersible to plant the Russian flag at the North Pole. If there are significant resources found in an ice-free region of what is now international waters, we could well see a serious conflict develop as each claimant seeks to control who gets to extract those resources.
This business of allowing territorial claims out to the continental shelf is insane, and very dangerous.
When I was a boy in the mid 60s, I sometimes accompanied my dad to Chinatown on business. The place was full of old, old men. No women, no children, almost no men under 60. The reason was that America had needed Chinese labor in the late 19th and earty 20th C., because the ingenuity and work ethic of Chinese workers were valued. But Americans didn't want Chinese people settling here, because they were afraid of being out-competed if those workers settled down here with their families and started businesses and farms. Until 1943 it was illegal to bring Chinese women into the country, and between '43 and '65 only a handful of Chinese immigrants were allowed in each year.
Through the 19th and early 20th C., successful Chinese businesses were frequently attacked, sometimes whole communities driven out of town. Although many Chinese men had agricultural experience, it was impossible to farm because of vandalism by Americans. It was rough making a living. These old men had spent the prime of their lives making money under adverse conditions and sending it back home to support the families they couldn't bring in here, and now they were too old to go back home.
So don't talk to me about the sanctity of American immigration law. It's nothing but a hypocritical crock of shit.
For years Mexicans have been coming here illegally, and we've turned a blind eye to them because we need them. They'll work harder for less money than all but the most industrious Americans. Our comfortable middle-class lives are underwritten by "illegals" providing cheap food and services, but we won't offer them the dignity of legal status because we want to pretend we're not letting in as many brown people as we actually are. We don't really go after the people hiring these immigrants because we want the benefits of more labor than we're willing to let in.
What do people do when faced with a stupid, hypocritical, unjust law? They break it. Speed limit on some stretch of road lower than is reasonable? I bet you go over it and never think of yourself as committing a *real* crime. But what about some poor bastard who just wants to feed his family and comes here *because we need and want him* to work like a dog to support our lifestyle? He's a criminal, right? What about the people setting immigration policies with the clear understanding that they could and should be broken? They have conspired to systematically undermine the rule of law, but we don't call *them* criminals. We re-elect them because they're tough on illegal immigration and pro-business, which means they cater to the needs of people who hire undocumented workers.
American immigration policy is sickening. It's disgraceful, racist, and hypocritical, because we elect politicians who pander to us and undermine the rule of law.
Am I the only one who loves KDE?.
Ah, the love that dare not speak its name...
you can't lose what you've never had.
I'm not blaming the Mormons for having a position against homosexuals or atheists, or enforcing policies like that for Mormon sponsored troops. But I think that the Unitarian Church should be able to make their own statement of Unitarian ethics. If you put yourself in their position, you would not find the solution of individual Mormon scouts sponsoring a watered-down alternative as vindication of the national organization's not allowing the LDS Church its own emblem..
I agree that if people don't like that they should recruit more diverse scouts and sponsoring organizations. I don't see what I wrote as an accusation because it's perfectly natural for the largest bloc of participants to have the greatest influence, so I apologize if what I wrote stung you.
I stand corrected on the Wiccan issue.
Scouts and regular education have become a lot more alike over the last several decades. In school kids go to "environment camps" and there's much more hands on education (e.g. designing and building bridges to learn about engineering)
Scouts have made rank advancement (something which didn't exist in Baden-Powell's method) ever more elaborate and challenging, and focused more on citizenship and explicit moral lessons. The original Eagle Scout requirements were twenty-one merit badges. Later requirements focused on woodcraft and personal self-sufficiency. Currently six of the twelve required merit badges for Eagle rank are focused on social adjustment: Citizenship in the Community, Citizenship in the Nation, Citizenship in the World, Communication, Personal Management, and Family Life. Since the 1970s scouts have to pass both a one on one review of personal morality with an adult leader and a community board of review,
So what happened? Well, it turns out a youth program like scouting fits well with the Mormon Church's missionary training. That's true of other churches, but the Mormons took to scouting in an organized way. Consequently scouting in the USA has evolved to meet the needs of it's largest and most organized bloc, and in some cases even serving the church's ideological ends (e.g. rejecting the Unitarian religious emblem badge on doctrinal grounds and barring Wiccans from membership entirely).
So in effect Scouting in the USA is a program geared toward developing leaders consistent with Mormon views of leadership. Non-Mormon sponsoring organizations and troops just live with this, quietly ignoring bans on homosexuals, agnostics, and pagans, and sucking up Mormon oriented advancement requirements. This has spawned a "Traditional Scouting" movement, which is much more focused on scoutcraft and self-sufficiency and less on indoctrination.
Give me fast enough, robust, easy to administer and standards compliant. Maybe a little less fast means you throw more hardware at a problem, but it doesn't matter if overall the overall cost and risk is inflated. A platform decision boils down to three things: (1) is it good enough; (2) is it economical; (3) if we decide later this doesn't work for us, are we totally screwed.
In any case, there's no meaningful way you can make a claim that a database management system is the fastest on the planet. All you have is benchmarks, and different benchmarks apply to different use-cases.
Well, there's a certain mentality prevalent in this country which causes people to respond to a difficult problem this way: we don't know what to do about this, but nonetheless something must be done!
Unfortunately that "something" never seems to start with considering approaches that might have a chance of actually doing some good.
the funny thing is that the assessment is that he would have been harassed relatively less in the US (he could have gotten a position there after his visit in Princeton).
Apparently being gay was not considered as suspicious as being a communist back then
Well, the only thing you can conclude from the whole sad story is that bigots are idiots. They took away Turing's security clearance because they were afraid his sexual orientation made him vulnerable to blackmail, even though by this point he was a *known* homosexual. The biggest potential threat to national security would have been Turing going to work for a foreign power because he could no longer work in Britain.
America was no better.In 1949 rocket scientists Qian Xuesen applied to become a naturalized US citizen, when reviewing his application noticed, "hey, this guy is Chinese!" He was imprisoned for a year and deported to China because being Chinese he was considered a security risk. He also happened to be the most brilliant young rocket scientist of his generation; so his deportation resulted in the worst possible outcome. He didn't give US rocketry secrets to China, he gave China its own rocketry *program*. Quian became the father of the Chinese ballistic missile program and later space program. He was deeply involved with education, instrumental to training the engineers and scientists who are running China's space program today.
The problem with this is that people immediately bring up the slippery slope. The theory is that if you restrict unreasonable gun usage, then you must inevitably restrict reasonable gun use.
This notion represents a failure of civics education. We have freedom of speech in this country. We also have regulation of speech. You can stand on a sidewalk outside your neighbor's house and shout political slogans at him at 3 in the morning. We also have punishment of speech. If you defame somebody you can be punished in a civil trial; if you divulge state secrets you can be punished in a criminal trial.
This is all built around two strategies. The first is to limit any kind of regulation so that it can be used to address the legitimate public concern without being used for other things. You can outlaw the bullhorn at 3AM, but not depending on the opinions being spoken through it. The second is that freedom doesn't mean absolution from consequences. You can say what you please, but if you defame somebody you will have to pay.
It seems to me the same standard could be applied to gun ownership and use that is applied to speech. You shouldn't be able to shoot your firearms at 3am next to your neighbor's house. You shouldn't be allowed to shoot under conditions that present a hazard to others, at least not without taking reasonable precautions. If you harm somebody or cause damage as a result of your reckless use of firearms, you should be liable as you would be for recklessly driving a car.
The slippery slope argument is a threat to gunowners' rights in the long term. If you say, "you can't outlaw irresponsible gun use without outlawing responsible gun use," then when irresponsible gun users become an intolerable problem then people who aren't gun rights activists will take you at your word and outlaw responsible gun use.
Austria is being paved over with highways, strip malls, excessive parking, soulless suburbs and soviet style housing projects at breakneck speed. Our decadent and postmodernist elites plunck down atrocities like these (Kunsthaus Graz) into the middle of our beautiful town centers.
Wow, that's right out of the Howard Roarke school of architecture, the one that says "F You, I'm an artist!" to the people who have to live with the building.
Oracle will clean up on compound interest.